Jonathan Shroyer is the Chief CX Innovation Officer at Arise Virtual Solutions. There, he leads the gaming and consulting verticals and runs the CX Lab in San Francisco. Shroyer has two decades of experience building companies and leaders. CIO Journal, a publication of The Wall Street Journal, named Shroyer among its “Top CX Professionals of 2022.”

Do you believe AI/tech advancements may lead to negative impacts when it comes to meeting customer or client expectations? How can companies in the tech or fintech industry navigate a world that is becoming more digital?

In general, every company we chat with at Arise is adopting digital transformations and has a pathway to derive value from AI, Automation and other digital transformation areas. Companies that are having the most success are those that keep the human experience of their customer at the center and augment it with AI and other tech. The others that fail tend to this AI, Tech will solve all their problems, or they trust it more than they should. If you keep humans at the center you can supplement with AI and Tech while delivering amazing experiences and building lifetime customers.

Your company revolutionized remote work before COVID-19. What advice would you give to companies that are still struggling to adjust to a world that has more people working at home than ever before?

The success of remote work is a hybrid set of tools, processes and frameworks and to remember a human is on the other side. You need a solid way of working together as a team. This includes: how do you communicate, when do you communicate, what tools are you using, what does success look like for the remote role and team. Then also looking at how do you build and maintain a strong culture that takes care of your people and ensures they never get stuck on an island by accident. Ultimately you have to design the work experience for remote work.

Working from home allows people from all over the world to work as a team. What are some challenges associated with that and how can companies overcome those challenges?

It is exciting to see more diverse teams coming together with the ability to add talent from locations that are new and will bring different ways of thinking to the table. In general, beyond what I shared above, I find a few items are critical. First, you should agree on taking more time for decisions, this will enable all the new talents' ideas to be fully realized. Secondly, you should use a tool like OfficeVibe to track weekly sentiment of different team members. This was a godsend for us as there were issues happening, we did not know about and having a sentiment feedback mechanism allowed us to drive improvement faster and keep culture solid. Thirdly, it takes a different type of ethos and leader. In short, the word trust must exist in large supply for teams to function and deliver great work in a remote way.

The economy is the topic on many peoples' minds these days. What should companies be preparing for and how should business leaders be proactive when it comes to leading their business through the storm?

Every decade or so we go through more difficult financial times. The 3 things I think any leader or company should consider are:

1. Don’t jump over dimes of revenue to save pennies of budget. Which means play the long game, not the quarterly stock market game
2. Leverage this time to encourage innovation in the company and position new challenge questions and include leaders in the solution vs. just cutting costs at the exec table. You may be surprised what people are willing to do for each other and the company
3. Optimize spend that is non-essential and that does impact your culture and people