The Senior Director of Operational Excellence and Six Sigma- US & Canada for Marriott Hotels, Sally Toister joins us from the OPEX Summit in San Diego where she shares that the organizations entire business is around customer experience. Her background is obviously as a six sigma practitioner. She was taught the hospitality business and has adapted six sigma into hospitality. From a process improvement perspective Sally is always balancing running a business and delivering on the customer experience. She’s always finding the freedom within the framework that ensures that she’s speaking to the bottom line while ensuring an outstanding customer experience which establishes loyalty in the brand.

Ep.50: Sally Toister, Marriott

Examining the relationship between the customer and your company.

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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.

Oracle's Nate Skinner On Mistakes To Avoid & A Path For Success

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.

Elan Frank, Slack

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.

Ep. 156: Karen Tilstra, Florida Hospital

Ep. 155: David Campos, SertaSimmons

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, they have a voice, and that the team is consistently being put in a position where they can enrich the lives of customers and see that as the core purpose in their work.”

Ep.50: Sally Toister, Marriott

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