Cx Network

The Global Marketing Lead for CX at Oracle, Nate Skinner joins us and takes us through Marketing Mistakes to Avoid. Along the way, he also sets a path for success all while sharing use cases from his impressive career with some of the best companies in big tech.

Elan Frank from Slack joins us and shares that the tool began life as a side project of another initiative. It's grown to be a true alternative to email. Channel based messaging is built for the future of work and as we discuss, the future of work is here, now.

Karen Tilstra is the co-founder of the Florida Hospital Innovation Lab. In this conversation, Karen emphasizes the intent of the Innovation Lab, which, not surprisingly, is innovation. However, the process to innovation is often overlooked. Karen describes it as a “multifaceted journey of learning, of discovery, of openness.” In other words, innovation isn’t instantaneous, nor does it happen in a silo. When a brand thinks they know what’s best for their customers—instead of interacting with those customers—it’s often the beginning of the end. Karen details Sears’ downward spiral as an example. Next, Karen questions the value of the typical enterprise growth mentality. Is “grow or die” a myth or a reality? True, meaningful innovation involves the application of certain soft skills that aren’t immediately apparent. Karen drives their importance home in this insightful, outside-of-the-box conversation.

Fred Reichheld joins us again, this time to discuss employee engagement. The business benefit to ensuring a positive employee experience is because that translates to a positive customer experience. As Fred discussed last time, a good customer experience means an increase in profit. However, Fred is careful to clearly define what make a good employee experience. Is it lots of vacation time, the ability to shirk difficult customers, and taking on only the best shifts? Of course not, as this would lead to a bad customer experience. Fred instead focuses on “helping your employees lead great lives of meaningful service.” Technology is used as a tool to automate unfulfilling tasks that humans used to be responsible for. In turn, human talent is freed up to inform, innovate, and provide meaningful change to the customer experience. Finally, Fred makes suggestions on to achieve such a lofty goal. Ultimately, Fred says, “I think what inspires people to do their best is when they feel like they are being listened to,

Fred Reichheld, the creator of the Net Promoter System (NPS), joins us to discuss the task of building a customer-centric culture. Companies that do the best at enriching the lives of their customers are growing two-and-a-half times faster than their competition. Today, word of mouth and truth spreads like wildfire. The modern enterprise can no longer depend on clever advertising campaigns to mask their shortcomings. Building a customer-first culture isn’t always easy, though. Legacy companies have to fight through their capitalistic pasts. Metrics need to change. Shareholders must get on board with the new nature of business. The Net Promoter Score is successful because it provides data that proves the effectiveness of customer-centricity to the bottom line. It is a modern-day metric that replaces the ones that no longer serve today’s landscape. Fred offers both suggestions and examples on how to successfully pivot to a customer-centric business model during this insightful conversation.

McDonald’s senior director of innovation, Deena John, joins us to talk about digital transformation. While definitions vary, Deena describes digital transformation as “transforming through integration of technology” with the goal of generating maximum value for the customer. End-to-end disruption means looking into the future and creating a transformation road map that leads to a new operating model. Deena discusses the differences and similarities between agile and lean, and the iterative process that makes scaling sustainable. Deena frames her key points with specific examples. Next, she asks and answers the question, “In an innovation culture what’s the importance of failing fast?” Ultimately, this insightful conversation with Deena focuses on the future of the enterprise and what needs to happen now to ensure corporations can keep up with the ever-changing landscape that technology brings to business.

Todd Gillam joined Comcast a decade ago—when the word “Comcast” was met with severe negativity. During the first part of our conversation with Todd, he laments over those dark days and discusses the progress they made the first five years after he was hired. They cleaned up their image by addressing common complaints such as hold times and technician effectiveness. Stage two involved systematically identifying and fixing a broader range of customer pain points by utilizing NPS surveys. By combining the operation end of things with the product, Comcast is offering a single digital interface solution across its offerings. Todd gives a few clever examples of what this entails. Finally, Todd asks and answers three important questions: How does Comcast build something and make it useful to the customer? How do you make that work with the rest of the company? And finally, how does Comcast achieve a higher state of existence with respect to customer experiences that feel like a seamless part of the product?

Uzair Rashid, with CVS Healthcare, explains the importance of structuring innovation. Uzair brings a unique perspective to CVS, a Fortune 10 healthcare innovations company, because prior to CVS, he spent many years as a consultant. He understands how to level set and create meaningful change in legacy companies. When it comes to healthcare disruption, Uzair puts it this way: “Innovation at the speed of regulation.” Uzair’s goal is to seek out key technology enablers that create new patient experiences, drive down cost, and take the challenge of resource contention out of the game. By leveraging technology in conjunction with traditional medical resources, the healthcare system can clean up the funnel of patients who are better served with these new innovations. First, as the patient must take priority, it is imperative we understand the narrative of what they want. Then, we can power that with data and connected devices. The more proactive and preventative healthcare becomes, the healthier people become, the

The entertaining Genworth Financial team joins us from OPEX Week 2020 to tell us their enterprise’s transformation story—or journey, more accurately. Kathleen starts off by explaining her view of the company 15 years ago: “It was a very siloed organization. It was very much command and control; very hierarchical. We were focused very much on our processes, like manufacturing, because we came from GE.” Sometimes, as Martijn is quick to interject, they were focusing on the wrong processes. Their new goal was to focus on the customer and increase associate empathy. The leadership team achieved this with some creative physical props that mimic certain hardships their clients experience. However, leading by fear negatively impacts the service a customer receives as well, so Genworth devised a new workforce strategy. “If you really truly believe that the customer is the most important person--because he or she pays your salary--then the front line employees are the most important people, and therefore, your team le

James Dodkins, Customer Experience Expert and heavy metal enthusiast, discusses the parallels between the two. First, he touches on the cyclical nature of refining a product to please its audience. Whether it’s music or tech, improving upon the output based on feedback about the original product moves the needle forward. At the same time, innovation flourishes in a space void of customer input. The secret to balancing these two conflicting strategies is interpreting feedback to anticipate an unarticulated need. James then weighs the pros and cons of niching down and gaining a hardcore audience or going broad and creating a product that is widely accepted but lackluster, somehow tying in a relevant Nickleback reference. Ultimately, James boils it down to this: “We need to move away from this Industrial Age process standardization mindset and towards a 21st Century customer experience, personalization mindset. Embrace that variation. Understand that people are all different. They have different outcomes, differ

Roland Haefs, with Henkel, discusses enterprise evolution and the shift from having purely transactional relationships to becoming a true business solutions provider. It takes strong leadership and an entrepreneurial spirit to pull off such a transformation, which Roland details. In order to demonstrate his point, Roland lays out Henkel’s approach to the shared services process of master data management. Next, the conversation turns to RPA and AI more specifically, including its role in shared services and how to make sure it is being deployed effectively. Further, Roland discusses Henkel’s four business priorities: fund growth, drive growth, excel at digitalization, and increase agility.

Rida Moustafa is an experienced data scientist with a demonstrated history of working in the retail industry. Rida covers a lot of ground in this concise, informative conversation. He shares his story with us, beginning in 1995 with the big data mining movement. Walking us through the way data mining has evolved, Rida hits on neural networks, deep learning, and expert systems. Today, however, AI technology has evolved enough to render some of these old processes moot. Of course, new obstacles present themselves, such as AI’s black box and its influence over regulatory decisions and prediction models. The last half of the conversation is reserved for Rida’s involvement with Walmart and the work he is doing with AI to automate processes and generally improve Walmart’s workflow and profits.

Dr. Timothy Renick with Georgia State joins us to talk about his implementation of predictive analytics within the university, including an AI enhanced chatbot. Since the deployment of these technologies, Georgia State is graduating 3,000 more students a year than it did seven years ago. Dr. Renick explains the university’s approach to finding solutions for problems over innovation for innovation’s sake. With a change in demographics, including a larger low-income population, the university felt it necessary to increase access to support and identify issues before students found themselves in dire straits. Dr. Renick discusses the process of finding a vendor to help them identify and build the perfect solution. It’s working, as shown by the examples he discusses during the rest of the conversation.

Max Just is accompanied by a special guest on this episode of Future of Work. Julie Seitz is an expert on all things workspace, which makes her the perfect partner for the topic of—you guessed it—the future of workspaces. While she notes that an enterprise can’t necessarily futureproof themselves in this regard, she encourages them to get out of their insular spaces for the sake of spotting trends in how people are working in universities, airports, etc. Flexibility and simplicity in a workspace make more practical investments than technological ones that will become outdated. Julie also reflects on the evolution of the public school classroom and how examining that process helps illustrate how different generations work differently. Max jumps in with the ah-hah moments he had while working with Julie, including the importance of providing collaborative workspaces for collaborative work. Ultimately, Max and Julie agree: workspaces matter.

Juan Araya discusses structuring for scale from the eyes of the disruptor and disruptee—both of which Juan knows well. Juan reminds us that before making any actionable change, an end goal must be set. Next, Juan discusses the role speed plays in structuring for scale. Some industries need to move faster than others, which affects their decision making. In the case of Uber, Juan understood that transformative technology supported the speed of change Uber strived for, even more than the other scaling components: people and process. On the flipside, scaling legacy organizations quickly and through technology-first means isn’t conducive to success. His new role with Stryker moves slower and with an enterprise-wide intention different than Uber’s, which he details well. Finally, Juan paints a metaphor between scaling and art.

Robert Welborn discusses five common myths surrounding autonomous vehicles in this discussion. He starts with three TV shows that have skewed perception around AVs. Next, he sets expectations around the maturity model of AVs by describing the stages as childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Today’s data presents itself in three-dimensional forms, and Robert gives time to the struggles and opportunities within this new model of data. It is the engineers behind AVs who are tasked with making things work, and Robert spends some time pulling back the curtain on their trials and tribulations. Finally, Robert recognizes that the elasticity and compatibility of all of the elements at play in autonomous vehicles have a tendency to be overestimated. 

Molecule is an open market based platform that incentivizes the development and co-creation of pharmaceutical IP. Molecule’s CEO, Devon Krantz, discusses the dire state of pharmacological R&D and its cost—literally and figuratively—to patients. Molecule, on the other hand, encourages a patient-centric approach to pharma. How? Devon puts it this way: “We are focusing more on bio-techs, on smaller research labs, on academia. [What we] want to incentivize is for researchers, scientists, and academics to take their IP, and maybe it's in an underfunded area, and put it onto the Blockchain, into an open market, which then enables other people to buy into the market and freely grow that market. We’re democratizing access to cures.” Devon elaborates on the innovative and complex ‘why & how’ during the rest of the conversation.

Sarah Aerni is a data scientist Salesforce. In this conversation, Sarah leads off by talking about what that even means. First, she gives a brief history of the expectation in customer experience and how it’s evolved with the introduction of AI. Then she describes her role in this way: “My role is to lead a team of really brilliant individuals that are focused on how to make it possible for Salesforce customers to build models, add predictions and intelligence without building out an entire data science team.” Sarah comes from a deep science background, having spent six years becoming the expert on automated labeling of C. elegans—a worm cell. How does that relate to forward-facing data science on modern platforms? Building a model is building a model, as Sarah explains. While she shirks the term “unicorn,” it is easy to understand why she’s been described that way listening to this episode.

Helenio Gilabert is the senior director for digital transformation with Schneider Electric. Right out of the gate, Helenio stresses that word “transformation” over “digital.” While technology is the enabler, meaningful implementation can’t happen without a process and cultural change. This process must include all enterprise verticals and every individual within an organization. As Helenio puts it, “You have to offer [employees] a clear view of the path that they can take as an individual to contribute to the organization. And that will require some investment from companies in training and professional development.” Lastly, Helenio defines edge solutions as a hybrid approach to cloud and AI. After all, data is only as good as what we do with it.