Q&A with TGI Friday's CXO: Sherif Mityas

Customer Contact Week is no longer simply about the service experience. We seek to address strategies around the strategy and tactics of the holistic experience, far and beyond the contact center alone. There is no one better to address end-to-end experience strategy than Sherif Mityas, TGI Friday's Chief Experience Officer. Over his four years at Friday's, Sherif took his Chief Information & Strategy Officer role to the next level through the transformation to a Chief Experience Officer that leverage technology and data to orchestrate all guest touch points. His role underscores the importance of a connected experience behind omnichannel service alone as well as the ownership of the end-to-end experience in the C-Suite. Customer Contact Week’s Principal Analyst & Head of Product Development, Michael DeJager, chats with Sherif about the transformation of this role as well as some tips and tricks for successful digital customer engagements.

Q. Your transition from Chief Information & Strategy Officer to Chief Experience Officer in 2018 is really quite telling of the increased importance that is placed on the end-to-end experience? Tell us a little more about that transition and the evolution of your role.

A. I believe it’s a transition that will/should occur across most consumer-facing sectors and organizations. The customer doesn’t care about functions or functional siloes – they care about their overall experience with your brand. That’s the realization we quickly came to within Friday's and decided it was time to “connect the dots” internally so that we could create the right end-to-end experiences for our guests – under one leadership structure. It was an honor to assume this role and help our great teams work in a more integrated and customer-focused manner.  Through their efforts, we are developing and executing truly personalized experiences now for our guests through both our digital and physical channels – creating real differentiation within the restaurant sector which we are seeing in increased traffic, sales and customer satisfaction.

Q. Effective digital customer engagement is a magical blend of data, personalization, and timing in their channel of choice. How have you and your team leveraged AI and machine learning as a catalyst to deliver meaningful digital experiences?

A. It started with understanding our guests at an individual level. We have gone well beyond targeting just Boomers or Gen Xers, we don’t even target soccer moms from Atlanta anymore. We target Mary vs Susan – understanding each guests’ unique preferences and behaviors when it comes to food and beverage to enable a more personalized and connected engagement strategy. The only way to accomplish this at scale is through the use of technology and specifically our AI tools that continue to learn the best methods, channels and content to create a positive engagement or action from our guests. That’s the true power of this new technology – creating personalization at scale – which we can clearly measure and show the impact on a daily basis.

Q. There is a lot of potential out there in terms of channel engagement. How did you prioritize which channels were worth investment? How long did it take for you to prove clear ROI in these investments?

A. The great thing about these engagement and channel strategies is they can be clearly measured in terms of ROI. We can see immediate and clear results when we do something right and it helps us and the AI tools practice continuous improvement.  I’m a big believer in testing a lot of things quickly – there is no need to say “I think…” when it comes to this area. Keep testing a variety of options and the winners will quickly be identified – this allows the facts to come out and you can confidently state “I know…” and quickly move forward.

Q. As a consumer brand, you’ve mentioned that customer loyalty and stickiness are absolutely critical.  What has been the single most successful digital customer engagement campaign to date?

A. The efforts that truly create a seamless and frictionless guest experience have always shown to be the most successful. As an example, we know a lot about some of our loyalty members… we know what they like to eat, what days they like to order and even what time of day. So imagine a guest who likes to order wings every Friday at 7pm…we can send that guest (our AI tool does actually!) a targeted text message at 6:55pm – letting her know that we’ve filled her basket with some wings and the dressing on the side just like she wants it and all she has to do is type back “yes” and it will be done. That’s creating a truly personalized and convenient experience – we made it easy and timely based on everything we know about this individual guest.  These types of highly personalized engagement campaigns are highly effective and continue to power our growth across our digital channels.

Q. How does your digital experience role collaborate and interact with the other functional departments at TGI Friday's to ensure you are delivering a holistic and connected experience? 

A. The role actually encompasses everything that touches our guests – including Marketing, Technology/Digital, Innovation and Ops Services. By creating this connected role, our organization is working together more across customer groups vs functional silos. We continue to focus on a guest-first mindset so that every initiative is rooted in the experience overall versus any one functional deliverable.

Q. Across your TGI Fridays career, what would you say you’d characterize as the rollout or accomplishment you are most proud of?

A. I’m most proud of my teams – they are truly rockstars and have created a completely new guest-first culture throughout our digital transformation journey. When I started I put out the challenge that we needed to become an innovative technology company that happens to sell beers and ribs – they have made that vision a reality!

Q. Can you share with us a fun fact about yourself?

A. Growing up I wanted to be an astronaut…I went to school for Aerospace Engineering and worked on jet engines as my first job out of school. I’ve had the good fortune of flying in jet fighters and hold my own pilot’s license – hopefully someday, I’ll book a ticket to space and fulfill a lifelong dream!

Join us for Sherif’s main stage keynote at Customer Contact Week Las Vegas this June 24 from 5:15-5:45 PM.

Leverage Technology to Deliver Extraordinary, Personalized Customer Experiences

TGI Friday’s Chief Experience Officer, Sherif Mityas, will explore how brands are using AI and machine learning to build, develop, and strengthen one-to-one relationships with their customers.  Armed with real examples from TGI Friday’s digital transformation, he’ll analyze how organizations are deploying new technologies enabled by digital transformation to create personalization at scale and share valuable lessons he’s learned along the way.

About Sherif

Sherif Mityas is the Chief Experience Officer for TGI Fridays with oversight for the Brand’s Strategy, Marketing, Operations, Technology and Digital efforts. Mr. Mityas has more than 20 years’ experience in the retail and hospitality industries in both senior consulting and executive industry roles. Prior to joining TGI FRIDAYS, Mr. Mityas served as the Managing Partner for JS Consulting and as the Chief Executive Officer for Hollywood Video/Movie Gallery.