
Mastering The Balancing Act Between Technology, People, And Culture
An interview with Thom McDaniel, Vice President, CEC Product & Site Services at Marriott International.
![]() ![]() THOM McDANIEL Thom leads the technology support for Marriott’s Global Customer engagement teams with 6,500 associates and 20 contact centers that deliver over $5B in revenue to Marriott’s shareholders. In a recent conversation with Thom, we discussed his career journey, Marriott’s culture, its values, and overall mission as it applies to CX-related technology, and how the brand is influencing travelers to create their own experiences. |
EXECS IN THE KNOW (EITK): Tell us a little about your background and how you came to be at Marriott. What is the day-to-day focus for you in your current role?
Thom McDaniel: Interestingly, my college background was journalism. At the time, I was interested in communications and always had a curiosity in technology, which progressed into a variety of job opportunities right out of college. I’d say I started in what a lot of people call “the business.” I started my career in sales operations and progressed into some leadership roles around technology initiatives with Ameritech at one point, and then with Novell. As part of my career, I spent the last seven years with eBay. That’s where Andy Yasutake and I worked together prior to coming to Marriott.
Coincidentally, I have a neighbor that was a leader at Marriott, and one day while we were socializing, he mentioned there were a lot of big opportunities they were trying to look at technologically. As we were talking about what I had been doing at eBay, he was like, “Wow, we need to do that at Marriott!” It turns out that he went back to his leadership team, and they reached out to me about helping them make some transitions at Marriott’s Customer Engagement Centers.
At the time, they had been progressively moving toward changing their support model. Marriott’s Customer Engagement Centers started off as Reservation Centers. Their entire job was just to book reservations. It has now become more of a broad customer engagement model where we service things. I had a lot of experience with both Novell and eBay that lent itself well to this Marriott experience. I had been working in Silicon Valley most of my career and thought it was time to venture out into travel and hospitality and venture into a different space.
In my day-to-day role, I have a broad set of technology teams, including an infrastructure team that supports our centers and our remote associates globally. I have several people stationed around the world in our 20 different contact centers that support the infrastructure in those centers directly. Roughly 80% of our organization today is now remote, which is crazy because we were the inverse of that when I first started at Marriott.
It was still a pilot six to seven years ago. I have a product team that is focused on product roadmaps, strategies, and initiatives related to core technologies, including voice architecture, IVR, survey platforms, workforce management platforms, and several reporting mechanisms within our business. Additionally, I have a team that drives the product focus for our reservations platform, our loyalty platform, and what I call our customer relationship management platform. They work with vendors as well as with our corporate IT functions to deliver these product-focused tools for our Customer Engagement Centers.
EITK: You’ve probably seen a tremendous amount of change in just the last couple of years. Can you explain these transformations?
Thom: Two weeks after I joined Marriott, they announced that they were acquiring Starwood. For the past three to four years, I had been in merger and acquisition mode for the technology space. I had just come from eBay, where I helped lead the separation of PayPal from eBay. At one point, we decided to make a case for integrating and transforming our two different customer engagement businesses into one. However, we wanted to optimize it in such a way that we could create real savings for the company while at the same time improving customer experience.
We partnered with Deloitte and began a three-year journey into expanding our use of Salesforce by using other channels such as chat, messaging, and expanding the use of Natural Language IVR. Our focus was centered around how we could provide more self-service opportunities for our customers, as well as better routing and optimizing our occupancy within our service centers across the globe.
With Marriott’s model being quite different from Starwood’s, we had to look at how we could distribute volume contacts across all our centers and optimize where we were sending them. We made significant efforts over that three-year period to drive about $100 million dollars annually and savings for Marriott. It’s an exciting change.
From a transformation context, the pandemic has created what I call the next catalytic event. When we think about Marriott as Customer Engagement Centers, it’s becoming more about the people — where they’re at, how they operate and engage, how you support them, and how they support the customer. There are a lot of new realities, both in the marketplace and when it comes to customer expectations, that have caused us to rethink our transformation.
EITK: How would you describe Marriott’s culture, its values, and the overall mission when it comes to serving Bonvoy Loyalty Program Members as it applies to CX-related technology?
Thom: Marriott’s Bonvoy Loyalty Program is a fundamental part of its business. It’s key to Marriott’s long-term strategy. The Starwood acquisition was to merge those SPG programs with the Marriott Rewards Program and take the best of both of those programs and, at the same time, increase the size and scope of this community. We’ve looked at how to differentiate service for our premier customers, and we’ve tried to implement that in both our soft skills and the maturity of our associates.
We have also thought about how we manage those customers as they come into our business, and then, ultimately, how we care for them through their overall engagement. From the point of initial interest in booking a stay with Marriott to the booking process and their actual stay, we are trying to improve that hand-off across the different Marriott teams that are servicing them.
Culture is a huge part of Marriott. Every time you hear any of our senior leadership, there’s always a reference to culture. While we are now a multi-billion-dollar company, it’s a family business at its core roots. Mr. Marriott has a famous quote about taking care of the associates, so they’ll take care of our guests, which permeates through a lot of the business.
When we think about the CX strategy, it’s a balancing act, particularly if you think about IVRs. I don’t know anybody that likes to deal with an IVR. Also, a lot of customers don’t like to deal with calling in and talking to somebody, and they don’t like to wait. Although, to some degree, I think COVID did change that a little bit. What we’re finding is that customers’ tolerance in terms of waiting on a phone line has improved depending on the topics they’re calling about.
That said, I work with my self-service teams quite a bit to balance this idea of deflecting or containing contacts from a cost perspective. How do we create an experience that allows a customer to get what they need as fast as possible? Depending on the customer and their intent, that means directing them straight to an associate. We have logic and rules in our process and tools that will push you straight to an associate. However, we are aware that there will be times when our associates can’t do much more than a bot that we implement.
It’s been crazy, especially for the airlines, which have been struggling. I travel quite a bit for work, and I’ve had four-hour wait times on some of the airlines I’ve called into.
Thankfully, Marriott hasn’t been to that point, though we are challenged with staffing because dynamics and the surge of business has changed since people came out of COVID. There’s this huge desire to travel, and so, it’s been interesting, but we try to manage the customer experience in such a way that it balances the degree to which we use technology to deflect or contain the IVR in a chatbot with the need to satisfy customer requests.
Expectations are definitely changing, and what people are calling about is changing on a regular basis, too. We’re constantly managing that and trying to create better experiences because, as technologies improve, we are trying to make it more intuitive.
EITK: What are some of the ways Marriott is using technology to differentiate itself from its competitors to improve the customer experience?
Thom: There are a lot of different technology silos within the operation. You have the digital experience of Marriott.com, and you have the mobile app, where Bonvoy Members can interact with both properties, as well as our service organization, through those apps. We’ve been trying to make that more robust and seamless across that flow.
At the same time, we’re using the contact centers and the Customer Engagement Centers as a key foundation for that interaction. Tying those things together has been a huge amount of effort, but it’s really paid out in terms of our customer experience.
When loyal Marriott customers find out I work for Marriott, they are always telling me how awesome the Bonvoy app is. Today, it’s becoming more table stakes. We’re looking at how to change out our core platform. Currently, we run on our reservations platform and our loyalty platforms, which are decades old.
Right now, we’re looking at making sizeable changes in our infrastructure of our core platforms to open a lot more opportunities and influence the travel experience. Overall, we are giving people a lot more choice in how they create their own experiences.
EITK: Can you talk about how Mariott approaches silo busting and building out cross-functional teams for large initiatives?
Thom: When we were going through the Starwood acquisition, we started to build some muscle in that space, because there was a necessity technologically but also functionally to figure out how to build those teams to address core use cases across the business. Loyalty no longer sits all by itself.
Loyalty as a program is intertwined with the digital experience, the customer engagement experience, and property experience. The technologies, functional areas, and how you talk about functional use cases and customer journeys must be connected. If you don’t talk about things end-to-end, you end up dropping these customers in these silos, and it creates poor experiences for them.
As we have begun to make changes with our core reservations platform, loyalty platforms, and our property management platforms, there’s been a huge investment from Marriott. The company has been focused on standing up the right organizational infrastructure to create and support the right teams. We are also spending a lot of time discussing how much to invest in maintaining and continuing to enhance our current environment at the same time as we are making transformations.
Big initiatives struggle with the devil being in the details. We are trying to get more real about the customer experience and how it applies to these tools and these processes that we are now introducing. It’s easy to sell a big investment while talking about all the possibilities, but you must think about what the roadmap looks like to get to the possibilities. That’s been most of the activity over the last six months here at Marriott. We are getting better at defining that roadmap and telling the story of that progression versus what it’s going to look like when we get there.
EITK: What are some of the technology changes that were put in place during the pandemic that have become a core part of the business?
Thom: The travel industry was affected significantly — it literally dried up overnight. We were scrambling at a corporate level to make sure we had a good handle on getting our cost structures under control and how we were supporting our properties, ownership, and so on. We are still trying to recover from staffing challenges.
The perspective of employees has changed regarding what type of work they want to do and how they want to do that work. Within our area, the channels themselves became extremely critical to us in how we were able to adapt to the types of topics that were coming in, the contact volume and where it went, and how we created more self-service opportunities.
We went from approximately 30% of our workforce being remote, particularly in North America, to roughly 80% of our business being remote, which changed a lot of things.
Expense structures needed to be put in place to achieve this at scale because we were losing some economies of scale with desktops. We had to be very flexible in how we delivered customer contacts to our associates and deployed technology when we made changes to telephony infrastructure and moved to a cloud-based platform because we never knew where people were going to be around the world.
I think the other part of our business that has been so challenging is the return. We expected things to come back slowly following such a dramatic dropoff. However, we just announced our Q2 numbers, and we have already exceeded our record high point in 2019. You can’t do that without both technology and the right mechanisms in place.
EITK: When you look toward 2023 and beyond, what initiatives are you excited about?
Thom: I’m excited about the large-scale investments Marriott’s making to change our platforms and introduce more travel marketplace capabilities as opposed to just room bookings. The fact that we’ll be able to offer more integrated capabilities with our loyalty program and services that play into the digital experience, including our mobile app, speaks volumes about how we plan to move the needle for our customers and guests. Within our engagement centers there are increasingly more opportunities centered around channels and how we can add value to these channels.
The piece that’s most interesting for me personally is how we create closer engagement with our remote workforce. I’m eager to learn how we provide better training and coaching capabilities and keep them engaged in the culture when everybody is remote. I think the traditional models of engagement are changing. Ultimately, technology opportunities are going to lead to better customer experiences, better engagement experiences for our associates, and better ways to work with our team.
Execs In The Know partners with brands that are providing outstanding customer service (CX) experiences. The Brand Spotlight Series showcases innovations and solutions to CX challenges faced by today’s leading brands.
Thank you to Thom McDaniel and the entire team at Marriott International for contributing to the Execs In The Know Brand Spotlight.
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We hope you will join us to hear about NFCU’s exciting journey as they deliver compassionate service that strives to always put the member first!
Leading Across Generations: Understanding and Embracing Differences in the Modern Workforce
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Attendees will:
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Join COPC and your peers to learn how to transform your leadership approach and create a culture that welcomes generational differences. Leave this session with a better understanding of how to lead and manage each generation while maintaining individual strategies for maximum success.
SmileDirectClub Facility Tour
Join Execs In The Know on Friday, September 22nd at 2 PM for an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of SmileDirectClub’s manufacturing facility, dubbed the SmileHouse.
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Be a part of this tour to witness firsthand the impressive 3D printing technology, observe the seamless production of the brand’s clear aligners, and explore how using the power of innovation can up-level your customer experience. We can’t wait to see you there!
Unleashing the Power of Customer Data: How iRobot Leverages Customer Care to Build Lasting Relationships in a Competitive Tech Landscape
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Join Ledia to gain insights on iRobot’s remarkable legacy that will inspire you to reshape your brand’s customer experience, unlock new growth opportunities, and cultivate enduring customer loyalty.
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LOOP Insurance Replaced Their Chatbot with Generative AI and Resolution Rates Soared!
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In this session you will learn:
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From Ordinary to Extraordinary Customer Support: A Real-World AI Success Story
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Join us to hear from Dan Medina, Director of Customer Service Operations at iPostal1, and Colin Crowley, CX Advisor at Freshworks, to learn how AI can empower your customers, agents, and leaders alike by:
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- Saving agents time and getting to contacts in under a minute
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Achieving Cultural Alignment: Neiman Marcus Sets the Stage for Optimal Strategic Partnerships
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In this session, learn how Qualfon and Neiman Marcus’ cultural alignment has resulted in the ultimate strategic partnership.
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- Integrate your company culture into your BPOs training curriculum to produce brand ambassadors
- Discover the results that are revealed with a culturally aligned partnership
The Future of Work: Navigating the Change Curve
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Behind the Screens: How MoviePass Is Redefining Customer Experience and Building a Moviegoer Community
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Join us for this thought-provoking and inspiring look into the future of cinema and Stacy’s ambitious plans for reinventing moviegoing for customers.
Finding the ROI of Your CX Vision
As CX leaders, we recognize that enabling a customer-centric vision holds immense potential for driving value for our organizations.
Join our esteemed panel of industry experts as we explore how CX is used to drive revenue opportunities and strong business value. The panel will unlock the key KPIs and performance metrics that leaders must be measuring and monitoring to validate and amplify the value of their CX vision. With an ever-changing technology landscape alongside evolving customer expectations, we will explore the future impacts of CX ROI and discuss the influence it will have on what we measure.
From this session you will take away:
- The CX outcomes that can drive value to your organization.
- Effective KPIs and performance metrics that demonstrate the value of your CX initiatives.
- Considerations on how to measure and evaluate your future state of CX.
What Is a Digital Worker?: Harnessing ChatGPT and Automation to Create New Strategies in CX
Enter digital workers, where AI and automation meet to support employee and customer experiences. They are changing our understanding of the future of work.
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Join us as we explore a real-world example of how a leading brand harnessed digital workers to revolutionize its contact center operations.
During this Shop Talk, you’ll discover:
- How digital workers can connect with customers by performing tasks guided by the power of Generative AI technology to provide consistent, on-brand CX.
- Ways to layer this technology onto your existing systems to overcome traditional tech blockers and modernize your customer care strategies.
- The tangible outcomes achieved by real-world clients, including accelerated productivity, exceptional first-contact resolution, and elevated customer satisfaction.
- How to leverage this technology in new ways to enhance agents and scale up customer service
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As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology evolve, contact centers are using them to transform customer experiences through agent assist, self-service, and conversational analytics capabilities.
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- Leveraging AI/ML for real world outcomes like better self-service, agent assistance, and conversational analytics
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The Agent, the Data, and Technology: Three Pillars for Enabling CX Personalization
With the global CX personalization market forecast to hit $11.6 billion by 2026, it is imperative that brands embed true personalization opportunities across the service journey. Facilitation begins with bi-directional omnichannel engagement that will require cutting-edge technology, insightful analytics, and advanced agent enablement.
This incredible panel will showcase agents alongside their business leaders in what is sure to be a powerful conversation on the approach needed to radically transform customer relationships. Join us as we unpack and explore critical insights from two unique perspectives on:
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- The influential role of agent empowerment in reaching CX goals
- How advanced analytics will unlock new opportunities
- Reaching the goal of moving Customer Service from a cost center to a profit center
- The role of technology and how it sets frontline agents up to create even more meaningful relationships with customers
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Inspiration is a catalyst for greatness. It transcends the mundane and ordinary, breaking through conventional boundaries to unleash the full potential of individuals and teams. In this captivating keynote, Carolyne M. Truelove, Vice President, Reservations and Customer Relations at American Airlines, will unveil the immense power of inspiration and its ability to ignite a drive for exceptional results and lead transformative change.
Discover the extraordinary possibilities that lie within you as a leader. Everything a leader does requires connection, including vision, strategy, and execution. Learn the art of connected leadership, fostering a culture of open-mindedness, and leveraging your leadership to navigate through the ever-evolving business landscape. When inspiration permeates every aspect of an organization, magic happens. Join Carolyne for an unforgettable keynote and unlock the secret to inspiring others into action.
Building Trust in Generative AI
Generative AI brings forth a new realm of possibilities for enhancing the customer experience. However, its propensity to occasionally deliver inaccurate or nonsensical information — a phenomenon known as a hallucination — could potentially impact hard-won customer loyalty. To ensure its success, generative AI has to solve problems and respond in a way that is accurate, helpful and free from toxicity and bias.
Join AI experts from TELUS International, a leading digital customer experience provider, for a Tech Forum exploring:
- The emerging technologies and processes that are being deployed to increase the accuracy of generative AI models.
- Potential legislation, similar to the AI Bill of Rights, being proposed in the wake of the generative AI explosion.
- Consumer perception of AI-generated content, including accuracy, completeness, attribution and age-appropriateness.
- And more!
How to Cultivate a Culture of Well-Being for a Resilient Workforce
Companies today require a robust well-being strategy to have a material impact on the growing crisis of workplace mental health and business resilience. Join us for this interactive session as we explore the Four Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence. We’ll be exploring how to intentionally cultivate learning, development, and leadership strategies that focus on mindfulness and emotional intelligence, and how they are enhanced by dynamic neuroinsights and AI technology.
Key takeaways:
- Learn how well-being helps to drive retention, effectiveness, and efficiency gains throughout the workforce.
- How well-being technology programs leverage AI to assist with the timely delivery of well-being interventions.
- Ways to deeply integrate holistic system design and well-being practices across the employee lifespan.
The Conversational AI Divide
There is a great divide emerging in customer experience (CX) and leaders are being presented with the opportunity to blaze a trail forward with Conversational AI to set themselves apart in their service experience.
Conversational AI presents the opportunity for companies to harness new technology in a low-risk, high-impact environment. Embracing these new possibilities makes it possible for CX leaders to deliver enhanced and effective service at scale.
During this Tech Forum, you will be guided through the steps and considerations needed to build your very own AI assistant. Participants will walk away appreciating how simple and risk-free it can be to deliver big CX wins.
Join us as we explore:
- The universal presence of AI assistants: Understanding how AI assistants are becoming ubiquitous, shaping the future of customer interactions across industries.
- Building better customer experiences with reduced levels of effort: Discovering strategies to leverage Conversational AI to streamline and enhance the customer journey, delivering seamless experiences that require minimal effort from customers.
- The ease of creating your very own virtual AI assistant: Exploring the possibilities of building custom AI assistants without the need for extensive coding or AI expertise, opening new avenues for innovation and personalized experiences.
- Uncovering the distinct advantages and untapped potential that can be leveraged by embracing Conversational AI and staying at the forefront of this evolving landscape.
Don’t miss this opportunity to bridge the Conversational AI divide and unlock the full potential of AI assistants in revolutionizing your CX.
Improving EX in a Remote Workforce
In today’s remote work environment, organizations must not only hire the right talent but must also leverage technology to effectively manage and improve the employee experience (EX) throughout the agent life cycle.
To boost agent experience and reduce cognitive load, leading organizations are:
- Using job simulation previews to set realistic expectations
- Helping accelerate onboarding and training through micro-module learning and personalized AI avatars
- Managing agent stress and anxiety with rapid employee feedback and real-time reporting
- Applying generative AI across EX to drive improved satisfaction
In this 90-minute session, we’ll explore how to best empower remote employees and motivate them to foster collaboration amongst themselves as well as with managers. With effective strategies in place, companies will see higher ESAT, engagement, and retention from happy and productive team members.
AI Simulation Roleplay Training for Speed to Proficiency in the New Hybrid Workforce
As you build onboarding for new hires, getting your agents to a place of confidence and proficiency can often be a challenge, especially in a hybrid workforce environment.
In this interactive session, we will reveal key findings on CX preferences designed for today’s consumers and what experiences they truly expect when contacting your brand for support. Find out why driving higher speed to proficiency with new hires is the top metric for delivering the experience your customers expect and deserve.
The hybrid workforce is here to stay. Learn insights into why companies are losing customers and market share by not having effective onboarding. While companies shifted to ‘virtual learning’ due to need, most lack a cohesive and scalable training and onboarding strategy for new hires in a global hybrid workforce.
In this session you’ll learn:
- The most effective methods to onboard new hires in a global hybrid workforce
- Best practices from your peers that are leading the charge in driving speed to proficiency
- Key findings on CX preferences impacting your business
- How to best scale onboarding consistency and accountability
- Which innovative technologies can be leveraged to achieve key outcomes
JACK MEEK
Vice President, US Care Support Operations, GoDaddy
Jack Meek currently leads customer care operations at GoDaddy, the world’s largest services platform for entrepreneurs around the globe. GoDaddy’s mission is to empower their worldwide community of 20+ million customers — and entrepreneurs everywhere — by giving them all the help and tools they need to grow online. With 21M+ customers worldwide and 84M+ domain names under management, GoDaddy is the place folks come to name their idea, create a compelling brand and a great looking website, attract customers with digital and social marketing, and manage their work. Jack is responsible for developing and executing the future global care strategy that will continue to differentiate GoDaddy as the advocate of small business success throughout the world.
Jack is an influential change leader who has a passion for technology, innovation, and seeing people succeed. His foundational expertise and passion for building a solid employee and customer centric culture started at MCI where he was repeatedly recognized for record-breaking performance & leadership achievements. He then went on to help build and consolidate large-scale customer service and sales organizations at in the Telecom and Retail Energy space. Jack has successfully transformed and maintained customer operations and sales organizations of all sizes and across many different industries. He spent several years as a senior leader in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry helping multiple clients such as Verizon, Sony, and T-Mobile achieve their customer outcome goals.
JEFF MYERS
Vice President and General Manager Customer Care, SiriusXM
Jeff is a passionate advocate for Customers and designing frictionless experiences for them. He began his career in Marketing in 1991, as a call center agent, while attending the University of Wisconsin, Madison and studying Communication Theory and Research. The first eight years of his career included multiple call center operational roles. Following his first eight years in operations, Jeff spent 10 years in the Omnicom family in both the US and the UK/Europe with multi-channel responsibility for Client Services and Program Strategy in a variety of verticals including Telecom, Energy, Media and Non-Profit. He currently serves as the VP and GM of Listener Care for SiriusXM with responsibility for all live customer interactions. His scope includes partnerships with 16 BPOs, in nine geographies, representing more than 60 support center locations.
Bill Colton
Co-Founder and CEO, Global Telesourcing
Bill Colton is the Co-Founder and CEO of Global Telesourcing, a premium provider of digital and voice customer experience and sales solutions for some of the largest and most recognizable brands in the US. Using native-speaking English agents who spent their formative years living in the US, their workforce is as bi-cultural as they are bi-lingual. Global Telesourcing serves clients from centers in both Monterrey and Leon, Mexico, as well as work-from-home.