Consequence scanning. Data organization. Tech translation… Oh my! This week, Kerry Bodine — CX consultant to name brand fortune 500 companies, founder of Bodine & Co. and co-author of Outside In — joins us to explore the seismic shifts AI is bringing to the world of CS. Forget what you think you know about customer service; Kerry reveals why it's all about understanding customer emotions, perceptions, and the entire customer journey. We tackle the tough questions: How do we balance innovation with ethical considerations? How do we prepare our data for the AI revolution? And how do we design experiences that are both human and AI-powered? This is a must-listen for any leader navigating the uncharted territory of AI-driven customer experience. Key Moments: 00:00 Who is Kerry Bodine, Founder of Bodine & Co.?03:19 The Biggest CS Mistake06:22 Perception vs. Reality: Bridging the Expectation Gap13:07 Consequence Scanning: Your AI Framework18:00 AI Risk Assessment & Navigating Ethical Gray Areas20:00 Leadership in the Age of AI25:05 Data Readiness for AI Implementation32:36 Human-Centered Design & Confronting Your Silos37:18 Key Advice for CS Leaders –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their AI strategy with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org
Chapter 1: Who is Kerry Bodine and what is her role in customer experience?
It doesn't matter what you think. All that matters is what your customers think.
In the world of customer experience, Carrie Bodine Stanz is one of the most influential voices shaping how businesses connect to their customers.
I don't think most organizations are understanding just how big the data lift is going to be to create all of these magical AI systems.
Chapter 2: What is the biggest mistake businesses make in customer service?
We literally have AI employees on our team doing things.
This is leadership in the age of AI. One of the tools that we are teaching is a framework called consequence scanning.
Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Chapter 3: How do perceptions differ from reality in customer experience?
They basically said we're not responsible for the answers that our chatbot provides. That's completely ridiculous. It went to court and now it is on the books that, yes, you are responsible.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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Chapter 4: What is consequence scanning and how can it help in AI implementation?
Customer experience is your customers' thoughts, emotions, and perceptions about all of their interactions as they do business with you. So it doesn't matter what you think. All that matters is what your customers think.
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?
Oh, gosh. I think one of the things they get wrong is that they really have to go out and listen to their customers. So first of all, companies have all kinds of data at their disposal. And I'm sure we're going to talk about data later in our conversation. But really going out and having conversations
Talking to your customers one on one and really hearing what it is they're trying to achieve, what's going on in their lives, what's bringing them to your organization in the first place. People have very complex things going on in the background. And they bring all of that to your website, to your call center, however they are interacting with you.
And you've got to really understand that complexity in order to serve your customers in the way that they expect.
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Chapter 5: What are the ethical considerations in AI for customer service?
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. And there are organizations that they have retail outlets, whether that's an actual retail commerce or a bank branch or whatever it is. And they do get the benefit of...
you know, having their customers right there, being able to, like you said, pay attention to body language and, you know, potentially have more in-depth discussions about what's really going on with someone when they are, you know, submitting an insurance claim or purchasing a dress for a big event, you know, whatever it is.
But those background stories are just as important when we're talking about digital interactions as well. The other thing, Lauren, that you just said about perceptions not equaling reality is that that's true from the customer perspective as well. And so they may be on hold, let's say, for two minutes to talk to a human.
But their perception might be that it was an hour and a half or just forever, just way too long. And so we have to find a way to marry up what is the objective reality and what is the subjective reality, whether that's someone in the business or a customer.
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Chapter 6: How should businesses prepare their data for AI?
Why is it important that businesses do this? What's the opportunity at stake?
Well, the opportunity, like you said earlier, is around competitive advantage. Companies that truly get this, they win in the marketplace again and again and again. The challenge is that it's a long game. When you are investing in customer experience, you're not going to see...
The results tomorrow or next week, you've got to have some degree of patience and just know that this is going to pay out down the road. Now, how far down the road that's going to be different for every organization and the degree of investment that they're putting in. But companies that are relentlessly managing every single decision to their quarterly results, they're not going to get this.
They're not going to get the strategic benefits of truly investing in customer experience like you and I are talking about.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 7: What does human-centered design look like in an AI-driven world?
Right. And the important thing to realize is that this is not an either or. This is not, oh, we just make these grand plans for somewhere down the road and hope that they'll work out. Like, yes, we've got to make quarterly plans and all that. But the important thing to realize here is that quarterly earnings are We weren't born with those. Those aren't embedded in our DNA.
They were invented at a certain point, and I don't remember the exact year, but during the 20th century because we wanted to create more transparency into how organizations were doing. We didn't want to wait for those annual reports. And so there is some benefit to them. Totally. But we've we've really like, you know, just just focused on them.
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?
Honestly, I think everyone is struggling with that. One of the things that I really focus on is just helping organizations take their customers' perspective, looking at the entire customer journey from the outside in and looking at where the pain points are, you know, where there's frustration, even hidden pain points, like
Things like waiting for a response from an organization that, you know, it's invisible to an organization, but it's a very real thing to a customer to be waiting hours, days, weeks, way too long to be hearing back with an answer. So taking the customer's perspective. And then the second piece is looking at what's going on behind the scenes, right? People process technology policies.
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Chapter 8: What key advice does Kerry have for customer service leaders?
I mean, there's so much more compensation. Compensation drives so much in terms of the behavior of an organization and helping them realize how all of those factors that are hidden behind the scenes, how they bubble up and really do impact the customer experience either directly or indirectly.
And once they can start to see some of those things, they realize that decisions that they might have made about a policy years ago are now catching up with them. And they start to realize that the decisions that they're taking today are going to impact the organization and the customer experience in years to come.
But really, this whole topic of taking a long-term approach, it really is my passion project right now because I feel that it's just so necessary in our organizations, in our own individual lives even. Because we are at a point in human history where we have at our disposal the tools to really make change. significant changes in the world that we live in.
And we've got to start thinking about those long-term consequences. And along with that are the long-term benefits of really taking a beat right now to say, hey, what's the potential impact of these decisions that we're making? What do we want to create right now that's going to pay off in dividends in the future?
What's inspiring you right now as you think about this topic?
What's inspiring me right now is actually really personal. I want to create a better world for all of us who are alive right now and all the generations to come. I also care a lot about the planet itself, regardless of humans on it. And so, yeah, again, we're really at this inflection point.
There's a lot of issues around AI and the natural resources that it takes for us to consume all of these AI-enabled technologies products and services. And I want to help people and organizations make better choices so that we can all create a better world. Thank you for saying that.
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.
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.
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