Stanley Huang. Image: Moxo
While the rise of automation has been huge, Moxo’s Stanley Huang believes the demand for the human touch is forcing the pendulum to ‘swing back the other way’.
Stanley Huang is the co-founder and chief technology officer at Moxo (formerly Moxtra), a US company that provides client interaction software through automation.
Huang is a seasoned architect of full-tech stack coverage for cloud service and software development. Prior to Moxo, he was an engineering director at Cisco and a senior engineering manager at Webex.
After helping to start Moxo a decade ago, Huang now manages the entire product lifecycle from business alignment to service delivery, as well as development, data centre operations and more.
“In my role, I see myself as an architect of technology and an architect of driving high-performance teams,” he told SiliconRepublic.com. “I try to channel this philosophy into our workflow solution in order to orchestrate the most seamless and intuitive client experiences for the digital world.”
‘Many businesses today are fragmented, with collaboration taking place from disjointed channels’
– STANLEY HUANG
What are some of the biggest challenges you’re facing in the current IT landscape?
One of the biggest challenges in IT right now is digital fragmentation amongst teams, which has led to a soured employee experience and has placed a lid on internal productivity as well external value to customers.
Today’s workplace has plenty of tools, applications and touchpoints to access information or complete a single task. This has also become a concern for security teams as sensitive data is left vulnerable when distributed among multiple channels.
Automation has also gained steam over the last two years with companies trying to rid the workplace of mundane tasks and reduce human error.
But we’re actually starting to see that pendulum swing back the other way. Especially in high-touch, client-facing verticals, customers want personalised attention and just-in-time services, so figuring out the right blend of AI, back-end systems and human touchpoints at certain junctions could pose a challenge for enterprise collaboration and its business models.
Many businesses today, especially in traditional industries, are fragmented, with collaboration taking place from disjointed channels, customer interfaces and data sources. But a unified solution – with structured workflows and AI/BI woven into the necessary components of the business – can streamline processes while striking the right balance between automation and personalisation.
The result is a frictionless experience for employees with reduced bottlenecks and increased agility, while still delivering a personalised, just-in-time experience to clients.
What are your thoughts on digital transformation?
Each company has their own context and target for digital transformation initiatives. In my understanding and at Moxo, we centred our digital transformation around our customers.
We live in a digital world. In this world, customers have evolving expectations in regard to convenience and the timely delivery of service. That’s why at Moxo, we’re focused on building the solution that meets these expectations, but also one that scales as expectations evolve; a future-proof solution, so to speak, to hedge against disruption across any industry.
With that in mind, we’re focused on enhancing the mobility component to business, offering branded digital channels that give customers access to the business in the palm of their hands, and blends structured workflows with unstructured, human interactions.
We like to think in terms of where we see the future of business going and building our technology around that. Business mobility, as well as a modern employee and customer experience, are key components to how we see the workplace evolving.
How can sustainability be addressed from an IT perspective?
Digitising services to the customer is one of the most critical responsibilities of sustainability. IT’s sustainability needs to be aligned with the business’s purpose. For example, a ride taken on the Uber platform is significantly less carbon-intensive than single-occupant driving – which makes up 40pc of all road travel in the US.
The same formula can be applied to any high-touch customer service industry. Digitising your just-in-time service model will improve the service efficiency and the customer’s environmental consumption from gas to paper, etc.
Beyond the core business impact, disparate computing infrastructures can increase a company’s carbon footprint, and ultimately offset the advantages of digitisation in the first place.
What big tech trends do you believe are changing the world?
I see tremendous potential and opportunity in customer-centric business modelling, especially for high-touch industries. When AI/BI abilities aid in the operational process and lead to more meaningful human interactivity, I believe it will lead to the next growing wave of computing technology innovation, particularly for its ability to enhance and integrate with the human component.
But when people think about being customer-centric, they often think about customer care. However, real customer-centricity is a shift in the business model and implementing the right technology to enable such a transition will be critical to achieving it at reasonable costs.
How can we address the security challenges currently facing your industry?
Trust is a key ingredient in any customer-centric business model, and you can’t build trust without having adequate security in place. From my understanding, security is a choice rather than an execution effort. As a company-wide strategy, C-level executives need to pinpoint the most high-value assets to the business and then strengthen security posture around them.
At Moxo, we are focused on delivering just-in-time services to customers while still offering bank-grade security. Therefore, we prioritise securing our digital channel so that all sensitive documents and mission-critical data can be exchanged in a fully secure way.
For high-touch industries, security incidents can strike right at the heart of customer loyalty, and usually cause them to switch service providers.
IT security teams need to understand that it’s not a matter of if, but when an attack may arise. So, if you haven’t already assumed a malicious actor will gain access or exploit system weaknesses, then you’re already a few steps behind. Businesses need to raise security concerns to the C-level, and ensure the right protocols are in place for a business to remain operational, even when standard security measures fail.
The human element to security also needs to be addressed, especially as remote work becomes more permanent. Failure to educate employees on basic security risks can only increase costs on IT and downtime in the event of a breach. So, work to make security awareness and training a part of the overall culture, this way everyone can do their part and stay collected if disaster may strike.
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