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Transforming the customer connection Menu

10 Executives Taking Customer
Service to the Next Level

This award pays tribute to the service leaders who set the bar for customer experience.

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FORTUNE™ Partners is pleased to announce the 2018 winners of the second annual FORTUNE™ Partners Top Service Leaders Award, an initiative underwritten by Salesforce.

“Our customer service teams understand that creating emotional connections with customers is key to seizing market share,” said one of the delighted winners, Diana Oreck, executive vice president of owner experience at the private jet company NetJets, “and they are empowered to do just that.”

That attitude was prevalent throughout this year’s fierce competition. There were hundreds of nominees from companies of all sizes across different industries, and we followed stringent guidelines in selecting the 10 winners. Nominees came from three sources: a public nomination form, an online search of candidates well recognized for customer experience, and Salesforce’s direct observations of successful companies.

A five-person panel of Fortune editors and customer service experts then carefully reviewed the pool of nominations.

How did we make the final selections? Entrants completed a detailed questionnaire, then wrote a focused essay. Our panelists evaluated their responses based on the following themes: the role contact centers play in their digital transformation, how they integrate field service into customer service, and how they use cognitive tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the customer experience.

Judges chose these themes because they reflect the cuttingedge thinking of leaders in customer care. In today’s business environment, for example, digital transformation is no longer an option. Trends indicate that many customer service visionaries understand that transformation must emanate from the contact center. They recognize that this critical information hub—the pulsing heart of their enterprise—is an ideal jumpingoff point, the place where they can test new technologies at scale. What’s more, it’s where the turbocharged customer experience generated by digital transformation provides the most return on investment in the shortest period of time.

These leaders are also celebrating the fact that digital transformation is blurring the line between sales and service. That’s a true paradigm shift. For more than half a century, the conventional wisdom has been that sales had to precede service and that each job was necessarily distinct. Today, however, with AI augmenting the workday, contact center agents have become strategic partners in their businesses. Their enhanced 360-degree view of the customer puts them in a perfect position to cross-sell and upsell. For their part, sales personnel are helping service by keeping them apprised of fixes, upgrades, and new available products, so that they can personalize their interactions with customers. These changes, of course, are all about the customer. As silos between the two functions break down, the customer experience becomes enriched by seamless, multipurpose interactions.

The third theme that we asked our nominees to consider is field service—a powerful means of meeting ever-increasing customer expectations. While the term may bring to mind hard-hatted technicians carrying hammers and screwdrivers, that perception is dated. Field service in this era is far more comprehensive—and important. After all, it may be the only place companies meet their customers face to face. And with so many devices linked by the Internet of things (IoT), self-service in the field is now possible too.

But one thing is clear: Highly competitive firms know that they must deliver the same degree of personalized, connected service wherever and however customers engage with staff. Cookie-cutter scripts for field service interactions no longer work.

The 2018 winners put these principles into practice. Not only have they embraced the contact center as the nerve center of customer intelligence, but they also recognize that, while analytics, workflow technology, and bots are reshaping the role of contact centers, human interaction has never been more important.

Here’s what put one entrant, Shaun Braun, in the winner’s circle. Braun is senior vice president of global services and solutions at Stryker, a Fortune 500 medical technologies firm.

“We’re raising the bar for customer service by delivering IoTdriven alerts through our Smart Equipment Manager,” he says. “It predicts product failures before they occur in the surgical setting.”

It’s clear that these honorees have mastered the art of delivering service directly to their customers, when they want it and where they want it. The winners are also acutely attuned to the need to make full use of ever-evolving developments in AI and machine learning. They are using these instruments—at scale—with one fundamental goal: to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

And as customer demand for increasingly personalized, connected experiences continues to rise, keeping up with these new tools and trends becomes a modern-day business imperative. The Top Service Leaders Award opens a dialogue about how leaders are doing just that.

The leaders honored here have met the difficult challenges of constantly shifting customer expectations with fresh insights, strategies, and tactics. They’ve worked hard to develop a fully rounded view of every customer interaction—and to make each one the center of their efforts.

“Like the human body, the heart of [our insurance firm] Aflac is what sustains us,” wrote winner Jason Goodroe, second vice president of customer assurance, in his essay. “You can’t train compassion, but you can infuse it through culture, and that is what Aflac does each and every day.

FORTUNE™ Partners is proud to pay tribute to these visionaries.