Cx Network

Darya Williams shares TMobile's appraoch to encouraging frontline employees: "I would say what drives the people, what they're really hungry for, is they feel like it's the pay, they feel like it's the benefits, but that's not always true on the front lines. There are so many reasons why those people come into work and do the jobs that they do every single day, and a lot of times the C-level executives just do not have the visibility to that. So, what drives their people to come in every day."

Chitra Unnikrishna shows us Koodo's approach to customer satisfaction: "Reducing effort is the best indicator of loyalty. There are companies that think that they have to add in products and services and other things to drive loyalty or reduce prices; but take away effort for the customer and that's the best indicator of loyalty."

Greg Marion shares his approach to adding value to customer experience: "We know what the interaction points are, but do we really fully understand how we're going to be different and when? Not through the the minimal viable product or prototyping. You can't do that until you have the strategies. So this is setting the vision and the future for the customer experience. Sometimes you have an experienced that you're incrementally making better. You realize you have to rejuvenate and restart. Sometimes it's a new experience that you're just starting."

Laura Evans shares her how her experience brought her to her current position: "We always sort of keep the customer right at the very front of mind. There was a lot of looking at data and I guess with the background and the experience that I've gotten my previous roles, that was, probably part of the reason why I was hired. I was able to bring that type of rigor and analysis to that kind of role."

"Without CX, our financial performance will never get to where we want it to be. We understand that customer needs change. If we don't keep up, we'll soon jeopardize our future success. We must understand how to make the customer experience the Bible to our business model." - Iassen Deenitchin, ING

Jason Liberman shares the importance of staying relevant and competent in the online payment space."I think it's encouraging that for companies to stay relevant right now, they need to be competitive, they need to be strategic, and they need to move quickly. For us, from a controls standpoint, it's exciting because we want to help. We want to jump in and say, "Hey, look, we want to also push out this great product. This seems awesome."

Alexis Smith on applying customer policy to the employee: "The reality is if you buy a beer and you hate it, not great, and I hope you don't buy one of our beers and hate it, but if you buy a beer and you hate it, you can return it, you can get your money back, you can exchange it for something else, but if you buy a career and you hate it, there's not really a receipt or a return policy for that. So we set out, and I challenged the team to say, "How do we go from beer sampling to career sampling?"

Circle K's Jorgen Lislerud joins us and shares: "All of us feel we are customer centric, but most of the people when I had the voting and people were submitting their question on the poll, I could see that everybody feels that majority of the people in the room felt that they are not spending enough resources, be it running people a time on customer centricity."

Peter Cszuczka joins us, giving insight on how to optimize productivity within: The talent we have, they are hungry for more and we can tackle that by having much more complex activities, automizing and outsourcing or offshoring, whatever can be done at the current level of knowledge there and focusing on more high value added activities to be done. That doesn't necessarily drive an increase in number of people working for us. It clearly drives an increase in the level of skill that is needed. That's what people want.

Uber's Martin Rowlson joins us and shares that the region comprises 20% of the volume for the organization but 70% of the complexity. Based on the pace of change within the industry and the rate of growth at his organization, Martin's goal is to identify best practice, align best practice and build on best practices. Defining processes can’t take two weeks because "that process may have gone…literally gone."

From Barclay's, Sebastian Antony joins us and shares his philosophy, "I mean we look at it from a customer lens to start with, the customers are at the heart of it, and we mean it. We mean it and we are the pioneers in bringing in innovative products."

The Director of Spark (lean transformation and Sustainability at BBC, Adrian Ruth joins us to share that four years on the organization’s transformation program called Spark program is going strong. His remit is to ensure that the “phenomenal” and “very, very successful” organization meets the challenges coming at them on every front- changing audience demands, exponentially multiplying competition, etc. Adrian notes that most folks at the BBC are like him- they joined the organization because they’re passionate about the organization and they really want to delivery the best possible output on every platform and every genre to the audience.

Suzy Nixon joins us and shares what her role is really all about, "the idea is really to help people realize that they bring a lot of their own experiences and assumptions and bias to any customer experience and their understanding of that. The idea is to help people realize that by utilizing things like human-centered design and getting new research and new insights, to think differently about how they can solve the problems, they will come up with some new ideas that are better for the customers."

On better customer experience through refining process and removing waste, David Gruber, "there's a tremendous focus on how to get cost out of the system. One of those costs are these negative processing, or the irritants that members are actually experiencing- if you have to call customer care six times to get some issue resolved- that is actually waste within the system. That waste is actually translating into higher costs for members. How do you now actually get that cost out of the system? That's through better customer experience and understanding what members are wanting."

On how CX works at John Lewis, @CatDunkley explains she's on "a very small team within John Lewis called Customer Experience and Insight. Specifically in the design side of that. As a whole team, we are the guardians of the customer experience for the whole of John Lewis. John Lewis in shops, online, over the phone, however you interact with us. In the design function we're there specifically to set the overarching ambition for what we want the customer experience to be and to help translate that for all of our individual business units. And critically to make sure it joins up across all of those individual units."

An interactive discussion of hospitality executives includes myriad pieces of advice: "One easy thing to do is stop calling it omnichannel, because that is from your perspective as opposed to the customer's perspective." "My main tip would be, be very creative in looking within your own organization, what type of resources you can use as part of your customer services organization." "Flexibility, and agility is key. We have to look at proactivity and a little bit more pragmatism on that front in terms of solving the issue that we currently have." "Be very creative in looking within your own organization, what type of resources you can use as part of your customer services organization. So in our case, we use employees in our travel shops, in our retail shops. When it's quiet in the shop, they log in as customer service agents for the contact center." "Expect the unexpected and make sure you've got robust disruption plans."

The only woman to summit Mount Everest from both sides, Cathy O'Dowd joins us with her history and some life lessons for us. She was a "stubborn and adventurous kid" who stumbled into mountaineering through a content. In retrospect, everything about that first effort was wrong from the make-up of the team to the raison d'etre. Cathy speaks of setting a rule set at the formation of every team. She discusses failures as successes- not just points for learning. And that  when you're climbing a mountain, summiting a mountain is just one of the goals.

Ken Goldman joins us a puts on a clinic for business, life, geopolitics and more. He discusses his time as CFO for Yahoo during the Marissa Mayer years. He shares his thoughts on why things were they way the were and turned out the way they did. When the team had to fix everything from product to Board composition- the first thing they looked at was culture. In the grand scheme of things, he discusses AI and the evolution of technology and it's affect on the future of work. He discusses a pillar of each enterprise being good citizenship to a community. He discusses the evolution of balance sheets for global corporations over the past 40 years. And Ken shares his evolution perception of economics- "unfortunately economics is not perfect." 

The Director of Contact Center for Global Services for Johnson & Johnson Katerina Vranovska joins us from Shared Services Eastern Europe in Budapest where she shares that her function was once internally facing and now she services external clients. Based in Prague, the organization is in the process of building a customer service shared service business right there in the Czech Republic. The global services center in Prague is already successful so the business is ready to be built there and Katerina suggests that the city and country itself is a calling card for the business as nearly 50% of J&J employees are foreign workers.

Turk Telecom’s Ahmed Gul joins us and shares his experience with the 200 year old company. Ahmed and the team are trying to expand into other markets. To do so, they’re developing products and services that they’re using at first- internally. Initial returns show 40% savings. That’s Visual IVR- the team also looking into big data, digital content and myriad other applications. He and is team work as entrepreneurs within the company- and as Ahmed sees it, his job is to convince and persuade digital initiatives into existence.