Dr. Emmanuel Manyonganise is a recognized Experience Executive and Thought Leader with over 20 years of rich and global experience. He currently works at Bank Albilad in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. His career spans across Banking, Telecommunications and Technology Consulting industries across Europe, North America, Africa and Asia. He focuses on helping businesses attract and retain customers and increase their lifetime value using a customer and data driven strategy and digital transformation. This empowers organisations to engage with customers more effectively, sell more and new products and services to them. Dr Manyonganise enables companies to make customers not only loyal but also become promotors and advocates of the brand by enhancing engagement and satisfaction through an integrated, personalized, and proactive customer & digital experience.
I am driven by customer experience innovative and groundbreaking solutions which turbo-charges organisations to deliver exceptional experiences especially through AI and hyper-personalization.” says Dr. Manyonganise.
As a recognized CX leader, he has judged and chaired several global customer experience competitions, notably the International Customer Experience Awards, the Gulf Customer Experience Awards and the Customer Centricity World Series. Dr. Manyonganise has provided seminal input into developing industry standards and best practices. His contributions to the customer experience and digital transformation world have made him a respected person and a sought-after speaker at international and national levels industry forums. As a recognized Thought Leader, he has spoken at industry summits like the Middle East Banking AI & Analytics Summit, Orchestra Thought Leader Round Table, 4th Edition Pronovea Customer Excellence MENA Summit and guest speaker at webinars and featured in CX podcasts.
He believes AI, machine learning, data culture and other advanced analytics technology can deliver tangible business outcomes and create highly personalized and proactive memorable experiences for customers. Besides his professional activities, Dr. Manyonganise is committed to mentoring emerging leaders in customer experience and sharing his knowledge and insights to inspire the next generation of professionals. His commitment to continuous improvement and excellence in customer service experience makes him an asset to any organization aiming to elevate its customer experience strategy and customer engagement.
Let’s examine his qualifications and experience more thoroughly.
Educational Milestones and Career Milestones
Dr. Manyonganise has achieved significant educational and career milestones throughout his professional journey. He completed a Global Executive MBA (GEMBA) at INSEAD Business School in January 2023, where he received scholarships. Before this, he earned a Ph.D. in Optical Communication Devices from the premier Imperial College
London in December 2002, supported by a UNESCO Scholarship for outstanding academic performance during his undergraduate studies.
His academic foundation includes high school at Kutama College in Zimbabwe and B.Eng. in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. Regarding career accomplishments, he served as the Head of Customer Experience and Digital Transformation at Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (du) focusing on Experience Design and implementation. Before that, he worked as a Customer Experience Program Manager at MTN South Africa.
He previously held leadership roles at Vodafone Group London as a Customer Experience & Digital Transformation Program Manager and various positions within Accenture, Amdocs Consulting, and Huawei Global Consulting specializing in Management and Technology Consulting for Tier 1 Technology and Telecommunication providers globally.
Impact of His Role on the Overall Mission of His Company
After completing his Global Executive MBA, Dr. Manyonganise felt he was well equipped to transition from the Telecommunication industry to either Financial Services or Technology, focusing on strategy, so when the opportunity to join Bank Albilad came, he did not hesitate to take it. “I am passionate about creating memories and delivering value to customers through an integrated, personalized, and proactive digital experience,” says Dr. Manyonganise. His role enables the bank to gain a sustainable competitive advantage over others beyond its banks cannot easily replicate.
Driving Team Motivation and Alignment with Customer Experience Excellence
Dr. Manyonganise takes every opportunity to coach and mentor his team and everyone he works with to stretch themselves, advance in knowledge, and perform beyond what they are expected to do. He challenges them to be courageous to take more significant responsibilities, and, as Dale Carnegie said, “Give them a reputation to live up to, and they end up making prodigious efforts to live up to the reputation.” Dr. Manyonganise also genuinely cares about his team’s health and well-being, and when he demonstrates this, they are always motivated to deliver above and beyond what he and the bank ask of them.
Journey as a Global Leader and His INSEAD GEMBA Experience
While considered the most intense program, INSEAD’s Global Executive MBA was also dynamic, transformative, rewarding and empowering. Dr. Manyonganise gained business knowledge and leadership skills and built a strong network of global experts and business leaders through his cohort from more than 50 countries and the INSEAD global alum network, some of which have remained great friends until now.
Completing the GEMBA program unveiled a world of new possibilities for him. He was able to change industries from Telecommunications to Banking, seamlessly relocate to Saudi Arabia and advance to a much more senior and strategic role. He is more knowledgeable about all business subjects and confident in his ability to lead and manage in the corporate world, new business and personal ventures.
Ensuring Innovative and Customer-Centric Solutions in Digital Transformation
“By default, the nature of my job is to ensure that my company delivers exceptional and memorable experiences to customers, and I achieve this by listening to customers in every interaction and across all touchpoints through both solicited and unsolicited, structured and unstructured feedback,” says Dr. Manyonganise.
The heightened customer expectations and increasing demands force him to look for innovative ways to meet and exceed them. We ensure the solutions are innovative by keeping up with technological advancements that enhance CX and learning from other industries, such as utilities, hospitality and airlines. Recent developments in AI excites me as AI powered CX will help us to deliver those exceptional experiences that have been eluding us for so long.
Strategies for Maintaining Work-Life Balance in a Demanding Role
“I prefer to see it as only a “Life Balance” because “work” is only one area of my life among multiple others,” says Dr. Manyonganise. Firstly, he always remembers that he only has ONE LIFE and therefore needs to manage it well. In general, he applies his life values when deciding and
prioritizing what he needs to do in life, and that means God, health & wellness and family come first, while other things such as work/professional, friends/personal relationships and social responsibilities follow (not in order). He also ensures that he manages his energy (physical, emotional, mental and spiritual) timely and effectively. This means optimizing my day to do the most important and hardest tasks when I have the most energy instead of focusing on completing tasks based on time boundaries.
Time is a finite resource, but energy is renewable. He takes a break to recharge/reenergize when the energy is finished, or when the energy levels are low. Depending on the depleted energy, this could be a simple 15-minute break, going to the gym for an hour or just listening to some music. Sometimes it could be as much as going on a holiday abroad.
Planning his day according to what’s important and urgent is another framework (Eisenhower Matrix) that he applies to ensure he gets the right things done on time. In the morning, he lists three big things that account for most say 80 % of the value he intends to create that day and three small things that he must complete each day and tries to focus and complete those things.
Staying Ahead of Customer Expectations and Industry Trends in Financial Service
We try to stay ahead of customer expectations by making strong connections with them and getting to know them deeply, their needs, behaviour, purchase and interaction history, and preferences. Then, with advanced analytics, we try to predict customer’s behaviours and anticipate future needs and engage them at the right time.
Being technologically well-equipped and empowered to make decisions impacting customers and acting timely is instrumental in delivering exceptional service experiences. Industry trends are not easy to stay ahead of, especially with the pace at which technology advances. The advent of generative and prescriptive AI comes with many benefits but ensuring that we are adopting the technology at the same pace and considering customer data protection and privacy policies is a huge challenge. To keep up, let alone stay ahead, it will take leaders who are curious and open-minded and organizations that are adaptable and brave to experiment.
His Take on Competition in the Telecom Industry
Competition in the Telecom industry has been consistently stiff globally in the past decade or longer, and this has led Telecom companies to realize that they cannot sustainably compete on lower pricing of voice and data packages or superior devices (mobile phones) anymore. In addition, switching to another mobile service provider has never been easier in most countries anymore. This puts immense pressure on Telecom companies to continuously enhance the service experience they provide to customers.
In the Telecom industry, Dr. Manyonganise has learned that product and service designs must be customer and data-led (i.e., based on customer needs and perceptions, not on what a company thinks the customer wants). He has also learned the importance of listening to customers’ voices (structured and unstructured feedback, solicited and unsolicited feedback), analyzing their behaviour, and designing exceptional experiences accordingly. The beauty of this approach is that it applies to and can be replicated in any industry.
Guidance for Aspiring Leaders in Customer Experience
Dr. Manyonganise advises, “Start with a diagnosis of the current business situation (i.e., Startup, Turnaround, Accelerated Growth, Realignment and Sustaining Success (STAR)), which helps you understand the challenges that the business and the CEO are facing.” He argues that a clear understanding of the business challenges determines the change that needs to be made and, therefore, the
Customer Experience strategy and focus area. Secondly, CX Leaders need to align their CX strategy with the corporate strategy to ensure that it helps to achieve the corporate business objectives, which gives you (the CX Leader) credibility and trust with senior management and ultimately ensures that your CX initiatives are prioritized. In parallel to business situation diagnosis, ensure you are aware of your organization’s CX maturity level to understand the gap between your current CX maturity level and your aspirations. This will help you to identify focus areas and build your roadmap of CX initiatives.
Future Goals at His Current Company
Dr. Manyonganise’s future goals are to continue listening to customers and powering CX with highly skilled agents and emotionally intelligent AI, focusing on highly personalized experiences for offering new products and services and in every customer interaction across all touchpoints. He is also determined to apply hyper-personalisation beyond sales and marketing to customer education and customer service
