Over the last two weeks Hunter and I had conversations with two people from very different backgrounds to help showcase the need for, but also the value of developing customer feedback loops in your engagements.
Today’s Episode
Maxine Teller is a strategic consultant in the Washington DC area with a large book of Federal agencies and commercial customers.
Two of my favorite stories to come out of the conversation with Maxine included gamification and communications guidance. While Jay’s reaction to Gamification, by its title alone, suggests a lack of interest, even he admits that the theory behind it is rather sound at understanding how to engage people in training, engagement, and feedback. Maxine’s story on a recent customer of hers who realized rather quickly that to succeed in the face of the recent pandemic-based work from home situation they needed to provide their staff guides to ensure efficiency and easy communications across the board.
Maxine also shared a great reminder that if we want to consider how to engage the end customer to ensure they understand the value and become engaged, consider yourself, while sharing a story of her own experiences on a consumer advisory panel.
As Office 365 was rolled out at Heathrow Airport, Samit Saini was a security officer checking bags. As a security officer, Samit new there had to be a better solution to the common tasks in which security officers relied on shared sheets of paper to communicate with passengers who spoke different languages. Diving into the Power Platform he built a simple translation app, now in use acrosss the airport.
Samit is now on the Devops team managing the Power Platform adoption program with over a dozen apps utilized across the airport improving efficiency of previously analog processes. His path to technology ensures he understands the value in not just gathering feedback from end users post deployment, but working with them to properly document the business requirement.
These tenants in hand, Samit believes end user engagement is the only way to successfully deploy technology today.
Regarding Gamification – this reminded Jay of a scavenger hunt for Microsoft Teams he had heard about, but couldn’t recall. Immediately after recording he remembered taht it was Carrie Basham Marshall, CEO of Talk Social To Me, who posted these three scavenger hunts; they are great examples of how to game training of new technologies with your staff. Check them out, and if you ARE using Teams, check out the This Week in Teams podcast, another podcast on the On the Spot Network!
Maxine Teller – Maximize Strategies
Maximize Strategies
Maxine Teller has 25 years of success creating new business opportunities, leading digital transformations and solving strategic problems for C-level leaders and senior program executives in government, media, digital, technology, health and nonprofit sectors. With depth of experience across a breadth of industries, Maxine draws from a toolkit of innovative processes and methodologies to rethink traditional approaches by aligning business objectives, fostering collaboration, and connecting people, ideas and organizations. Maxine encourages clients to think differently to grow more effectively.
Maxine has extensive expertise helping government agencies improve mission efficiency and effectiveness. Her government clients include DoD, USDA, SSA, HHS, DoL and IRS. In her work with the U.S. Department of Defense, she developed and co-authored the Web 2.0 policy for the CIO, launched the Emerging Media Directorate, and secured distribution in 12 million households for the Pentagon Channel. Maxine directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer Meal Expansion Campaign and led digital strategy for the Back to School campaign.
Her commercial clients include: Dun & Bradstreet, USAToday, XM Satellite Radio, Comcast, InnerWorkings and the HealthCentral Network. She directed strategy and business development at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive; managed and grew the USATODAY.com account for interactive agency marchFIRST; co-founded startup StockGift.com; and led global client teams through strategic innovation initiatives at IdeaScope Associates.
Maxine earned her MBA from Georgetown University and her BA in sociology from Brandeis University.
Samit Saini (MVP) – Heathrow Airport
For 13 years, Samit Saini worked as a security officer at Heathrow Airport in London, checking bags and reading X-ray machines. Heathrow is Europe’s busiest airport — 80 million passengers passed through last year alone — and Samit noticed how challenging it was to communicate with international travelers because of language barriers.
Samit asked his IT department whether there was an automated solution to replace the sheets of paper listing common phrases and their meanings in different languages, which security officers relied on, but he was told it was too expensive and there wasn’t enough funding.
That didn’t stop Samit, though. With the aid of online tutorials, he learned PowerApps and built a simple translation app on his own.
It was such a success that Samit now works as a full-time IT user-adoption specialist at the airport, training others how to use PowerApps. The Heathrow team has built more than a dozen apps to date, improving the efficiency of processes that were previously done with paper and pencil.
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