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Alice Pope joins us from the Chief Customer Officer Exchange and shares her background growing up in the DC area. Her father was a professor and taught Alice that education was a foundational building block to help realize the American dream. The household had a culture of learning, she and her two siblings all  have Masters degrees or higher. She was told by her father to figure out her passion and go after it. Her mother told her to impact lives, to make a difference in peoples lives which is  ultimately what brought her to customer experience. She first became a chemical engineer, gaining a six sigma black belt developing process which she took forward to demonstrably impacting the customer experience bottom line.

Recorded at OPEX Financial Services, Jon Theuerkauf joins us and shares that after dabbling in sport, he started his own company and the ripe old age of 25. US Steel came to him and asked him to assess the skill sets of steelworkers and set them up  for a next step of success.  After studying early process excellence disciplines Jon caught on with MCI Worldcomm for some interesting days. Jon then made his way to GE Capital to work under Jack Welch and he takes us through some key learnings from Jack. Jon goes on to share successes and other learnings through the rest of what became an international history and ultimately how he sees things now.

Recorded at SSOW Filippo Passerini joins us and takes us through his history from Rome to Istanbul to the UK to Latin American to North America to line management in Greece and eventually to GBS. At P&G, the baseline cost and service models wasn’t clear so when they had a few glitches there was a lot of noise. They had tried outsourcing, monetizing and then called Filippo. He realized that he and the organization needed to move very fast because the unit couldn’t continue to be in limbo. He brought in his line management mindset, strategy and approach which was transformational for GBS. He also was CIO so he discusses reporting into CIO, CEO and CFO and the implications of each.

Sue Martin joins us from the Chief Customer Officer Exchange to share that her core customers just love the brand and the brand loves them back. She shares that at a trade show, those core customers will flock to the booth, they’re influencers and defenders. Sue has the organization set up to ensure that the customer experience is just as true for every customer. She shares that that customer-centric thinking goes all the way to the very top of the organization. The entire organization understands that customer service and customer experience go hand in hand. Service can be there to help a customer, solve an issue but customer experience is the link between every aspect of the organization and each customer.

Karen Ellis joins us from the Chief Customer Officer Exchange and, among other things, discusses her roughly 15 years at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport- the busiest airport in the world. It turns out that leadership at the airport likes that distinction and manages the organization to stay on top- receiving various awards for being the most efficient airport. Karen shares details on the Customer Experience Training program that she modeled after Disney and built over 9 years. The program brought together employees from the airlines, concessions, parking, security…even the TSA learning the unified standards for the airport in appearance, behavior and service. Karen shares that passengers absolutely noticed the results…and she’s brought that training program forward to her new post.

Recorded at SSOW Tomasz Byoshstofski joins us and discusses the keys to managing his millennial team. He has learned that other generations have politics inherent in our communication. He’s learned to put politics away when dealing with his team which contains mostly folks in their 20s. If you’re not real, you won’t be heard. Regarding his history, after spending time in tough job roles the Netherlands and Kuala Lampur building his global people management skills, and utilizing Dutch directness he he went back to Poland in another difficult position in shared services. Overall, Thomasz found that in managing people, especially non Gen X, non boomers, the best question is always why. 

Mark Buchanan joins us from the Chief Customer Officer Exchange where he shares that on his most recent journey- he and his team have collaborated with more than 10K globally distributed people in all kinds of different fields. There are more than 8K product skews meaning there’s an enormous range of jobs and expertise. As the organization has acquired over 180 different companies, on top of the unique people, there are different cultures with different approaches and world views. These are the fascinating problems and opportunities associated with completely changing a brand language from where it started at the Stanford technology help desk to where it is now- a truly global enterprise with all levels of technology acumen interacting with the brand.

Once a nurse, always a nurse, Lynn Skoczelas joins us from the Chief Customer Officer Exchange. She shares that the Chief Experience Officer title is new and that executives across the board should fully understand the value of experience vs. service. Service is being nice and following protocol. But to create a memorable experience is quite another thing. Lynn says that we are all continually creating memories and the question is- are they positive or are they negative? So the goal is to have the patient walk away from a serious healthcare experience with the most prominent memory being positive. Lynn says to make that happen- experience-thinking must be prevalent throughout the entire organization.