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.

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.

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.

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.”

Fred Reichheld, the creator of the Net Promoter System (NPS), joins us to discuss the task of building a customer-centric culture. Companies that do the best at enriching the lives of their customers are growing two-and-a-half times faster than their competition. Today, word of mouth and truth spreads like wildfire. The modern enterprise can no longer depend on clever advertising campaigns to mask their shortcomings. Building a customer-first culture isn’t always easy, though. Legacy companies have to fight through their capitalistic pasts. Metrics need to change. Shareholders must get on board with the new nature of business. The Net Promoter Score is successful because it provides data that proves the effectiveness of customer-centricity to the bottom line. It is a modern-day metric that replaces the ones that no longer serve today’s landscape. Fred offers both suggestions and examples on how to successfully pivot to a customer-centric business model during this insightful conversation.

McDonald’s senior director of innovation, Deena John, joins us to talk about digital transformation. While definitions vary, Deena describes digital transformation as “transforming through integration of technology” with the goal of generating maximum value for the customer. End-to-end disruption means looking into the future and creating a transformation road map that leads to a new operating model. Deena discusses the differences and similarities between agile and lean, and the iterative process that makes scaling sustainable. Deena frames her key points with specific examples. Next, she asks and answers the question, “In an innovation culture what’s the importance of failing fast?” Ultimately, this insightful conversation with Deena focuses on the future of the enterprise and what needs to happen now to ensure corporations can keep up with the ever-changing landscape that technology brings to business.

Todd Gillam joined Comcast a decade ago—when the word “Comcast” was met with severe negativity. During the first part of our conversation with Todd, he laments over those dark days and discusses the progress they made the first five years after he was hired. They cleaned up their image by addressing common complaints such as hold times and technician effectiveness. Stage two involved systematically identifying and fixing a broader range of customer pain points by utilizing NPS surveys. By combining the operation end of things with the product, Comcast is offering a single digital interface solution across its offerings. Todd gives a few clever examples of what this entails. Finally, Todd asks and answers three important questions: How does Comcast build something and make it useful to the customer? How do you make that work with the rest of the company? And finally, how does Comcast achieve a higher state of existence with respect to customer experiences that feel like a seamless part of the product?

Uzair Rashid, with CVS Healthcare, explains the importance of structuring innovation. Uzair brings a unique perspective to CVS, a Fortune 10 healthcare innovations company, because prior to CVS, he spent many years as a consultant. He understands how to level set and create meaningful change in legacy companies. When it comes to healthcare disruption, Uzair puts it this way: “Innovation at the speed of regulation.” Uzair’s goal is to seek out key technology enablers that create new patient experiences, drive down cost, and take the challenge of resource contention out of the game. By leveraging technology in conjunction with traditional medical resources, the healthcare system can clean up the funnel of patients who are better served with these new innovations. First, as the patient must take priority, it is imperative we understand the narrative of what they want. Then, we can power that with data and connected devices. The more proactive and preventative healthcare becomes, the healthier people become, the better healthcare becomes. Uzair summarizes the process beautifully with this simple phrase. “[With technology], you think about routing people appropriately to care.”

The entertaining Genworth Financial team joins us from OPEX Week 2020 to tell us their enterprise’s transformation story—or journey, more accurately. Kathleen starts off by explaining her view of the company 15 years ago: “It was a very siloed organization. It was very much command and control; very hierarchical. We were focused very much on our processes, like manufacturing, because we came from GE.” Sometimes, as Martijn is quick to interject, they were focusing on the wrong processes. Their new goal was to focus on the customer and increase associate empathy. The leadership team achieved this with some creative physical props that mimic certain hardships their clients experience. However, leading by fear negatively impacts the service a customer receives as well, so Genworth devised a new workforce strategy. “If you really truly believe that the customer is the most important person--because he or she pays your salary--then the front line employees are the most important people, and therefore, your team leaders are the most important leaders. Most people leave their leader. They don't leave the organization.” The team details how they achieved this monumental task.

James Dodkins, Customer Experience Expert and heavy metal enthusiast, discusses the parallels between the two. First, he touches on the cyclical nature of refining a product to please its audience. Whether it’s music or tech, improving upon the output based on feedback about the original product moves the needle forward. At the same time, innovation flourishes in a space void of customer input. The secret to balancing these two conflicting strategies is interpreting feedback to anticipate an unarticulated need. James then weighs the pros and cons of niching down and gaining a hardcore audience or going broad and creating a product that is widely accepted but lackluster, somehow tying in a relevant Nickleback reference. Ultimately, James boils it down to this: “We need to move away from this Industrial Age process standardization mindset and towards a 21st Century customer experience, personalization mindset. Embrace that variation. Understand that people are all different. They have different outcomes, different needs. Make sure that our companies are aligned towards the delivery of those things. Boom.”