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Dominic Hoffmann, the Chief Customer Experience Officer of Lazada Malasia of the Lazada Group of the Alibaba Group joins us and shares that NPS might not be the definition of success as it’s currently widely understood. That said, Dominic does agree that it’s one of the most important KPIs to measure the customer experience. The organization even uses it as a basis for incentives. But for the customer experience practice you need to see it from a different angle. Don’t utilize NPS as a blunt object. The goal for CX is to unpack NPS to understand what it entails and how it’s recipe might have changed from one year to the next or over the lifetime of the organization.

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.

Akiko Fukuda joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit in London where she introduces us to Cotoha the AI agent. Cotoha stands for communication happiness. The organization has launched commercial customers and they’ve got a lot of positive feedback. Customers have the option of choosing a human agent or the ai bot and they are choosing the bot. Akiko explains that the younger generation in Japan doesn’t like human interaction within this service reality. She further explains that humans don’t mind asking bots questions they feel might be stupid whereas they might be reticent to do so with a human agent.

The CMO of IHH Healthcare/Parkway Pantai, Alvin Neo joins us from CEM Asia in Singapore where he shares his organization is the second largest private hospital operator in the world by market capitalization. They service the middle class and above- those people who can afford, have the desire for and beyond the best clinical outcome, appreciate good patient experience. Service and speed and spec is important to them on top of the clinical service. One of the ways the company does this is by combining what you expect from a hospital with what you expect from a hotel- visually and in terms of the actual customer experience. Alvin dives into the myriad other means as well.

Viral Chhaya joins us from SSOW where he shares his history. After initially deciding not to be an engineer, Viral eventually wound up with a six sigma black belt when he landed a job with Jack Welch’s GE. He notes that when he joined the organization it was like university all over again as only the best and brightest got allocated to six sigma where the team trained you. Viral’s job as he saw it was to be open and willing to learn and then willing to deploy. As it turned out, he got is black belt just before 9/11 when no one’s agenda included business continuity planning and disaster recovery processes. But then of course, BCPDRP shot to the top of everyone’s list. GE needed certified talent to head those initiatives and Viral was lucky enough to head it up in India. He’s taken that experience forward in his career.

Utilize RPA, reach for AI, focus on automation- no matter what you’re talking about, according to Bart van de Sande the Head of Operations Transaction Banking for ABN Amro, it’s all just transformation. Bart notes that these are all just new tools on the transformation journey, just as lean management and all of the tools before and after. At the core he notes, do you love your clients? Do you have passion for your clients? Do you want to go the extra mile? Do you know what drives them? How are you going to help them to fulfill their dreams or maybe sometimes help them to get out of their worst nightmares? But that, Bart says, is the core of transformation. Not the tools that you use to answer those very questions.

The h after the t in Thom of Thom Hacker is no accident. It’s been placed there after years of progression. Thom is responsible for supporting the online environment through his customer contact center. Any online purchase or order questions that you the customer have for the Home Depot go through Thom and his team. Interactions with the center run the gamut but the top two are ‘help me place an order’ and ‘where is my order’ or WIZMO which is actually around 50% of all calls. Thom sees opportunity in the progression of the order but there are folks that still do want to call. Understanding that,  Thom truly enjoys working on the strategy of creating an effortless customer experience.

A bit of a troubadour early on, Melissa Leon joins us and shares that she loved the idea of driving across the country and stopping in at a TGIFriday’s along the way and waitressing that night. When off the road, Melissa took a job as a teller which along with a degree in hospitality, led to a finance job in hospitality which led her to a management position in housekeeping which she intensely disliked. They moved her into a management role in room service which also didn’t click. But, she got the taste for managing spreadsheets in room service which the controller of the hotel noticed and asked her if she’d like to join the accounting department. Which is where she landed and it clicked. Four Seasons recruited her where she has spent time in Hawaii, Miami and Los Angeles until she landed a job in shared services in Arizona.

Recorded in advance of Customer Experience Management Asia, Miao Song joins us to share her thoughts on the digital transformation journey. There are two perspectives on which to focus- the external perspective- how is the organization connecting with customers in a digital fashion. There, you’re looking at customer-centricity and how you can improve digital engagement. And of course the internal perspective where you focus on digitalizing internal business processes, continuously driving improvement, automate internal processes to create an efficient organization and so on. A third focus would be building advanced analytics capabilities across the organization supported by big data.

Ashima Kanwar joins us to share that based on her upbringing she has a very solid work ethic which has ensured that both she and her employers over the years have focused on the fact that she’s dedicated and accountable. She was going to school and had a full time job concurrently early in her career. She took up a focus on six sigma while working for GE which is of course a great place to do just that. And again, based on her work ethic, she had a black belt role without having the black belt. She’s now a master black belt which she’s now applying to intelligent automation.