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Chris Dotson joins us and shares that he leads the operations enablement group which is comprised of the training, quality, process, risk and change management teams that surround the customer contact center. Chris and his team have to make sure that they’re always looking at things from the players perspective. To understand- what are they looking for- which is ultimately to not to contact the organization. So although his focus is enablement, his job is actually to ensure that players don’t need him. So Chris is always asking the question, what can we do to eliminate the need for the player to contact but if they do, make it as easy as possible.

Dariusz Bazeli oversees shared services in Gdynia and Wroclaw Poland respectively. He grew up in an operational role and that’s where his heart is, so he sees his role as a manager of operations with his operations directors. At the same time, he has the responsibility of overseeing those support functions of finance, IT, HR. And as Geoban is part of Santander, in that banking environment, Dariusz is most focused on control, ensuring that processes are secure, correct and compliant. And like everyone else in central and Eastern Europe, Dariusz and the organization are concerned with positioning the brand to ensure it’s as attractive as possible to the best talent available.  

Recorded at Intelligent Automation with clicking and clacking behind us, Sreeharsha Upadhyayyula begins by quoting William Gibson, the science fiction writer, with “the future is here, it’s just that it’s not evenly distributed." As the world wide web and new media went from being bright shiny objects to simply part of the way we do business, Sree notes that, that’s precisely where we are with intelligent automation. Rather than a bright shiny object, businesses are now asking how does this make me smarter about my business, how does this get me closer to the customer, how does this truly help me solve a customers problem? These next few years as Sree sees it are about test and learn.

The Chief Customer Experience Officer for AIA Malaysia, Troy Barnes joins us and shares that he tries to keep it as simple as possible. He see’s his position as ultimately him being personally accountable for the experiences the organization creates for customers. He, of course, credits his very talented team for actually getting the job done. The biggest thing that management tries to endorse is that when they talk customer, they practice customer. Meaning that rather than simply talking about the customer experience, he and the team actively get out into the world and experience what the customer experiences so that they can improve on that very thing.

Katarzyna Szaroleta of DFDS joins us from SSOW in Budapest and shares that the HR role is quite wide and complex. She notes her main responsibility as helping managers become better managers. And so she sees her role as that of a coach or adviser. Katarzyna helps develop skills and talents while avoiding mistakes. A Team leader is  traditionally a former SME’s who is an operationally talented person. Managing soft skills is where the rubber meets the road for a would be successful manager- and Katarzyna points out that these skills can be taught if the manager in question has a predisposition for that side of management. From there, Katerzyna is managing personality types for ultimate success.

Marek Sowa is a techie. He’s not ops, he’s not financial services. That said, he’s not a traditional programmer. So he see’s it as he creates ideas and delivers results. He wants to make sense in that he’s speaking the same language as everyone with whom he’s working. So he’s taught himself how to program so that he can communicate at the deepest level with the front lines of that aspect of the team. His quest is to understand how technology will disrupt customers, current operations and how those very technologies can be embedded in said operations. What can be done and how far can he and the team push the boundaries to meet the customer where they are- no matter the time, place or service desire. Marek is engaging in ai through voice recognition with results and he shares examples of those results with us.

Peter Csucska, the General Manager Business Services Lexmark joins us from SSOW where he shares that his top priority is "challenging the way we work.” He’s pretty confident that the organization’s GBS model is robust. When it works well though, a level of comfort drifts in, and so Peter says at points “we got too comfortable.” Which has led him to ensure that every 3-4 years the team evaluates the shared services strategy, revises that strategy and moves forward. Past performance is of course, not a guarantee for future performance. Understanding that, however, over the past decade Peter and the team have established a service center plus.

With 30 years and change of experience in financial services Nigel Trout feels that he must have learned something. He notes the fact that the bigger banks continue to try to find solutions in technology while the upstart fintech’s continue to search for scope and scale. While working at HSBC the focus was on the cost reduction side so Nigel and the team had to really streamline operations which led him to a focus on the technologies which could most readily accomplish that goal. He's looked at disruptive and exponential technologies including machine learning which showcases the opportunity to offer better service to the customer.

Hope is not a strategy. So says Wells Fargo’s SVP National Client Service, Heather Magaha who joins us from CCW and further shares that you’ve got to have a plan but at least try something. You can’t sit in status quo or you get nowhere- by definition. You’ve got to be brave. When she came into her role, she did hear the familiar refrain “we’ve always done it this way,” but she was blessed with the fact that a good portion of the team didn’t like it. Change though, as Heather shares is still difficult even if you actually don’t like the way things currently are. But she did have a bit of momentum on the way into the concept of change management.