The corporate social responsibility stories that make headlines are large-scale, organization-wide efforts:

– Google plans to give $1 billion in grants and 1 million employee volunteer hours in the next five years.

– IBM’s travel program sends their best employees to developing nations to use their talents on pro-bono assignments.

– Patagonia’s Action Works initiative supports grassroots environmental activism by pairing individual volunteers with non-profits in their communities.

– Microsoft gave non-profits $1.2 billion in services and software last year.

Because of their scale, these corporate programs have a deep and obvious impact on the planet. But organizations can have a staggering effect on a smaller scale, too—just one person and 20 computers were enough to transform the future of a town in Africa.

The Power of Individuals—And Community

A chance meeting through a mutual friend introduced Execs In The Know co-founders Chad and Susan McDaniel to Yembe Nfor, a young man from Cameroon with a vision for bringing technology to his country. His story inspired them so much, they asked him to share his message with their children.

He spent hours with the family, detailing his vision for a space where people in his city could access the internet. The kids were moved to help in any way they could, as were their parents. Chad and Susan turned to the EITK community to see if they could obtain the resources he needed, gathering support by sharing Yembe’s tireless individual endeavors.

Yembe’s Story

Yembe has always had high expectations for himself. “My name… means ‘Behold Wonders,’ and one of the biggest goals of my life has been finding the wonders my grandparents and their grandparents before them were looking at when they thought that name up,” he said.

His home, Cameroon, is one of the most politically and economically stable Sub-Saharan African countries. However, it lags behind the developed world in many respects—Yembe was 19 years old the first time he stepped into an elevator. Economic development in Cameroon is slow, in part because of a lack of access to technology. Just 18% of its 24 million citizens have access to the internet, and even fewer own a personal computer.

Without technological resources, young people in Yembe’s country—and more than 60% of Cameroonians are under the age of 25—struggle to get the education they need to provide skilled labor to employers and better their lives. Without that education, without those resources, Cameroon’s ability to keep up with other leading nations of the world community is inhibited.

Yembe has worked very hard to change the trajectory of Cameroon’s future, and his efforts have made an impact. In 2017, he was awarded a Mandela Washington Fellowship, which brings promising leaders in Sub-Saharan Africa to the US to study at a college or university. After their education ends, Fellows like Yembe return to their home countries and receive continued professional development support.

Making Yembe’s Vision Reality

While in the US, he gave presentations on the challenges people in his country face. In these presentations, he posed this question: what if people in Africa had the same opportunities as people in the developed world? He asked listeners to “imagine providing a space where young people with a passion can gain access to a computer and internet through which they can learn, develop skills, and use them to better their community.”

His vision for these Digital Spaces inspired Chad and Susan, and they started exploring the EITK community for a corporate partner that could bring his ideas to life. They shared his story with Aileen Allkins, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Customer Service & Support. Aileen reached out to her network and contacted Tek Experts, which uses an expert workforce to provide business and IT outsourcing services. The company pledged their support: Tek Experts would donate 20 laptops to Yembe’s Digital Spaces project. In addition, Susan would bring her expertise to Digital Spaces as a board member.

The Difference One Person’s Determination Can Make

Though Yembe’s mission was one big step closer to being fulfilled, the reality of Cameroon’s political landscape soon intruded. First, the government turned off the internet for several weeks because of political unrest, delaying important conversations. He created a non-profit, then had to re-submit the paperwork.

After working through those obstacles, the laptops were shipped and arrived in Cameroon. One last stumbling block appeared: custom duties of $200 per laptop had to be paid before the computers would be released. After more than a week of negotiating, Yembe brought the duties down to $1,000 and finally Digital Spaces had its first pieces of equipment.

The struggle to get just 20 computers illustrates the barriers he faces in his quest to provide access. Yet he remains dedicated to his goals, which extend far beyond Cameroon’s borders. His vision for Africans is ambitious, but he has created a roadmap for getting there.

“Now it’s become clear what those wonders my grandparents were looking at are,” Yembe said. “They’re the possibilities that we can unlock, if we give digital opportunities to our young people.”

Corporations Can Change The World, One Project at a Time

The most successful CSR programs are inextricably linked to organizations’ core values. “Tek Experts built its business on offering exceptional career and development opportunities to our employees around the world and when we heard Yembe’s story, we really wanted to help,” Raymond Murray, Global Marketing Director, said.

This story proves our networks are a vital resource for our social responsibility efforts. From Chad and Susan, the story traveled to Aileen and then on to Raymond. At every step of the way, Yembe’s inspiring story moved people to action.

“Yembe’s tireless devotion to providing people with opportunities to better themselves, to realize their potential and to achieve more, is what we’re all about. So when EITK/Microsoft came to us to see if we could help we jumped at the chance,” Raymond said. “It’s people like Yembe that can really make a difference in the world and we’re proud that we could do something, no matter how small, to be part of his amazing endeavor.”

From assisting individuals like Yembe with their goals, to multi-million dollar charity projects, corporations can do good in many ways, large and small. The best organizations will work on unlocking possibilities, not chasing profits.

How You Can Help

If Yembe’s story galvanized you into action, reach out to us at info@execsintheknow.com. We’d love to hear the stories that inspire you—and leverage our community to help—or discuss how you can give to the Digital Spaces project.

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The following is a guest blog from Aileen Allkins, Corporate Vice President – Customer Service & Support at Microsoft. To view the original post, click here. 

Last week I had the privilege of giving the opening keynote at the Customer Response Summit in Chicago. It was a great opportunity to connect, engage, and learn from other customer service leaders across many industries to hear what they’re doing to create delighted and loyal customers. In addition, I was able to share some insights into our digital transformation in Customer Service and Support at Microsoft and I’ve shared some highlights of my presentation below.

Our customers range from individual consumers to the biggest enterprises in the world. We support developers, gamers, government agencies, CTOs, small business owners, parents, grandparents, and everyone in between. Essentially, we support the world. Each year we have nearly 70 million assisted support interactions and over a billion unassisted support interactions across multiple channels including phone, chat, email, communities, and social. We have thousands of engineers and advocates across Microsoft employees and delivery partners, who provide deep technical support as well as non-technical support and customer service across more support and service scenarios than we can quantify.

When I started at Microsoft and took on the challenge to digitally transform the Customer Service & Support organisation, I quickly realised that with such a broad scope of customers and technologies, there was no single program, tool or technology that we could implement across the organisation that would magically make us “digital” and that the transformation needed to be broken down into smaller chunks.

At Microsoft, we took a step back to have a worldview on the impact of digital disruption. We are looking at how the intelligent cloud and mobile are changing how customers want to interact with companies. We are looking at ways to support customers who are using multiple, interconnected devices and how to help them with problems that potentially span multiple brands. We are also considering how customers are much more dependent upon us in a server-less world to ensure their business continuity as well as how we can help them achieve more with our technologies.

Regardless of the changes in technology available to us, and regardless of the world digitally transforming, when it comes to customer support some things remain the same. First and foremost, we would all prefer than customers never experienced problems and so had less need to contact Customer Support. Understandably, customers would prefer to avoid problems altogether and when they do have them, most would prefer to self-solve as the first step and want us to make it easy for them to do that.

We initially focused the first phases of our digital transformation on ‘Shifting Left’. Commonly known in the service and support industry, Shift Left strategies focus on moving issue resolution as close to the customer as possible, and we are doing that through resolving issues before they happen and providing improved solutions to self-solve. AI and machine learning provide the foundation for our Shift Left strategy and I truly believe the potential for what we can achieve is only limited by our imagination. Virtual agents are not new, but the machine learning and natural language technology behind them is significantly improving the value we can offer customers during self-solve scenarios.

The customer experience is at the forefront of our digital transformation and we want to provide customers with support how and when they want it. If, during their interaction with our virtual agent, a customer decides they would prefer to connect with a live agent, they can seamlessly switch at any time. Our virtual agent then takes on a supporting role to the live agent, providing all of the details the customer has already shared about their problem and offering additional solutions. The agent can then rank the quality of the recommendations and/or add their own, thereby continuing to teach our virtual agent and making it more valuable for the next customer.

We are progressing well on our digital transformation journey. Customer support scenarios, one by one, are being streamlined or automated with AI and machine learning being applied. What is most exciting to see is that with the time we save, we are able to add value to some of our customer interactions by conducting what we call ‘Achieve More’ conversations, helping customers get additional value from their Microsoft products and services. In our pilots, we see a significant increase in customer satisfaction on cases where we have this additional conversation and in many cases we also see increased consumption of our products and services.

Our digital transformation is a journey towards creating a world class support experience that delights customers and creates fans. By Shifting Left to reduce volume, we are able to focus on the more complicated support scenarios, providing our customers with more value and helping them achieve more with our products and technologies. Whilst our journey may take different paths and we will have lots of learnings along the way, one constant will remain the same – our customers will always be at the centre.

The post Creating Delighted and Loyal Customers Through our Digital Transformation appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Customer Response Summit Phoenix is an intimate, laser focused forum, providing outstanding opportunities to directly engage with some of the brightest senior executives in customer leadership. The strength of the forum lies within the innovative design of informative sessions, relevant industry tours, specialized networking opportunities, and dynamic extracurricular activities all centered on one thing – customer service excellence. The theme of this year’s Summit is Customer Driven.

Highlights of the Summit include a behind-the-scenes interactive tour of the GoDaddy facility, and the release of the Customer Experience Management Benchmark Series 2015 Corporate Edition Report, a joint effort between Execs In The Know and COPC Inc.

“The customer should be at the heart of all that you do,” said Chad McDaniel, President and CEO of Execs In The Know. “All of the members of our community are Customer Driven. Driven to respond to customer feedback, engage with their employees, innovate their products, services, and technology, and to provide moments of magic during each and every customer interaction. Customer Response Summit is the perfect place for executives from every industry vertical and department, to gather and share best practices, to enhance not only their own brands, but the customer experience industry as a whole.”

Sample of Panelists:
Amazon – Tim Hickler, VP WW Customer Service
Target – Efrain Irizarry, Director, REDcard Guest Services & Collections
Orbitz – Carolyn Matseshe-Crawford, VP, Global Customer Experience Services
Walmart – Michele Watson, VP Customer Care & Payments & Risk 
UPS – Elias Hakim, VP Operations Global Business Services  
Kohl’s – Brian Dennis, VP Customer Experience  
Microsoft – Claudia Cristiani, General Manager, Services Operations
Michael Kors – Ebrahim Hyder, VP, Consumer Support  

To learn more about Execs In The Know Customer Response Summit Phoenix, visit the event website https://execsintheknow.com/events/crs-phoenix/ or download the full event agenda http://ow.ly/YoN2S.

About Execs In The Know

For over 15 years, Execs In The Know has built a reputation of excellence in the Customer Management Industry and a worldwide community of over 50,000 Customer Experience Professionals. Execs In The Know connects people to engaging industry content, thought leadership, current trends, peer-to-peer collaboration, networking, and industry employment opportunities. Examples of this can be seen at their Customer Response Summit events, roadshows, webinars, workshops, Blog Talk Radio segments, Industry Benchmarking Series, blogs, thought papers, and social communities.

To learn more about Execs In The Know, visit www.execsintheknow.com. For more information on their Customer Management Recruitment Solutions, visit www.justcareers.com.

Media Contact

Alyssa Pitura
Director of Marketing and Brand Experience
info@execsintheknow.com
www.execsintheknow.com
@ExecsInTheKnow

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