The X-Interviews | CX Journey Orchestration

Interview #5 - Trent Rossini on Journey Orchestration

Trent Rossini on Journey Orchestration

In the mid-2000s at Microsoft, I was immersed in a sea of data like I had never experienced during the Dot-Com boom. “Corporate Performance Management” as it was called. THINK: “Big Data” before that term was coined. Globally distributed enterprises were attempting to outflank their competitors by harnessing their operational and financial data. Bill Gates was still at the helm of Microsoft and was demanding “Performance Reports” for C-Level decision making. These reports would include data types such as: Finance, Operations, Sales, HR, etc. The internal functions of the organization.

What was missing from these reports was “Experiential” data, i.e., the experiences of customers and users. At that time, User Experience was mostly measured by usability testing in on-site labs. And Microsoft was using CSAT as the key indicator of Customer Experience. However, the problem with CSAT was two-fold: First, and worst, Executive compensation was tied to CSAT and that promoted ‘dark patterns’ to artificially inflate customer satisfaction. Second, there was no connection between customer satisfaction scores and operational outcomes. These data were siloed, and cause and effect could not be measured between customer satisfaction, operational outcomes, revenue, and profitability.

In 2023, not only is it possible to connect the dots between Experiential and Operational data, but it can also be surfaced in context of the customer journey – a seemingly impossible feat 20 years ago.

Today we have Trent Rossini from inQuba on The X-Mentor to share some of his insights and unique perspectives on CX and Customer Journeys. We’ll explore the “Holy Grail of where CX needs to go.”

X-Mentor: Welcome to The X-Mentor, Trent! Great to have you with us. Trent is the Managing Director and Co-Founder of inQuba. He’s a Customer Journey Orchestration expert who’s helping large corporations reach their goals by visualizing the end-to-end customer journey and engaging with customers across channels to gain a deeper understanding of the customer’s journey and what can be done to successfully progress more customers along those journeys.

Trent, did I pronounce inQuba correctly?

Trent: It's inQuba (In-Q´- bah) and it goes by a number of pronunciations, but that's probably the one we use most commonly.

Traditional CX

X-Mentor: Tell me a little bit about inQuba. You're a cofounder, how did things get started?

Trent: The impetus for inQuba was myself and my co-founder Mike Renzon, coming together. Mike had worked in various industries, and he had a strong background in call centers other channels and delivering solutions for large corporates. My background was in insurance operations. What we had done is we had set up an insurance company in 9 months from concept to go live. It was on an offshoring basis and we were really trying to understand the customer experience. One of the things that I learned through that experience is it’s quite difficult to get a sense of what the customer experience is when you're not actually present in the market that you're servicing. So, we started to think about how you get insights on a remote basis. With Mike’s experience and my experience, we brought the learnings together to form inQuba. That was the combination and the impetus for getting inQuba up and running.

X-Mentor: Where is the company headquartered?

Trent: We are headquartered out of Johannesburg (South Africa), but we have operations out of the US. We have a presence in Australia as well. And we're also doing work in the UK. So, we do operate across the globe.

X-Mentor: How long has inQuba been in the market?

Trent: We can’t classify ourselves as a new company anymore. We've been in this space for over 10 years. In fact, going on to our 11th year. But I think the evolution has been quite interesting. So, when we started off, our approach was very much I guess following what the market was doing with traditional customer experience management. The whole notion of soliciting feedback, collecting, organizing that feedback, and feeding it back into the organization. I think the dynamics of the markets in which we operate are such that they certainly change quicker than other markets. We thus realized that the traditional CX approach really wasn't working.

And I think of late, and we've seen a lot in the press, some of the big analysts like Forrester have started to say customer experience management, as an industry, is not doing well. According to Forrester, one in five CX initiatives or capabilities within organizations is going to collapse. I think that gave us the impetus to start thinking about and focusing on improved customer experience in a very different way. And that led us to Customer Journey Orchestration.

In our current incarnation, which is focused on customer experience management through Customer Journey Orchestration, that focus has been in place for the last four or five years. So, I guess that element is relatively new and that's where we found the sweet spot. I think that's where we start to do some very interesting work in getting some truly amazing results.

X-Mentor: What prompted you on your journey to pursue the technological approach to CX, that combination of human behavior and technology?

Trent: I think maybe just going back to some of my previous background, I spent quite a lot of time through the “Dot-Com and dot-bomb” of the early 2000’s at an Internet service provider doing ecommerce developments. That led me to an insurance company. And within that insurance company, our focus really was switching customers from more traditional channels, (e.g., walk-in centers, call centers), into the digital space. So, I guess with the first combination of digital manifesting primarily through the web, I've got a lot of exposure to that. And in fact, I've played the role of CIO for two health insurance companies. And I think that then my role expanded into more of a COO role, taking more responsibility for the overall customer experience. I guess I brought with me some of that technical background. Then we started to use that to be able to manage the customer experience.

And as I said, our biggest challenge was basically: How do we deliver this really great experience when you're not living in the market in which you're servicing? In fact, I think that is a problem that every CX professional suffers from.  What I mean by that is, if you work for a bank or insurance company or telco, you do not experience what the customer does. And the reason is quite obvious, which is by way of example to take my background of health insurance. You don't have to go and talk to the claims department. You go to your friends next door. You don't have to go through approval for a procedure because the person down the passage does it. You don't have to fight with the approvals of claims because you know the people in the organization.

Executives have a completely twisted view of what their customer experience is.

The same parallel applies to organizations such as banks. Many of the experiences that customers have to deal with when interacting through the channels, and the call centers, and in dealing with many of the aspects of customer service, you never experience as an employee. And I think that situation in fact gets worse as you become more senior. Executives have a completely twisted view of what their customer experience is. Because in many cases, their personal assistant is doing the work. So, they never actually truly get to experience what their customers experience.

X-Mentor: I would imagine that holding the Chief Operating Officer role would bring a certain perspective on creating value for the company – right?

Trent: Yeah, 100%. So, you know, having worked in an insurance company, insurance companies are often filled with many actuaries and that certainly was the case in the environment in which I operated. And you know the debate often goes: What is the causal relationship? Do we offer great customer experience which then causes more people to sign up for new policies and that increases your retention? Or is it that those people are sticking around because they’re having a great experience?

“From our point of view, you can't really control revenue. But you can control the experience.”

From our point of view, we felt we couldn’t really control revenue. But we could control the experience. So, if you control the experience and you have a belief that there's a causal relationship, then often the path to great revenue is in fact meeting the needs and the goals of the customer. A lot of the work that we're doing today within inQuba is centered around that notion. A customer that has a relationship with the company will do so because there is a value exchange. So, let's say I'm in the process of wanting to sign up for a new mobile data plan. I'm going to choose a brand that I perceive as offering me the maximum amount of value. I'm going to choose that particular brand. I'm going to choose to do business with them and I'm going to increase my spending with them because I'm receiving value. So, the starting point is to understand the customer and understand the customer's needs and to try and understand the goal of the customer. So, my goal might start off quite simple, which is I need a mobile data plan. I might then extend that to say well I need a fiber plan for my home, and I might want to extend that to my wife and my kids. So, each of those goals has to be fulfilled. And I think in many respects, that's again where traditional CX really hasn't met the expectations of the markets. I think the problem is if you don't understand the goals, if you don't understand the idea of what objectives the customer is trying to achieve, ultimately what happens is you don't fulfill that need and you try and react to the feedback along the way. But you're not driving to a definitive goal point. You're not aligning all your activities within your organization, and you're not aligning your people to the goal of your customer.

X-Mentor: You're touching on something that is a friction point, or a debate, among some CX professionals. The notion that experiences are “constructed.” Thus, they cannot be “delivered.”

What’s being delivered to the customer?

Trent: In the work that we've done, our actual point of departure is this notion of value delivery. And value delivery can take different forms and they're slightly different models. But one of the models that's been well popularized is this notion that value can be put into categories. The model I'm going to run through works well for annuity type products.

The notion of Economic value, in other words, what I'm paying for and what I'm receiving for the money that I'm spending. The Functional value. What are the features of the offering that I have? Maybe it's a flexible data plan. Maybe it's the ability to do international roaming. Then it's the element of brand and potential status – Brand Value. So maybe there's some tiering. Maybe some superior level of service because you are at a particular tier. Then lastly, Experience value fits within the other areas. So, customers are looking for value.

The point is well made that experiences can't really be delivered, that it is an interplay between the consumer and the organization providing that.

But I think it is fair to say that you can construct an offering that has value, and that value can be perceived by the customer if the right components are put together, then ultimately what happens is there's an experience that delivers value.

Now what we also know from behavioral science and to your point, is that humans inherently are irrational, and any decision is a rationalization of a feeling. If you read Daniel Kahneman’s THINKING, FAST and SLOW, it’s very much a case of people making decisions and then they rationalize them. As practitioners in the space, we need some framework or some construct to be able to organize the elements of value that we deliver to the customer so that we can create environments that's not necessarily as a delivered experience, but the experience felt by the customers is a good one. And if you make the customer feel like they're having a great experience, then inevitably they'll make a decision that leads to basically spending more money or continuing to spend money with a particular company.

It isn't an exact science, you know. This is not perfect accounting, but what we do know is that if you line up the elements and if you orchestrate well and you have a framework for putting the elements together that ultimately you can nudge more customers to take up your offer and have less customers leave your company and go somewhere else. It's very much about having a framework of management as opposed to having a silver bullet that initially solves the problem in a perfect way.

The point that I really want to make is this new approach is fundamentally different than the traditional CX approach, where you're simply asking customers for feedback. Because that approach is absent so many components. It doesn't understand customers along the journey. It doesn't understand goal achievements. It doesn't understand the interplay between the behavior of the customer and their perception along the way. So, what you ultimately need is an integrated model to pull the concepts together to take a customer forward.

I think the other part of our experiences is that we are starting to see just fundamentally different results. In so many cases with traditional CX, and we go to the very traditional measures, whether it's NPS, or whether it's Customer Effort Score, or Customer Satisfaction, often those metrics are quite static in organizations and they're very difficult to move over a period of time. Part of the reason they're so difficult to move is the only way you can really move the metrics is that you need to bring about a change program for people that are employed in that organization.

Now when you're running an organization such as a bank or a telco, you've got thousands of people that are under pressure. They have their “day jobs” of doing administration or doing engineering. And now you're trying to get this large group of people to synchronize their activities and drive customer experience in addition to everything else they're doing. It's just such a difficult ask. Then what we do is we give the task to a CX manager, sometimes not even an executive, and we don't empower them to have any means to leverage a change in behavior. So, I think the construct is just flawed. And that's our view as to why it's been so difficult. And, to an extent, it’s why CX is losing some of its value. Having said that, if you look at all the brilliant examples and the case studies in this conversation, we have to mention the Tesla’s and Amazons of the world. Those companies are doing so unbelievably well. So, what is it that causes some companies to do it so well and yet so many companies to fail?

X-Mentor: You speak of human behavior as being inherently irrational. Well, let's start with the human at the top of the organization, the CEO. Forrester’s data will tell you that one of the key predictors of CX transformation success depends on the CEO making CX a corporate priority. Anything short of the CEO listing CX as an annual goal with target results, then organizations will not take CX seriously. The fact that middle-managers have other things to do keeps the organizational inertia of the status quo unchanged.

Why are organizations taking the wrong approach to CX?

Trent: So, I see your point, but there's no simple answers in this space. The reason I think that there are no simple answers is because for delivery to happen we are relying on human beings making decisions, and we both agree on the fact that human beings making decisions is inherently an irrational process. The point of departure for this discussion is then that there are human, irrational consumers making decisions. So now what you must do is put together an experience that makes sense.

There's two broad ways that you can bring about delivering a really great experience. One, as you correctly described earlier, is to bring about a change within the organization. And it is true. It's completely true that if the organization embraces CX and that embrace comes from the CEO, and that there's strong motivation that the organization will change. But that, in our experience, is unusual. Where it happens, obviously, you get a good result. But often CEOs are under tremendous pressure whether it's cost pressure or market pressure, competitive pressure, innovation pressure. And the customer centric narrative isn't always at the forefront of what they're thinking about. So, let's say for the sake of debate, 20% of organizations have a CEO that's fully committed. For these situations, sometimes we use the term “religion” associated with customer experience that is passionately driven out. In this situation CX is truly driven through the organization.

Now, it isn't true to say that the balance of the 80% of organizations that don't have that passionate, committed CEO can’t benefit from customer experience management. We want quite the opposite situation. We all know the benefits to organizations that are customer centric. And yet we see organizations or CEOs where CX is not imperative. And as you correctly pointed out, you've got a whole lot of middle managers that are under pressure to do other things.

An Alternative Approach to CX

So, what you need is an alternative approach. The approach of Ask, Categorize, Act and the Follow-up specifically as related to change management, simply doesn't work. What we do know, particularly off the back of COVID, is that digital engagement has become the center of all organizations and remote working has become the new normal. Organizations are becoming a lot more digital across multiple channels. Chats, Generative AI, have become features within customer service. And people are switching channels. So, what do we do for the 80% balance? That's where we have seen tremendous benefits coming from Journey Orchestration.

Journey orchestration is this notion that customers have goals, and they want to achieve outcomes. And if you can track the customer along the customer journey, understanding where they start and understanding how they're progressing and how they are being taken to their goal. Well, then, ultimately, you're going to fulfill the needs of the customer.

That need typically has two elements to it.

1. The one element is simply I'm going to try and achieve the objective that I've set out to do, whether it's buy a retail product, whether it's take out a mobile phone contract, whether it's buying an insurance product, or maybe it's getting a new investment.

2. The second element is the whole element of perceived value. Therefore, we see this whole interplay between overlaying value delivery across the whole customer journey. Understanding definitively where it's breaking down and putting corrective actions in place.

Now, the fortunate thing is once you are interacting across multiple channels, you are no longer as reliant on changing staff’s behavior to nudge customers forward. You can start using some exciting digital technologies. Whether it's multi-channel chat, whether it's intervention or websites, whether it's nudges through outbound calls. Sometimes you even want to orchestrate a team member that's sitting in a business process, or in a call center, to nudge that customer forward. And it becomes far simpler, because everyone is simply moving the customer forward and the technology itself is moving the customer forward.

So, customer experience is not negated in any way and it's as important as it always was. But you're shifting your reliance on the changing behavior of staff, which is a really difficult task. And I think as I said earlier, it's even more difficult for an organization that has a CX manager that doesn't necessarily have the power to bring about change in the organization. But you can use these digital tools to nudge Customers forward.

And if you can nudge customers forward and they can meet their goals, ultimately, they become satisfied because their need is met. Then you get revenue.

So, I think it's not really a conversation about negating the value of customer experience. We certainly are strong believers in CX. And we live that out every day. It's very much more about how you use a different set of tools to achieve a different and better outcome.

X-Mentor: You mentioned the overlay of the perceived value on the journey. That's something that I find to be quite unique about inQuba. What is your perspective on CX Journey tools that are out there today? And what are they missing, or not seeing, compared to what you're able to see in inQuba?

Trent: Yeah, you know, some would say that we had brilliant insights, and we anticipated the need for this interplay between customer perception and customer journeys. But I think this was just fortuitous. I think it turned out we happened to start in this CX space. And we saw some value in it, but we also saw some significant shortcomings. So, I think our background and our heritage led us to the conclusion that while there are strong merits in some elements of customer experience management, it has major gaps. I think a lot of the customer journey orchestration players have come from a different perspective. They come from the perspective of channel management. They come from the perspective of digital integration. We've come to realize that it's the interplay between the channel interactions and customer perception. And we do pride ourselves on the fact that we have somewhat of a unique level of integration. So, you'll typically find that many of the customer journey orchestration players have customer feedback and both structured and unstructured feedback only as an add-on, as an adjunct. We’ve taken a different view. We think it's super important that it's wholly integrated. It comes back to this fundamental belief that if you look at human behavior, humans act based on how they feel.  And if you want to understand this interplay between how customers behave and how they feel, you need the data to portray that integrated perspective.

I think that the other element, which is kind of a more practical element, is to ask the question: who likes to fill out surveys? Let's face it, surveys are terrible. If you think about it from a conceptual point of view, I'm going about interacting with an organization, let's say it's an investment organization. The client is interested in investments and then out of the blue they receive a survey that interrupts their flow that asks them questions that are not in the context of what they are trying to do at that point in time. It's disruptive. It has a negative impact on the customer experience. So, we've taken a view that surveys are terrible devices. I think their heritage comes from the 70s and 80s and filling in forms and that you just must have a better way. And the way we go about doing that is not to have people fill out surveys. Because we honestly don't believe in them.

What we do make use of is digital dialogues. And we make it feel natural. We have conversations and we take advantage of unstructured text to get a much deeper insight of what's going on. So don't force a customer on their journey into an uncomfortable place of asking a set of what seems random questions that are incoherent with what you're doing.

Rather have a conversation. That's what people want to do.

The overall approach goes back to the very essence of business, which is, your corner store that you go and visit every day and the person knows you and has a conversation, asks how you feel and what your need is, and they get to understand you. We need to emulate that as much as possible using technology. And our ability to do that improves dramatically with some of the generative AI capabilities that we've seen. So, the conversation literally becomes a natural one. And we're not pretending that there are people behind it, we're just making it feel like it's natural.

X-Mentor: “Markets are conversations.” That’s a quote from The Cluetrain Manifesto – a book that many Dot-Com era innovators referenced and quoted almost like scripture. Interestingly, many of those policies and opinions from the “95 Theses” still ring true today.

CX Journey Orchestration

X-Mentor: Now we have data overlaying the journey, which means that we can visualize various data types at any point in the journey. And I'm envisioning that someone could put their hands on some levers here and start exploring ways to optimize journeys for better customer value?

Trent: Yeah, yeah, 100%. So, the way we organize our analytics, and to your point, we start to collect data, we start to see the paths that customers are taking. We start to understand their emotional responses at different points in time. What it allows you to do, if you map out the relationships between the data, is you start to understand the causal effect. So, in a customer journey there's some basic points that any robust journey solution should be able to show you:

1. Start: Where did the customer start? Do they enter the journey? And you can have multiple, alternative, journeys?

2. Drop-off: Have they got to drop off points? Have they exited out of the journey and potentially exited out of the journey without getting to the goal points? The objective is to optimize towards goal achievements, so the goal point is certainly obvious. It is obvious in the case of inQuba.

3. Stall: Then there is the notion of a stall. This is where we're seeing a significant amount of potential. Stalls are part of our daily life.

For example, we had a conversation earlier. While you were chatting, Greg, you mentioned your dog was barking (e.g., dog barking provides notification that an Amazon delivery is at the front door). And people have disruptions like this in their daily lives with just fetching their kids or cooking dinner. Now, completing an application form for a new loan or providing information for your short-term insurance is not necessarily a priority in your life. Often what will happen is, you have the intent to progress with a particular brand, and you have the intent of going through a journey, and you have the intent of getting to the goal, but often what will happen is you stall. Not because the organization has necessarily failed, but simply because life has got in the way. So, there's this combination of the distractions of daily life. And recognizing that's the case by trying to understand how people are perceiving value participation. If you want to be really purist and say that you can't deliver Value-to-Customers, then ask: How are customers perceiving value participation? Is that combination coming together in a way that allows progress to be made?

The other point is customer journeys are inherently indeterminate. They're random in nature and they are becoming more and more random as the number of channels is exploding. So, you can't presuppose a workflow, and if you do I think fundamentally orchestrating customers fails. Should my journey be: I go to the website, and then I call the call center, and then I go to the walk-in center? Maybe I choose to go to the call center three times and then go back to the website and then interact through my app. Your interactions with an organization are not predetermined and you cannot orchestrate to that level because all that happens is you frustrate the customer. You take away their freedom, and they start perceiving that you're not truly multi-channel or Omni channel.

“If you can make customers feel good about life, ultimately that's part of a great experience.”

So, you must keep context across channels and understand the person, the being, and we agree 100% with your perspective, which is fundamentally they are humans and humans want to interact. And they want to experience, and they want to have conversations, and that makes them feel good about life. And if you can make customers feel good about life, you know, ultimately that's part of a great experience.

You know, at the same time, you probably want to take away friction points and you want to take away frustrations and you want to deal with things like fears and a sense of risk. So, you're playing off all those human emotions. Now, again, we don't pretend to be an automated dynamic psychologist. But it is fair to say that if you've got a deeper understanding of the interplay between these components, that you've got a greater chance of having a higher percentage of customers that make it out the other side.

Journey Economics

X-Mentor: You talk about this in terms of establishing “journey economics.” What are you doing to bring financials into focus?

Trent: This is a super exciting space and we started to do some incredibly interesting work. I've described in quite a lot of detail that we dynamically built-up customer journeys. The next logical thing to do is start to cost the journeys.

If you think about just a very simple scenario, an application of a credit card, for example. I might start off and interact through a display ad. I might then go to social media. I might then go onto the website. I might fill in an application, the application goes for credit scoring. I got a call from a call center. I then maybe receive an offer. I could print out that offer. I could send it in, and it gets processed, and I get accepted. Now, with a fully-fledged journey orchestration solution, each of those interactions that I've just described can be costed. Then what you can do is you can start to accumulate the cost of each of the elements and you can start assigning them to the customer, to the journey, to the engagement, and for that matter to the product that's subsequently taken up. So, we can start to understand the cost.

The second element is related to goals - I’ve spoken at length about goals, so the approach we use is to say, OK, a goal is linked to an outcome with association to revenue. Now revenue can change obviously in acquisition, it's really by contracted revenue and that revenue might change depending on your product choice. For servicing journeys, it might be simply that the customer is satisfied, and they're retained. Obviously on a renewal journey, the retention of the revenue becomes very important. So different journeys can have different revenue associated with different respective goal points. Once you can start accumulating costs, you can calculate the costs and you can calculate the revenue. You can offset the two and that leads you to profitability. That's where things get exciting! Because now what you can do is you can start to both analyze and visualize customer journey cost. You can start looking at the profitability of journeys. Then what you can do is compare it to all the aspects that we spoke about earlier in the conversation.

We can start to see the relationship between cost and revenue and profitability in the parts of the journey that I choose. And then the most important part, and I think this is a Holy Grail of where CX needs to go, you start to associate those human feelings with the revenue that you generate. Now, there's an element for me that makes me feel that this is a little bit perverse, because we're really monetizing human emotions. But in many respects, I think that's what businesses do and that's what marketing does, it's understanding that interplay. We start to understand which human emotions lead to what level of profitability. And once you can do that, we’ve passed all the notions of what we spoke about earlier, so no longer do you need the charismatic CEO that represents 20% that has everyone aligned in the organization. You now start to have conversations with your CFO, and you actually start to show the relationship between experience and revenue. And I think many of the doubters of this space will be brought around, and you'll have far better outcomes within an organization.

X-Mentor: Absolutely. You're now speaking the love language of the CEO and CFO. As perverse as that may sound, that is what they care about most. They are focused on: Revenue. Cost, Reduced Risk, Profitability, Margin. If we can’t connect-the-dots, we risk losing their interest and attention.

When you find friction impacting financials using inQuba, you can course correct. Is that right?

Trent: That is 100% correct and I think that's when we can start to really take advantage of all the developments in Generative AI. We've got a number of exciting projects where marketing is centered around making sure that you get the right message to the right customer at the right time with the right value elements. The number of permutations to be able to do that, given the complexity of human beings and human emotions, becomes infinite, and it's very difficult to do that. But what you can do using all the tools available, and we have a very exciting project that we're busy with at the moment, is actually to take the profile of the customer, which you then store and is persistent, and you generate content dynamically using generative AI to make the message, or the nudge, depending on the channel that you’re choosing, to make it highly salient to the individual.

When that message is salient, the chances of an individual reacting to that nudge become a lot greater.

The other element is you can truly start to understand which element of the model, when I say model I mean the model of customer experience value delivery, is the most relevant value element to achieve your outcome. So, is it the economic element? Is it the experience? What element of the experience? Is it the functional elements? Is it the amount of time that the customer is on the journey? Is it because you're not explaining your offering? Is there actually an impediment to progress? And each of those can be quantified into metrics and then using predictive models, it's very straightforward to just plug all the variables into a predictive model and see which element is the most important and the biggest driver.

Something else to mention is that anyone that has done substantive AI work will tell you the most important element, and the most difficult element of predictive models, is the organization of the input data. If you don't have well organized data, you can't fit it into the algorithm and you can't predict outcomes. And so much work has been done around algorithms, that whole domain is well covered. Players, such as Microsoft, have got technologies that are plug and play. That's almost what's become the easy part. It wasn't previously the easy part. It's become the easy part. The difficult part is feeding the model with well-organized data so that the predictions are accurate. The second difficult part of prescriptive machine learning is making sure that the actions that come out of the predictive model are fully automated and can be customized.

Pulling these pieces together, we can start to arrange the concepts that are part and parcel of general orchestration with customer experience, with value participation and start to predict which outcomes are going to give you the best results and ultimately drive to ROI. And we're very, very excited about that because, while there probably is no panacea, we are coming close to a panacea of a unified model to drive outcomes and drive profitability directly linked to customer centricity.

X-Mentor: You mentioned Microsoft. I understand that inQuba is one of Microsoft's premier partners and you've recently been named partner of the year, is that correct?

Trent: We've got a wonderful relationship with Microsoft. So right from our early days, they had a startup program called BizSpark. We participated in that. But I think more recently what we've done is we've harnessed the Microsoft technologies, taking advantage of the integration into Open AI. We take advantage of a lot of their BI technologies such as Azure Synapse. And I think at a relationship level we are referred to as an IP Co-sell ISV Partner. So, in Microsoft terminology that basically means that we've got our own IP running on top of Microsoft Technology and we're very fortunate to be able to cooperate together with Microsoft on one client. We have a number of projects with them, and we're starting to leverage that relationship for our global expansion, which is in its early stages, but very exciting. So yeah, Microsoft is certainly an organization that I think we have a strong relationship with and a mutually beneficial relationship.

X-Mentor: Trent, this was a fantastic conversation! Our time has certainly flown by. Such an interesting topic to discuss with you today. I haven't seen anything quite like what inQuba has put together in terms of an experience that enables you to visualize and overlay the financials like you do. And to be able to pull levers and steer towards outcomes that would be optimized for the business and for the customer alike. It’s impressive! So, congratulations on achieving something that I've been dreaming about for a very long time. And thank you for sharing with us today on The X-Mentor!

Trent: Thank you. Thank you, Greg. I think as a vendor and a player in this space, one of the challenges when you have a different perspective, and you're trying to drive change in the market, and you're trying to question the conventional wisdom, it helps tremendously to find people like yourself that appreciate the difference in approach. Therefore, having conversations like this is invaluable both in our learning, but hopefully to build some awareness of something new and innovative.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Trent Rossini is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of inQuba.

Greg Parrott is The X-Mentor and publisher of The X-Interviews.