Lauren Wood
Appearances
Experts of Experience
The Art of Conversation Design for AI Agents
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Experts of Experience
The Art of Conversation Design for AI Agents
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Experts of Experience
The Art of Conversation Design for AI Agents
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Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
I'm so happy that you bring up the concept of leadership experience because at the end of the day, it starts with the leaders. And especially when we think about employee and customer experience, those are usually owned by individual leaders that are a part of a greater whole. And I find the ability for the leadership team to collaborate cross-functionally, to
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
to understand the needs and challenges and pain points of one another, to be on the same team directly impacts the ability for the employees to feel safe, for the employees to feel heard, for the employees to feel connected to the business. And then also be able to then go on and create that for the customer. And that leadership component is just so incredibly vital.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
And I know we talk, I think every leader knows the importance of great leadership. but it is not that often put on the table as a key point of focus.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
And it's the reason why I became a leadership coach myself, because as I went and sought coaching, because I knew I needed to step up in terms of my leadership, I saw that connection and I was like, okay, I'm not getting, I'm not going to get this from my organization. So I'm going to go and pay and get someone to help me from the outside. But I think that it's,
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
It's something that executive teams really need to think about is how are we leveling up and how are we supporting our leaders to be the face of the organization and to inspire the organization and to connect the organization? I think it's just such an incredible point here.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
And leadership experience isn't something I talk about that often, but you are going to send me on a rant now because it's a big one.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
I want to make sure that I understand here. Can you define one more time for us high ground thinking versus low ground thinking?
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
And we are constantly moving between those two things frequently. And I think there's also a level of skill in terms of being able to move between the two from the high level to the kind of being up, up in the clouds, strategic thinking, where are we going? And then in the weeds where, What are we doing right now? How are you making these specific actions take place? And all of that.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
It's a very popular word.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
And this is where that purpose piece comes in as well, because I mean, I'm fortunate enough to have worked at companies where there was a very strong sense of purpose, where there was a very clear mission, where we were working to help people or the environment. And it's the reason why I joined those companies in the first place.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
But especially as organizations grow and investment becomes or profit becomes more important, I find that there can be this trade-off. And when you get down into the weeds of what you are doing day to day, it can be difficult to connect that sense of purpose and keep that sense of purpose.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
If you are, for example, in a customer success team saying, okay, we need to sell more, we need to upsell our customers, we need to make more revenue, whether it is good for the customer or not. And the employee is like, but wait, aren't we here to help people? And so why am I trying to sell them something that they don't necessarily need just so that we can increase our NRR? Yeah.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
And I think that it's really important for leaders to help their teams tie back to that purpose and to make decisions from that purpose place as well. Because often I find purpose is like a nice to have where profit is a must. And those two things should actually not be separate because the purpose will drive the profit.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
But often we feel like profit comes first and then we'll talk about purpose once we achieve that profit.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
And it's something that we need to repeat over and over and over again. I know a lot of the leaders I coach, they'll be like, well, I told my team that this is why we're doing it. And they still don't seem to get it. And at the end of the day, the human brain doesn't always remember. Those things, especially when it feels disconnected and we need to consistently message.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
And I always like to think of every colleague we have is also a customer in some way. We need to understand them. We need to show that we understand them. And then we need to present things in a way that is proving what's in it for them. Yeah. This is the essence of influence, right? And when we talk about purpose, it is not a one and done thing.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
When we are changing culture, it is not like we do one thing and culture changes. It takes time. It takes nurturing. It takes repetition. It takes coming from multiple angles to really experience something different so that we embody it and we take that forward. And I think when it comes to purpose, it is... It really needs to be an obsession by everyone in a leadership position.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
And they have to be obsessed with ruthlessly asking, does this connect to that purpose? And how do we make sure that it does so that we can stay true to our values and be authentic? in what we're doing. Because if you are not aligned with your purpose in taking actions and that inauthenticity is present, people feel it, people doubt you, trust will be broken.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
We have to stay true and authentic to our purpose.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
It's something we have to live and breathe. So before we run out of time here, I want to talk about how we bring all of this into the concept of AI, because I see a lot of leaders making difficult decisions or feeling the pressure to have AI as part of their businesses or utilize AI or make these investments.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
And I think especially as we think about purpose, it's so incredibly important that we are approaching AI from a values-driven place. What is it that we really are looking to get from this technology? How can we use it in a way that is still aligned with our purpose and our values? And I'm curious to get your take as we talk about digital transformation. How...
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
organizations can keep that sense of purpose as we embark on a whole new way of working.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
It's important to get started now. It's important to start playing and understanding what can AI do for us. It can apply to so many different areas of the business. It can help us to level up our employees, but there's a lot of implications on our businesses. And I think something that I would say to add to what you just shared is really aligning before we even dive in, really aligning on
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
What are the values that we hold around AI? How does this connect to our business? What is green light? What is red light? And how do we create clarity for everyone involved, everyone in the organization around how we are approaching AI and what it means for us? Because I think so often I see organizations just... Diving into it and they're like, oh, cool, this can fix this and this can fix this.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
It's just a free for all. We need to create some structure. We need to create our sandbox, our own unique sandbox that everyone can play in because the opportunities are truly endless. But without boundaries, one... creativity is actually stifled. Boundaries create creativity. It creates space for creativity. We know how far we can go. We don't have to question, is this right or is this wrong?
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
Am I allowed to do this? Is my boss going to get mad? Let's create that clarity for people in the Bad situations from happening that are going to be deeply embarrassing and hinder your customer and employee experience, which, as we've talked about today, is so essential to business success. So, Sujay, we're running out of time here and I'm so sad because I know we could go on forever.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
About these topics. But I have two last questions for you. The first is we ask all of our guests these questions. The first question I have for you is I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a brand, a company, an organization that left you impressed. What was that experience?
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
I've seen it in America as well.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
And I'm curious to know, you know, one of the biggest things that I find as I work with companies on their experience, both their employee experience and their customer experiences, is it's not always easy to tell what is the ROI of investing in this. We know inherently that if a customer has a great experience, they're more likely to come back.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
I really appreciate that example because I've been in that experience myself many times on very different airlines. And I really... If the... airline employees had fought back, if they had shown up without respect for the company that they're working for and respect for the customer, we all know where that would have gone. It would not be pretty. It would have made a lot more pain.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
It would have honestly been a lot more expensive for the company. And I also really appreciate the point of empowerment and It is so important for us to empower employees to be able to solve these problems and to help mitigate all of the issues that we are facing or that the people on our teams will face.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
And so I appreciate that example because it really highlights where it is important for leaders to focus on their employee experience. So as promised, I have one more question and then we'll be done. What is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear?
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
We know inherently that if an employee has a great experience at their job, they're more likely to stay. But it's not always easy to be able to say, if we do this, we will have this revenue impact. And I'm sure that your customers wonder this. So how do you approach that topic?
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
Customer experience or experience in general is a must have, but it's the leader's job to communicate why that is. And value is really the connecting point there. So thank you so much, CJ, for coming on the show. It's been such a wonderful conversation. I'm so excited about everything that we've talked about and I hope you have a wonderful day.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, we are going to dive into the key word of this show, experience. We are joined by Sujay Saha, the founder and president of Aquis Cortico-X, a boutique experience-led strategy and transformation firm.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
Well, the thing about experience in general, whether it is inside the organization or outside of the organization, is it is complex in nature. And it is also emotional. It is not something that we can draw a direct line to revenue as we can if we say, we're going to have X number of sales calls this month, and that's going to drive X amount of revenue. It's not a simple equation.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
And so I think it's really fascinating how you're acknowledging the complexity, but also the fact that we need transparency in seeing where our efforts are going and how they are driving the business forward and the ways the business wants to grow. And I think it's one of the reasons why experienced leaders, one, tend to be quite siloed, but two, have a difficult time really communicating the
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
to the key stakeholders in the business, why it's important to invest in more experience led initiatives or human led initiatives that we all know will help the business, but it's just hard to draw that direct line.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
And so I'm curious when you create the return on experience, when you go into an organization and you're presenting that, is it bespoke to the individual business and the metrics that you're pulling together to really create that number? Or do you have a general, maybe templated approach that you kind of always apply?
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
We are going to dive into Sujay's insights around experience and driving innovation through a human-centric lens. Let's get into it. Sujay, wonderful to have you on the show.
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
What would you recommend to our listeners? I mean, obviously, if they could work with you, that's great. But I think this is a... We're unpacking a problem that I know so many CX leaders and also HR leaders struggle with in really being able to communicate the impact of what they are doing. And where do we start? How can we start to really...
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
Amazing. Well, as you know, this is my favorite topic. And I'd love to just kick it off by talking a little bit about employee and customer experience. I know this is something that you talk about all day, every day at work with your clients. It's a key focus of what you do at CorticoX. Tell us a little bit about at a high level, how do you approach this topic?
Experts of Experience
Return on Experience: The Secret Metric Every Business Needs to Know
communicate that impact and show the return on investment?
Experts of Experience
Tech Obsession is Failing Citizens (Rescuing Government Customer Service)
Great CX starts with a great story, and AgentForce helps you tell it consistently across every channel. AgentForce allows you to build AI agents that empower teams and customers to provide top-notch customer service 24-7, all seamlessly integrated with Salesforce. Discover the future of CX today and visit salesforce.com slash agentforce.
Experts of Experience
Tech Obsession is Failing Citizens (Rescuing Government Customer Service)
Consistency builds trust. And that's what I love about tools like AgentForce. With AgentForce, AI agents can help you deliver consistently excellent service to your customers 24-7. Fully integrated with Salesforce, AgentForce is redefining CX. Salesforce has the experts, resources, and technology to help you start your agent force transformation today.
Experts of Experience
Tech Obsession is Failing Citizens (Rescuing Government Customer Service)
In fact, Salesforce's support experience is now powered by agent force. See the future in action at help.salesforce.com.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
It's interesting, you know, as we enter this new age of AI and we're focused more and more on how computers are or AI agents are able to do things for us. I think it's such an important narrative to really bring back this importance of technology.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
humans and the fact that we are humans using technology, that we're humans doing business and to not get lost in the like, yes, it's amazing what AI can do for us, but for us, for us, the humans. And I just see, you know, the narrative is so new and this technology is so new and how we utilize it is still yet to be seen exactly. How does the dust settle with the connection between humans and AI?
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
But I just I think it's so important for us to keep having this conversation about technology. humans being here because just as you said like I mean from a we are divided and we have a environment that we are also dividing ourselves from and coming back to the real you know why are we here in the first place is it's always been important and it's more important now than ever I think
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
How are you using AI in your customer experience?
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
And I've heard you say that human connection is essential today. Can you elaborate on that a little bit and how you're incorporating the concept of human connection into the work you're doing at Mazda?
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
I can imagine with your dealer relationships, you have less control over the customer experience. So how are you really keeping those human-centric values alive in the dealer to customer relationship?
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
What kind of training do you provide or how do you really ensure that that relationship is consistently strong and that the dealers are supporting your customers in the way that you envision?
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
I want to talk a little bit more about that personalization, that one-to-one experience, because we don't hear about that every day. How do you approach that in general and then especially in that dealer relationship?
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
What are some of the questions that you would recommend people ask?
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
Completely. If the customer gets that you get them, they are so much more likely to be open and honest about why they're there, what they're looking for. They will drop all the breadcrumbs for you to pick up and then be able to sell them something authentically that they actually need versus leave a bad taste in their mouth.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
That is exactly it. How do you bridge the gap between the online experience and the in-person experience?
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
Yep. I have two last questions for you. We ask all of our guests these. So the first one I would like to hear is, what is the recent experience that you had as a customer that left you impressed?
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
Mm-hmm. And how do we bring that into business? Because I agree with everything that you're saying. And then when we talk about how do we tie that to the businesses that we are running and really incorporate it into it, tell me a little bit about how you're doing that at Mazda and just in the work you're doing as a CMO.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Brad Audet, the CMO of Mazda Americas. Today, we are going to dive into how he leads the brand's evolution through personalized customer experiences, strategic partnerships, and innovative marketing campaigns that drive emotional connections between Mazda and its customers.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
I mean, here's what I'm picking up on and what you're sharing. It's these little things. Like in the Air France example, it's how it's packaged. The things that were delivered to you for lunch. That whole experience of eating was thoughtful. In this example of the valet, it was not thoughtful. $75 for valet is...
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
You feel like someone is attacking you almost just because you happen to be here at this moment and now they're going to charge you a ton of money. And so it's those little experiences that really go a long way.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
And when something does go wrong, if there had been many little tiny things that were less than ideal, we'd go back in time and say, oh, well, that happened, and then that happened, and then that happened. And then it becomes a bigger thing. thing. And so it is the little things that matter.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
It's every step of the experience that helps people to either feel like I connect to this brand and this company, or they feel like they aren't actually thinking about me and my best interest.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
How do you do that? Now I'm asking you more questions, but I'm just curious to know how do you approach that? Because with so many little things, it can be a lot to... follow and a lot to manage. So what is one strategy that you use?
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
And having those forums for people to bring those insights back to the organization, bring those insights back to their teams so that we can discuss and iron out those kinks and learn from one another's experience. It's so essential.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
I love that example so much. Thank you for sharing. So now we will get to my last question, which is what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear?
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
I could not agree with you more. Brad, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking to us all about being human. We are humans serving humans. And I've absolutely loved this conversation. Thank you so much.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
I think it's such an important thing for businesses to think about. We are humans serving other humans. And at the end of the day, if we can connect to that innate human need, that is where we create authentically providing value. And we all as consumers want to receive actual value and not just be sold something.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
And I think that Mazda does such an amazing job of really hitting on that human note. And as you're saying this, I'm like thinking about the ads that I've seen from Mazda that always just feel so uplifting. Can you tell me a little bit about your process of really approaching marketing from that human driven lens?
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
And so it's bringing that into thinking about the customer. How do we deliver on those values of the customer, those current needs that they have in this day and age and, and really be there with them in that, in the marketing that you're providing and the initiatives that you're putting out there.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
Brad, so wonderful to have you.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
So how is customer experience a competitive differentiator for you?
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
Wow. That's really impressive. Congratulations.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
Mm hmm. Yeah. I want to double click on something that you said about the difference between hearing and listening. Because I think that there is such an important distinction in that. And I often work with teams, enterprise, customer success teams that are really working one-on-one. And
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
It is different to listen in a one-to-one conversation than it is to listen to the masses in the way that you're mentioning and that social listening and to really understand what is happening for our customers and those people. Can you tell me a little bit about that listening versus just the hearing?
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
Oh, my God. It's so it's so essential. And I think so often we focus on the words and less of the feelings when in reality, listening is about listening. Not just the words, it's about, especially in a human-to-human conversation, it's about the tone of voice. It's about the body language. It's different online, but there's still things that we can pick up on. How is someone saying something?
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
It is not just, this is good or this is bad. It's what emotion is being evoked? What words are they using to describe that so that we can really understand where these people are coming from and how we can be there with them in that experience so that...
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
Yeah. It's like the concept of mirroring. Do you know in sales, people always talk about mirroring to when you listen to someone, say back to them what they were saying. Show them that you understand. And that... concept of showing someone that you get them. They have to get that you get them. Then you build a connection. Now a connection is being made. They're like, oh, you understand me.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
I feel comfortable with you. I feel like you are really hearing the problems or the issues or the feelings that I am experiencing. And now I like you more because we are here together. And it's so interesting to think about that at the brand level.
Experts of Experience
#59 Radically Human: How Mazda is Redefining Customer Experience
I couldn't agree with you more. I want to talk a little bit about sustainability because I know you are a part of a CMO group working on sustainable development goals. Tell us a little bit about that and how you're bringing the concept of sustainability into your work.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
So today we're going to explore how leading hospitality players like Shannon are really creating customer loyalty, leading empowered teams and creating wow moments at scale. Shannon, so great to have you on the show.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
I want to talk a little bit about that, making sure that the guest has a good experience and kind of ensuring that you're remedying something quickly because it can... It's easier said than done. And I know having worked in restaurants and hospitality myself and then moving into SaaS, it applies for all of us in every space.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
What are some of the tactics or techniques that you teach your team around how to really remedy something so that a guest or a customer can have a good experience quickly?
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
So I want to kick it off by taking a little bit of a trip down memory lane. You first started working in hospitality as a high school student. So you've literally been in this space for pretty much your entire career. And I'm curious to know if there was a specific experience that really shaped the way that you view the hospitality industry as you've gone through your career.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
We need to identify what is valuable to our unique customer. It is sales 101, right? Listening to understand what is it that this person really cares about? And then how can I remedy this situation properly? to their needs because we've all, I'm sure we've all been in an experience where something wasn't working with some company and they say, okay, well, we'll do this.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
And you're like, that's not what I want. That's not helping me. And it just increases your frustration where if someone really listens to you, ask questions, it makes you feel seen and heard and then delivers to the information that you have given them. You uniquely have given them. then trust is built. And sometimes often trust is built even beyond where it was in the first place.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
They trust that you are going to ensure that they have a great experience. Like that's the simple root of it is they're following you because they trust and they know that you are going to ensure they have a great experience and that's where they want their money to go. I truly believe it's all about the recovery. When we have something that happens, there's always gonna be things that happen.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
But if we recover well, then that's where loyalty sprouts from. So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the evolution of hospitality. It has changed a lot in recent years from COVID happening to AI now being on the scene and something that is really infiltrating our ways of working. How have you seen, let's start with 2020, because that's still in our recent memories.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
How have you seen hospitality change since COVID? And then we'll get into AI after that.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
What I'm hearing you say is that AI and AI agents or bots are really enabling your team to spend more time with the customer, less time behind a screen, which is amazing. I actually have a client in the hospitality space at the moment, and I've been kind of diving into what are some of the new AI technologies coming onto the scene. And I've heard things like having a voice recorder.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
I don't know if you've heard of any of this, but tell me if you have. Like a voice recorder at the front desk where it's listening to the customer and then it has a screen telling the person behind the front desk what it is that they can recommend or suggest. So if a guest is saying, for example, oh, I don't like that room. I stayed here last time. Can you move me?
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
The AI is automatically saying, here's a suggested room so that the person doesn't even, the person behind the front desk doesn't even need to spend time going in to look at what's there. I don't know if that, that to me was like an extreme example of AI use. And I don't know if we're there yet per se, but just the idea of
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
of removing the need for that front desk agent to be behind a computer and really focus on the customer is amazing. So I'd love to hear some examples of what you've seen around really enabling that human to human interaction more than ever before.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
Oh, completely. I mean, as a consumer, as a traveler myself, I'm so excited and so looking forward to what AI can do to help improve my experience and the experience for everyone. I think it's really opening up a new frontier of what experience means, right? Because we are enabling people to have that more of that human to human interaction. When I think of luxury, I think of like concierge.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
I think of someone really considering my unique needs. And I think this is doing it so much more. I'm curious to know, what about in the realm of CRM and kind of tracking guest preferences and things like this? Have you been using AI at all in that arena?
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
Because when you get those insights, a guest asking a question or saying, oh, it's my husband's birthday. Yeah. Taking note of that so you can use it later. Like that's such an amazing way to create those wow experiences. And that's really where technology can help us because there is no way that that one front desk person today is going to be the same front desk person a year from now.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
And that guest comes back. You know, and so really making it easy and streamlined for us to gather that information.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
And again, this goes without saying to every single industry, every single company, taking notes on your customer, on those insights they give you, on the requests that they make, on the things that they say they're interested about will help you in the long run to provide those wow experiences. So. Really exciting about what is happening now and really enabling us to streamline those efforts.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
Something else that I wanted to just mention really quickly in going back to the chat function and the virtual concierge, I love this so much. And this is also something that I've been seeing in my research for this client that I mentioned is that one, we are streamlining front desk operations. We don't have to have a concierge 24 seven.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
I mean, I can definitely imagine that that was an extremely formative experience. And how has that then kind of shaped your view of the industry as you've moved on to build and grow and lead some very large hotels that are really aiming to provide an excellent experience? What have you taken?
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
We are able to get back to the guests immediately because they can have information when and where they want it. But what this is also really doing that I think is important to note is it's diversifying the experience for your customers so that if I am someone who would prefer to look at the tours available to me from my bed, I can.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
And if I'm someone that wants to go and talk to someone and have someone recommend to me what it is that I need, I can go downstairs and do that too. If the concierge is open, you know, I might have to wait. But at the end of the day, it means that depending on our preferences for how we experience something, we can.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
And I think that's just such a great advancement in how we're servicing customers.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
Are there any examples that really stand out to you as efficiencies that have come from technology that you were just kind of blown away by?
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
What are the insights or lessons maybe that have really stood out to you as you've moved on through your career?
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
I mean, thinking about a cashless casino is kind of blowing my mind. I don't know a ton about the space, but just in thinking of what I know about casinos, it's very, very different. So that's amazing. Well, we're coming up on time here and I want to make sure that we talk a little bit about one of my favorite topics, which is employee engagement and how you really engage your team.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
Because I know you know this because we've talked about it is The engagement of our team directly impacts the engagement of the customer. And so I'd love to hear a little bit about how you approach that. How do you approach leading your team and really making them feel like they have a home with you?
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
Acknowledging people for specific things like that. Again, it's almost the same thing that we were talking about and like really listening to the customer and understanding their unique needs, that specificity in human to human interaction, right? goes so, so far and being specific with your team members about here's something that you did really well. Thank you for that.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
It makes people feel so good. And what about like, we talked about training. We've talked about how you really empower the team, but how do you create a culture that really supports itself too, because you can't speak to every single person. And so there needs to be kind of an environment that people operate in that continues to reinforce the stage that you're setting. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
There's always going to be things that happen. But if we recover well, then that's where loyalty sprouts from.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
I love that you do that together, that you're reading those books together because it creates a focus on improvement in community. And I think that it can, I've done this as well with my leaders on teams that I've led, where we've all read books together and kind of like implemented it together and then said, I tried this thing and maybe it didn't work so well. Like, how have you done it?
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
And we can kind of, you know, help each other learn and grow and it builds trust amongst your team as well. So thank you for sharing all those titles and Unreasonable Hospitality is the one that stands out to me the most just because I hear about it all the time. It's next on my list. Actually, like literally it's next on my list. Because it applies to every industry.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
Again, what I kicked the show off with is that hospitality is something that every client-facing leader should be looking to to learn from. Because it's, in my opinion, really like the essence of customer experience is what we experience when we go to a restaurant or a hotel or... a show somewhere that's really in that luxury space. It can show us and teach us so much.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
So thank you for those suggestions. All right. We are in the final moments of this episode and we have our lightning round questions. So first and foremost, I would love to hear about an experience that you've recently had with a brand or a company or a venue that left you impressed. Tell us about that experience and why it was amazing.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
You were the third person to mention the Conrad on the show. So we're going to have to have someone come on. Maybe you can help us find that person mentioned often as an example, as a response to this question. All right. My last question for you, Shannon, is what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear?
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
So such wise words. Thank you so much, Shannon. It has been so wonderful to have you on the show. And I hopefully will get to come and visit you in Vegas sometime. I've never been.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
Something I think about a lot when it comes to hospitality is how do you provide that one-on-one personal experience at scale? I know you've mentioned to me previously that you've managed some properties that are over 4,000 rooms. but you still aim to create that individualized experience. How do you do that?
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
Mm hmm. So it's really thinking about how do we take all of the activities that are going to be the same for every person and automate that so that we can create more space and time to address the individualized needs in what you are serving.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
Mm-hmm. Is there any other advice that you would give to customer experience leaders who are really trying to balance personalized experiences with a scaled operation?
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
It's all about the team. It's about the team of people who are interacting with that customer day in and day out. And you mentioned something that I think is just so vitally important for client facing leaders is really empowering your team to know what decisions they can make.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
And so can you give us some examples of how your team is set up so that they know I can do this and take an opportunity to make a customer's day with kind of some predetermined boundaries?
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, I'm excited to have Shannon McCallum on the show. She is the vice president of hotel operations with Resorts World Las Vegas, as well as the global board director with the Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals Association.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
Delays impact the trust of the customer. When something takes a long time, when the person that you're speaking to, when the person the customer is speaking to is not able to make a decision, where they have to go back to someone else, you start to degrade the customer's trust minute by minute.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
And I think it's just so vital that organizations, again, in any industry, think about the cost of that long-term decrease in trust. Because like you said, we want to close something up as quickly as possible so that that guest can then move on to having a good experience. We need to do that quickly. And I know I've taken the Ritz-Carlton customer service training in the past.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
As an example, they have a $2,000 amount for each employee. And of course, that's a lot of money and not every business can do that. But just that fact of you are able to spend this money to make sure that something gets resolved, you are empowered to resolve it. enabling employees to do that builds trust and drives revenue in the long run.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
And we just have to think beyond that initial dollar amount and really look at the total lifetime value of a customer.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
I'm curious to know, how do you run your meetings with your team? Just in terms of having them, one, be comfortable to make decisions and then also learn from their peers. I'm just, I can tell that you're such an impactful leader and I'm just curious to know what are some of your methods, tips, tricks so that our listeners can learn from you?
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
We get it all here. Hospitality is one of the best industries to learn from when it comes to customer experience, no matter the industry that you are in.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
Shannon has over 30 years of experience studying and transforming customer experience within the hospitality industry and has been named the top 25 hospitality executives to watch in 2025 by the International Hospitality Institute. Personally, I believe that hospitality is one of the best industries to learn from when it comes to customer experience, no matter the industry that you are in.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
It's like continuous learning and enabling our teams to continuously learn and gain insights and inspiration around what they can be doing differently. What's working, what's not working, what are people liking, what are people not liking? It's so, so, so valuable to gather those insights from all the different channels and bring them back so that that client facing team can really learn more.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
from what has happened. Because it is so often that we help a customer or a client and we don't actually know what their outcome was or what they're feeling about it was later. And that feedback, if we can help our teams get that feedback, it will really support them in their growth. And speaking of growth, I wanted to talk about training.
Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
I know you mentioned you have a very robust training program for your team. Tell us a little bit about what are the key components of that training program?
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And I will say that this is an extra special episode for me because after the devastating California wildfires that have impacted many of my close friends and neighbors, as well as just barely missing my home, we are going to talk about really what's happening in California and how Bright Harbor is supporting so many people in need. Gavin, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I want to dive into that deeper in one moment, but before we do... how, when it comes to that, not coddling, but showing empathy, it's this very fine line.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And I'm curious to know if you can share some, even like statements that you train your team on saying, I know you had shared with me earlier, like, how do you open the conversation in a way that shows that empathy, but also is like, we're getting down to business.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I always say that it's not enough to just listen to someone. They need to get that you're listening. People need to know and be assured that, yes, I understood what you said and I'm repeating it back to you. And that creates this connection where they feel like, ah, okay, you're not just sitting here zoning out. You actually are here with me in this experience.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And it's something that I think it's such an easy thing to do But it's something that so few teams in my experience are really taught to do. And so it's that's such a great lesson. And I will also say that in my experience of living in L.A. throughout these fires and through that period of time, I spoke to quite a number of different customer service teams for years.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
different things because I thought I was losing my home and I had to, you know, deal with, navigate different things. And I'm not going to name any names, but there were some companies who did this really well. And there were other companies who did it so poorly. And I understand they're not trained like your team is to deal with these types of situations, but they know where I live.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
They know my address. They know what I'm calling about. And I think it's so important for any team to who has that information when there is a disaster happening, that we just change our tone and show that empathy, ask a different question instead of, how are you doing today? How are you hanging in there? It's such a small shift, but it has a massive impact on how that customer is going to feel.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
So I want to just introduce to everyone what Bright Harbor is all about, and then we can talk about some of the things that you're currently working on. So can you tell us the story behind Bright Harbor's inception?
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
So I want to talk a little bit about where technology comes into play, because as we bring more and more AI into the picture, I have this question of where does empathy play a role and how do we find the efficiencies of AI? if like increasing the level of empathy, because I actually think we have quite a deficit of empathy when it comes to customer experience as a whole.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And so how are you approaching that?
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I want to get into how you support people through this insanely crazy time.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I think it's so important to have empathy in our tech stack. Like thinking about how can we... what is it that the customer or the client really needs and how can we use technology to help to get them that when they need it? So for example, in not sending you through a big IVR menu where you have to wait on hold and do all these things like,
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
getting back to someone immediately, I actually think is the kindest thing that you can do instead of having them sit there and wait. And so how can we leverage AI to really support people and their needs? And I think that what that requires is for our teams to think about what is the customer experiencing at this moment?
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
If a customer just had a total loss and now they're sitting, pressing all these buttons and then waiting on hold for a really long time, is that the most empathetic experience? How can we speed that up? How can we reallocate our resources so that our team can be there right away and we can have AI take care of some of the low-hanging fruit that don't require it? human to be involved.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And so, yeah, I completely agree with you. It's definitely a hybrid approach. And where I think things get dicey is when we're talking about AI as a replacement. Even if it can, should it replace the human touch and a human voice? I say no, but I'm sure that there are some people who disagree with me.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Oh my God, I so, I totally agree with this. When I was at Too Good To Go, which is a global surplus food marketplace who works with everything from big, large enterprise grocery stores to small mom and pop shops, we found that texting kind of obviously was the best way to communicate with our independent customers because they're small business owners. They're running around their stores.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
They're going out to like pick up more supplies. they're not on their email. And when we, it was kind of this like major aha moment of, oh, if we text them, one, they respond to us. And two, they are more engaged with us. And three, they are happier talking to us because we're meeting them where they're at. And I've seen some amazing use cases of SMS, especially recently.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I think I'm not exactly sure the mechanics of this, but I'm sure AI is helping to enable us to have better texting capabilities. So I don't know if you know much about what's happening in the back end. If so, I'd love to hear about it.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Just to add on to that as well, because I totally agree. The tech abilities, I mean, there's also restrictions for how many text messages you can send per day and regulations around text messaging that makes it a little bit confusing. And I find a lot of the legacy CX tools, you have to get creative with your tech stack. But the juice is well worth the squeeze.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And something else I will say that I found in working with international teams is the WhatsApp. hack because using WhatsApp, I mean, for Americans, we don't use it as much, but pretty much everywhere else in the world, your customers are on WhatsApp. And so using that as well is really amazing. But again, another channel to deal with that I totally...
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I totally agree with you on the channel front. So a couple last questions for you. I wanted to talk a little bit about analytics and what are some of the metrics that you think are really important to be tracking, especially as we start implementing more AI into our systems?
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
What are you looking at to make sure that your team is not only responding in a timely manner, but also creating a great experience?
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And Joel is actually a good friend of mine. And so I've seen him build Bright Harbor and kind of what was inspiring him to create this company, which is... In this moment, I am really, really seeing the incredible impacts that Bright Harbor has. And so in this moment, obviously with everything that's happened in Los Angeles of late, there are so many people who are in need.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And that efficiency piece, I just want to double click on that because it is... When we think about customer effort, and I don't know if that's a metric that you're measuring at this stage in the game, but customer effort, how much effort does a customer need to put into taking the action that we want them to take? The same thing applies for the employees.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
If we make it really difficult for our team to take the action that they need to do to do their work well, we are not helping them. And I think it's a really important measure to be looking at because If that is really challenging for our team to take an action, it's going to be challenging for the customer to get the support they need. And so it all intersects.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And so I love that efficiency metric, internal efficiency.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And as you just explained, the complexity of the aftermath is crazy. Quite insane. And so I'm curious to know, because you've worked in the insurance industry for a long time, can you tell us a little bit about why it's so difficult for... people who have dealt with a natural disaster affecting their home?
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Completely. It is the ultimate NPS hack. So that's so awesome. Thanks for sharing that. I could not agree more. All right, Gavin, we have two last lightning round questions for you. The first is I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a brand that left you impressed. Tell us about that experience.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Why is it so difficult for them to actually get the insurance support that they've been paying into?
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I love it. Now you're inspiring me. I want to figure this out. I'm making it a mission to have an episode about it. We're getting someone from Apple on the show. We're going to do it. We're going to do it. And then my last question for you is what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear?
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
We can't innovate if we're following the herd. Yeah. We need to rethink how things are done. And I think that that is one of the beautiful challenges that AI is actually bringing to the table is it's forcing us to rethink how we're doing things. But then there's also companies like Bright Harbor, not necessarily AI, but that's exactly what you guys are doing.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And I'm so grateful for all of the work that you're doing to support not only Los Angeles, but all the areas around in the United States and soon the world that are struggling with these types of disasters. So really appreciate all the work you're doing and thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing these wonderful insights.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
It's not enough to just listen to someone. They need to get that you're listening.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And I think that's why I, part of the reason why I wanted to have you on the show is that the experience of going, like the loss itself is a terrible experience. I have many people close to me who are going through this right now, but then the actual rebuilding experience is like, also awful.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And that is such a moment where we can be helping people to navigate such a complex situation, which is exactly what Bright Harbor is here to do. And so I'd love to learn a little bit about how are you supporting clients through that? Can you give us a bit more of a picture in terms of what is the experience you are trying to create for those who are working with you?
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
When there is a disaster happening that we just change our tone and show that empathy, ask a different question. How are you hanging in there? It's such a small shift, but it has a massive impact how that customer is going to feel. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And I can imagine, I mean, even myself having been so near to the virus happening and there being this huge rebuilding effort, it's very difficult for people to see what is the next month going to look like? What is the next year going to look like? People have children in schools and there's so many complexities of life just compound.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
And so giving people an element of control when so often they don't have that control where they're just dealing with, you know, request after request, I can really understand that that's giving people peace of mind. And so you're really reshaping this awful experience into something that's much more manageable.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I want to get into kind of how you support people through this insanely crazy time. But before I do, I want to just ask, how are people in L.A. doing? You are speaking to people in such a tender moment. And I want to check in. How have you been feeling, the Los Angeles folks handling all of this?
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
Today, we are speaking to Gavin Blair, the COO of Bright Harbor, where we will be exploring how Gavin and his team are rebuilding trust in moments of total loss, quite literally. After helping Lemonade reinvent their customer experience, Gavin's now tackling one of the most emotionally charged challenges in business, guiding families through wildfires, floods, and climate disasters.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
I share that sentiment and I haven't been talking to as many people as you and your team have by any means, but I've been so incredibly blown away at how LA is showing up. And like you said, it's really this community effort to support one another. And it's moments like these, I think, where we need to come together and we really see the beauty of humanity despite immense devastation.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
So I'm happy to hear that. So let's talk a little bit about how you create your experience and really usher people through this difficult time. And I know you and I had chatted about how
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
At Lemonade, as you were building up the CX team, you really learned how to speak to people when they are going through these difficult moments and how your frontline team, your agents can really communicate in a way that empathizes with where someone is at.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
So can you tell us a little bit about how you are training your team, both in how you have in the past, as well as at Bright Harbor, to really... communicate when you have a customer or a client who is going through a very difficult time. I think this is an important lesson for everyone in CX, just to put that out there before I let Gavin answer, because...
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
We've all had those really difficult customers. And in this type of moment, it's like the extreme because of what the customer is going through. So tell us a little bit about how you approach it, Gavin.
Experts of Experience
LA Fires Exposed a Harsh Customer Service Truth
We're going to dig into how frontline teams are showing up for customers in these dire situations, how AI is enhancing human connection, and why most disaster recovery operations fail the empathy test.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
Today, we have a little bit of a different episode for you. I'm going to be passing it off to a wonderful new host, Lacey Peace, who has been in the podcast world for quite some time.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
Are they leading from a place of anxiety and fear? Or are they leading from a place of calm power? If you're having challenges with your customer experience, the first and best place to look at is yourself.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
And so today we are going to introduce you to our new host, Lacey Pease. who has been in the podcast world for quite some time, helping to create over 35 shows and reach over 45 million listeners as a part of the Mission.org team. And for those of you who may not know what Mission is, it is a media network that produces incredible podcasts. Go and take a look at the other shows that they produce.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
Completely. The nature of AI is we will not know. We do not know the answer. No one knows the answer. There is no right answer. The only thing we can do is to be curious. We have to be curious. And I think a curiosity mindset as we enter into this AI world is essential because there's no right answer. So let's ask questions.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
When you're thinking about improving your customer experience, it's important to also look at your leadership and look at the space that you're creating for your team and your customers. And I mention this all the time, but the thing that I think is just so incredible about the topic of customer experience is that we're thinking about the humans doing business with humans.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
And so like come back to that human element of what it is that we're focused on. Of course, the metrics matter. The money matters. The KPIs matter. But how are the humans experiencing whatever it is you're doing?
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
I am so happy to finally be the one receiving this. But then as I was like, I know she's going to ask me this question. And I started thinking about it. And the first thing that came to mind is most experiences that I'm impressed by are so easy that I forget about them, which is actually kind of the goal is like for a brand to just be like smooth and like not in my face and annoying.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
Like that is a goal. But there is always appreciation for that. the surprise moments, the wow moments. And I recently had one when I was staying at a hotel in West Hollywood in LA. And it was at this hotel called Petite Hermitage, which is a, it's a one of a kind hotel. It's not a chain. It's just this one. And it is a creative expression. It is a pure piece of art.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
It's been around for like 15 years and still Friday nights. It's like a lineup out the door. Everyone wants to be there. It's the coolest place in town. And the thing about this hotel that just I'm inspired by time and time again is that the property itself is not new and fancy. It's kind of like kitschy in its design, but it's expensive and it is classy.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
And the thing that stands out to me is the way you feel when you walk in that space. You feel like I am in another world. I am in some authentic expression of someone's crazy mind and I am I am here for it. You know, they have like little, I don't know, like weird statues and they have like cookies inside of a container that says Quaaludes on it.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
Yeah, exactly. But the last thing I will say about this experience that it's not only the hotel's amazing and it's like really wonderfully done, but it was my birthday. And my partner tells them when we're checking in that it was Lauren's birthday. And she's like, I'm going to send something to your room in a moment. Super nice. You know, a lot of hotels would do such a thing.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
Lacey is the perfect person to... take the stage with this show because she has been in deep with how brands can truly position themselves authentically to their audience, which as we all know, is a key element to a great customer experience. And Lacey also manages the relationships between Mission and all of their brands. So she knows the deal. Lacey, it is so great to have you.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
And here comes a bottle of nice champagne and some dessert. Amazing. But the thing that stood out was a handwritten note. And it was not a happy birthday, Lauren, written on a card. It was like a six sentence letter of appreciation written by hand. And I was like looking at it under the light. I'm like, is this actually handwritten? Or did they like have AI write this and like print it out?
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
You know, they have companies that do that. No, someone like sat down and wrote this letter to me. And it was the sweetest thing. I told all my friends, I posted about it on LinkedIn. It is the human connection that stands out.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
And that's where AI is amazing at taking off the work that is not that important so that we can focus on the important thing, that human connection, the way that humans feel. And I felt so special and so well taken care of.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
They also know that no one's probably checking to make sure that they wrote six full sentences. You know, right.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
I could have just written like, you know, throw in the towel, like, happy birthday, Lauren. So glad you're here.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
Exactly. Exactly. They took the time. And that shows exactly, as you said, that their experience is an empowered experience and they want to create excellence for their guests because they probably feel well taken care of themselves.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
Definitely check it out. It's incredible. Well, I guess this is the end of our show, so I will close it out for us. And I just want everyone who's listening, I know that there are some of you who listen to this episode or this podcast all the time. And to those of you who have, I just want to say a massive, massive thank you for your support and
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
Thank you for reaching out and sharing your questions and your encouragement. It's been, like I said, the greatest pleasure of my life to host this show. And you are all in wonderful hands with Lacey here. And the future is so incredibly bright for the topic and the conversation of customer experience. So thank you, Lacey, for taking over. And I can't wait to keep listening.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
Oh, I love it so much. And I think that just as I'm hearing that, you know, when we started the show, customer experience, like it was kind of a question mark of like, is this a show that people are going to be interested in? Like it's a passion for myself and you and the team at Salesforce. Like we all are obsessed with the topic and we know that people are obsessed with the
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
at least for me, I see talked about that often. And I really wanted to make this show something that puts the concept of customer experience on a stage because it's so important and it's at the root of every business, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, our customer experience is ultimately where we build trust with a customer and we build lifetime value with a customer.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
It all comes down to the experience. And so I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to really build talk about this at length, as you just shared, and really see all the different perspectives and pieces of insights and lessons that these incredible leaders we've had on the show have learned. Thank you again for the opportunity. And I'm so excited for what is to come next.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
So Lacey, what types of guests can the audience expect moving forward? Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. This will be my last episode as the host of Experts of Experience, and I'm going to be passing it off to a wonderful new host, which I'm going to introduce to you in just a moment.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
Lacey, I would love to give the audience an opportunity to get to know you a little better. And so my question for you is what first drew you to the concept of customer experience and acknowledging that customer experience involves the brand, it involves conversations. What is interesting to you?
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
I think that your story probably resonates with a lot of people where none of us got into this being like, I want to work in customer experience. It's like, what is that thing? What is that? It's like it just is. And now customer experience can be seen as like a customer service team or a lot of people might acknowledge it as that. But really, it's it just goes so much deeper as you just shared.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
It's something that is like it's an essence almost more than it is a department. At least that's how I see it. It's it's more of a mindset approach.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
What topics are you excited to explore as the host of Experts of Experience?
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
We are just at the tip of the iceberg, like the very tip, tip, tip of the iceberg when it comes to AI. Like you said, there's such a great use case for AI and customer experience. It's so obvious that we can have AI answering customer inquiries, answering tickets, even doing voice, which is all very true.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
And before I do, I just wanted to say this show has been an incredible, incredible gift to me in enabling me to dive deep into the world of customer experience, far deeper than I have ever gone before, and speaking to some incredible guests.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
But if we look at it from the perspective of the employee's experience, if we're enabling employees to spend their time on higher value activities, it's actually really beneficial to their experience.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
And if we look at it through that lens, then we can start looking at, okay, how do we enable our employees to spend more time on the most important things, which means reducing time on the things that are just cumbersome. How can we empower our employees to get the right answers from our knowledge base quickly, to answer emails faster?
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
We can look at it from an efficiency standpoint, but I prefer to look at it from a employee experience standpoint.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
I'm sure you will. So, Lacey, what types of guests can the audience expect moving forward?
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
It's one of the things that I think has been the most illuminating in hosting this show or just in the past 75 episodes that we've done. Most successful companies are the ones that see customer experience as a mindset that everyone in the organization sees.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
to really illuminate not only what is customer experience in terms of a department or a function, but really how can leaders live and breathe a customer experience mindset that truly creates meaningful connection with their customers, no matter the type of business. It has been truly my greatest pleasure to host this show, and I am so excited for it to take its next phase.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
should hold from the sales team and the customer success team to the finance team, to the HR team, everybody, if everyone adopts that mindset, the customer experience will be better and the business will be more successful. I don't just want people to see, Oh, this is a customer experience show. And I should, which should only be listened to by customer experience people. I
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
We are all in customer experience. If you are in business, you are in customer experience. So this applies to everyone.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
I've learned so much. This has been truly a masterclass in business. Like I just said, it's not just customer experience and being able to really hear from top leaders, people who are at the top of their career, their peak of their career, who have seen so much sharing information with us. And it's also come at such an interesting time because of AI.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
And even when we started this show a year and a half ago, AI was nowhere near where it is now in April 2025. And still, we are at the tip of the iceberg. But what I will say is that AI is radically changing customer experience. That might seem like an obvious statement, but it is wild what is happening. As a consumer, we can be excited about Because we will not need to be on hold any longer.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
Like I would say in a year or two, we're not going to be dialing and being like, please hold. You have to wait 45 minutes that or like two hours like that. We are done. We are done with that. We can now have the phone answered immediately. It will be an AI. It will speak to us as a human and we will be able to get a large portion of our problems solved in that way. So like that is exciting.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
From a customer experience standpoint that goes beyond that, brands have now the ability to understand us so much better. The insights that they can glean from any interaction that we're having with them can now be processed. We can take that unstructured data and process it. And brands can get a lot smarter about what is actually in our best interest.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
And it is something that a brand needs to choose to do. It is something a company needs to choose to do, but the opportunity is there. And I'm just so excited about that aspect of it because as someone who's worked in customer experience my whole career, I am constantly spending a ridiculous amount of time, like before a year starts,
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
I would spend so much time gathering insights to then go to the product team to say, Hey, customers care about this. Like we don't need to do that anymore. Now it's, it is data that is processed and we can, we can share it effectively. The other thing that we've talked about this quite a bit, but my second lesson would be that customer experience is not a department. It is a mindset.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
And I just want to hammer that home so much. Like, I don't even think we should talk about customer experience as purely customer service anymore. It is doing it a disservice. Customer experience is a mindset that goes through the entire business. And it's really the leader's job to the CEO, the COO, really any leader, but those leaders especially have to see this fact.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
My third lesson that I've taken from the show, and we've mentioned it already here, is that to have a great customer experience, we need to have a great employee experience. We know, and there's been a few episodes where we've gone specifically into this topic. The episode with Joey Coleman was one, also with Tiffany Bova, two thought leaders who
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
in the space who are deeply connected to the connection between the employee experience and the customer experience. And what we know is that if employees feel safe, if employees feel supported, if employees feel engaged in their work on a day-to-day basis, they will pass that on to the customer. Customer engagement is very, very, very difficult to create without employee engagement.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
And to take it one step further in how do you create a great employee experience, it really starts at the top. It starts with the leadership team believing that we need to create a great experience for our employees in order to create a great experience for our customers and to have a thriving business as a result.
Experts of Experience
Customer Experience Is Changing. Meet The Host Who’s Leading The Conversation.
And so it's actually what has inspired me to dedicate myself fully to executive coaching and team facilitation, which is something I've been doing for many years, but it's now taking the forefront of my work because anytime I've gone into a company to consult with them about their customer experience, it ends up coming back to the leader. And how is that leader leading their team?
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
So something I always think about with hospitals, and I'm so glad that we have you on the show because this question, anytime I walk into a medical setting, I always wonder, how do you approach balancing the patient experience with the operational complexity of running a hospital?
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
Really in and others who are really out. And so I think when we tie it back to that loyalty conversation of how do you create lifetime patient loyalty, the physician loyalty is critical to that.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
Tell me a little bit more about the patient award.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
I can imagine. I mean, I love this concept because it creates so much transparency. I always find it really difficult to find a good doctor. Personally, I live in California, so I unfortunately can't come to Northwell, but I always find it to be difficult in really finding a great physician. And when I do see that there is ratings, it's like, oh, okay, I can understand.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
Or people can leave comments. I can start to understand a little bit more of who that physician is and are they the right fit for me? Because at the end of the day, it's such a personal experience.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
And just creating that transparency, I think for anyone who's listening in any business, as much as we can create transparency of how do other people experience this experience, it also forces us to level up It forces the providers to really create an experience where five stars can be given.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
And on that note, I want to talk about the employees beyond the physicians, because it is not just the physician that creates the experience. It's the front desk employees, it's the nurses. How do you go about training and empowering those teams to really provide the level of experience that you want to create within Northwell?
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
So what I'm hearing is that there's not only the training, like the onboarding and the training, but then this ongoing support and having people on the ground too. And tell me a little bit more about that. Is it someone who's kind of guiding and saying, oh, you didn't do that right. This is how you can do it better. Or what does that really look like in terms of that ongoing support?
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
And what about the initial training? How did you go about developing that? I'm just curious to know, how do you even approach this type of training program? And I'm not sure if you were a part of that or not, but I'm just curious to know, how are you going about really ensuring that all of the employees have a solid foundation of knowledge and how they should be providing to the patients?
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
I have done the Ritz-Carlton customer service training or one of them. I'm not sure how many programs they offer, but I just having had that little peek into the level of focus and awareness and attention on the customer experience, I can imagine that that. I mean, it's so needed in the healthcare space because I often feel like it's the polar opposite of that.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
And I'm just beholden to whatever I have to do in order to get support or care from a physician. And I love that so much. And it just really piques my interest about... what the experience must be like at Northwell. What would you say is a key differentiator in terms of your patient experience compared to some of the other competitors out there in the world?
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
These three points that you just made are so incredibly important for any business. Finding the yes, every moment matters, and really finding what matters most to that person. How can we provide value to them? Because it's different. It depends on each and every one of us.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
And I think that finding the yes, I just want to highlight that one specifically because I'm sure we've all been, we've all called And, you know, I think insurance companies or there's some companies that tend to be a little harder to find that yes with where you call and they say, no, we can't help you with that. There's nothing worse than hearing someone say yes. We can't help you with that.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
Sorry, try someone else or do something else. And having a team activated around working together to get the person to the result that they need so that we don't have to say no to them is just such an important factor. And I'm sure it's very difficult to do in a healthcare setting as well. I can imagine there are a lot of things that you can't always do.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
So how do you guide the team to really do that?
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
I'd love to dive into that because I know the physician experience can be really challenging. I mean, if we think about what these doctors are facing day in and day out in some of the most high stress and difficult situations that I think anyone can be in. How do you go about really supporting and empowering those physicians to provide that great experience while they're handling everything else?
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
Yeah, I'm so glad that you brought the technology piece into it because it is so often I think we take for granted the impact that the technology we have really contributes to the ability for our teams to provide a great experience and having the technology.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
internal tooling to help us get the right answers, to really personalize the experience for the patient enables anyone, any, it doesn't matter what business you're in, any client facing person to really show up in the face of that customer, in this case, patient, and provide them with a great experience because they have that in many ways, like army of resources behind them.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
And I'm curious to know a little bit more about how you are implementing Salesforce and how it is helping you to really enable your teams and your providers to provide that personalized experience. If you can add a little more color, I'm so curious to know.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
Which can be really difficult to glue it all together. I've been a part of companies where we grew through M&A and- It is very difficult, so I understand.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
Amazing. But if I'm hearing you correctly, I want to just make sure I understand. In this, because of your new system with Salesforce, you are able to better refer a patient to the right doctor for them, their needs, their location, all of that.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
So I can imagine the level of care and also personalization will just be able to be exponentially better.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
Mm-hmm, completely. Well, this has been so fascinating, Alyssa. We are coming up to a close. So I'm gonna ask you a couple of our lightning round questions that we ask all of our guests. And the first is, Just think about your own personal experiences as a consumer out there in the world.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a brand or a company that really left you impressed. Tell us about that experience and why it was amazing.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
I definitely want my physician to be able to have that type of place. You know, I can just imagine that that creates such a better working environment, such a better mood and ability to really show up for the patient. So I'm feeling like I need to move back to New York now. And my last question for you, Alyssa, is what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear?
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
I love that advice. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and educating us in terms of the future of the patient experience, especially in the hospital system. So really appreciate your time and all of your insights. Thanks so much.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
Yes. Really?
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
There's nothing worse than hearing someone say, we can't help you with that. And having a team activated around working together to get the person to the result that they need so that we don't have to say no to them is just such an important factor. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
Yeah. I think that's something most people don't really understand is that Every doctor, every essentially minute that they send with the doctor, there's two minutes of admin. Can you tell us a little bit more of what is that admin? And then I want to understand a bit more of how technology is helping you to mitigate that.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
Yeah. How have technological advances changed the way that your providers are providing to patients? I mean, you said you've been at Northwell or at least in this position for seven years. And I'd love to understand how this is changing even in the time that you've been really working with providers.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
I can only imagine that that's a massive project and also something that is so needed. I think the qualm many people have with the healthcare industry is it seems to be very outdated and antiquated in the way that it's working.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
Today, I am joined by Alyssa Scully, the Assistant Vice President of Operations at Northwell Health, to chat about New York's largest health care provider and how they are setting new standards for patient success through data-driven metrics, personalized care programs, and prioritizing the physician experience. They have a vast, vast network of hospitals and outpatient facilities.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
And as someone who has spent my career in tech, I'm just constantly like, one, as a patient, often frustrated, but two, I think about these doctors who are also working in these areas kind of slower systems. And so I think it's interesting that you're going through that digital transformation because it is necessary.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
And also the way that technology is changing so quickly, how do you keep up with that? Like, that's also a thing I think about is how do you make sure that your, your systems are matching what is actually possible from a technological standpoint?
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
What are some of the components or even what's your favorite part of that new wellness program?
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
Mm hmm. Well, congratulations on that award. It definitely shows that you guys have been spending efforts in the right places. I'm curious to know, what is the impact? I mean, it sounds I can definitely think of, you know, why it is impactful to make sure that there is a strong approach to ensuring that providers are mentally well to be able to deliver on this job.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
And so we're going to really understand how Northwell Health is working to create the best possible experience for both their physicians and their patients. Alessa, wonderful to have you on the show.
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
But what have you seen in terms of the impact of really prioritizing the well-being of your physicians?
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
And I can imagine from the patient perspective, having a physician that's really connected to their why in being a physician and getting into medicine in the first place, it is not an easy job. You have to be driven by purpose, I would imagine. And the patient experience, I'm just kind of thinking and playing this out, the patient experience in
Experts of Experience
Doctor Visits Can Be… Good Experiences? Northwell Health Talks Healthcare Without Burnout
being provided to by a doctor that is really connected to that, why is really passionate about the work they do versus a physician that is maybe bogged down by a lot of processes and doesn't really feel like their wellbeing is taken care of. It just seems like it's night and day. And I'm speaking from my own personal experiences of working with physicians or being a patient of a physician who's
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
I think the interesting thing about this, so thank you for breaking this out because I think that I'm like, I wrote it down. I'm like, I'm gonna use this for all my decisions now I mean, I love a good two by two. It just helps you to visualize what is happening here and really get all your thoughts down on paper.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
I mean, this is why I'm a total facilitation nerd, because if we are guided through having a conversation, especially a difficult one, like what we are talking about here, we can actually get to a decision in a much more meaningful way and faster way.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
But I think the interesting thing about this is when we talk about the unintended negative consequences and those like big risks, those big looming risks that are, I mean, the way that AI is transforming our world today, even a year ago, we could not have seen some of the things that are happening for better and for worse. Right. And there are some very large risks at play with just AI period.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And we know we're still going down this path globally together. We're all on this train and there's just going to be some, you know, bad guys that jump on the train with us. And it's part of it. And of course we are responsible in mitigating those risks. But how can organizations, the question I'm having is how can organizations really make a decision of go or no go?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Like, how do we know if the risk is so big that we should abandon ship? And I want to just like play this out. And I know there's no black and white answer. This is the nature of AI is it's gray area. And we have to use our instincts, our human instincts to decide if something is worthwhile or not. And I'd love your thoughts on that because I think about this all the time.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Many people say you have to talk to Keri. She's such an incredible voice in the space. And so I'm so thrilled to finally have you on the show. And in going through your work and reading what you have done, there's two key things that I really want to dive into today. One is...
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Like, how do we make the decision? And there's no... There's no right answer. It's just how do we make that?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
How human-centered experience design has always been key to customer experience when we think about how are we building for our customer. And then this piece of AI, because you're teaching a really interesting course on how to design for AI with the customer in mind that we want to dive into.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Yeah. I think you're also highlighting there's both an urgency in thinking about it and there is a need to. tread lightly just in terms of like a lot of people want to just dive into the AI world headfirst. I see a lot of organizations saying, okay, great. We can turn AI on today and it's going to answer all of our tickets tomorrow. And like, yeah, it can. It totally can. But should it?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Just because you can doesn't mean you should. And we need to take a minute to think about what could happen here. What could go wrong? And how can we... train the AI to not do that? How can we test it? How can we build trust in this new employee that we essentially just brought on the team to do all these things?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And I actually think it's helpful to think about AI in terms of a human that is very multi-dimensional, especially as we get into agentic AI. And we literally have AI working
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
employees on our team doing things because this is what's happening we have ai employees on our teams doing things and we need to train that employee and provide that employee with guardrails of you can do this and you cannot do this and like we have all learned through our leadership journeys i am sure there are things that you didn't expect that someone would do But they did anyways.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
So we'll start with the basics of customer experience and all the incredible work that you've done in this space. And then we're going to dive into our second favorite topic on the show, which is AI. So first and foremost, this is kind of a broad and big question, but I would love to hear it from you. How do you define customer experience?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Okay, let's dive into this because I totally agree with you. Organizations are not understanding the level of the lift. So where do we start? What advice would you give to an organization who's like, we want to use AI? Yeah. Where do we need to start?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And when you say work on it, is it like different tooling, different roles of people managing the data? Yeah. Let's go a layer deeper. How can people start working on it?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
I'm going to speak to something that I actually don't know that much about, but... something that I just think is, it's just a message that I, the drum I am drumming these days is I really encourage organizations to go and speak to their current providers.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Like I think of my clients who are on, you know, Tableau or Salesforce data cloud or any of these look or whatever it is that they're using, go to the organization, go to the provider that you currently have and ask them, how can I be more AI ready? I bet you that there is information there. And and support or new tools or access to what you need to at least start this.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Because I always wanna break things down to like, what's the next step? And I know I have some clients who are completely overwhelmed by the concept of re-imagining how they approach data. It's like, we have been stuffing stuff in a closet for a long time and now we have to go and open that door and clean it up. That is, I don't wanna do it. But we have to start. It is essential that you start.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And so one tip I would give to people is just look at what new technology has come out from your current provider as a starting point and then see if that's fitting. Also have conversations on your team about what data do we need to feed our AI? What AI do we want to start bringing in? And what does that AI need in order to operate effectively?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Let's just start breaking down this really big, ugly problem into something that is more actionable because avoiding it is not going to help you. We have to start taking little bites at the very least out of this apple.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
That is the gospel. And I think so many people are like, oh, customer experience equals customer service. No, it goes so much deeper than that. I see your eyes rolling. And so my second question is, what do businesses typically get wrong? as they approach customer experience?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
I'm glad you brought up human-centered design because I know that's a lot of what your course is about and how... the approach to human-centered design is changing with AI. And so one piece of that, as you just shared, is having data be a part of it. How else do we need to be approaching human-centered design differently in the age of AI?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Oh, that's so exciting. And you're just getting my wheels turning. There's so much for us to learn. When it comes to looking towards our AI future, there is so much opportunity. There is so much risk. There's so many things to consider. And the way that we think through approaching it is not, we cannot just think through it in the same way that we've thought through other technology approaches.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
implementations that we've done. It really requires a mindset shift. And I'm so excited that you are bringing that research to the table to teach people how to really go through that thought process. So I'm very excited to learn more about that and take your course. I'm in the next cohort for sure.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
An unlearning and a learning experience. I think we're all going to go through that very, very rapidly here. Well, Keri, thank you so much for coming on the show. How can people find out more about you?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Amazing. Well, thank you again. And we'll definitely be in touch.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
That is very important advice. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Mm-hmm. Something that you're saying that I really wanna underscore is that our perceptions do not always equal reality and often they do not. We can look at the data and we can infer insights or we can infer assumptions about our customer, which get us part of the way.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
We literally have AI employees on our team doing things.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
But until we actually speak to someone, until we can hear their voice, we can understand the context, we can listen to their body language with our eyes and our ears, you know, until we do that, we can't fully understand where our customer is at. And I think that that is such an important thing.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
There's companies that relentlessly speak to the customer and companies that think it's just a nice add-on. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's a big mistake.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Why is it important that businesses do this? What's the opportunity at stake?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Yeah, I mean, it comes down to lifetime value. And I think that's such a difficult metric sometimes to think about because it doesn't line up with our quarterly metrics.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
If we are making an investment in the trust that we have, that our customer has in us, in the relationship that we have with our customer, in listening to our customer today, the benefits are not necessarily gonna come in the next three months. This is investing in the long-term relationship with our customer. And in the long run, the dividends certainly pay out. Logically, we understand that.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
But when we get too focused on hitting our quarterly or even our monthly metrics, we lose the ability to really see how what we do today is going to impact this long-term relationship with our customer for a long time into the future.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
How do you guide organizations to think about the long term relationship with their customer and really like shift their focus to build for that?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. What happens when companies stop treating customer experience as a checkbox and start treating it as their competitive advantage? In the world of customer experience, Carrie Bodine Stans is one of the most influential voices shaping how businesses connect to their customers.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
In the world of customer experience, Carrie Bodine Stanz is one of the most influential voices shaping how businesses connect to their customers.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
What's inspiring you right now as you think about this topic?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And I could not agree more because I think that our kind of going into this topic of short-term thinking and long-term thinking, I think our short-term nature has caused a lot of the issues that we are seeing today. If we talk about the environment, that's a whole rabbit hole. We're not going to go down right now, but I just have to say one thing.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
It's another podcast because I could talk about it forever, but it's, it is what has caused us to get into this place where we're saying, I want this now. And so I'm just going to go and get it instead of thinking about the consequences and the repercussions of it.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And as we think about our customer journey and the decisions that we make today and how it's going to impact our customer and our business in the longterm, um, it's really to everyone's benefit to put our heads up and look further into the distance and really think through what can we do today that's going to impact tomorrow for better or for worse.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
She's the co-author of Outside In, a book that has helped many, many businesses reshape how they think about customer experience. She's the founder of Bodine & Co., where she works with Fortune 500 brands and beyond to design more human and customer-centric experiences.
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And so I would love to talk about how you're helping companies and educating people on this topic as we look at AI, because it is radically shifting how we are going to operate in the very near future today. And we are just scratching the surface. So how are you thinking about that? And how are you guiding people to the future?
Experts of Experience
The Big AI Lie & Why You Still Don’t Feel Ready
And today, we're going to be diving into the business opportunity of effective CX strategies, the frameworks to design those strategies, and why designing with AI in mind is fundamentally different in how we approach customer experience. Keri, so great to have you on the show. I am thrilled to be here, Lauren. Thanks so much. Your name has come up many times as I've done this show.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
How do you think that when it really comes to like defining the value of customer success and communicating the value of customer success cross-functionally, do you have any thoughts on that? Because I also think a lot of companies struggle to really share that throughout the organization.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
Well, I met you at the Women of Customer Success Summit in New York City last fall, which was a fabulous event for anyone who is interested, any women in customer success. It was great. And you gave this amazing presentation about the future of customer success. So I had to have you on the show. And I'd love to just start off by hearing your take. Broad question.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
Another piece of this, I'd love your thoughts on it, is it's one, having the data structure to be able to understand what value are we giving to our customers so that we can report on it.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
But I also think that there's a piece of training for client facing teams around how to listen for and provide value. that I see companies missing or teams missing sometimes where the CSMs or whoever is facing the client is just taking what the client says at face value and not digging deeper into what is it that they really care about?
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
Like, what are they really doing over there on the client side so that I can speak to that and not only show value in terms of the number, because of course the number really matters. Like that is the name of the game. But there's also like other crumbles of value that you can be reflecting back. Do you think about this or have any thoughts on that?
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
and take time away away from some of that and those insightful conversations yeah i mean i think that there's two ways and this kind of is a segue into our ai conversation and how ai is changing customer success actually i'm going to ask you some questions about that and then i'll share my opinion later but how would you say that customer success is changing in the face of ai and what are you what are some of the trends that you're seeing
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
But what trends are really shaping customer success today? If you can tell us, what are the handful of things that you're really seeing in how customer success is shifting and changing today? today.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
From an employee standpoint, too, I think employees are expecting that their organizations are going to invest in tooling to enable them to do their jobs better and faster and more efficiently. And there's so many things that can now be utilized to help us take the low hanging fruits of our day to day and automate them or just like remove that clunkiness from our workflows.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
And I think this is where my opinion comes in. I see organizations taking, this is a bit of a generalization, but one of two approaches. One is let's reduce the amount of work that the team needs to do in order to provide a great experience to the customer so that they can spend more time working.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
with the customer, more time thinking about the customer, more time strategizing about the customer and really understanding their needs so we can provide that value. That's one camp. And then another is let's use technology so that the team can take on more clients. We can have less people and everything will just be cheaper. And I'm not saying that one is better than the other.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
I think it depends on the business. It depends on your customer. It depends on your customer's needs. But I will always come back to build your business for your customer's needs and structure your team, structure your technology so that your team is able to provide to the customer what the customer really needs to be successful. So there's my soapbox moment. Love it.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
How else are you seeing, like, what are the opportunities that you're seeing when it comes to AI in customer success? And if you're kind of looking down the line, I mean, usually I would ask this question, what's happening in five years? But like six months is going to be a totally different game. One year is going to be a totally different game.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
So in the somewhat near future, what are you seeing and how is AI going to transform the function of customer success?
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
Do you have an example for that last one? is it something we've seen yet? Like, can you, can you share anything that you've seen that would really fall into that bucket?
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
You're reminding me of Salesforce when they launched their success plans. It was last year, I believe. And we had Jim Roth, the SVP of customer success. Apologies, Jim, if that is your wrong title. I know it's changed, but he came on to tell us about that. And I think it's such a when we think about really providing value. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
It's saying, here are the key metrics that we know you care about when it comes to this product. And we're going to reflect that back to you and make it really easy for you to be able to make decisions and really easy for you to know how well you are utilizing this investment. And now we have something that's a shared understanding that we can share. speak on and work to improve.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
And it's just providing so much more transparency and ease as well. Like going back to one of the other examples that you spoke about is just like the ease. How can we make sure that that journey is more useful for the customer, which is so incredibly important for when it comes to creating a great customer experience. Talk about that all the time on the show.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
I'm curious to know though, what about for people in customer success today? Everyone's thinking about how is our role going to change? What skills do I need? What advice would you give to people in customer success in terms of where to upskill so that they can really be at the front of this AI wave?
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
The human element, those human relationships, I think is something I think about a lot. My hope is that AI relieves us of a lot of technical things, especially as we get further on in our careers and we are leading more relationships, whether it's internally or externally.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
And how can we really excel in those human to human moments that we have, which will become fewer and far between, I think, maybe. How can we really make sure that those moments are excellent and really create a human to human experience that's memorable? I think it's just such an important factor to think about. So I love that you brought that up.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
I'm curious to know, where do you feel like that is really important for folks to You said that as people transition in their career and grow... those three buckets will change. Where do you think that's really important for people?
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
It's a passion point for me. So that's why I dug into it. I want to talk about our last key topic here about the cross-functional element of customer success and how customer success is not just a function, but also a mindset and but kind of sprouting from the CS org. How are you seeing that change?
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
And what advice would you give to customer success professionals around really bridging the gaps throughout their company?
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
I feel like the companies that do this really well, where there is a clear understanding of how customer value is being provided, each of the phases, what needs to happen at each of the phases of the business or each of the departments in order to for that value to be seen and experienced by the customer. Those are the companies that are really providing exceptional products and services.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
And personally, as I look under the hood of different companies, when there's very strict silos and saying, no, that's customer success's job, or like, we don't need to do that because customer success will do it later. That's where things really start to break down and it just creates all this friction internally. That being said, we spoke about this a little bit earlier.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
The silos, I personally believe that the silos within a company are important for creating clarity for a team. They know this is my role. And what's happening right now is customer success is kind of starting to break those silos where it says this is all of our job. It's not just mine. It's not just customer success.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
It's all of our jobs to make sure that we're getting the right information from the customer at different periods and sharing it with each other and providing that feedback. How are you helping organizations through that?
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
We have to be really brave in putting the pressure on our company internally to make sure collectively that we are proving business value for our customers.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
Oh my God. I could not agree more. It's always like onboarding. Everyone's on top of the customer and there's like all this redundant work happening. And then later down the line, they're like, oh, they're, oh yeah, those guys, you know, that customer forgot about that. And really I, this is why I love journey mapping as a tool so much.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
even just in the most simple form of aligning on what does the customer need from us at all these phases and who's giving that to them? Who needs to be involved in this? And let's just take a step back, look at it all, look at where we've come to because the nature of businesses, they're always growing and evolving and we're problem solving and creating solutions for different things.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
But that creates a lot of organizational debt and just weight that we need to then redistribute
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
Oh my gosh, I completely agree. And really understanding where do we not have pipes across our teams? Like in this case, if there's no feedback loop between the client-facing teams and the product team, what a missed opportunity. And now with AI, we can make that so much easier. as well and take unstructured data and make it into structured data and all that great stuff.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
But yeah, I'm big fan, big fan of the journey map. Well, Mary Beth, we are coming to a close here. We have just a couple of last minutes. I have two last questions for you. We're going to rapid fire it. What is a recent experience that you had with a brand or a company that left you impressed?
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
but they're doing it really well. I think it's a great, great use case. Thank you for bringing that up. And then my last question for you is what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear?
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
And this needs to come top down too, just to add onto this, is we have to account for the time it takes for us to work together. It is not just checking off all these tasks. There's always going to be a need for us to cross-functionally collaborate, to have workshops, to take time to have conversations and really understand the needs of our internal clients, which is our different departments.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
So I... Could not agree with you more on that one. Mary Beth, it's been wonderful having you on the show. Thank you so much for coming and sharing all this wisdom with us. It is clearly a very exciting time for customer success. And I am sure everyone listening has learned a lot from you. So thank you so much.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
Yeah. I mean, all of those rings so true to me as a customer success leader myself and someone who has just been obsessed in studying how customer success is changing. Because even three years ago when I was in a customer success leadership role before I started my consulting business,
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
All of those things were ringing true, but it's only been exacerbated as AI has really transformed how we're approaching business and also just the state of the economy and things. And I want to dive into all of these things. And the first thing I would love to talk about is really the identity crisis that you mentioned, because
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
I look at so many different organizations who use the word customer success to describe a different role, a different set of responsibilities. And I'm always wondering like, Why is it so difficult for customer success to have like a standard function, a standard approach? What would you say to that?
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
So what I'm hearing you say is there needs to be a direct revenue focused activity that customer success owns. Makes total sense. But I feel like it's a little easier said than done because I see a lot of organizations say that. And then they say, and you're going to do support and you're going to help the sales team and you're going to do this and you're going to do that.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
And the customer success team is not really set up for success in achieving the revenue potential that they can drive. And I think it really, in my opinion, comes down to the customer success leader to say no. If you want me to achieve a positive NRR, if you want me to go after this number, if you want me to drive revenue, I'm not customer support anymore.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. In today's business landscape, customer success isn't just evolving. It's revolutionizing how companies grow and thrive. And there are few people that understand this better than Mary Beth D'Souza.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
I'm not onboarding or I'm not whatever it is that doesn't make sense that isn't actually helping to drive that number. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that because I think so many CS leaders struggle with this so greatly.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
This is why I love journey mapping as a tool so much. Aligning on what does the customer need from us at all these phases and who's giving that to them?
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
And that brings me perfectly to my next question around the ROI of customer success. Because as you also mentioned, budgets have been cut. Customer success has been on the chopping block. I think it's also part of the reason why customer success becomes kind of this hodgepodge of all these different roles because leaders are saying, well, customer success doesn't drive that much value.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
So we're going to just like reduce headcount over here and give it to customer success. And it gets messy. Right. But for organizations that are struggling to prove the ROI of customer success, what are the most valuable pieces of data, the most important insights that they should be bringing to the table to really show that?
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
Mary Beth is a principal at Deloitte Consulting, where she leads their customer success organization and talent offering. With her journey from customer success leadership at Salesforce to being a strategic leader at Deloitte, she is pioneering a new approach and showing why customer success is truly the heartbeat of modern business.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
The thing about this that's so difficult is that it takes a lot of work to figure out these numbers and to figure out the lines to these numbers. I mean, the last one that you just shared,
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
That means getting the company to share with you, getting your client to share with you, here's the business impact that we've seen on our side, which I think a lot of CS leaders and CSMs feel hesitant to ask about, or they feel like there's not time that their clients are willing to give to get into that.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
And my take on it is we have to be looking at every client from the outset that this is a business partnership and that we need X information in order to ensure that we're servicing you in the best possible way for your business. But it is... It is, I think one, harder to get later on in the relationship, but it's not impossible.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
And it is such an important factor to understand, are we driving the impact that we said we're going to drive or that we know we can drive or that we want to be driving? And it's also going out on a limb because if we're not driving that impact, that might be a churn risk.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
But I think we have to be really brave in going after it and also putting the pressure on our company internally to make sure collectively that we are proving business value for our customers.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
So today we are going to talk about the state of customer success in 2025, how AI is revolutionizing client relationships, and how customer success is no longer just a team, but an approach. Mary Beth, so great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for having me.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
I mean, at the end of the day, value is what it's all about. We need to be able to show value. And a key piece of that is understanding what are the challenges that our clients are facing, asking questions, listening to the need behind the need for what they're really dealing with. And at the end of the day, we know it all comes down to money.
Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
We know revenue is the number one thing that every business is focused on. And so... really listening to understand how can we help you to achieve your goals and then reflect back to you how we are doing that. And if we can do that, we are probably in a good spot and can then prove the ROI of customer success to our leadership teams.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
You're getting my wheels turning now just as we're talking about this. And I think that that's one of the beauties and also one of the difficulties of this new AI generation that we are just on the cusp of is really being able to imagine what is possible.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
And that's something that we like to do on this show is to help share those examples of what people are doing so that we can start thinking about it. But I want to talk a little bit about how can we, well, actually, how do you in particular help to guide your customers to start thinking about one, what is possible, but then also what boundaries do we need to put in place?
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
So today I am so excited to talk about our favorite topic, AI and customer experience, because pretty much every organization, I think it's safe to say, is looking to benefit from generative AI in their business. And there's a paradox to this, which is there are great efficiencies to be had, but there is a risk of failure. impacting the customer experience negatively if we don't do it correctly.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
Because there's always this balance of, okay, well, we could do that, but just because we can doesn't mean we should. And how do you approach that?
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
Number one rule, don't be creepy.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
Oh, I love that you brought up trust. It's one of my favorite topics because in customer experience, it's this like, it's like the gold that we can't always see or measure. Because if we have trust, like you said, the customer is much more willing to share information that we can then use to help improve their experience. They're more likely to come back, to be retained, to tell their friends.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
When we have a trusting relationship, everything runs smoother and faster and more efficiently and just better. And I think AI is one of these areas. There's definitely a generational component to it. Some of the older generations are immediately going to be less trusting where the younger generations are like, here, have it. Everyone knows it. So whatever.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
But there is an important role that a company plays, especially when we think about customer data, about how do we build that trust through these interactions? And I think that a... Generative AI in customer service environments, especially, there is a lot to gain and a lot to lose.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
Because if it doesn't go well, if it's creepy, we're really impacting that relationship and that trust that we have with that customer. But if it's serving them and using their information in a way that actually makes their experience better, we can actually build trust. So what do you think about that? And where do you see companies doing it really well versus making mistakes?
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
And so I'm curious to know your opinions and thoughts around what are some of the common misconceptions around generative AI and how we're using it in the customer experience space. And then we'll go on from there, but we'll start there.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
I haven't actually, but I get it completely. Because when I moved to the East Coast, I was like, wow, people love this grocery store so much.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
Mm-hmm. It's an inside out job. It has to start on the inside. You can't build customer trust and have the benefits of customer trust if your employees don't deeply trust the organization that they're working for and then are committed to making that organization successful because it's something that fulfills them. It's not just a job. And that's what I'm hearing you say.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
And as you describe these companies, It's really something that it starts on the inside.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
I think that this is one of the best use cases for AI that is not getting enough airtime, in my opinion, is really how we can use AI to improve the lives of our employees because that then gets transferred to the customer. And I think...
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
I'm sure most people can agree with me here in that one of the things you dislike about your job the most is when you are stuck in the weeds between tools, trying to find information and copy and paste things. I remember once I almost quit a job because one of my jobs as a senior manager in a company
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
was to copy and paste 200 lines of expenses from one spreadsheet into another spreadsheet because it was critical information that could not be seen by anyone else. So I had to copy and paste it line by line. It was one of the most infuriating things I've ever done in my life.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
Yeah. I think that technology, we've kind of gotten ourselves into a hole. The more tech we've built, the better life has become, but also the worse it has become. And I kind of feel like AI is here to, generative AI is here to save the day and relieve us of this mess that we've created for ourselves.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
So it's such an important thing for organizations to think about as we implement AI is not just how do we grow the business with this, but also how do we empower our people to do their jobs in a way that they can not only be better at, but also more efficient and just enjoy their work more.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
How can organizations set those boundaries? What is the process of getting there? Because I think it's not always easy. And I'm curious to know if you have any examples of methods or good results that you can talk about.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
If we were to simplify this, if I take everything that you just shared and just simplify it into what is the difference of when something should go to AI versus when something should be with a human. And what I'm hearing is that if there is an emotional component to this interaction, humans should be the ones to interact with the customer.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
If there's something that I might be afraid of, or there's something that is not black and white, And I need to have a conversation about it. Even if AI could have the conversation, it doesn't mean it should have the conversation. If the fraud conversation or the fraud notice, I think is such a great example, because if that happens, I'm going to start freaking out and I need someone to talk to.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
An AI bot isn't going to cut it.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
What about the experimentation component of this? Because I think as everyone is exploring new AI, I guess, what's the mindset we should be approaching it with?
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
Exactly, exactly. It's like, okay, all my European friends are in this chat.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
No, you're like hitting on something that is so important to me. So go for it. You can have all the time you want.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
This kind of brings us back to what we were initially talking about and just thinking of the possibility and getting outside of the box. First off, I just want to reiterate what you're saying is we need to ask our customer what they want. Because so often we're like, well, it's easier for us to send this type of message through this channel.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
And it's easier for us to send that type of message through this other channel. But what does the customer want? And we really need to ground in what... what the customer's experience is throughout the journey in order for it to be a great experience that builds trust and has them wanting to come back.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
But I think you're pushing it a level further, which is, do they even need to talk to us about this? Do we even have to have a conversation? Or is this something that we can just automate and take off their plate completely? And I think that that's this next frontier of what AI is opening up for us is we're
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
oh, we don't have to wait until they tell us their fridge is broken because we've built a system into the fridge where the fridge will tell us if it's broken. And so now life is easier and they trust us more because we're thinking about the customer's best interest all the way through.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
It's exciting. Well, I think that's a great place for us to wrap up the conversation. And Michael, we have two questions that we ask all of our guests. And the first is, I'd love to hear about an experience that you recently had with a brand that left you impressed. What was it?
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
I would love to sit with Dot and see what her dashboard looks like.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
Crazy. Do you think she knew who you are? No.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
I know that this guy is going to be on a customer experience podcast. And he's going to say my name.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
Yeah, exactly. Dot, if you're listening, please reach out. We'd love to talk to you. We love you. So my last question for you, Michael, is what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear?
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
Yeah, and leaders need to understand this. Well, they have to drive it.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
Cue the standing ovation. That was exactly what I wanted to hear. Thank you so much, Michael. It's such, such, such important advice, both for leaders to own that and also for employees. If you don't feel like you are supported in your role and really a part of a great customer experience, you also have a choice to go somewhere else.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's been such a pleasure to have you. I cannot wait for this episode to be out in the world. And I hope you have a beautiful day.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
It's so exciting. I mean, even a few years ago as I was leading a customer service team and we're like using four tools in order to get a picture of the customer, it felt crazy, but there wasn't really another option. And all of a sudden it feels like we can have it all in one place. And it's really, really cool the way that Salesforce has been approaching it with the agents and
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
And really, this agentic AI, you've been leaning hard into agentic AI. And there's so much to come that I'm so, so, so excited about. And we're going to get to all the good use cases and all this good stuff. But I'm curious to know, you get to see a lot of different implementations. And we don't need to name names, but where have you seen organizations maybe do it wrong?
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
What are some of the common pitfalls that you're seeing people fall into as they're implementing AI? Yeah. that we need to be aware of and kind of move away from.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, I am joined by Michael Maoz, who is the Senior Vice President of Innovation Strategy at Salesforce, where he's focused on developing innovative strategies, as the name describes, that enhance customer experiences and, of course, drive business growth.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
I keep hearing this statement, garbage in, garbage out, when it comes to data and AI. And I really like what you're saying about clean water. We need to have clean resources in this form, data, to make sure that whatever system we're putting in place is working correctly. It's like the foundational element of how we can use AI and data. And then make great experiences from it.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
I kind of want to go there right now, even though I was planning on talking about it a little bit later, but you brought it up a couple of times. And I think we just need to talk about how... Can companies, one, get the right data and know that they have the right data?
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
Because there's so much data now, it's hard to know exactly what do we do with all this information and funnel it into the right places that we can create the right outputs from our AI.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
So prior to joining Salesforce, Michael had a pivotal role in founding Gartner's CRM practice and spent two decades there focused on helping organizations around the globe improve their customer support and service. And Michael has extensive experience in sales.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
So it's thinking through, of all the information that we have in all these different places, what is ready to be used versus what do we need to go through a project of cleaning and sorting?
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
That's essentially kind of what organizations need to be thinking about. For example, we have all these emails that have already been sent that the customer has already received. We can use that information as a good starting point for how we're going to respond to future customers because we're just going to be saying essentially the same things in most cases.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
And then we have information from different places. What I find organizations struggle with, some of them that I work with as a consultant myself, is even thinking that different data sources could be used.
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
Like, I think sometimes we're still kind of looking at things in the way that we've always done it before, where then there's opportunities in different data sources and information that maybe we hadn't thought to tap into before. Is that something that you run into? And maybe you have some examples of pieces of information that aren't maybe obvious to use, but have been beneficial?
Experts of Experience
This One Thing Will Generate 400% More Customer Data
cutting edge AI implementation that we're going to dive into today and really understand how organizations can build their teams and their processes and their data effectively in order to really drive customer experiences of the future forward. Michael, so wonderful to have you on the show.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Awesome. So I'm so excited to dive into this because when it comes to AI, everyone's favorite topic these days, customer service is really one of the best use cases for this new technology. And Salesforce is really at the forefront of creating what I would think of as our AI future when it comes to customer service. So from your viewpoint, what
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So I want to talk a little bit about some examples of customers that you have or just like ways that this technology has been used and what kinds of tasks. We talked about a couple of them, but I'm just curious to know a bit more of the breadth of the different types of things that these AI agents can do to help us.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
I love it. I want to talk about data. You mentioned data, which is a big piece of this and being able to really process lots of unstructured data. I mean, any customer experience leader I have ever spoken to has always said we are sitting on a goldmine of information about our customers. But the challenge is then actually processing it.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
What does customer service look like as we look forward in time? And how is AI impacting that?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
into insights that we can utilize to be more proactive, to understand our customers better. How does service cloud in general help organizations to really process this data to make use of it?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
I think that this is one of the places that most companies struggle with a lot is actually bringing all of the information into one place so that AI can make the right decisions or guide you in the right way considering all factors. because it's not only what are the customers saying to you, right? It's what are, or what are they saying to you via your customer service channel?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Might also be what they're saying out there in the world on social media or in focus groups or in industry research. All of these things, we need to be taking it into consideration. And I think that that's one of the areas where, as I talk to people just in my own work about implementing AI, is we really need to look at the number one thing is what information are you training that AI on?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And does it have all the information? And it's one of the biggest challenges is getting all of that information into one place where it can actually be processed. And I'm so glad that Salesforce obviously is thinking about that because that's what you guys do. But it's really a holistic approach to being able to provide the best service.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Garbage in, garbage out. I hear this all the time as I'm talking to folks about how do you get the right data to really power your AI? What advice do you have for leaders as they look to implement AI in their customer service when it comes to really getting the right data? Any tips or tricks for our listeners?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Yeah. Taking it one step at a time, I think is, I hear a lot of companies say like, okay, we're going to overhaul everything. Like all of our tickets are going to into AI tomorrow. And I think that's a dangerous approach personally.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
because we do need to find that right human to AI balance. And I'm curious to know if you have any tips there around how to really navigate that in what areas is the human involved versus what areas does the AI kind of run on its own? How do you approach that with your clients?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Yeah. The greenfield area, let's circle back to that for a second because there is, once we find these efficiencies with AI, once we're able to reduce the workload of each employee to actually service the customer and we move away from the, let's deflect as many tickets as possible, we can actually handle them. Now there's this space for us to create great experiences.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And it's just the area that I'm the most excited about because now we can actually look towards what do we do with this extra time? How do we go above and beyond? How do we, like you had said earlier, proactively look at if something's not working or if someone complains,
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
or they don't have a good experience, we can go and proactively say, here's an offer, here's something towards your next experience. And I think that that is, there's just so many opportunities. And I'm curious to know what you've seen out there in the market in terms of what companies are doing to really make the most out of this extra time that they have and provide a great experience in turn.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So it's not only reducing the costs, because we always look at customer service as a cost center. So reducing that time and effort, but also providing proactive service that actually creates a better experience overall.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
The building of a relationship. of really being able to say, I actually have a little time. I can ask this customer questions. I can better understand what it is they need so that I can show them value based on what it is that they're looking for. It opens up a whole new opportunity for what customer experience means, which is really exciting.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
I want to spend a little bit of time here talking about the future and just your opinions. You've been in this space for a long time. You've helped to build some of the greatest tech companies in the world. And I'm curious to know what you think as we look towards 2025, what emerging trends or technological shifts can we expect?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Great. On the flip side, I know you're an optimist. I am too. But is there anything that we need to watch out for?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
I think that employee training piece is something, I know a lot of people are worried. They're worried about their jobs in the face of AI because AI can do things that they're doing currently. And it kind of goes back to the values piece as well that you mentioned. for companies to think about what is the experience that we want to provide to our customer?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
What I find often is that what companies want to be providing is not what they're providing. And I think if we stay focused on creating the experience that we really envision for our customers and we allow our employees to grow into providing that with the help of AI, everyone is going to be happier.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So this is again, my, my optimist view, but I really see there's such, there's a open green pasture for great customer experiences that so many companies have not been able to step into. And we can now do that. And so it's not about having less people working for us per se. It's about having more people doing the right things that create the right experience that really
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
increases our relationship and the value that we can provide our customers, which just makes everything better, in my opinion.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Well, I have two last questions for you. These are questions that we ask all of our guests. The first is, I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a brand that left you impressed. What was that experience?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Mm-hmm. On the DMV thing, them caring about your time goes so far. Feeling like a company cares about the amount of time that you have to spend. And I think the reason why people get frustrated with the DMV or the IRS or whatever is because of the time that it takes. And we're like, why do I have to give so much time in order to do this thing that you're making me do?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So if it becomes easier, and I think every company can learn from this, that if we help our customers to be efficient, we are also efficient at the same time. But if we help our customers be more efficient, they will love us for it.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And it's one of those things that's just, it's easier said than done, but I think it's just a really great area to focus on is how can we think about the effort our customers have to put in to do the thing that we need them to do.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Nailed it. Yeah. Last question for you. What is one piece of advice that you think every customer experience leader should hear?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Mm-hmm. be where they are. This is such a key thing. And different customers have different preferences too. Exactly.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Well, Kishan, it's been amazing having you on the show. Thank you for coming on and sharing all of your knowledge with us. The future is very clearly bright for the world of customer experience. And thanks so much for helping us to make it happen.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Awesome. Well, I hope you have a wonderful day and we'll talk to you soon.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Yeah. And just easier for the customer. I think this was the thing that stood out to me so much when I was at Dreamforce and seeing the agent force demos was that you can pick up the phone and you can call the a company and you get someone, an AI agent answering the phone immediately, you don't have to say press one, press five, press no, no, no, no, no, to get all the way through.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
You're just speaking to someone normally in natural language and getting your problem solved quickly and efficiently. And I was, honestly, I thought that this type of voice AI customer service was something that was like, I don't know, three, five years down the road, but It's here. It's here right now. And it's really amazing. It's really amazing.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So I want to talk about AgentForce today quite a bit, but could you just tell everyone, for those who maybe aren't familiar with what AgentForce is, can you give everyone a bit of a download on what Salesforce has brought to the world?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, I'm thrilled to have Kishan Shaitan, the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Salesforce Service Cloud, to discuss how Salesforce is transforming customer service with AI.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
I attended Dreamforce this year, and I have to say it is wild what Salesforce is bringing to the table when it comes to customer service and AI. The innovation is absolutely out of this world, and we're going to dive into all of that today.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
I think everyone listening has probably had an experience with a chatbot where you're asking a question and it's misinterpreting you and then you ask it again and it misinterprets you again. And then you're just like, human, human, send me to a human, right?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And it is so painful. And so that is why I really think that, you know, it is amazing for anyone in the customer experience space to know that it is possible for us to transcend that customer pain using AI to help us create experiences that feel human to human, but also... And I want to talk about that human to human connection because there's a lot of pros and cons here.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
In some cases, it's there are not enough people on the team to answer the phone immediately. An AI agent will always answer the phone immediately. but then sometimes the AI agent can't handle everything that a human can and we need to do the handoff.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And so tell me a little bit about the role that humans play when it comes to an AI agent and how we really create that relationship that provides an exceptional service.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
But before I do, I think it's important to quickly highlight exactly who it is we're speaking to, because Kishan has spent his career innovating at some of the world's largest tech companies. Previous to Salesforce, he was at Microsoft, HP, and SAP, just to name a few. So we are truly speaking to an expert today on Experts of Experience, and let's dive into it. Kishan, how are you?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Mm-hmm. I think you mentioned a really great point that the AI agent is not only for the customer, but also for the employee. And we talk a lot on this show about the importance of the employee experience and if we can make it easier for if the customer does need to speak to a human.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
How can we enable that human within our company to provide a great service easily, efficiently, so that they can spend more attention on the customer that they're speaking to rather than going into multiple tools or systems to find the right information and propose the right thing.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Like it really is, the AI agent is really acting as an advocate or as an assistant for the human employees to make sure that they're able to do their job better, faster, easier, all that great stuff.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Completely. I had an experience the other day where I called my health care insurance company and I've called them many times in the past. And it's usually this thing I put off forever because it's painful. Like it's waiting on hold to wait on hold to wait on hold to get handed to someone else to wait on hold again. And it's just like I just it's hours of my day and I hate it.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And I called them and it was an AI agent that answered the phone, asked me a bunch of questions. I had a conversation with this AI agent. She handed me to a human and immediately a human picks up. answers my questions, says like, he knew everything. I actually need to see if they're a Salesforce customer. Cause it was like, it was amazing.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
I was like, I actually want to call my insurance company because I, this was so easy. It was so seamless. And I just, I value that company more now rather than them being a pain for me. It was actually a, wow, they are amazing. acting in my best interest. They are considering my time and they're giving me the attention that I need, doing the exact thing for me that I'm asking them for.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And I can walk away with a smile on my face. And I think that that's the big difference when we talk about like a great customer experience versus a lacking customer experience is how quickly are we able to give the customer an answer? How easily are we able to guide them to get the help or the support that they need?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And it's, I think it's just one of the biggest pain points in the customer experience space is really the lacking technology that we've had. And like you said, losing all of your employees every year because probably there's pain for them in doing their job. We can solve that with this new technology. And it's just, the future is so bright. I'm so excited.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Perfect. We'll spill the tea for everyone here. Yeah. So Steve, you've built many successful products across various industries, social networking, music production, transportation, now health tech. And I'm really curious to know how you think of customer experience as a competitive differentiator for you.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
I wanted to ask you about building and leading teams, especially in the early days where you have people coming from all these different expertise and just in seeing the team you've built with Supco, it's like a world-class team. You've brought exceptional people together, but they also have different opinions.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And how do you create an environment where, like you said, people can test and they can learn and... you know, maybe there's some healthy friction, but you're able to still move forward.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Now I've thought it has been really cool to see the cadence at which you meet this every six weeks onsite team gets together. And then the daily connection of feedback. I mean, you've been building really quickly because of that. And I initially, I'll be totally honest when Nick was like, oh, we meet every day. I'm like, really? Like that feels like kind of a waste of time.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Do you really need to do that? Like, yes, it's early stage. Yes. It's a small number of people, but now you're like, what, 10 people? Yeah. About that. little more than that. That's like, you know, it's a lot of time. It's an expensive meeting.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And especially when resources are tight and I've kind of questioned it, but then I've seen the results of that type of touch point and just the fast iteration that you're able to do as a result. But then how does that scale? Like, what are you going to do now that you're like, what did you do at Splice, for example, just in terms of bringing people together?
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Feedback can be really helpful in showing you what to prioritize. But it's so important not to lose that intuition and that intuitive sense of people don't know they want this. And that might be something that just blows their mind and makes them want this product even more. But they didn't ask for it. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
that in-person time goes so far in building trust and allowing you to actually speed up as a result of it. You know, if people have human connections with their peers, you can ask those questions. You can be vulnerable. I'm not really sure how to do this. Or like I've been rabbit holing. Can you help me get out of the rabbit hole?
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
You know, and if you don't have that connection, which remote work has, I think that's been the biggest hit as a result of remote work is that human to human connection that we have with our peers. So finding the time to just be together, even if it's not about work is so important.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah, completely. I mean, empathy inside and out is what I always say is so important. Inside the organization, we're having empathy for ourselves. And then we can also apply that to our customers, of course, to understand their points of view.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
I mean, I think it's really difficult to do that the bigger you get. But in my opinion, those small groups like creating your little pod where you can open up and there's vulnerability and it's the leader is expressing that and showcasing that, then you can kind of continue it on. But it's really, really difficult to create that level of openness when you're dealing with like 200 people. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. How do you keep that customer connection though? As you grow, how do you make sure that everyone is really staying in the mindset of the customer and staying connected to the customer's needs?
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. I mean, you being the original user, I can imagine gives you a major step up because you are, you were building this for yourself. Like I know with Supco, for example, both you and Nick are those like extreme supplement nerds where you have spreadsheets on spreadsheets of all the supplements you're taking and the nutrients and you really were solving a problem for yourself. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Can you define dog food for us? Because you guys say this all the time and I had to ask what it was the other day.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. Using the product is so, so key. And it's definitely difficult if you're in like a SaaS based business and You can't necessarily use the product, at least as in depth as your customers are. But I've also at times had teams like actually go and be with the customer.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
It's brutal, but it's such important information. Another thing that I did when I was running Customer experience at Too Good To Go, especially when we had like a big backlog of tickets. And I guess AI is like somewhat solving this, but what we did as a result was great. We would do care parties where every single person in the company would...
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
We would have like a two-hour block and we would give them a little rundown of here's how you answer tickets. Here's all the easy tickets that you can answer. And we would essentially have like a race, like who can answer the most tickets in this amount of time. And then we had prizes and we would have like breaks with like fun things that we would do and just like make it exciting because...
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
it can be really draining to do this, like to answer tickets and just the same type of thing over and over and over again. But it does a couple of things. One creates a deep understanding of what the customer is dealing with. And it also creates deep empathy for what the care team is dealing with. And it really just does wonders for anyone out there who's listening to this.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
If you don't have your team answering customer support tickets, I highly recommend that you do. Just getting everyone to... jump on board for a period of time goes so far in really developing that customer and that employee understanding.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And so I'm curious to know how you've kind of then translated that into a business, because it's one thing to say, hey, I have a problem, but it's another thing to go out and actually build the thing.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. You have to make it easy for people to give you feedback. And feedback is absolute gold, as you are saying. If someone is going to take that time, one, there's so much... juice to squeeze out of that message that you can then bring back to your team. And we should make it easy for people to share their thoughts first and foremost.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Does anyone understand this?
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Totally. Well, Well, I think what you're highlighting is something that I really beat a drum on is that customer experience leaders need to focus on being more influential and being more influential means drawing people in. Like you want the rest of the team to be interested in what the customers are saying, not just, oh, we're getting this complaint, fix it. We're getting this complaint, fix it.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
We're getting this complaint, fix it. That's not inspiring. No one wants to act on that. And like you're saying, if you go and speak to a musician and they tell you that feedback, then you're like, I'm inspired to make a change where, you know, we got 50 tickets that asked for this feature, do it. Like it's not inspiring.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And I think that CX leaders are in a difficult position because they are at the intersection of these two parties, but they're also in such a powerful position because they're at the intersection of these two parties, the company itself.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
and their team and the customer and through effective communication we can really inspire change within our organizations and so i think it's something i know for myself that was a kpi at one point i set for myself i'm like i need to be more influential this quarter that is my focus i'm making friends with everybody i am positioning every message that i send as what's in it for them what's in it for the sales team what's in it for marketing what's in it for product to help me fix this issue and
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Little changes went a really, really long way for me getting some projects that I had been complaining about for years to get the green light finally, just by changing how I approached it.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about revenue streams, because I know at Splice, you had a pretty unique approach to what I mean, the business itself, you were enabling people, you are enabling people to purchase royalty free music and use it in their creations.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
But tell us a little bit about how you structured the subscription model and how you did that in the best interest of your customers.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. I mean, and people trust the brand.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And it sounds like you really had the customer's best interest in mind with the ways that you were charging them. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
I mean, I have a bone to pick for a lot of subscription-based models where you get locked into something and you can't leave or else there's a punishment for leaving or pausing. I have been a member of ClassPass for a long time and I think this has changed, but I don't know because I'm no longer a... customer because I couldn't pause. I would have to throw out all my credits in order to pause.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And I was going away for three months and I was like, well, I don't want that. And it took so much for me to, they eventually paused it, but I was like blacklisted. I never actually, like there was no prompt to renew. And I just didn't because I was kind of annoyed. And I'm like, that's such a missed opportunity.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
I honestly don't understand why that isn't the case all the time.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
I think that's a great point to end on. We have two last questions that we ask all of our guests. And the first is, I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a brand that left you impressed. What was it? All right.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Tell me about it. Yes.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I actually have never heard of JSX, so good to know. Look over here. I'm on the website right now.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
That's awesome. All right. And my last question for you is what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear?
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
It's actually interesting, the concept of like, what's the group that you go after? Because I think a lot of businesses struggle with this. It's like, do you go for the super users and the super users only in the beginning? Or Like you said, are you trying to educate people and open it up to a wider net? How do you think about that? And like, how do you make that decision?
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
oh my God, it goes so far when we're having a hard day, which is inevitable that we are all going to go through dark times as we're building businesses, growing businesses, you know, things are not always rosy, but that inspiration, that why, that how are we impacting other people's lives is really what will carry you through. And I know I've leaned on that many, many times myself.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And I think it is really the leader's role to help tell that story. And draw those lines, even when it feels like you're in the depths of it all. I really appreciate that. Well, Steve, thank you so, so much for coming on the show. It's been so awesome to have you. You're my first friend on the pod.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
We really do. So we'll have a great day.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. I mean, you have like splice as an example, you have both the, the experts as well as the people who are just exploring music as a hobby. And that's such a, there must be a fine balance there between, you know, speaking to the experts and then speaking to someone who's just learning. How do you approach that as you're building the business and especially the features that you offer?
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Because that simplicity piece gets really complicated when you're trying to serve multiple different groups.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Today, I am so excited to have my dear friend Steve Martosi on the show. Steve is a serial entrepreneur with many successful businesses under his belt. GroupMe, a group messaging app that was sold to Skype, Blade, the helicopter company you may have heard of, Splice, a royalty-free music platform for creators, and now Supco, a companion app for your supplement routine.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. It's kind of like they can see their journey in front of them.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
It's really interesting, actually, because that's inspiring. Like when you can see what others are doing, you can see that, oh, this person in the case of Splice put out this song and they found that sample on Splice. Like I can do that, too.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And with Supco, I think you guys have really nailed this in the fact of having influencers share their stacks where you can go and find what people that you're looking up to are doing. taking and what they recommend, and then you can go and do the same thing. So even someone like me, who, despite having lived with Nick for almost five years now, I do not know that much about supplements.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
I can go and learn and see, oh, here's what an expert is doing. And I can be like that as well.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. I think it's actually really special though, to not just say, here's the opinion you should have, but here's all these different opinions. So then you can decide your own path within that. Cause that gives people so much agency and, oh, I have choice in what I believe here or how I do things. And I can see the variation of how others are doing the same.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
We are going to dive into creating businesses with the customer in mind and really dive into Steve's genius around business building. And I will say that I have had a front row seat as he's been doing this on his latest venture because his co-founder and CEO of Supco is actually my partner, Nick. So...
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
That's awesome. I want to talk a little bit about the balance between customer feedback and intuition. As you've built businesses, I'm sure you get a lot of feedback from not only users, but teammates, investors. And then there's this like innate intuition that you have as a builder. And I'm curious how you navigate that.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah, I think feedback can be really helpful in showing you what to prioritize, but it's so important not to lose that intuition and that intuitive sense of people don't know they want this. And that might be something that just blows their mind and makes them want this product even more, but they didn't ask for it. And I think we really need to balance that.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And I speak to a lot of leaders and I facilitate workshops where we're prioritizing products. And this is the conversation that always comes up of like, well, what are we intuiting? And then we need to validate it.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
I have definitely gotten to learn a little bit more about Steve's leadership style and how he builds businesses, and today we are going to dive into all of that. Steve, so great to have you on the show.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. Hypothetical feedback is very different than real life experience. And I think hypothetical feedback or, you know, saying what would you want is helpful to see, okay, what's, what's the mindset of the customer? What are they thinking about?
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
But it isn't until you actually show them and, or even if they're a paying customer and they have skin in the game that you're really gonna be able to understand how they're responding to something. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Have there been any examples where you intuited a feature that didn't end up working out?
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Yeah. I mean, it's one of the things that as a customer experience leader, my entire career, I've struggled with deeply because I intuitively know that if we are able to be proactive, if we're able to create a good experience, we will have more customers for longer who are happier and less expensive to support. Yep.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
So today we have Kevin Yalowitz, who truly has a front row seat to all of this as the software and platforms industry lead for Accenture. And while he is working with top organizations, navigating the complexities of AI tech and digital transformation, he is really getting to see the challenges of AI adoption, both inside and outside of organizations. Kevin, so wonderful to have you on the show.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
But it's very difficult to say how expensive that really is because the data just doesn't connect. And I want to dig into this a little bit. How have you seen companies starting to draw those lines using generative AI? What's the opportunity at play here?
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Mm hmm. Thank you for bringing up that example. It's actually such a great case study on customer experience because it's exactly that. Instead of locking them in, instead of forcing someone to pay us money when they're resenting us for the amount of money that they're having to pay, how do we create ease? How do we make it so that they want to be here? I think it's such a great example.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
But I think that this is where AI is really enabling us to build that connection. Of course, there is the connection in terms of the are both teams aligned in what their vision is. Is there like top down alignment on here's the experience we want to create? I think that's always first. But then there is how do these two teams actually play together and how do they see eye to eye?
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
And it is so often that the customer experience team, and I'm sorry to all my CX people, you're kind of annoying sometimes because you're like, here's all the problems. We have all these problems. Why is no one solving the problems? I get it. I feel you so deeply because I've been there. And then the product team is like, ruthless prioritization is essential. And so how do we...
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
see the product team almost as our customer in saying they need to prioritize. So how do we position information so that they see what's in it for them so that they can understand that information and they can make prioritization decisions on it. And this is where AI is really helping us because if you have a great customer support tool, it is automatically tagging trends for you.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
No longer do we need to then say to our team of, you know, whether it's five people or 100 people, oh, we need to tag about this, you know, product bug. Every single time you see one of those tickets, click five times to put the tag on it so that we can see, you know, how many people reached out about this thing.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
So in our prep call, you shared so much incredible information, and we're going to try to cover as much of it as possible.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
AI is helping us, one, track all the inbound, but also see where issues are happening on the product itself so that we can connect those dots and see those trends and tell that story in a more tangible way. And this is where I think AI investment is so, so, so necessary because the investment in understanding the data or collecting the data, that unstructured data...
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
And then processing that data allows us to create collaboration across teams that ultimately makes the customer experience better. So that's something I'm really excited about.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Yes, I totally agree. It's democratized. Like we can all have it. It's, yeah, it's all there.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
First, starting with the consumer. I know that your team has been doing lots of research and studying the impact of consumer behavior and opinions when it comes to AI. And I'd love to just start off by asking, what are some of the most surprising findings that you are seeing?
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
And I think it's really exciting for us consumers. We are all sitting at the cusp. Totally. We are sitting at the cusp of much better experience across the board. And I do think that it is going to really influence our purchasing decisions. How well a company is able to understand your needs, deliver to your needs and do so efficiently.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
All the companies that are not investing in AI and their customer experience to drive that improved customer experience, they're going to be left in the dust. in my opinion. It's table stakes.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
I'm so glad I mean, this is my hypothesis, and I'd love to hear your take on why is this problem so pervasive in organizations as we get bigger? In my opinion, it's easier to create our own boxes and operate in our departments like we have our own thing here. And getting someone else's like goals involved just makes it complicated.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
If we're like trying to then, we're both trying to like build a product really fast and we're trying to make sure that the experience team is like less burdened by complexity. It's just like, it's too many things to focus on. So we just try to focus on one, but that's doing a really big disservice to the company, the customer and the organization or the people in the organization as a whole.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
That's my take, but I'd love to hear yours. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
The question of trust comes to mind. How can we trust that this is real? How do we know that what is being told to us is true?
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
It is so much easier said than done. Why is that?
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
I think it's also... When I see organizations that are really doing this well, it is a top-down obsession. The Amazon example comes up all the time. They had an empty chair. Jeff Bezos always would make sure there's an empty chair in the boardroom and that represents the customer. And it was from him that he enforced that the customer obsession really exists still.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
And I think that that's really where it starts. But then there also needs to be... An approach and a strategy to that customer obsession. It's not just we're all obsessed with the customer. Well, what does the customer think? It is that measurement. It is that ensuring constantly that all the teams are aligned and remembering what we are here to do, especially for the non-client facing teams.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Product is the obvious example. Engineering. I even think of like legal or finance. Like just because you're not speaking to the customer every day does not mean that your actions don't impact them. Everyone's actions impacts the customer at the end of the day. It's just like, that's what we're here to do. So that's what happens. And we have to remember that.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Yes. What is going on inside of an organization is felt by the customer, whether you want to believe it or not. When you are working with a company as a consumer or as a business and things feel complex or complicated or unclear, I guarantee if you look under the hood of that company, you see that same complexity everywhere. underneath. And it seeps out.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
And I think it's just really important for us all to remember, especially leaders, that if that is the experience of your employees inside, it is going to be the experience of your customers outside. And so applying AI internally is a key piece of this customer experience improvement that we're talking about. But as you and I have spoken about, it is Complicated.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
And a lot of companies are struggling. And can you tell me a little bit about what are some of the challenges that organizations are facing as they adopt more AI within their organizations?
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Yeah, exactly. What information do they have access to? It's like, yeah, we have to make these types of decisions. And, and probably more so I haven't rolled this out myself, but more so than a human. I mean, you can't say like, they should know better. Like, No, it's AI, you know, like we have to create really clear guardrails and they are very good at following direction.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
It's like the best intern you could ever imagine. But like, they still just came out of school. Like you still have to give them the sandbox for them to play in, you know?
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
I mean, this is huge transformation, probably a greater level of transformation than most organizations have ever faced.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
As companies are approaching this, which I think this is also, it's also transformation that every company, is it fair to say every company will go through at some point over the next few years in some way, shape or form. How should leaders be thinking about this transformation in terms of readying their team for this change?
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Yeah, yeah. So if I were to summarize what you're saying, top down, it's really creating the rules and the regulations for how are we utilizing agentic AI in workflows? How are we improving efficiency? What's the overarching strategy for how this is getting into our organization? But bottom up, it's like we want to create a playground. We want to enable people to experiment and explore.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
But playgrounds have fences.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Around them. Right. And so how can we empower people to try new things so that we can then propose even greater solutions? Because when we think of, OK, we want to bring AI in to help our sales team be more efficient. OK, great. But there are like. infinite tools that are popping up. Like there is a new tool every day to help sales teams be more efficient. It is wild.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
And the case is for every single team. The level of new tech hitting the market right now is obscene and it is very difficult to parse through it. And so it needs to be an all hands on deck thing. But I think that what I see in my clients as a consultant is Some leaders see this and some leaders are maybe a little intimidated or they're like, I just can't think of it right now.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
I'm going to like, I don't know. We don't have to do it right now. Your team is going to start using AI whether you like it or not. And so... Are you going to put a fence around it? Or is it just going to be like the Wild West and someone's going to get hurt? And I think that we do still need to create some level of guidance around this is what we want you to be experimenting with.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
And this is where it's not something that we want you to do. Because I have seen, I've spoken to leaders who are like, my, you know, an executive is like using an email from ChatGPT that wasn't edited and sending that out. And it's like, well, that's not a good idea. And you wouldn't think that you would have to say something, but maybe you do. You don't know.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
I like, I think it's, we do have to create some boundaries.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
I really appreciate that distinction. I fully agree. I mean, it's something like also on the topic of using the tools you already have, we need to mandate that sometimes. It's like, let's find out what does Salesforce have now that we didn't know six months ago when we did a shift in the system. let's dedicate time and resources to figuring that out.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
How can we be using the tools that we already have better? And then if we need to, are there other tools out there that we trust that are going to bring us long-term gains that we should look at implementing? Those types of decisions cannot be made bottom up. That has to come top down because it is very expensive, both from a tooling and time perspective.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
If you haven't already, look at all the tools you're already paying for and see what new features exist because it is changing constantly. And I have this conversation with clients all the time. I'm like, have you looked into the tool you're already invested in to see if that is going to solve the problem? But I get it.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
It's confusing because we're getting bombarded with all these new shiny things. And I think we also just have to be really careful about how much time we are investing. in AI implementation because it could become a whole big rabbit hole.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Something else that we spoke about previously that I wanted to bring up is the approach that leaders take in implementing agentic AI into workflows. And there is kind of the softer approach and the more firm approach. I'd love for you to share your perspective on that.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
But sometimes we need to mandate the use of it. And I think that this is the case with most technology transformations is people will be resistant to change. And with AI, I feel like there's even more resistance to change because there is this question of, is AI going to take my job?
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
And of course, we don't want to steamroll people into having to do something that they really, really don't want to do, but we need to... really focus on guiding them into this.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
It's not just like, this is a fundamental step change in how people are working and we need to train them and we need to make sure that they're using things in the way that they need to be used in order for us to get the job done.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
It's so fascinating because I find myself do that where I'm like, is this AI? I mean, it's been so fast where I remember... a year ago, seeing my, the first, maybe a year and a half ago, seeing the first AI generated image and being like, oh, whoa, that's crazy. But it also looks like a computer and, but now it doesn't. And it's, you know, how, like, how do we know?
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
It's table stakes. It is. We need to understand it and we need to tie it back to revenue. It always comes back to that. But now it is, I believe, easier than ever to do that based on the data that we're seeing. We just have to think fast. about how can we show the value.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Totally. I have my popcorn and also my keyboard. I'm like in it, in it and watching. My last question for you is, what is one piece of advice every customer experience leader should hear?
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Yeah, completely. Because we're often chasing our OKRs, not our customers' OKRs. And if we put ourselves in our customers' shoes, literally, if you can, go and sit in their seat, walk in their shoes, live their life. then we can really understand what do they care about and bring that back and make that our North Star as well.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Mm-hmm. Kevin, it's been so wonderful having you on the show. Thank you for sharing all this wisdom with us. It has been so insightful and I cannot wait to see what the future, what the near future holds. Totally. It's at our doorstep.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Have a wonderful day.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
And so I, the question of trust comes to mind of how can we trust that this is real if it's being said to be real? Yeah. Or how do we know that what is being told to us is true? And I think that there was also that happening in the background. I'm curious to know what you've seen in your findings. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Completely. I mean, it makes me wonder about what's going to happen to creative industries, for one thing. And the concept of music creation, I think, is one where my mind goes. Where does AI play a role here in helping artists create music? But is music going to be enjoyable if computers are creating it?
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Like, I mean, I guess it will be, but there's something like the magic kind of gets taken out of it if it's not like the genius behind someone who spent their entire life learning how to create this thing. Same with visual artists or even advertisers, you know, the creativity of how do we take these consumer insights and translate them into a like wow moment.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
is I'm kind of like already nostalgic for like the old days a little bit.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
We are so early.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
How is this impacting consumers purchasing decisions?
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Consumers are now going to be looking for the human element. That human touch is going to be the differentiator. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, we are talking about one of the most important shifts happening in customer experience, the impact of AI on both businesses and consumers.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so much low hanging fruit when it comes to post-sale support. Like, and we all know that no one wants to pick up the phone and call a company. I have like always, there's like a list of things when I call this company, call the bank call. And I'm like, I don't want to, because it's going to take half my day and it's going to be frustrating.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
What, what if we flip the script on that? And I think that that's where when we think about like purchasing decisions where every company obviously wants consumers to be purchasing their products and services. If you have a good reputation, because that post-sale experience isn't always something that you're leading with.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
But if you have a good reputation and like my ears always perk up, obviously, if a friend's like, oh, they have the best support. Yeah. you have to go with this company because if you have an issue, they're going to help you. And I'm like, okay, that's kind of like the ultimate gold for me. If I know that the pains of actually getting what I need will be solved, then I want that.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
And we're going to talk about the employee experience in a moment. So I want to put a pin in this one. But I think just to... underscore what you're saying. How can we use AI to enable our humanness to thrive and be less bogged down by... technical complexities. Like in the customer experience world for so long, it has been, how can we be more efficient? Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
How can we answer more tickets, get back to more customers faster? Like just send them a stock response. Just get back to them. Doesn't matter what you say. That is changing now. Consumers are now going to be looking for the human element. That human touch is going to be the differentiator.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
We know that the topic of AI is consuming all of us these days. And while the promises of AI bring efficiency, personalization, engagement, the reality is far more complicated. Companies are struggling with implementation, employees are wary of change, and consumers have mixed feelings about how trustworthy AI-generated content really is.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
And I'm curious when it comes to like marketing and content, how can companies leverage, if you have any thoughts on this, leverage generative AI while still keeping an air of authenticity and trust?
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
And what I think is an important piece of this is that when the problem happens, human emotions start to get involved. 100%. This is my take on it. If you have an angry person, you need a person to connect with them and bring them back down.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
It is very, very difficult for AI to emote and show empathy so that someone's... Literally, if your amygdala is activated and you're like, I am angry, I am in a fight or flight mode... That's when you have to have a human involved. That's when it's a human conversation.
Experts of Experience
Accenture Lead Explains Why Customers Are Leaving non-AI Companies
And if we can avoid those high emotional experiences through frustration or things just not working the way they're supposed to or great disappointment, if we can avoid that altogether, then yes, AI can solve a lot of the problems. And so this is where the call for proactivity is so ultimately clear. Totally. We can just get ahead of it.
Experts of Experience
Stop Guessing! Win Customers Through Data AND Emotion
Great CX starts with a great story, and AgentForce helps you tell it consistently across every channel. AgentForce allows you to build AI agents that empower teams and customers to provide top-notch customer service 24-7, all seamlessly integrated with Salesforce. Discover the future of CX today and visit salesforce.com slash agentforce.
Experts of Experience
Stop Guessing! Win Customers Through Data AND Emotion
Consistency builds trust, and that's what I love about tools like AgentForce. With AgentForce, AI agents can help you deliver consistently excellent service to your customers 24-7. Fully integrated with Salesforce, AgentForce is redefining CX. Salesforce has the experts, resources, and technology to help you start your agent force transformation today.
Experts of Experience
Stop Guessing! Win Customers Through Data AND Emotion
In fact, Salesforce's support experience is now powered by agent force. See the future in action at help.salesforce.com.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Well, congratulations. I'm sure that feels really good to say, oh, okay, there's the recognition for what we've been doing. But I just want to highlight the importance of storytelling here. And it is... The first thing is always having a great product that... works well, that people enjoy, that solves the customer's problems.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Which is huge. And you also shared that the way that you would design these products is really built on the premise of human centered innovation. And so I'd love to talk a little bit about what human centered innovation really means at LG and how that's a differentiator for you.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
But there's also, in what you're describing, this really important piece of telling the story of what this brand means so that people feel connected to it. And I can only imagine that as we become more and more connected to our technology.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
And that our homes become, our technology becomes connected to each other within our homes and all of that, that we want to feel like we are a part of something in that. And it's not just a product that we put on our counter, but it's actually something that's here to help us live a better life.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
And you mentioned this a little bit about Interbrand, but I'm curious to know, how do you measure the effectiveness of these campaigns in really driving the outcomes that you are trying to create?
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
You mentioned something that I am curious to go a little bit deeper on, but it's really sharing customer stories internally. Because I think that talking about those experiences, those pieces of feedback or those, the things that went well or the things that didn't go well internally is so great. What practices do you have on your team to really share those stories, if any practices?
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Yeah. It's that cross-functional understanding that I think goes so far. And it's something that in my experience is It feels like a nice to have and we're like, oh, it takes time to have these conversations and no, no, no. But the result of it means we're thinking about the customer more and I find it can really drive innovation.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
What got us here won't get us there. Telling the story of what this brand means so that people feel connected. We want to feel like we are a part of something in that. And it's not just a product that we put on our counter, but it's actually something that's here to help us live a better life. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
And speaking of innovation, I wanted to talk a little bit about LG Nova. Can you explain to us what LG Nova is?
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Cool. So it's kind of the innovation incubator where you're bringing different minds to the table outside of people from outside of LG to come in and help think through what the future can really look like.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Sometimes we need to think outside of the box in order to really... find the next path forward. I was listening to a podcast the other day. It was with Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. And he was talking about how their innovation lab, and I know Apple has an innovation, a lot of companies have innovation labs, but how they need to be in a different building, separate. From everyone else.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
We have to create that space of literally outside of the box of the normal building to be able to think about all these different ways of approaching perhaps the same problem, but from a different way, a different perspective. Yeah. And I know LG has done some incredibly innovative things. I was telling you earlier that I used to live in Korea. I went on a student exchange there.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
And I remember this was about 15 years ago. And that was when they first started launching or talking about the flexible screen, which I've seen incredible results.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
I mean, I am definitely of the generation where I don't like having the black box in my house. So I don't have a TV and I'm like, I want it when I go to somewhere else. I love having a TV, but I just don't like seeing it. So I love the innovations around how we can make that more just a part of my life instead of this reminder of like watching TV.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Well, I am going to check that one out because that sounds like exactly what I want.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Amazing. So speaking of B2B, there's been a renewed focus on your B2B segment. How are you approaching that, especially when it comes to customer experience and marketing?
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
It's a, it's in many ways another world. And at the same time, it's, Like you said, it's providing the right message. It's thinking about what that customer needs and wants and how do we deliver to it. So that's exciting.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
It also sounds like there's, I mean, just with the innovation that is happening in this space, how can we be integrating products more into our lives, as you said, like in our homes? That is really exciting. You've been making big improvements and waves when it comes to your products. brand and your customer experience. And I love to just look at the other side of things sometimes.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
What are the challenges that you're currently facing?
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Which is expensive now, by the way.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
I'm like, how much does it cost to have cable TV? It's insane.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
And you were telling me earlier that you've recently made updates to your voice of customer program. Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired that change and what it looks like now?
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
I mean, sometimes that competition or the shifts in the market force us to take it a step further and really think about how do we provide more value for the products that we are that we are selling. So I love that story because it's I never would have thought, oh, LG is doing this. But look at that. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Completely. So I have two last questions for you as we wrap up on our time here. And the first is, I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a brand that left you impressed. What was that?
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
I want to just say Chewy is probably the most common response that I get to that question. Chewy and Apple, you know, but I think it just is such a testament to the way that Chewy not only recovers if there's a mistake, but I think most of the time it's either the customer's mistake or misfortune that Chewy just steps up to the plate around.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Mm-hmm, Zappos is another one that I, if you haven't read Delivering Happiness, I highly recommend it to anyone because that, again, Zappos really pioneered, I think, in the space of making their customer service, their marketing.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Because people will tell that story of how the customer service agent that was helping them pick the right pair of shoes or find the right dog food went above and beyond their wildest expectations to support them. that is the type of referral and storytelling that really goes so far.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
And my last question for you is, what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear?
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
You are speaking my language. I think that collaboration is one of the most important things and our ability to develop relationships with our colleagues is essential to be able to get things across the line, to be able to bring the customer voice into the company in order to innovate and through creating safe spaces for people to come up with new ideas.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
And I do think if I take what you just shared one step further, will I agree that we want to make sure that everyone in the room is collaborative, that we really empower the people who are amazing at bringing others together? We can also teach collaboration. I believe that, that people can change even if they don't want to. It is possible.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
I could not agree with you more. Well, Louis, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been such a great conversation and we really appreciate it.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
What are some of the data sources that you're using that you weren't using previously that you found to be really valuable?
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Today, I am joined by Luis Giagrande, the Chief Marketing Officer at LG Electronics USA. Today, we are going to explore how he's leading a transformative shift in the customer experience at LG, leveraging innovation, new market expansion, and a redefined brand vision to strengthen LG's connection with both customers and businesses. Before we dive in...
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Yeah. You're highlighting something that is just music to my CX ears, which is the collaboration between customer experience and customer support and marketing. And when you really marry those two teams and we look at the insights and the wealth of knowledge that is coming through customer service...
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
We can not only improve the experience for the customer, improve the marketing messaging for the customer, but also create products and think about how these products will impact the customer in a more meaningful way.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Fully. What challenges have you experienced in this? Because at the same time, as we create these deeper connections, we also create often more complexity. And I think a lot of the reason why we've stayed in our own lanes is because it's easier to stay in your own lane instead of merge the highways. You know what I mean?
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
I think that because of the difficulty that we're talking about, that executive alignment all the way at the top to say, we are going to take on the challenge of cross-functional collaboration and integration into our systems and our ways of working, the juice is worth the squeeze, basically. And we acknowledge that it's not going to be a cakewalk. It's probably going to be somewhat challenging.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
We'll need to invest in that collaboration. And so I- Trial and error.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
But what got us here won't get us there. Yeah. And that is a great segue into what I would love to now talk about, which is what's the next phase of LG? It feels like you're really at a turning point right now. So tell us a little bit about that.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
I just want to share a quick little PSA for everyone who is listening. If at any point in this episode you say, I totally agree, or that was really interesting. I'm really enjoying this episode. Please let us know by giving us a quick rating wherever you listen to your podcast. That helps us to know that we're doing this right. And we really appreciate your support. Now let's dive into it.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
And what does that require? What are you looking at in terms of different ways of working and also different ways of designing products?
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
I'm just thinking about the Jetsons right now and how I never thought that that would be a reality in my lifetime, but here we are.
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Lewis, how are you doing today?
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
I'm very, very well. So I'm really excited to talk all about LG. And in our prep conversation, you told me that you have over 1400 products on your website. Is that correct?
Experts of Experience
#60 Storytelling 101: CMO of LG Electronics Shares the Key
Tell us a little bit more about that. What was the philosophy and the influence of this new brand story that you're telling?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I see this a lot in my consulting work because I work with a lot of startups who are in that position where we kind of have a blank slate or it's not too hard for us to take a step back and redesign how we're approaching AI, especially AI and CX. And then I also work with organizations that are much larger who it's challenging.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Like we have to really change our fundamental structure in order to now work with this AI and bring it into our existing system. It's just more complex and it takes more time and intention. Although I will say, I think the intention is important no matter where you're implementing AI and really how you're doing it and what you want it to be doing.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And just so everyone knows, Marketing Trends is another mission show that Stephanie leads. So definitely head over there to listen to that as well. But we're doing a joint episode today because we have a very special guest, Bernard Slowie, who is the Senior Vice President of Digital Customer Success at Salesforce.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
But there's definitely an opportunity for earlier stage companies to start off with AI as a foundational principle.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So I'd love to talk a little bit or a lot actually about Salesforce's agentic AI journey because Salesforce dove into agentic AI quite early on and developed agent force, which I know you were lucky enough to be customer zero. And I want to get into that story and understand one, what was it like really bringing in an agent agent? workforce into your team.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And then we're going to get into the lessons and the learnings and all that good stuff. But first, tell us just what was it like starting to use this?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And today we talked about how they were customer zero for their new AgentForce product, which was really fascinating. Steph, what did you take away from the conversation?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Which I think is generally, if you can be your first customer, you always should be just as a principle when it comes to customer experience, because that allows you to really learn deeply what your customer is going to experience.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So like launching in four weeks is insane, especially if you think about how new this technology is and how complex the Salesforce system and help center is as well. Can you give us a bit of an insight into like what you launched? I'm assuming it wasn't like the whole thing. I'm assuming you kind of took off a piece and said, okay, we're going to launch this.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I can't imagine the anxiety you were feeling in that moment.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, what about you?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I mean, I think that, fascinating thing for me about agent force. And I've been nerding out on this big time because agentic AI is the next wave of AI. We've been in the generative world using LLMs, chat GPT, all this stuff. And now we have actual AI employees that are joining our team who can own entire processes, who can make decisions on their own.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I mean, that's such an important factor, which I actually think a lot of people who are approaching or rolling out AI, building it into their systems, we all need to do it. And people are taking different approaches. But the thing I keep hearing time and time again is that... Your data is critical. The information that you're feeding to the AI is critical.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And it's a very large and complex thing to think about because we have, it's almost like we have like all of our stuff is like strewn everywhere. And all of a sudden we have to organize it in a way where someone can come in and actually like intake it and use it. And I'm curious to know your thoughts on that piece. And like, how did you go about organizing your data so quickly?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
To then allow AgentForce to use it or had you already had a totally clean house and none of that had to happen?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I mean, it's really the strength of your agent at the end of the day. Like, as you were saying, it's not going out into the internet to find answers. It's using the information that you provided to it. And that's the beauty of it. And also it means we need to do that extra legwork to make sure that the agent has what it needs.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And that requires us to think very differently about how we are using AI and training AI and actually coaching AI to do what we need it to do. And Salesforce has really been a pioneer in this space. And they've been very early. And I think that agent force is really the best example in the market of an agentic AI that is enabling customer experience to really be what it should be.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah. The thing that I'm like kind of mind blown by is you're taking a training that you give to humans about soft skills and you're able to train an AI agent on the same content.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so it was really cool to hear Bernard talk about their experience of being their first customer and the learnings that they had in actually utilizing it and how they're helping other companies now do the same. So I thought it was fascinating. I'm really excited about this episode.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I mean, you're literally showing like we are using this and here's the results that we are getting in real time. I think it's something like this point about transparency is so critical. It's always been critical.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
But when we talk about AI, it is ever more important because customers, whether they're B2B or B2C, will trust you more if you are transparent with when you are using AI versus when you are not. And we see that in the data. And I just want to, I just think it's a really great point. a really great website.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Salesforce dove into agentic AI quite early on and developed AgentForce, which I know you were lucky enough to be customer zero.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I think that this piece is something that so many companies struggle with, especially from, as a CX leader, I would always say, let's make the experience best for the customer, but it's not always the most cost efficient, right? Yeah.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah. Let's get into it. Bernard, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So we want to kick it off by taking a trip down memory lane and talk a little bit about your history and what you've seen over the past, wow, decade plus in the tech space. And I know you started your career in customer service as a project manager at AOL. Is that correct?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
The way that we can utilize AI in customer success is still yet to be seen in many use cases. And Salesforce is really, I mean, Salesforce has pioneered customer success, period. So it makes sense that you are getting to lead that function. The new wave of what customer success really means.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I'd love to hear some examples of other clients that you've been working with other than Salesforce yourself to really utilize agent force and how that's been taking place.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It's a really cool... I have one that I'm using right now. They're the best.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Tech support agent.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Amazing. And so you've seen a lot of change. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've seen since then until now?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
How have you gone about creating the guardrails? Beyond just the here's the content to pull from, but especially as we think about the more like empathetic skill set of the agents, how do you like set values in place with the agent and how have you made those decisions around what to train it on?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And I think that that's, you know, it's one of those steps that has to be talked about before implementing. So many companies want to just dive right in. But this is one of those things. It's like, make sure your data is clean and then also be aligned on where you want this. agent to play and where the boundary is. Where's the fence to the playground?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I've seen it many times.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So then we have to train our agents to be cross-functional.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I just wanted to bring it back to a real life example here that this is a real life problem that this is solving. When we call up a number and we wait on hold and then we get through and we end up being on the wrong number. And then they're like, oh, let's transfer you to this other place. And you can wait on hold over there again, which is the most frustrating thing in the world.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And this is the beauty of agentic AI is that we, the consumer or the customer no longer needs to deal with that because it's The AI knows what it is that we're asking for and can directly put us in touch with the right agent where we don't have to wait on holds because it's AI.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It's a problem. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the impact on the humans in the loop here. And how this is, I mean, obviously AI is having a huge impact on business and with new employees, these AI employees, it's going to impact the existing employees. And the thing I keep coming back to is what are the skills we need to be learning?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
to really work with AI now that we have these new types of friends that we're working with day in and day out?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And our ability to support customers as well. Like if you think about being on the phone, walking them through a physical action of putting a CD into a computer to download. Now it is just a whole other level of automation and ease as well. And so I'd love to hear, you know, AI agents is the big conversation.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah. I mean, with any technological innovation, new roles have been created. And of course, right now, a lot of people are afraid, oh, is AI going to take my job? And as you know, your job to be today, probably in some cases. Yeah. But there's going to be whole new jobs, whole new careers, whole new departments maybe that are even created.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I know I've been talking to a lot of people about the new role of the AI manager, the agent manager, like as a human needs to now manage this team of agents and train them and guide them and coach them.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And then it frees up time for more valuable activities as well. I mean, I think about, especially in the realm of customer success, if we can spend more time listening to and thinking about our customer instead of doing operational, you know, even scheduling meetings and things like that, that just like eats up our time.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
We're much better off thinking about our customers, spending time with our customer, listening to our customer. And then bringing that insight back into the organization because those human to human interactions, that is what AI will definitely never be able to replace. Right. So let's lean into that.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
We're going to talk about AI agents a lot today because of AgentForce and all the incredible work that Salesforce has been doing. What makes you excited about AI agents, especially as we look at it in the context of where we've been even in the past 10 years?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I think about this often. I'm so glad that you share this take or this opinion, Bernard, because going back again to what AI will not be able to replace, it's our intuition. And it is so important that we hold onto that intuition and if anything, strengthen it. Now that we have AI doing a lot of the logical thinking for us, where we can say, is this right?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Just because the data says it doesn't mean that we need to do it that way. It is insight. It is information. We can take that, but we still need to use our human critical thinking skills to decide, is this the right way to go?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Have you changed how you lead your team at all now that AI is such a big part of your day to day?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I think that the AI hype cycle definitely has a lot of people's attention at the moment, but it's really important to remember that it's not everything. It's the shiny new thing, but there's still a lot else.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I mean, on that point, I actually have a question for both of you, which is what is your favorite personal use case?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I'm taking it. It's hot tips.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Well, Bernard, we have one question that we ask all of our guests on this show to close it out. And that question is, what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And it goes back to the data point you made. It's not just the data. We have to actually have those conversations, really be there with our customer, listening to them, understanding what's the need behind their need and digging deeper with our questions. So I could not agree more. Thank you so much.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I think it solves so many of the problems that we've been seeing in the customer experience space. For example, when we call, I mean, this is still to come, but when we call a company and we have to then choose the button or choose who we want to talk to and go through all of this, it's so laborious. And now we are just easing so much of that friction. through AI.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And I'd love to just take a quick step back to make sure everyone understands what we're talking about when we talk about AI agents, because this is still new. Can you define it for us?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It's like having an employee. It's an AI employee. And I think that that's the big shift that I'm seeing when we talk about agents is it's no longer just a tool. It's actually capable of so much more and making decisions on its own, which is also wild to think about.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah. It's wild. I actually, a quick example of that is Airbnb. I'm an Airbnb host and I've had guests from other countries come and stay at my place. And I talk to them in English and sometimes I get an email in another language, but in the chat, it shows up as English. And so I've been like, what is this? And then I went in to look at it and I was like,
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
oh, that's what they're doing is real time translation between the guest and the host. And it's like, wow, that opens up so many more possibilities. So when we think about agentic AI and bringing this into businesses, what is the opportunity at stake for companies to start using agents as soon as possible?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. And today we have another host as well, Stephanie Postel.