CEO Today Hall of Fame

HALL OF FAME 3 www.ceotodaymagazine.com TELUS International has experienced substantial growth and evolved significantly under your watch. To what do you attribute your success? Success has many parents and a lot of factors have contributed to ours. Certainly, making strategic acquisitions over the years accelerated the expansion of our global service capabilities to provide a more comprehensive suite of services to existing and prospective clients. Our two most recent acquisitions included Voxpro in August of 2017 - a US and Irish-based CX provider specializing in serving fast-growing tech companies; and Xavient Digital - a US and India-based next-gen IT solutions company a short six months later, in February 2018. Most importantly, however, I’d say it’s our corporate culture and our team members who embody it that are the foundation of our sustained success. Culture is key at TELUS International, and our commitment to it has been consistently reflected over many years in our industry-leading employee engagement scores as measured by third-party surveyor, Aon. In 2018, we achieved a score of 86% globally, which is up a significant three hundred basis points year-over-year. This correlates to our equally impressive attrition rates that continue to be more than 50% lower than those of our competitors in most of the regions where we operate. Given that staff attrition costs companies dearly in terms of hiring, training and retraining, not to mention the obvious impact it has on proficiency, businesses should be doing everything in their power to recruit and retain great employees. And, when you’re a customer service provider like us, there is another, perhaps less obvious cost at play; less engaged, or disengaged, workers might damage the reputation of the brand they were hired to serve — and that cost could be exponential and irreparable! Essentially, I believe it comes down to this: If you hire people who share your values and you treat them well, providing them with opportunities for personal and professional growth, and you invest in the communities where they live, work and raise their families, they’ll reciprocate by rewarding you with loyalty and engagement, staying with your company over the long-term to grow their careers and giving you their very best, every single day. How did you discover TELUS International’s niche in the customer experience industry? Providing customer experience and digital solutions to some of the world’s largest and most disruptive brands, we don’t subscribe to the “your mess for less” mentality by offering the lowest price through the exploitation of wage arbitrage. We’re not interested in fulfilling that value proposition. Instead, we focus on partnering with like-minded organizations where we can be trusted advisors and truly add value, from strategy to training to operational implementation. This was a real gap in the industry when we first began, and we’ve been able to leverage that opportunity to become a participant of consequence in global customer service delivery. In your opinion, what is one of the most definitive and long-lasting trends that will continue to shape the customer experience? I think personalization is here to stay, and it will underpin the evolution and development of so many technologies. Customized ads, customized service, customized experiences: Everything will be tailored to the individual. This drive for personalization is already supported by AI, machine learning, advanced data analytics, conversational bots and so on. We see this kind of high-tech, high-touch approach in action across all consumer touchpoints, such as on social media, with online and in-person shopping, and in chats and on calls. We’re connected in ways we never were before and TELUS International is committed to leveraging and developing these technologies to better support our team members so they can deliver against these heightened expectations. Any words of caution? With the advent of next-gen technologies and its capabilities, everybody’s trying to collect as much customer data as possible in the quest for better, more profitable businesses. I think that will change as public opinion shifts about what people are and aren’t comfortable giving up in terms of their personal information and as more governments make and revise privacy rules. We can’t undo the disruption, so businesses will need to have a strategy in place to utilize the technology in different ways to create responsible solutions that will help them remain connected to consumers. Also worthy of note here, when it comes to the challenge of a data ‘gold rush’, I fear many companies are unknowingly suffering from ‘InfoObesity’ - gorging themselves on an inconsumable amount of data. Companies need to focus more on the quality of data vs. the quantity of data. Can you expand on how AI and automation will impact the customer service delivery industry from a staffing perspective? There’s a lot of concern that robots are going to steal our jobs. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is upon us and next-gen technologies are disrupting products, services and entire industries at an astonishing pace. Transformation is the name of the game and companies that aren’t ready or willing to adapt will be left behind. Leading TELUS International since 2008, President and CEO, Jeff Puritt, has never been one to shy away from change or a challenge. As the driving force behind a company that has grown exponentially since its inception, Jeff continues to lead the ongoing transformation of TELUS International’s core business and operations to meet and exceed heightened client demands. With the one-year anniversary of the company’s latest acquisition just celebrated, we spoke with Jeff about his company and team’s growth, why digital transformation and customer experience (CX) should be top business priorities in 2019, and his own experience as a transformational CEO in the digital age.