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

Maxine TellerMaximize 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,