B2BiQ

Recorded at the OPEX Summit in San Diego, Emmanuel Obiorah joins us as the Director of Process Excellence for Verizon. Going to law school at Harvard and business school at Case, Emmanuel has always had an inclination to be all things. With experience working for GE, Bank of America, and eBay he's come close. And it goes without saying that he brings a wealth of experience to his current position. His time in law gave him experience in risk management but he wanted to truly build things. He eventually landed at Bank of America where he indeed did build something- digital loan origination. Growing the analog business from 500M originations to 5B. He continues to conflate the analog world with digital today.

John Dickens joins us and shares his history- joining the Barclay’s management program out of school which led to five years at the Soho Square training branch where he was involved with Channel 4 in the UK in it’s first year of license. Joining banking was more of a round-about for John. He noticed that the banking model was changing so he moved on to the music industry to differentiate himself which allowed him to use banking management techniques at a company that really needed it. He focused on how the organization could be effective and efficient and drive cost out while adding value. He then joined a fast growth company where he re-engineered everything soup to nuts and found an initial shared services operation. And from there he’s had twenty years in the space.

Lee Coulter joins us and discusses what he’s doing in regards to machine learning, what he’s doing in regards to standards around intelligent automation and what you might want to think about on your own automation journey as you go from RPA- or as Lee says, task automation- to more cognitive based solutions for your enterprise. The average decently sized corporation is somewhere in the first 24 months of automation. And so, Lee’s experience with a brick and mortar retailer engaged in machine learning, sheds light on where you might be many moons from now when you find yourself two years into your own machine learning, but more importantly Lee sheds light on what you need to be thinking and doing now in order to get to the starting line successfully.

Eytan Bensoussan joins us and shares his thoughts on customer experience from a fintech perspective. His thoughts are if you’re creating a new option, the role of the bank should be different. And so in servicing small business owners, Eytan’s point of view is the role of the bank should be a first line of defense against the burdens of financial management. Accounting, Expense Management, Cash Flow Insights are either done on the side or are extremely expensive to have done. He’s set up shop to absorb data and repurpose it for the client. And so, he’s disrupting an industry, he’s disrupting technology and he’s disrupting customer service and customer experience in the name of the customer. He has set up a financial institution where the product is customer experience.

Recorded at CCW, Rod Johnson joins us and shares that he runs service operations for Farmer’s Insurance. He says that he’s responsible for service related to customers interaction with agents in person on the phones and digitally. The technology that Rod and his team is building has to address that fact that the brand has to be more cognizant of the fact that the customer wants more of the relationship. With an army of 48,000 agents that the customer could rely on for 89 years, the brand realizes that the customer now wants an additional digital layer to offer self support which supports the personal service provided in-person. The value proposition remains to be a trusted advisor…Rod’s just adding tools.

Alexander Hubel joins us from the Nordic RPA & AI Summit and shares that automation at Ericsson was born out of a digital strategy project where they were looking for opportunities. Within that timeframe, Alexander saw a demo of RPA in action and he says he’s lucky because his background is in the outsourcing industry and so he knew the type of work that’s traditionally offshored and outsourced- and so in the demo- he saw familiar work being done. In terms of experience, Alexander was also a part of the largest ever M&A project in the Nordics. During the project he realized the importance of investing in systems and resource integration.

Recorded at SSOW Manchester, Wojciech Wieronski joins us with over a decade of experience as a CFO. When asked how shared services executives should approach a CFO, he suggests to begin with a basic business principle. For instance, he feels that business transformation isn’t the goal. Making business simpler is the goal. Because simpler is more effective. More effective business means that you can focus on what really matters. And what really matters is your customers. The goal as Voichek sees it is to track back from the customer to the employee and then to the business. He’s saying start with the end in mind not the other way around.

Celebrated Author, Paco Underhill joins us to share that when he was doing research for commercial zoning issues for cities on the roof of the SeaFirst Bank building in Seattle he had an epiphany. He would do for merchants of any kind what he was doing for cities- helping them understand what customers were doing in their respective establishments and sharing what the merchants could do to improve their customer's experience. He literally wrote the book on it- “Why We Buy,” which came from an article that Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Paco for the New Yorker. Paco discusses how he goes about helping merchants with Envirosell, providing some insight on what drives customers and how that’s changed over the years. He also provides a few international case studies. And finally, we discuss his passion which is helping with homelessness through Urban Pathways.