Navigating change has always been a challenge but what if you could learn from the experiences of others? How do you build trust and loyalty with customers and keep a workforce happy, even through the difficult times of the pandemic? How do you transform your culture despite years of entrenched ways of working? How do you ensure any IT or business transformation is on the right tracks and doing what it is supposed to do?

Join Pip Marlow, CEO Salesforce ANZ and ASEAN, and broadcaster and businessman Russel Howcroft for The Future of Business, Now podcast series. Here they talk with five ANZ industry leaders about transforming company cultures, putting employees and customers first and creating digital ready businesses fit for the modern age.

Banking on culture: How to build trust and loyalty through customer experience

What are the key ingredients of transforming customer experience? How can businesses build trust and loyalty with customers, especially during a time of unprecedented disruption and change? 

As Head of People, Culture & Client Experience at Macquarie Bank, Rosalind Coffey has helped build a truly transformative culture. It has been a key element in understanding and developing a customer voice, which has been crucial to enabling informed decision making and personalisation.

In this episode, Rosalind examines the connection between customer experience, employee experience, culture and business and community success. She also shares valuable insights into how Macquarie Bank uses data to drive visibility and the overall impact this has on its ability, to not just service customers more intelligently but also look after its employees with greater empathy.


 

Growth is a balancing game, so how do you manage risk and expectation?

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically re-shaped our working lives and consumer habits impacting businesses across the globe. So, how do you balance business growth, survival and rising customer expectations across multiple markets during a time of incredible change and uncertainty?

Far from ripping up the rulebook on how to win business, Katrina Konstas, Vice President, Sales APAC at Afterpay, talks about placing customers at the centre of business success to build competitive advantage. She reveals how Afterpay doubled its customer base last year by focussing on customer needs and driving innovation to meet expectations of consumers and merchants.

An honest and open story about the challenges all businesses face when it comes to winning new business, structuring the organisation and managing risk.


 

Put your people first: A plan for innovation and great customer experience

How do you reduce complexity and cost of business-critical IT while building velocity and customer satisfaction, against a pandemic backdrop? Evolving and supporting customers is a challenge for any business but for Natalie Screen, General Manager, Customer Success at Xero, it has been an inspiring journey.

While recognising the need to be nimble and agile in a disruptive and competitive financial services market, Natalie reveals her secrets for success, to grow business and keep customers happy. “People are your biggest asset”, she says, as she talks about her strategy and defining what success looks like.


 

Customer knowledge and culture is key to business transformation

Like many large enterprises, Telstra had grown lots of silos, creating lots of inefficiencies and often at the expense of what really matters, the customer.

When Kieran O’Meara, Executive, Telstra Software Engineering, was part of the Telstra retail business, he was front and centre in driving the organisation’s transformation towards new ways of thinking, working, collaborating and engaging with customers. In this podcast, he talks about the challenges of transforming a large enterprise and the structure and principles required to make it work.

From customer knowledge through to culture, teams and boardroom buy-in, Kieran provides a real insight into the rollercoaster ride that is transforming people and processes and reveals valuable lessons learned.


 

Don’t sugar coat change, IT transformation needs to be transparent

In 2017, NAB embarked on an IT transformation project to simplify and enhance its broker system and created NAB Podium, a technology platform that enabled brokers to manage functions, such as CRM, marketing, communications and communities. It reduced the number of instances from 2,800 to one and has been heralded as a great success.

However, the journey was far from smooth for Simon Southwell, General Manager Performance and Operations, Aggregation Partnerships at NAB, his team and NAB’s broker customers. So, what does a large, complex, IT transformation teach you? What can others learn from NAB’s unique experience?

From underestimating impacts on customers, the need for transparency, executive stakeholder support, and managing expectations, budgets and risk, Simon delivers an open appraisal of his transformation experiences and asks, “how do we transform the business through our tech platforms which will enable awesome experiences for all our stakeholders?”


 

We’re only human. The importance of people and culture in driving success

Organisations need a flat structure. Everyone needs to be heard, to have a voice, to innovate and play an active role in the customer journey. Happy, engaged employees can deliver great customer experiences but how do you get there? What does it mean to create a diverse, inclusive, engaged and considered workforce?

Rosalind Coffey from Macquarie Bank and Natalie Screen from Xero return to the podcast in a joint episode to discuss their experiences of shaping cultures and what this means in terms of overall business performance and brand. From developing a set of company values through to wellbeing initiatives and establishing a culture of learning, this episode reveals the extent to which successful businesses go, to create engaging workplaces, even during a pandemic.


 

The Future of Business, Now podcast series is live. Listen in as ANZ industry leaders explore the challenges of delivering business success based on modern customer experiences together with Pip Marlow and Russel Howcraft.