Jeff Oskin Podcast Transcript
Jeff Oskin joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Jeff Oskin. With a proven track record in the high-tech industry and a strong focus on customer experience, Jeff helps align the three pillars of people, processes, and technology.
As an executive coach, technologically savvy executive, and leader, owner of multiple businesses in his career, he understands life in the trenches and the importance of strong customer alignment. As a successful entrepreneur with a deep understanding of customer experience, his focus is on helping businesses thrive in today’s complex economy.
Well, good afternoon, Jeff. Welcome to the show!
Jeff Oskin: Good afternoon, Brian! Pleasure to be here.
Brian Thomas: This is awesome. I appreciate you jumping up, getting on a podcast like I do every day, right? It’s just an hour difference. You in New York, me in Kansas City. Let’s have an awesome conversation today. So, Jeff, jumping into your first question…
How do you ensure the customer experience remains at the forefront when aligning the pillars of people, processes and technology within a business?
Jeff Oskin: Hey, Brian, great question. Listen, certainly, uh, customer experience remains central and involves really integrating it into every aspect of the business framework.
At NewLogiq, my company, we start by defining what good looks like for the customer experience through really kind of a detailed journey mapping process. This map ultimately becomes our blueprint, and we help our clients create really customer centric culture where every employee understands their role in enhancing the customer experience as it relates to that map.
From a process standpoint, we’d like to streamline and automate where possible to reduce friction points for the customer in their journey. And then finally, technology, and in particular, AI, in my strong opinion, is not used just for efficiency, but to personalize interactions at scale. We implement continuous feedback loops where technology captures customer interactions, processes analyzed for these insights, and then people ultimately act on these insights.
So, as we’re continuously improving that customer experience. I feel by keeping the customer journey as the guiding light, we can ensure every decision innovation is very customer focused.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. And you know, for a lot of years, the mantra we used in the technology space, as you know, people processes and technology, and that’s something that I hold near and dear to my heart.
And I appreciate you breaking that down for our audience today as well. So, Jeff, can you share an example of how you helped a business align its strategy and execution in a rapidly changing environment? What were the key challenges and how were they overcome?
Jeff Oskin: Yeah, absolutely. Certainly. Brian, one of our clients, a midsize manufacturing firm, was really struggling with the rapid pace of change in the industry.
The products that they manufacture happen to be in a crazy evolving industry and they had a fantastic strategy on paper, but. At the end of the day, execution was falling short, largely due to a misalignment between their teams and a lack of agility in those teams. And we stepped in and conducted a series of workshops to break down their departmental and inner silos and created a series of cross functional collaboration teams and tiger teams that we asked them to go rethink the process and how they interact with their customers.
And we then also implemented on top of that, an agile project management framework. That allowed that company to be more responsive to market changes. Really, the key challenge was shifting the organizational mindset from kind of a traditional waterfowl approach to very much an agile, rapid development, fail fast, if you will, mentality.
And we did that really by demonstrating some quick wins that involve leadership. They saw the light bulbs go off, if you will. And that in turn allowed them to turn their strategy into very actionable results that the team could. Go execute on and ultimately gain market share and outpace their competitors.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I love success stories like that. And sometimes it is hard to get buy-in to get people to move and shift and see the vision. But obviously with some quick wins and you kind of show me the money sort of thing. Right. Show me through action. You really have helped that company along. So, I appreciate the story.
Jeff, as a leader with a background in both high-tech industries and entrepreneurship, how do you balance the demands of technology with effective leadership practices.
Jeff Oskin: Yeah, great question. Again, there’s some balancing technology and innovation with effective leadership. In my opinion, it’s all about maintaining a clear vision and having strong communication as a leader.
And technology is great, but really, it’s a tool to achieve a business outcome, you know, not an end in and of itself. And so, from my experience, it’s really about kind of four things. Number one, you know, is that vision and communication, right? Clearly communicating a vision where the technology serves the business strategy, you know, not just technology for technology’s sake.
Number two is empowerment, right? You’ve got to give the teams the autonomy to experiment, to come up with ideas on their own, to leverage new technologies on their own. So, you’ve got to provide the resources and kind of get out of the way. Number three is, is about integration. And that’s. If you do bring new technology on again, it’s done in the, in the context of solving a business problem.
So therefore, it’s got to be integrated. It’s got to be integrated with the existing systems that are in place so that it enhances rather than, you know, disrupts or, or creates jagged edges in a workflow. And then finally leadership doing it by example, right? Staying up to date myself. I spent a lot of time staying up to date on technology trends, understanding what’s coming how we might be able to do things differently and learning and adapting.
And I think that in turn sets the tone for the team. And so, you know, I think the combination of all these items. You know, while it allows us to kind of push the boundary of technology, we do so in a way that supports the business and its goals and doesn’t come at the expense of our employees, their engagement or customer satisfaction.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. And there is a blend, several things you had mentioned, but obviously having strong process in there is key to success, but you know, your experience that you blended in there as a leader and someone that has been in the tech space for quite a long time. So I appreciate the breakdown.
And Jeff, last question of the day. How do you see artificial intelligence transforming customer experience in the near future? What advice do you have for businesses looking to leverage AI to enhance their customer relationships?
Jeff Oskin: Yeah, AI and the customer experience is really at the forefront of what we do here at NewLogiq.
And so, this, this particular question is very near and dear to my heart. At the end of the day, I think AI is, it’s poised to revolutionize the customer experience really by enabling hyper personalization at scale. I think in the near future, AI will not only predict customer needs, but also engage in very human like actions.
You see it at some stages today. Through advancements in natural language processing, machine learning technologies from an AI standpoint like that. And so, my advice to businesses looking to leverage AI is really a couple fold. Number one, start small, right? Again, going back to technology helps solve a business problem, identify a problem or an area where AI can make a very tangible difference.
For example, like customer service chatbots or personalized marketing and deploy it and deploy something, learn from it, understand it, get comfortable with the technology. Number 2, it’s data. Whenever we’re in working with a client doing assessment of their processes and infrastructure, one of the things we look for is a strong data infrastructure to support AI.
You’ve got to have really clean, well-organized data for AI to learn from in order for it to truly work. And if you don’t have a strong data foundation, there’s no sense deploying AI. Your best bet is to first focus on getting that data foundation in place. Number 3 is to be conscious of the ethics associated with AI.
Be transparent with your customers about how you’re using it. Customers appreciate you knowing that they’re interacting with AI. I think it’s important for building trust. I think especially in this day and age, people expect it. But the more transparent you can be with it, the more trust you’ll gain with your customers.
And then finally, you know, this is not a set it and forget it mindset, right? AI is, is all about continuously learning. And so, the models are evolving. They’re, they’re evolving every single day. It’s kind of an arms race out there, but, you know, be prepared to regularly update whatever it is you deploy and train it on new data, train it on the customer feedback, you know, make sure that it is in and of itself is continuously learning.
And so. You know, kind of to summarize it all, I think, in my opinion, integrating AI thoughtfully, you know, businesses can really think about enhancing the customer experience in their interactions, but more importantly, gain insight that allow them to make more strategic decisions, make that customer experience better, and really help the organization at whole, you know, make the overall experience that the customer has a differentiator for the business.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I appreciate you bringing up some of the ways you can integrate AI into a business. Obviously, you want to do it thoughtfully, as you mentioned, but there’s so many things that you can do today that are low hanging fruit just to make some quick wins in that space. Of course, you’ve seen the conversational AI take off and call centers.
Now it’s, it’s amazing. But keeping, you know, hand on the throttle, got to watch the ethics around AI. But Jeff, I really do appreciate your insights today. And it was certainly a pleasure having you on. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Jeff Oskin: Right. Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Jeff Oskin Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
