Jonathan Shroyer, Chief CX Innovation Officer at Arise Virtual Solutions, was interviewed by Adam Torres on Mission Matters Innovation Podcast.
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In this interview, Jonathan Shroyer talks with Mission Matters about the growing importance of customer experience and the trend of decentralized work.
What mission matters to you?
Driven by a mission to empower smaller communities, Shroyer says the question that keeps him awake at night is, “How do you give people opportunities, no matter where they live in the world, to have purposeful work to be able to uplift the economies where they live and also to have fun with their families?”
“I grew up in a small town in Texas,” he continues, “and one of the things that I noticed early on was there just wasn’t as much technology service and other job opportunities in those small towns. And so, our mission has always been: how do you bring those economic opportunities through business to those small communities?”
How did you get started as an entrepreneur?
“I started my career in large enterprise companies and never really envisioned myself as an entrepreneur,” Shroyer says. “A few years ago, I came up with this idea around a decentralized network of CX (customer experience) workers and thought, ‘this is what the future of CX is, in a decentralized network of profit-based workers,’ and decided to try it out.”
Two years later, his firm, Officium Labs, had earned $10 million in revenue. With resilience and grit, Shroyer was able to maintain his core purpose while pivoting from the specifics of the original idea. That process, he says, informs his advice to industry newcomers.
“To have a successful startup business, you must have a problem that you’re trying to solve, have a different way to solve it than anyone else has done, you have to be able to monetize it, and then you ought to have the passion to really go after it,” he says.
Can you explain in a nutshell what customer experience (CX) is?
The minute you buy a product, Shroyer explains, your customer experience begins, and when you stop using that product, your customer experience ends.
“When you’re looking at the entire spectrum of your experience from the start to the end, there are many different points along the way,” he says. “Maybe you have a question you talk to support, you might engage with their website or app, maybe you engage with other people in a community; all of those things are inside of that customer experience.”
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Tell us about Arise and Officium Labs.
Arise Virtual Solutions recently acquired Officium Labs, Shroyer explains, and for good reason.
“Over the last 27 years, (Arise) has been building a decentralized workforce of service partners that bring value to huge enormous brands all over the world,” he says. Their mission aligns seamlessly with the work Officium Labs does, with its focus on three pillars: transformation, decentralization, and innovation.
“With our transform business, we help companies understand how to create a profit center-based customer experience organization and framework, and then we show them how to prove it mathematically,” he says. As for the decentralization focus, he says it’s important for people to be able to work anywhere in the world with an efficient platform, technology, and opportunity.
“The future of services is a network of workers, technology, and capabilities where you can tap workers from anywhere in the world to clients and technologies and create this profit center focus,” he says. The innovation component, he notes, involves products and technologies and helps companies optimize using AI and analytics.
What’s next for the brand?
“We strongly felt that Arise was well-positioned over the next upcoming years to not only help us fulfill our vision and purpose, but to do it 10x better than we could have ever done ourselves,” Shroyer says. “That’s why we were super excited to join the Arise family and to bring the best of us to the best of them so that we can create (something) amazing together.”
To learn more, visit https://www.arise.com/.
