CX Files

Evan Jones is the CIO of Youth Employment Accelerator, Harambee, based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is also the National Board Chairman of BPeSA, promoting and advising the wider BPO industry in South Africa. In this episode of CX Files Evan talks about Impact Sourcing and how CX can be used to create employment and change lives across Africa, and beyond. https://www.linkedin.com/in/evanjonesbpo/ https://harambee.co.za/

Shai Berger is the CEO and co-founder of Fonolo, a technology company based in Toronto, Canada. Fonolo manages call-backs for contact centres eliminating the need for customers to wait on hold. In this podcast Shai explains how a simple change can have a dramatic effect on CX. https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaiberger/ https://fonolo.com/

Rod Jones is a contact centre legend. Based in Johannesburg, South Africa, he has consulted and advised on contact centres for over 40 years. Contact Centre Helper magazine once called him the most trusted contact centre advisor *globally*. His work takes him all over the world both to work with clients and to speak about his experience at conferences. Rod recently mentioned to me that there are a few problems that come up in almost every engagement he works on so I called to ask him about these common issues. rodjones.co.za www.linkedin.com/in/rodjonessouthafrica

Srikanth Iyengar is the Group CEO for Europe of Conduent, a major international business process service company with expertise in digital platforms and a technology-focused approach to customer experience. In our conversation Srikanth talks about the evolution of customer service away from the contact centre to a world of data analytics and technology platforms and what this means for the partners asked to provide this kind of expertise by their clients. www.conduent.com www.linkedin.com/in/srikanth-iyengar-a4ab314

Steve Jones is the Head of Insights and Data for Capgemini North America. He has a background managing both AI and Big Data for Capgemini and is a leading global expert on how companies use data for insights and improved CX. In this episode of CX Files he talks about using data insights to create great CX and the effect of emerging tech such as facial recognition. He also explores the ethics of insights - can too much insight start to feel creepy as brands know everything about us? www.linkedin.com/in/stevegjones www.capgemini.com

Mark Davies is a business design expert at PA Consulting with a focus on customer disruption and also author of a recent study titled Customer 4.0. This research explores different demographic groups and how different behaviours are making modern customers extremely complex. In this episode we explore some of the findings from the Customer 4.0 research - in particular why brands just don't understand customer needs. https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmdavies/ https://www.paconsulting.com/

Christine Bardwell is the Senior Principal Strategy for Oracle Loyalty and Commerce and she is responsible for all the global go to market strategy for Oracle Loyalty. Before Oracle, Christine was an industry analyst at companies including IDC and Ovum and therefore she has spent several years analysing the markets that she now works on for Oracle. In the podcast we explored smart speakers, China, Google, data analytics and the question of human or digital CX - a complete omnichannel of CX. https://www.linkedin.com/in/cbardwell/ https://www.oracle.com/

Sarah is the Chief Happiness Officer at Happy Coffee Consulting. She is also the Head of Customer Service at Sure Petcare managing a customer service team that works across borders using several languages. For CX Files she is speaking in her Happy Coffee capacity. Sarah speaks on this podcast about Employee Experience and the importance of great managers and work culture - how does this influence CX? https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahmetcalfecambs/ https://www.happycoffeeconsulting.co.uk/

Amit Shankardass is the Executive Vice President of worldwide marketing at Teleperformance. Teleperformance has over 300,000 people delivering CX services to 170 markets from 80 different countries. In this edition of the podcast, Amit talks about the differences between a human and digital focus on CX and how brands can achieve the best possible blend of both. If 80% of customers prefer to speak to a human, why is everyone automating CX? https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitshankardass/ www.teleperformance.com

Until very recently Vadim Anikanov was the Head of Global Customer Operations at Digital Finance International, which is a member of the Finstar Financial Group. He has spent a couple of decades in various CX leadership roles and at present he is researching the effect of smart speakers on the customer experience. Vadim is particularly interested in the way that smart speakers, such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home will change and influence customer behaviour in a way that allows much greater interactivity with brands. This is an important topic for executives managing CX today because there are now hundreds of millions of these smart speakers installed in homes globally. Vadim is based between Salt Lake City and Moscow - I caught up with him at his Moscow office and asked him to explain some of his smart speaker research. Are brands taking smart speakers seriously enough? https://www.linkedin.com/in/anikanov/