From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale, just off the runways here at Moffett Field. Really cool place, a lot of fun toys and gadgets that I have not got to play with yet, but I got to do before I leave. But the conversation today is really about customer experience. We had a small panel this morning of experts talking about customer experience. What does that mean? How do we do a better job at it? And we're excited to have an expert brought in just for this conversation. She's Annette Franz, the founder and CEO of CX Journey. Annette, great to see you. Thank you, thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. Absolutely. It's been a fun morning. What did you think? What were some of your impressions of the conversation this morning? You know what, it's always great to sit in a room with so many people who have been living and breathing this customer experience journey. And so it was great to hear what Comcast is doing. It was great to hear from some of the other folks in the room, what are some of the latest trends in terms of data and technology and where customer experience is headed. Yeah, it was awesome. So customer experience, it's a little bit over. It's almost kind of digital transformation in a little bit. Everyone's like experience, experience, experience. And that's a big complicated topic. How do you help customers really kind of break it down, make it into something manageable, make it into something they can actually approach and have some success with? Yeah, so I spent a lot of my time working with clients who are brand new to this field. I had a former boss who said that they can't even spell CX, right? That's a problem. Yes it is. So yeah, so I go in there and I really listen and understand what their pain points are and what they need help with and then get them started on that journey. Basically soup to nuts CX strategy work. We typically start out making sure that the right foundation is in place in terms of the executives, that they're all aligned, that they're all committed to this work. The culture, we've got the right culture in place. We've got some feedback from employees and from customers of what's going well and what's not. And then from there we dive right into a phase that I call understanding. And that's listening to customers, listening to employees, developing personas so that we can really understand who customers are and who our employees really are. And then also journey mapping to really walk in their shoes to understand the experience that they're having today and then use that to design a better experience for tomorrow. So there's a lot of work that happens upfront to make the things that we talked about in there this morning happen. What's the biggest gap? Because everyone always talks about being customer centric and I'm sure if you talk to any CEO, of course we're customer centric and we see it with like Amazon, Andy Jassy and that team is just crazy hyper customer centric and they execute it with specific behavior. So what's the part that's usually missing that they think they're customer centric but they're really not? Yeah, I think you just hit the nail on the head with the word execute, right? So there's a stat out there that's been out there for forever and we know it. Every single company, every single business interviews or surveys us to death, right? So they have all this great feedback but they do nothing with it. They just don't execute, they just don't act on it and they've got such rich feedback and customers want to tell them, hey you're doing this well but hey this is not going so well so please fix it because we want to continue doing business with you. And so yeah, it's about execution. I think that's one problem. The other problem is that they focus on the metrics and not on actually doing something with the feedback from the experience. Do they just ignore it? Do they not have the systems to capture it? Are they kind of analysis paralysis? You just said they have all this great data and they're not doing anything about it. Why? Yeah, it is that too, analysis paralysis. Let's just beat the numbers to death and what's the quote about beating the number until they, beating the data until it talks kind of thing, you know? Don't know that one. Something I know I've just messed that up. Yeah, yeah, that's okay. But yeah, they don't have the system in place to actually then take what they learned and go do something with it. And I think a big part of it, and we talked about this in the room this morning too, was around having that commitment from the top, having the CEO say, listen, we're doing this and we're going to, when we listen to our customers, we're going to act on what we hear. So, but they don't, they don't have that infrastructure in place to actually go and then do it. Right, it's pretty interesting. You have a deck that you shared in advance, eight principles of customer centricity. Yes. And eight, three are people. People before products, people before profits, people before metrics. That sounds great, but it sounds contrary to everything we hear these days about measure, measure, measure, measure, measure, right? It's human resources. It almost feels like we're kind of back to these kind of time motion studies in trying to optimize people as if they're a machine as opposed to being a person. Yeah, well, it's not because we have to, the way that we think about it is we have to put the human into this. That's what customer experience is all about, right? It's about putting the human in the experience and it's interesting that you bring up that deck because when I open that talk, I show a commercial from Acura and it's, if you've never seen it, it's called The Test. If you can Google it and find the video and it's really about if we don't view them as dummies, something amazing happens. That's the tagline, right? And so it's really about people. The experience is all about people. Our business is all about people. It's why we're in business, right? It's all about the customer. It's for the customer and who's gonna deliver that? Our employees. And so we've got to put the people first and then the numbers will come. Right. Another one that you had in there I just have to touch on was forget the golden rule. Which I always thought the golden rule was, he who has the gold makes a rule. You're talking about a different golden rule, which is really treat others not the way you think they want that you want to be treated but treat people the way that they want to be treated. It's such a small nuance but it's so important. And I love this example that I share too. I just recently read a book by Hal Rosenbluth called The Customer Comes Second, right? And to most people, that seems counterintuitive but he's really referring to the employee comes more first, which I love. And the example that he gives is he's left handed and he goes into a restaurant. He frequents this restaurant all the time. And until I read the story, I never even thought about this and now that I go to restaurants I think about this all the time. The silverware is always on the right hand side but he's left handed. So this restaurant that he frequents, the waitress, he always seemed to have the same waitress. She caught on and so when he would come into the restaurant she would set the silverware down on the left hand side for him. That's treating people the way that they want to be treated and that's what customer experience is all about. Right, one of the topics that you talked about in the session this morning was the reputation in that service experience is really defined by the sum of all your interactions. And it's really important to kind of keep a view of that that it's not just an interaction, it's many, many interactions over a period of time. That sounds so hard to manage and then there's also this kind of the last experience which is probably over-weighted based on the whole. So how do people keep that in mind? How do they make sure that they're thinking kind of holistically about the customer engagement across a number of fronts within the company? Well you've got to think about it as a journey, not just touch points, not just a bunch of little touch points because if you think about just the last experience or just a touch point then you're thinking about transactions. You're not thinking about a relationship and what we're trying to get at is customer relationships and not just transactional. It's they're in, they're out, they're gone, right? But we want relationships. We want them to be customers for life and that's the only way that we're gonna do it is if we focus on the journey. Right, but about the challenge of that which was special suddenly becomes the norm and we talk a lot about kind of the consumerization of IT because as soon as I get great results on a Google search or I find exactly what I need on Amazon in two clicks and then to take that into whatever my B2B or B2C application is when now those expectations are not being driven by what I promise to deliver but they're being driven by all these third party apps that I have A, no control of and they're probably developing at a faster pace of innovation that I can keep up. How should people kind of absorb that, deal with it and try to take some lessons from that into delivery of their own applications? Yeah, so you brought up two things there which I want to address the first one too which was about the delighting customers. But to answer your question it's really about focusing on your customers and your customer's needs and that's why I talk a lot about customer understanding, right? It's about listening to your customers. It's about developing personas and really understanding who they are, what their pain points are, what their problems are, what needs are they trying to solve or problems are they trying to solve and then walking in their shoes through journey mapping and that understanding allows us to design an experience for our customers, right? For our customers. If we don't solve a problem for our customers they will go elsewhere and they'll get their problem solved elsewhere, right? So I think that's really important. The first part of your question was our point was around delighting our customers and you're absolutely right. We don't have to delight customers at every touch point. I know that's counter to what a lot of people might say or think but to your point once we delight at every touch point now it becomes the new norm. It's an expectation that has now been set and now delight, where does it stop? Delight is here and then it's here and then it's here and so it's a whole different, so my thinking on that is that most businesses cannot delight at every touch point and they certainly don't. I think we need to meet expectations and the only way that we can do that is to listen and to understand and then act on what we hear and most businesses are still very primitive even when it comes to that. Right. Okay, I'll give you the last word. Okay. What's the kind of the most consistent, easy to fix stumble that most customers are doing? When you get engaged and you walk in, what's that one thing that you know with 90% confidence factor that when you walk in this is gonna be one of these three or four little things that they should stop doing or that they should do just to get off the baseline? Yeah, I think it's, you know what? I think it's a combination of sort of speed and responsiveness. I'll give you an example. I won't name the company, but I thought, man, in this day and age, this shouldn't be happening, right? It was a company that I contacted. I was supposed to set up an account and they, and I couldn't for, it just wasn't working. I tried different browsers, just wasn't working. So I sent them an email. First I tried to call, but I got stuck in IVR hell and then I sent an email and the email that I got back was an auto responder that said we'll reply within five business days. I know, I should have. I'm like, really? Why didn't you just ask me to send a fax, right? So that's the kind of stuff that, seriously, when I saw that email, I was like, really, in 2019, we're still responding in five business days. That's just ludicrous. So I think that's one of the, and it doesn't cost anything to respond in a timely manner and to respond at all, right? You know, here it is. It's been, I haven't heard from them yet. So it's been like seven days now. So it's been like seven days now. So there's that. And next time just tweet at the CEO. I'm going to, yes. Hopefully the CEO tweets, it maybe doesn't tweet. I know, right? Yeah. Well, and that, you know, not the bad opportunity for you because this is not an easy, it's not an easy thing to do. It's hard to stay up with people's expectations and to drive new and innovative products when they don't necessarily even know how to engage with those things. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the field is wide open because like I said, there's still so many companies that are still just trying to get the basics right. So, absolutely. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time and thanks for participating today. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. She's in that. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.


It's hard enough to get up here and talk about pushing code, doing live demos, but it's a whole other thing to get up here and talk about diversity and inclusivity. And so you have my heartfelt thanks, Steve, and it's a great reminder of what community actually means. So we're going to wrap this up really quickly because I know there's a ton of sessions and we're running just a few minutes over. So we have a great couple of days planned here at Summit. There's so many sessions packed in to the next 48 hours. So find a track or hop between tracks. We've got everything from container and serverless core projects to ecosystem experiments and extensions, operations and security, and finally the use cases and wildcard tracks. There's a ton of great talks, so try to go to as many as you can. Tonight, 6 p.m., there's the welcome reception and the booth crawl. Please do stop by. There's a lot of great booths out there. And again, we're really appreciative of all the sponsors that come and have booths here. Hands on Lab. We experimented with this earlier this year and it's a fantastic success. If you're new to Cloud Foundry, this is a great place to go and ask questions. If you've been using it for a while and have some next level questions, this is a great place to go, ask questions, and get help. Tomorrow, we're going to talk a little bit more about diversity at the Diversity Luncheon. We're going to also be showing the screening of the Chasing Grace project, a docu-series, which were sponsors and I'm a big fan. So I highly recommend you attending that. And then, I have to thank the sponsors again. And I know you're like, okay, the sponsor time, thanks. But it really is important. This does not happen without sponsors at all. And so we really deeply appreciate all of you, our platinum and our gold sponsors, but also our silver, our bronze and our startup sponsors, because you are the ones that power this event and make it possible. I also want to thank you to Google for having a diversity scholarship. For those of you that aren't familiar, we actually sponsor a few individuals every summit to travel here and be part of this event. Our scholars are undergraduate students, software engineers, open source mentors, community organizers, and academics. So thank you Google for sponsoring. And if you see them in the hallway, please talk to them and share ideas. There's a lot of great ideas coming from around the world to participate here. Finally, thank you to the city of Basel, of whom also made this possible by making this a great place to host an event and by helping us hold the event here. And am I missing anything? Oh, tomorrow, new stack pancake breakfast, 7.45 a.m. I know that's super early, but Alex and Judy have promised amazing pancakes and pretty decent conversation. I don't want to set the bar too high, Alex. And then we also have coffee. We have coffee. Tea and water and snacks, for those of you here last year, I'm just going to put emphasis, we have coffee. It is like $20 a cup, so please drink the coffee. Drink all the coffee. That'll be in the foundry on the second floor. And again, I want to thank everybody for coming and spending a couple of days with us. I saw that many of you were new. This is your first time. There are ambassadors running around with tags on. Find an ambassador if you have a question. They represent our community, so please find them if you have questions and want to learn a little bit more. And then also I wanted to give a thank you to Brian Roche for becoming our first Cloud Foundry Summit meme of the week. There's a nice travel meme on Twitter right now if you're curious, where they've just kind of built on to his taxi experience, and now we have a full analogy around buses. So good job, Brian. Thank you all for coming.


Obviously, we've all, for a long time, watched what John Carlo can do when he makes contact. As someone who knows who you're yourself, what impresses you most about the way he goes about his business and just how he's able to be so effective when he's out there? G is awesome. You know, he's someone that you have to... He's a man of very few words, and he's a guy with a ton of talent. So, it's fun to be around him. I kind of have to poke him to try to get him to give me some insight sometimes. But he and Judge, and obviously there's a few other guys that the size that they are and the way that they hit the baseball. I mean, I did something with the yes or the other day where it said that I'm probably ruining the trivia question that's going to be on the board. But Stan has the highest exit velocity every year on Stackcast, and that is insane to me. Because he's such a physical being, and obviously we want him in the lineup as much as we can because he's such a force. There's a reason why he won the MVP. There's a reason why he has the career that he has, and it's a lot of hard work. It's a lot of God-given talent, and ultimately, he's the man. I love shadowing him around every day and just trying to pick on him as much as I can. You mentioned that he's a man of few words, but he was in your yesterday's speaking about how much he could try to use his voice a little more last year. Not just about baseball stuff, but other stuff too. What did you yourself learn from the experiences that you saw him going through last year and from the messages that he was trying to spread around the team? It was cool, because with G, you see a guy that, when he walks in the room, you know that he's in there because of how physical he is. And it was cool that he was speaking up, because there are people in that room that have never experienced anything like others have. And when he was speaking out and he was talking about things that he had experienced and others were talking about it, it pulled at your heartstrings and it made you realize that the way that these guys compartmentalize some of the things that happen in their everyday life versus what's happening at the field is really impressive, because ultimately we are human beings that go through everything in a different way than other people. And Stanton has drawn a lot of attention over these last few years of being here, and he's still the same guy, and he's still capable of doing really great things, and I think everyone wants to see him in the play every event, because he's the guy that, if you mess up, he's going to be jogging pretty slowly around the bases and getting a few RBIs.


Hi you guys my name is Brittany and welcome back to my YouTube channel. You guys in today's video I will be sharing my kindergarten homeschool curriculum picks for the 2023-2024 homeschooling year. You guys I'm so excited to start off one of my kiddos from the beginning in our homeschool journey and I'm a little bit nervous but I am ready to go. So if any of you guys are new here to my channel again my name is Brittany I'm a homeschooling mom to three girls ages 11 five and three and I will be entering in my fourth year of homeschool this upcoming homeschooling year. So you guys let's go ahead and get on into this thing with math. So for math we will be continuing with the Kenny Garten math with confidence series by Kate Snow. We actually completed the preschool math at home series this homeschooling year and you guys this program was so great and I'm so excited to like continue in the series. The preschooling math at home series actually really laid a good foundation for my daughter to start the Kenny Garten math with confidence series and you guys this is such an affordable and a very thorough great math program it definitely works with the kiddos with that mental math that's subitizing it really gives them a good foundation in number sense with mathematics. So I'm really really excited to continue off the series Kate Snow's math with confidence series. Now as far as math I do have a second math curriculum that we will be using as a supplement because my daughter loves math. So we will be using the math you see primer with her as well. You guys she loves this program as well. She loves using all like the math manipulative blocks with this one and this is such a great and sweet introduction to math and two number senses as well. Now do I think you need two math curriculums? Absolutely not but my daughter loves it. We actually can do both of these math curriculums in about 20 minutes. So 20 minutes to sit down with your Kenny Garten I think that's nothing. These primer shoot you guys they take like literally two minutes and sometimes we can get like two three sheets done like fast because they're really simple great math skills she loves this one and then the math with confidence series the games and things like that we can break up these lessons but we do do them all together. So these are the two books we will be continuing off with our math. So as far as like our phonics and phonics instructions we will continue with the all about reading program. This is all about reading level one. We actually worked on the all about reading pre reading program this homeschooling year and you guys I'm so excited and I'm so happy that I did the all about reading pre reading program with my five year old my five year old actually has a speech delay and we worked with our speech therapists all this homeschooling year as well and when I started the all about reading pre reading program my speech therapist noticed like a big jump in Leia's speech and her speech development and I'm so happy that I went ahead and I did that pre reading skills program with her it really focused a lot like on like the rhyming the syllables and even though she didn't know her letter sounds before entering the program all of the games was definitely great in helping her with her speech in particular. So in knowing that my daughter has a speech delay and we will continue with speech therapy this upcoming homeschool year as well I am going to be taking this all about reading level one very very slow. My goal to end off our homeschooling year is to at least get through half of this book. I'm really going to take and follow her lead when it comes to reading and reading instructions. I don't want her to hate it. I know she's going to have to work at it a little bit harder than most because of her speech delay. So we're just going to take things at her pace and I'm just going to try my best to make it as fun as possible and because all about reading has like so many interactive games and she's not like writing or things like that we can like really focus on the phonics. I think she's really going to continue enjoying the all about reading program. So this right here that I'm holding is the all about reading teachers manual. It also comes with the three cute hardback books you guys. I'm really hoping these can stand the test of time and I can use them at least for one more of my kiddos coming up. It also comes with the all about reading learning activity book and as you guys can see I already took out my like yellow sound cards and I laminated those because we already started just using the all about reading level one cards so she can kind of like get used to how like the sound cards look. So we've already started using those right now so I really need to assemble my all about reading activity book so I can have it planned and prepped and ready to go and it will be easy for me to read use it again with my last kiddo. So this is the all about reading activity book. If you guys want to see me prep this like all about reading curriculum I definitely can make a separate video and showing you like how I'm going to like organize it and everything like that. So the all about reading program also came with this like reading interactive kit and this has like all of my little magnetic pieces as far as like the letter sound car or the letter sound towels is what they're called. So I'm not too sure if I'm going to do like the big whiteboard or if I'm just going to have these like in a little box and we'll pull them out as we do the reading lessons. I'm really trying to figure that out but these are like all of my little letter towels that goes along with the program and then of course my reading box. So that is all about reading level one. Now as far as like extra supplemental things that I am going to be using as far as phonics instructions I know sometimes you do want to like break and pause while you're doing like your formal phonics to like bring in some like supplemental practice things and I decided to go ahead and use the JDA elemental phonics level one as far as like our supplemental practice. I know some days we may not pick up the formal all about reading curriculum and I do want her to have like the continuous skill and practice in like the blends and the phonetic sentences and I definitely think by using this very very clear I love how like clean the pages are in her elemental phonics is and I definitely know this will give us like a something else a fresh a breath of fresh air to look at especially in teaching phonics and reading. Another supplement that I have for our phonics instructions is of course explode the code.  We actually did the get ready for the code book A this homeschooling year and then I found quickly she didn't need any more of like the letter sound finds instructions so I skipped the rest of the series and I held on to it for my youngest daughter so for her we're just going to go ahead and start off with the level one. As far as other like cute books that I have for her to do as far as like reading goes I do have the first book set of the Bob books. I will be checking out some phonetic readers from my library as well just so she can kind of get a variety of different readers and things that she may be interested in especially as she gets more fluid in her readers but we will start off with like just the beginning set of Bob books you guys these are tried and true and we're just going to go ahead and stick with it. As far as handwriting goes we will be starting off with a kickstart kindergarten from handwriting without tears. We actually did the green preschooling book this homeschooling year and it went really really well. I actually purchased the chalkboard with the chalk and the sponges as we were really practicing forming those uppercase letters and I will continue to use the chalkboard with doing the lowercase letters in the kickstart for kindergarten. I also have the kindergarten book which is the letters and numbers. I'm not too sure if we will get through like two handwriting books this homeschooling year but if we do I do have both of the like pre-k and the kindergarten handwriting without tears uh handwriting to go for her. Now you guys as far as like our science and like our stem and things like that I decided to go ahead and go with knowledge crates you guys. I definitely wanted to keep our homeschooling year simple. I didn't want to have to think about it you guys I wanted something that was going to be all prepared for me at least for like our stem our art our science and you guys knowledge crates definitely came in clutch for me. This book this box right here you guys has 20 activities. It has it comes with also five actual books as well to pair along with each of the like the art and the stem activities. Everything that I need is in this box. I don't have to think about it you guys uh this will definitely ensure that my kiddos get art for this upcoming homeschooling year and I have no excuses so I'm really really excited to continue with the knowledge crate series. I am going to do the curly boxes this year so this is the spring curly box so I will have like a summer crate a fall crate and a winter crate and you know of course a spring crate to like go with me throughout the whole homeschooling year and I'm really really excited to have everything put together for me. I really really don't have to think about it and um I still can touch on like those science and fun stem activities. We also will be checking out books from our library as far as like science and uh some things on like community helpers and geography. I will definitely utilize my library as well and bring it in uh literature in our homeschool as well but other than that you guys I'm really going to keep it simple this homeschooling year especially in starting off kindergarten. I really want to focus on the three Rs are reading writing and arithmetic and I definitely want to make sure I give my kiddo a strong foundation in those subjects. I know our formal science and you know geography and history those are to come in our upcoming homeschool years but I definitely want to just like ease us into our homeschooling journey and really really um I guess motivate my middle daughter Leia and have her be excited about homeschool. So you guys these are my kindergarten curriculum picks for my upcoming homeschool year.  I will be sharing you guys what I'm going to be using for preschool slash pre-k for my three year old and also my sixth grade homeschooling curriculum picks for my oldest daughter. So you guys as always thank you guys so much for watching today's video and I look forward to seeing everybody in my next one. Bye!


How much actor William Nguni, Pastor Mbaitha, allegedly earns at Ozalo? No doubt he is currently the face of Mzansi's most watched drama series Ozalo. The Baka William Nguni is a celebrated South African actor best known for his on-screen character Pastor Mbaitha on Ozalo soapy. On Ozalo, he stars as a self-ordained bishop and former pastor and board member of Kwamashu Kingdom Church based in Kwamashu. The bubbly man of the oath was once married to Madongwit, but their marriage went south. After his fallout with Madongwit, the two got divorced. However, through the storyline, we have witnessed Mbaitha trying to rekindle his love with Madongwit. On screen, he is best known for stagging the ouster and denouncing of Pastor Kibanga. The controversial pastor was determined to sell the KKC Church, but Mbaitha couldn't allow that. Off screen, he doubles as a business mogul and entrepreneur. We can all agree that he has the plug and the bling too. He has often loud Mzansi with his dressing, rocking inexpensive designer clothes, and capping his bling with expensive exotic cars on social media. Recently he was off the hook after he took some time off the small screens. In the wake of this exit, the showrunners indicated that the actor had requested short leave to sort out personal family issues. A few days ago, he marked his grand return with thrilling drama as he took a swipe on Pastor Gwilla. However, his unmatched drama has gotten Zansi wondering how much does the seasoned actor earns from Uzalo. We can all agree his illustrious career that spans decades makes him one of the most sought-after actors. Despite Uzalo being a low-budget drama series, the actor is paid a whopping R-75,000 per month. Despite all being said, one should know that actor's salaries are determined by several objectives such as experience and time on scenes.


A lot of people have been direct messaging me asking me what they should choose for a career, how to make more money. Here's my answer. For most people, there's a few exceptions. I recommend two things. Number one, create your own business. Even if it's only part-time and you have another career, never rely on only one source of income. It's too dangerous. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Number two, take the profits or some of the profits and invest them in real estate. I've always been a part-time real estate investor. I've never been a full time because I've always been doing businesses that have created the cash flow. But then you invest in real estate. Why real estate? Well, they're not making any more of it. That's what they say about land in real estate.  Second thing is everybody needs a place to stay. It's the most in-demand business that you can get in. So there's been more millionaires created by real estate and a lot of the programs that I create online, the free ones, the paid ones that I have are on those two subjects, you know. Creating a business, there's multiple ways to do it.