The people I’ve worked with say it best.

Sue led the Customer Immersion programme for E.ON UK and it became a core part of my customer strategy.

We were running a major, complex, highly regulated business serving millions of customers. We had the data, NPS, complaints, operational performance, customer pain points, call listening and dashboards and, like most leadership teams, we believed we understood our customers.

Customer Immersion showed us the difference between knowing about customers and truly understanding them.

What made Sue’s approach so powerful was that she stripped everything back. No hierarchy. No titles. No name badges. Customers had no idea whether they were sitting next to someone from the frontline or one of the most senior leaders in the business.

We were simply people, sitting with people, listening.

And that changed everything.

Customers spoke without filtering what they thought we wanted to hear. They told us what it genuinely felt like to be our customer, where we made life easier, where we caused frustration and, sometimes, the very real impact our decisions had on their lives.

Sue also created an environment where my leadership team could take the corporate armour off and really listen. Not defend. Not explain. Just listen and understand. That trust became even more important when we brought the regulator into some of those sessions.

Some of the customers I met I can still remember today. Their stories stayed with me long after the dashboards and monthly reports had moved on.

This was never a peripheral CX initiative. Customer Immersion sat at the heart of our leadership agenda and became a powerful catalyst for transformation. It created a shared understanding across my leadership team and influenced the decisions and changes that helped take us to an award-winning business.

Sue was central to that. She didn’t just bring customers into a room. She created the conditions for us to hear them differently.

For me, that is the power of Customer Immersion.

I have worked with Sue for a number of years and I found her extremely energetic, passionate and absolutely obsessed in putting customers at the heart of everything she was doing.

She has been an inspiration to all us in guiding and bringing us together to create a better customer centric organisation! She has a massive experience in customer immersions working directly with the Board and the senior executive teams, not only in the UK but across EON Group internationally! She is a great people person, a colleague but equally a friend! Pleasure to have worked with her!

Leading an operation of over a thousand people serving millions of customers, I spent years analysing NPS data, listening to recorded calls, and tracking complaints.

But nothing prepared me for the power of customer immersion until Sue introduced me to it. Sitting in a room hearing directly from customers, when they had no idea what role we played, stripped away every layer of our corporate armour.

Over time, this became our most transformative storytelling tool.

It forced us to see the raw, unfiltered truth of how we showed up in people’s lives, where we relieved stress, created moments of magic, and where we caused absolute havoc!

That insight changed everything. It gave our entire leadership team a shared purpose, and directly drove our transformation from the bottom of the service league table to a best-in-class award-winning business.

Sue is a rare diamond. Her unique gift is creating a space where customers feel genuinely welcomed, heard, and valued enough to share their honest truth.

She was the beating heart behind our turnaround, and the impact of her work stays with you long after the session ends.

Sue led numerous customer immersion sessions when I was CEO of E.ON UK, covering different energy related themes with hundreds of customers.

It was brilliant to watch a professional at work, who could really make people feel comfortable and draw out their honest opinions.

I learned more about how energy customers really experience our product from those sessions than any number of PowerPoint presentations.

Sue led various customer immersion sessions that I attended, from more generic customers to others which were more specific focusing on a difficulty in our service provision.

In all cases they had clear goals and were well managed with Sue ensuring that we, and the customers, got the most out of it - ensuring that the customers voice was heard.

Those which focused on poor performance were tough but so well managed - the customers message was truly heard, we were held to account and the sessions were very constructive.

The more difficult the issue the more you want to connect and hear what your customers think, the more you should call Sue!!

I’ve known and worked with Sue for over 20 years, and throughout my leadership career she was the person I repeatedly turned to when I wanted my teams and me to get closer to our customers.

Sue led customer immersion for me across several different businesses, from large events involving more than 100 people and virtual sessions, through to small roundtables with a dozen customers.

She also managed a community of thousands of customers who had volunteered to share their views with us, giving us a fantastic way to quickly test ideas, get feedback and involve customers in our experimental test-and-learn approach to change.

We brought customers directly into the business on many occasions too - for example, to help us design customer communications they would understand and actually want to read.

We even asked customers to walk around our offices and look at our internal performance boards. The test was simple: could a customer understand how we talked about them and their experience, or had we disappeared into corporate jargon and acronyms?

What makes Sue exceptional is that she is obsessively customer-focused, but she also understands how to turn customer insight into action.

She knows how to create the right environment for honest conversations, get beneath the surface of what customers are saying and then challenge leaders and teams to do something meaningful with what they have heard.

She is equally comfortable working with senior executives, frontline colleagues or customers.

For anyone who might be nervous about taking part in an immersion session, Sue has an incredible ability to put them at ease through a combination of empathy, support, energy and fun.

Sue introduced me to customer immersion many years ago, and it became something I carried with me throughout my leadership career.

I repeatedly asked her to work with my teams, challenge us and make sure we never became complacent about our customer experience.

I believe everyone in an organisation, leaders and colleagues alike, should regularly spend time with their customers, hear their experiences first-hand and be prepared to be challenged by what they hear.

If you genuinely want to build a more customer-obsessed organisation rather than simply talk about being one, I couldn’t recommend Sue more highly.

I remember the customer immersion sessions years ago at E.ON very well. Great driver for change towards a truly customer centric Organisation.

All the best with your next steps.

Sue, I absolutely loved the many customer immersion sessions that I had the pleasure to attend a few years back at E.ON.

With customers at the heart of our thinking and propositions these sessions were key to provide the genuine insight that you can only gain from personally listening, interacting and talking to customers.

I still remember the energy, thought and organisation that you personally brought to the sessions to make each and every one of them so impactful.

Please let me know if I can help in anyway.

I've attended several sessions that you ran. And was always really impressed with how you were able to get everybody speaking.

There's an art to bringing a room of different people along with you, getting them comfortable enough to share what they feel whilst digging deeper for the things you're aiming to uncover.

I particularly remember coming to one of your immersion sessions with people using district heating systems to heat their homes.

As a regulator, the session was really important, giving me insights into real life views and issues that we had not heard before.

It really helped me develop a better understanding of an area we were starting to develop a role in.