This week on the Voices of CX Podcast, we talked to Jonathan Shroyer, Chief Customer Experience Innovation Officer at Arise Virtual Solutions. His passion is for customer service and helping people understand how to create amazing customer experiences in a decentralized way.

About Jonathan Shroyer

CEO & Co-Founder
Jonathan has been a customer service professional and leader for 22+ years, leading large teams at established companies such as Microsoft, Monster, and Autodesk, as well as startups like Postmates, Kabam, and Forte Labs. A thought leader in the industry, Jonathan can often be found speaking at CX conferences, participating in podcasts, and writing about his passion—the future of customer service and the CS marketplace.

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Follow Jonathan on Twitter @jjshroyer

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About Voices of CX Podcast

The Voices of CX Podcast is a podcast that covers all things business strategies, customer decision insight, empathetic leadership practices, and tips for sustainable profitability. With a little bit of geeking out on behavioral science, A.I. and other innovation sprinkled in here and there. The guests span multiple industries, but all of them have years of experience to bring to the table.

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Transcript

Mary

Hello to our listeners and viewers. Thank you for joining us once again. We are back. Season nine of Voices of CX Podcast. Today, I’m joined by a good friend of mine, Jonathan Shroyer. Say hi, Jonathan.

Jonathan

Hey, everybody!

Mary

So great to have you with us today. I’m going to let you introduce yourself in just a second, but a reminder to everyone watching and listening.

Make sure you subscribe. Make sure you follow. We are now on our own home page, voicesofcx.com. So make sure to check in there. You can sign up for newsletter. You can see all of the old episodes go through the archives and watch our new video series. So go ahead and check that out. And now, with no further ado, Jonathan Shroyer, I am going to let you introduce yourself because I don’t think I can remember everything.

But why don’t. Why don’t you get started at the beginning telling people who you are what you do, how you got here, and what you’re truly passionate about?

Jonathan

So I’m Jonathan Shroyer, the former CEO and co-founder of Officium Labs. I started off my career as on the phones with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Windows 95, if that age is just a little bit

So, yes, a little. But I’ve always kind of had this passion that people should how people serve or to how it has always kind of been in my ethos. So I’ve been in the services arena for about 28, 25 years or so, and most recently relaunched Officium Labs, which was the brainchild of myself and my co-founder Scott McCabe, on how to really think about the future of service in a decentralized way.

So a little bit about me. I’m from San Francisco, so if you’re ever in the Bay Area, you want to talk me I’m happy to host you here at the lab. We have a cx lab here and I’ve got a wonderful wife and as Mary knows, a new seven-month-old, which is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger every day. Thanks for the honor to be on season nine.

Mary

Well, it’s been a long time coming. We’ve been talking about doing this for so long, but it’s great to have you now because so much is happening with the Officium, with everything that you guys started off it’s been an exciting beginning of 2022. Do you want to give our listeners and viewers kind of the rundown?

Jonathan

Yeah. So, you know, we grew Officium from four people and an idea and $150,000 loan started in 2019 and after about two and a half years we can hit 30 plus clients, ten plus million in gross revenue. And then we started to think about well what’s next what’s the future look like? How can we continue to drive this value that we’ve driven with our clients.

And the reason why we started Officium in the first place was according to Sarukhan and I think it’s 2019 $339 billion is lost because of poor customer service experience. New York City said this is 200 billion is being spent on BPOs that provide that service experience. So it’s $2 to lose $3. And my accounting background, that’s a failing business. And so we really felt it was a new way to disrupt that and create a profit center focused, flexible, decentralized resource model that would change the game.

And so we had an idea. Somebody believed in us. They gave us 150k, and you fast forward, you’ve got lots of customers, lots of revenue with them. What’s next And so we started to think about how do we take what we’ve done and really grow it to become a $50 million, $100 million opportunity and that opportunity to bring value to our clients.

And so when we did that, we looked at VCs and we looked at opportunities to do mergers of partnerships with we found an excellent partner in Arise Virtual Solutions to come out and they invented work from home kind of customer service. 1999 so they’ve been doing it for quite some time and they were a great partner culturally from a process standpoint, from a vision standpoint, ethos, and they wanted to help us to continue to grow and develop this amazing product and service that we have done, so that only small things have been happening lately.

Mary that that’s what’s been happening. So we’re in the midst of that integration now.

Mary

So what is your current title?

Jonathan

So I’m the chief customer experience innovation officer. And so what that means is that I get to look across all of Arise inside of Officium’s business as well, and how do we continue to innovate, how we look at the experience, the journey that these customers are having with these products, and how can we come up with these products, services or augment ideas that we’ve already done to really help create profit and value and stickiness with those end users for the clients that we work with.

So it’s a fun role. Plus, I get to run the lab, which is what a grand opening is in April know, special guests can come, come by in March and do special tours if anyone wants to stop by. We’re super excited that the lab is going to give us an opportunity to really not only think about it from a perspective in Arise and Officium point of view, but getting 15, 16, 17, 20 leaders in here and talk about the things that they’re dreaming about the blue sky for the future.

Mary

it’s really exciting and I’m excited to fly out to San Francisco at some point and get to know the lab you guys are.

Jonathan

There’s there’s a Worthix workshop here.

Mary

I feel like that’s coming. I don’t know where I’m getting this feeling from but you know taking it a step back to when we first met Jonathan, I remember the first time I saw you, you know, kind of on social media talking about customer experience was a couple years ago.

Jonathan

Yeah.

A passion for improving customer experience

Mary

Where did that passion for customer experience come from? Because you’re not from this industry. How did that start?

Jonathan

Well, I mean, I think for me, you think it was all I’m going to try to leave brand names out of it. But those are the really bad phone calls and the really bad experiences and I had this idea that, like, hey, you could deliver.

I really profitable experience. Like I say, for example, I buy a very I love this. So I go in and I buy a Ferrari, right? So 100,000 for a – let’s just say that’s what it was. If I walk in the next day, people are going to be there. They’re going to be like, Oh, how can I help you?

Mr. Shroyer What can I do to make your experience better? Not because you spent quite a bit of money on the product and they care about you. When you look at different markets, especially in the video game space, you know, people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on these video games. Right. And in other products that you buy, you’re spending on cars now, $30,000 to $70,000 on cars.

You know, houses the price of houses, and even just common goods, electronics, thousand dollars. People are now looking in and they want a great experience. They want that Ferrari experience and they want it every day. And if and if they don’t get it, then they’re going to leave, they’re going to go, their eyeballs are going to go somewhere else.

In the grand scheme of things, if it’s a software digital product, it’s a hardware product, they’re just not going to buy you next time. And so because I had a finance and a numbers background and had an understanding of what it was like to be on the phone and so forth, I said, Well, what if you put data together with the experience, you tie the CRM data with the database experience, and you could prove that 360 view value of like, Hey, actually we treat this person good, they’re going to spend more money and not only are they going to spend more money, they’re going to stay with us longer.

And it’s cheaper to keep a customer than it is to acquire a new customer. And so I just kind of had this intersection of thoughts, right? I learned this term yesterday multiple potentialite. I guess that’s the personality of a person that takes really good thoughts and brings them together to create something new. So I have this intersection of thoughts and I said, hey, we this is the future.

We should do this. So that was like one element of it. And then the second element that I had was like, hey, I grew up in a really small town. In Texas, and there weren’t very many tech opportunities out there for me. So I left, right? I left. I went to Salt Lake to go to BYU I went to Seattle with Microsoft, I went to London to work for Symantec, blah, blah, blah, and I went to tech hubs.

Right. So I had this idea was like, Well, if you could take a business and you could decentralize it to where the workers of the business don’t have to be 25 miles away from physical locations, you could move you know, economic capital from tech hubs to local communities. So people get those jobs. And I said, Well, let’s bring all this together.

Me and my co-founder Scott McCabe, walked through the streets of San Francisco as we figured this out, and let’s watch it launch a company and see if the industry is interested. That’s the biggest thing about a startup, which is you all know, Mary, is, is the industry ready or interested in what you’re having to do? And within two months we had five clients and were profitable.

So that’s kind of a little bit of the contextual story of how it all came together.

Decentralizing vs. tech giants moving from city to city

Mary

You know, it’s interesting because all of this happened pre-COVID. And then when COVID happened, it was just a crazy acceleration. You know, I was discussing this earlier on today about this concept of decentralization of work and how important this conversation is for so many different reasons.

One, the tech hubs as we know them, they’re not working It’s not sustainable. And you know, this exodus from San Francisco, from New York, even from Austin, Texas, where people just can’t afford it anymore, it’s it’s no longer pleasurable it’s no longer good. Even though tech has some of the highest salaries in the world, it’s still become like completely unsustainable to live in these locations.

And and, you know, tech is almost like locusts. They just, like, move into this area, deplete it will hold on. And everyone needs here. They depleted of all its resources and then move on. And a lot of this happens because they’ll move into a new location. They’ll pay these enormous salaries. They’ll bring people in. So the city has to construct houses.

Traffic goes to hell. People that come into town have higher acquisition power and then they drive the price of real estate up, force all of the locals out of those properties wreak havoc on structure that was previously in place. And then once they’ve had their fill, they move on. And I mean, this has become an epidemic and you’re still in the Bay Area.

I lived there for a while. We know what that’s like. We know that that is something that’s truly not ideal. These cities end up losing their identities. They lose their character, they lose their personality, they lose their charm. And when you decentralize it, not only do you solve that problem, you also give opportunity to many, so many more people.

And the company is pulling from such a greater pool of individuals. So it feels so much like a win-win. Is this kind of where your mind was going? Am I tripping like totally on the wrong page? Or is that kind of the argument?

Jonathan

No. I mean, I think, you know, when you look at the macroeconomics of the world and you look at the availability to capital and you see that it’s fairly centralized.

And I think the you know, there’s a reason why cryptocurrency is becoming so interesting to people now is because it’s the ability to decentralize wealth. And and in if you if you think about the biggest transformation is that I think that are happening kind of globally in the business world, I think one is a general decentralization regarding doesn’t really matter whether you talk about payments whether you’re talking about work, talking about business information whatever it is there’s this decentralization and in some ways I think people tie decentralization to fairness and equitability, which in some cases is probably true right.

And and so any time that you centralize wealth into a certain area, you know, whether it’s tech or whether it’s something else coming in, you know, that area is going to the DNA is going to change. Right. Mm. I think what COVID has done, which is super interesting, is it has expedited some of the things that we were predicting were going to happen in 5 years like when we started Officium, we were like in five years, you know, 30% of the people are going to leave tech hubs.

Right? Well, it ended up being, you know, in one year, right? Or in two years. So, expedited this capability for people to change their mindset. Carol Dweck business growth mindset. Right. Sometimes people get stuck in a fixed mindset. It’s so COVID actually forced people to think like, wait a second, what are my priorities in life? What are my values what are my ethos?

How do I value work time versus family time versus me time? Right. And then and the where, where is that value where can I get the most for that value at? And so I was very not happy, obviously, about COVID, but very happy to see some of these open minds about starting to think about, “hey wait,” there’s another way to work.

Let’s change the way people work and by changing the way people work, you give them the opportunity to do that. “I work where I have to work and I live where I want live. Now he gets to work where he wants to work and live,” where he wants to work in this new world, generally speaking.

Right. And I think that’s a powerful statement for families and for personal health, for mental health, as well as economic health, if that makes sense?

Post-COVID: how not to lose focus on the customer experience when adopting a hybrid model in your company

Mary

Yeah, so I’ve got a two part question, which is that through this all, I mean, you know, this the subject has been so top of mind for everyone, right? Right now we’re going through the great resignation where people are just just calling it quits, no longer accepting to work in conditions that they don’t deem, you know, honorable or healthy truly.

We’re also going through this whole coming back from COVID or not. And the idea of hybrid is becoming mainstream, whereas a lot of companies that never even considered the possibility of allowing people to work from home are now adopting at least a hybrid model. But sometimes we get so caught in this conversation that we lose focus of the most important thing of all, which is how does this affect customers?

So I’m sure you have figured this out in your mind. So share that with us a little bit. How does how do customers benefit from this movement or do they and which the second part of the question is which industries benefit the most? And are there industries that don’t benefit from it at all? So let’s start with that first one with the customer.

Jonathan

So one of my first idea is that I had when I was creating Officium is I was sitting on a recliner in my living room and I looked down and I looked at a wireless router and immediately I was like, oh, that’s the future. Of startups. And and you’re like, What do you mean? Or wireless router is the future of startups? No, the idea was I was thinking about how does information and value get to traverse a mesh network in a wireless home like you have your main router and then you have your extenders.

And depending on the strength of those extenders is the strength of the output of value that comes out of it to the user, the device takes it and so forth, either uploads it and downloads it to a bi-directional value of information leading inside of this mesh network, essentially going to somebody else, a mesh network for the low and I said, Well, what if we built a global network of human capital technology and companies and client, and we plugged it together in such a way that that bidirectional value was so, so critical that it becomes what we’re Rochelle Devers likes to call them emotional affinity.

Like, I can’t live without the flexibility of the work. I can’t leave out the flexibility that I have to work the clients I can’t live without the fact that I can have a thousand workers from all over the globe with amazing talent to be able to do my work for the client. I can’t live without the different economic opportunities that I have provided.

And this is social responsibility that I’m now representing as part of my company. The workers like I can’t live without being next to my family or doing things that I’m passionate about. Maybe they love living next to the beach, the mountains or whatever. Like when I was one of our our chief customer officer at Officium, John Pompei lives up in Tahoe in the mountains.

And like two days ago he came in with a ski cap on a stick. So how’s the steering today? He’s like, Oh, it’s great. I did an hour break in the morning, so I went for the ski run and then I hit my meetings and he couldn’t do that if it wasn’t decentralized right? So you start to see these different components, like, I can’t live without all these things.

And now then you get to the customer. Like, if you have happy clients, happy workers, if they can work together and get value from each other, then the output of that is going to be better customer experience, better customer service. That’s the output because you’re going to have happier people wanting to wanting to fulfill the purpose that they chose to work in a more meaningful way and not being dragged down by the one hour commute or this stress, that stress or a company having to work on both have to work with talent that isn’t the exact fit.

You know, you eradicate all of that and all of a sudden the customer benefits and they start really paying attention to like, well, how do we make this amazing for our customer now that we’re flexible and we’re in a good place? I think in the end, it’s super beneficial. Industries where I think it’s most notably beneficial is going to be digital.

And anything that’s digital if you have a digital footprint, it’s not going to be hard, in my opinion, to to move directly to a hybrid model, make it work when you get into physical, you know, product, it’s a little bit harder. Depends on your physical product. How mobile is that physical product. So I’ve got a friend that I adore over at Midday Square’s Jake.

I love those. I just had my midday scores before we got on the call today. And he has a mobile physical product. So his product, you know, is very small. You get you and you need it a lot in order to enjoy it because it’s food and so forth. So something like that could definitely and should probably be hybrid.

But when you go into like, Hey, I work in the hospital or I work and finance or something, or I work in a factory that creates things, you know, some of those will be a lot harder to be hybrid depending on the role in those facilities. Like, you know, even in hospitals, you’re starting to see remote doctors where they will do half of their time, remote and half of their time in surgery.

Right. So you’re starting to see even some flexibility. But there’s definitely going to be some where it’s just going to be incredibly difficult. Right. Now, as we think about the early days of the Metaverse, it’s going to be difficult right now, you know, to be hybrid.

Focusing on the virtual customer experience

Mary

Yeah. Now, do you think that eventually is your bet on the future, that eventually it’s going to mostly be virtual except for possibly brick and mortar perhaps hospitality and industries that are built on the notion of being in person?

Jonathan

That’s a really loaded question. You just came with it. I just mentioned the metaverse and then you talked about hospitality. But I mean, I think generally speaking, the company that have the ability to go virtual, that have the foresight and the willingness to take the risks to go virtual, are going to see some enormous value. I do think there’s still a lot of synergy, if I can use that word, with in-person connection.

Like, for example, I am I’ve been virtual for like five, six years. Right. But I still like maybe once a month to go see some people and talk to some people and engage. Right. So I think there’s definitely a human component where they’re going to want to be hybrid. And so balancing that out is super critical, I would say, in 50 years, once we really understand better what the metaverse means and what drones and other kind of technology technological advancements actually mean, we may see a lot more virtual.

I think what’s going to happen is as people become more comfortable going out in public, for example, I have a baby and now it sounds like we might be really close for him to get a vaccine. So now maybe I’m actually willing to go on an airplane as an example, as people get more comfortable traveling, we’re going to see a little bit of a regression now a little bit of and then and then from there, like maybe progression.

Right. And and so it’ll be super interesting just to see how it all plays out. At the end of the day, the thing that I really love about again, I don’t love COVID It’s terrible. Oh, it’s terrible. But what I really love about a couple of the outputs of it is worker flexibility, worker choice, worker happiness, because that ultimately is going to lead to customer happiness, customer retention, customer stickiness, because the worst thing is to have somebody to quit instead.

And so you want to have your most motivated workers that are passionate about cx that care of our customers and in their day helping the customer that bought this thing that they loved. And they don’t want to leave it, they want to keep using it. They just need somebody to help them get back to doing the thing that they love, if that makes sense.

How Officium and Arise tackle scheduling in customer service

Mary

Let’s talk really quick about how Officium and now Arise are helping the customer service aspect with the scheduling, which is something revolutionary that I know that you played a really big part in.

Jonathan

Well, it’s, so what’s interesting is if you’re familiar with the customer service or customer experience and the customer call center, context experience, you’ll know that volumes tend to kind of be a little bit erratic

And what ends up happening is companies tend to overstaff to deal with kind of that erratic nature so that the response time is within the paradigm of acceptance of the customer. And but what that ends up costing 20, 30, 40 percent more depending on the business and with the Officium with Arise well we have the ability to do is map directly to that to that spike to that curve where you only pay for exactly what you need or what your customer uses.

So if you have a thousand client or clients or in user customers to call you but they call you all throughout the day like this we’ll staff to that and you only pay for that as opposed to other competitors. They’ll staff up a lot Right. And then you’re basically losing or wasting money with all of those gaps right?

And so that’s the revolutionary thing that Arise did years ago that Officium didn’t invent, but we, we leveraged in the gaming space and also I would say in the consulting space because we do the same thing in consulting where we do on demand where, hey, if you need a workforce manager or a trainer or a cx advisor, you want to pay a full time rate like 5 hours this week, 10 hours a we it’s really thinking about mapping supply and demand and as a more perfect union.

And that’s that’s really what we do differently. If you look across our ecosystem with global ecosystem, where obviously the United States, India, Philippines, South Africa, where in Latin America, we’re in Canada, a variety of other places as well, Serbia where we have this On-Demand talent that can plug and play and help these clients and meaningful and interesting ways is over 80,000 service partners now they can help clients not only answer and get those customers back to doing what they love their products, but can work with clients to create profit center based customer service.

So rather than just thinking customer service is a cost, think of about as a profit center. And we’ve worked with literally hundreds of clients where we help them create profit inside of their customer service by any any customer service leader. That talks to me, that talks about customer service as a cost center you know, I have to I have to be very patient with, because in my mind, I’m like, no, it’s a profit center

It’s been a profit center. Let me show you how to do it. This is how you do it because it’s a profit center. And you and me we are profit creators for every company that we invest in. And customers should always be seen as profit creators and value generators. And if they are and if that mindset is there, then you’re always going to be treated in the way that you want and the way that you should

The real secret when hiring a customer service team in the industry

Mary

When I think, well, I think it’s beautiful. It’s my favorite part. When when we talk about front-line employees, they’re the ones that are dealing with the customer directly. They represent an organization. It’s the part of organization that the customer sees. So when you’re outsourcing or when you’re staffing all over, what is the secret?

I mean, I’m sure you know this really well, and most people in the customer service contact center industry understand this really well. But I’m sure there are a lot of our listeners and viewers that have no idea how this works. So how is it that you’re able to train all these individuals to somehow be the face of that organization?

Is there a secret sauce? Is it just training, training, training? What is it exactly?

Jonathan

Well, I think that when you think about a customer journey, you tend to think about when the customer buys the product or when they leave the product and all the potential challenges that they have. And how do you mitigate and help customers through this challenge?

The same is true about a service partner journey. So we call them service partners. So the same is true about a service partner journey. When you onboard them onto the platform and they start working with your clients you have to think about it and design that entire journey for that service partner. And so it’s not just training, it’s just it’s not just certification, it’s not just scheduling, it’s not culture, you know, it’s not all these different things.

It’s we have devised and designed an experience journey for these service partners so that it’s a meaningful and wonderful experience for them so that they then want to serve the end user customers in the most beneficial way. And that’s what the secret sauce is, is everything in my opinion in customer service, and customer experience starts with experience design.

If you just spend the time to design the right experience and then you build the appropriate people, process technology on top of that and then the operational application of that, and then you check in on how things are going with your, you know, like voice of the customer. I know we have a lot of clients that love Worthix the voice, the voice of the customer looking at others CSAT surveys voice of the customer by talking to the agents or the service partners that talk to it, you know, listening is a key component.

And then improving that is another key component as well. Those are the things that I would focus on so experience design, you know, really focusing on voice of the customer and then continuous improvement and change management. Those are three things that if you’re starting up or if you’re figuring out how to transform, I would do those things or you just call me and I’ll help you and I’ll show you how to do that especially.

Innovation is unstoppable

Mary

Well, we know especially I know that you know, this, that innovation is unstoppable, right? Yeah. But do you see any future scenario in which we scale back to the way things used to be, where we’re going more in-person than virtual, where we’re going more local than global? Is is this a reality that you can envision? Is it a reality that you’d want to envision even

Jonathan

I think it’s interesting when people ask questions like this in all fairness, Mary, I think it’s a pointless question. Because anybody that is anybody that you’re thinking and I know you’re not thinking that anybody is thinking that way, is they’ve already lost their business. You know, they’ve already lost their employees. They’ve already lost their customers. Because if you’re thinking about the way things used to be, then you’re already thinking about you’re in the fixed mindset, right?

You’re not in the growth mindset. So I don’t even think about those types of things. I think about what is five and ten years look like and how do I design a company, design and experience, design a culture, design a product to be able to answer those questions. Because if I’m answering the questions of just today, then I’m already five years behind.

I always need to be five to ten years ahead. In fact, I was with Nate Brown. He and I was we were at a conference in Southern California where we were both speaking, and we invited him out. We sat on the balcony, we had dinner, and I said, Hey, Nate, I learned something today. And he said, what did you learn and I said, I learned that we’re now only two years ahead.

People are now catching up to Officium. And this is pre-acquisition. People are now catching up to let’s sit down here for the next 4 hours on this day, order as much food as we need to and let’s invent the future today. And that’s what we did. We we spent 4 hours and we said, okay, this is what, this is what the future of service looks like in five years and ten years.

And we started to invent it today. And I would say the same thing is true about the future of work. You know, I think Arise if you look at their our motto, it’s kind of like we are changing the way people work. We’re not staying the same. We’re not regressing. We’re changing the way that people work to adapt and get ready for that value creation, that value attributes and bi lateral value sharing of the future. So that’s how I answer that question.

Are you worth it to your customers?

Mary

Your camera did a really dramatic zoom, right as you were saying and it made for like a movie scene. It was great. It’s fantastic. I’m going to keep that in the edit.

But you know, you’re saying this and I’m thinking back and you mentioned Nate Brown, and it’s a coincidence because, you know, at Worthix we we always kind of felt like we were way ahead of the industry and we were we were like that lone voice in the wilderness telling people to consider the decision and consider what’s worth it to people.

And, you know, the drivers that go on in their mind before they make a purchase and that if you can tap into that and understand that, then, hey, how much could you increase your profit and everything? But it really, really felt like I was the only voice in the wilderness for a really, really long time. And this week, in fact, Nate Brown tagged me on a post from Denise Leon on LinkedIn and the header of the post was Are you worth it to your customers?

And everyone started tagging me on this publication and they’re like, Mary, is this you? And it’s really great to hear and see the market start catching up when a message that you’ve been preaching for a really long time, you know, when when you realize that people get it and that everyone is kind of coming together behind this mindset, it’s exciting, but it’s also terrifying.

Exciting because yes, people are listening. Yes, it’s working, but terrifying because, hey, you had a unique advantage where you were the only one that had that point of view and now it’s becoming mainstream. So you’ve got to you’ve got to hurry up. Yeah. And I feel like that’s what happened so much with COVID where it was like you said, it was terrible.

It still is. It still is such a mess. But when you think of the acceleration that we had in so many different areas, it forced kind of a reckoning of organizations about how they treat their customers, how they value their their employees. All of these things had to all of a sudden be considered and it didn’t work in a lot of cases, which I think is what caused this aftermath.

Of the great resignation of people saying, hey, you let me down, hey, you don’t get me, hey, you don’t see me. And it’s not only happening on behalf of employees, but it’s also happening on behalf of customers where customers are walking out on brands, on legacy brands that they were with for a while. Because, hey, when I needed you the most, you didn’t get it.

So there is I do feel like there is going to be like a pre-COVID and post-COVID market and the people and the companies that withstood that and got it and moved on and adapted and move forward they’re the ones that are going to carry on and be the companies that our children are going to do business with and be the employers of the future.

Jonathan

And there’s actually companies that today are being created that we don’t know about that are are going to be the companies that are going to be the next Google, the next Apple you know, those types of things. Right. You know, one of the things that I thought about it slightly off topic but somewhat on is the massive amounts of progress we’ve made in the biotech space over the past couple of years.

There’s going to be so many interesting innovations are in that space. And what you’re going to start to see is an entire you’re going to start to see BPO companies create a biotech sector. So rather than just health care, which is what the vertical is, there’s going to be a biotech vertical because these companies are going to need assistance with talking to all of these customers because they created all these amazing new capabilities these customers are no doubt going to use.

And so it’s going to be interesting to see even in those those types of experiences of how biotech and health care customers compartmentalize a little bit.

Mary

Yeah, I mean, just a side note, Telehealth, for years people said that was impossible for years. The industry rejected that notion. And now I think that it’s people’s preferred channel of seeing a physician.

Jonathan

Yeah. 100%. 100% yeah.

Mary

It’s a crazy and exciting new world. And I look forward to seeing what Arise and what a Officium and all of you futurists that are working behind the scenes are going to come up with. Johnathan, so exciting to have you on. It was so great to have this conversation today. I’m going to let you tell our listeners and viewers how they can find you not only if they want to drop a line and have a conversation, but even to hear more and learn more about what you do.

Jonathan

The easiest way to find me is I’m Jonathan Shroyer on LinkedIn. I’m there. I pretty responsive. You can also find me on the website officiumlabs.io and arise.com in all those locations to maybe Mary will bring me back on and I’ll be a voice who knows season 17. I don’t know but for now you can find me here at season nine replay this this is a great opportunity to spend some time with Mary as a voice of cx.

It’s an honor to be on the podcast. Thank you so much.

Mary

Thank you. I really appreciate it. To our listeners and viewers, check back in with us next week. We’ll have more. And Jonathan, you’re always welcome to come back. Thank you so much.