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Moderator:
Melissa O’Brien, Executive Research Leader, HFS
Panelists:
You can listen above or watch this HFS Videocast here:
Session Description:
We have learned that “X takes all” when it comes to competitive differentiation, where experiences define a company’s brand. It’s not just about customer experiences; it’s also about employees and partners in an ecosystem approach that drives new sources of value and reacts quickly to disruptions.
In a world of constant curveballs, the more autonomous a business is, the more effectively it can respond to changes, make better business decisions, and ultimately gain a competitive advantage through better experiences. Getting humans out of loops that don’t need humans anymore can speed decision-making and drive purpose in real human interactions.
We’ll hear from leaders on the front line of driving improved EX+CX+PX to address these questions:
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This transcript was auto-generated from the original recording and lightly edited for readability. We've done our best to catch errors, but names, technical terms, and company references may be misspelled or imperfectly captured. For the definitive version, please refer to the original audio or video. Views expressed are the speakers' own.
All right, hi everybody. Good morning. Thanks for joining. So we are going to talk about experience. It’s definitely been flirted with, talked about a little bit, but this session is going to be all about X. It’s the competitive differentiator, whether you’re talking about employee experience or customer experience or making good experiences for your partners. So what does this mean? What is the impact of these things we’ve been talking about — the autonomous enterprise, the generative enterprise, which is our new coined term? So without further ado, I’d like to invite my panel up to join me. Great. Well, thank you all for being with me today. So not only do I have an esteemed panel of great business leaders, I also have the panel with the most fabulous shoes. Can I ask you guys to just go down quickly and introduce yourselves?
Thank you, Melissa. Yes, my name is Fiona Blades, and I’m the founder of a company called Mesh Experience.
Hi, I’m Margaret Molloy. I’m the global chief marketing officer of Siegel+Gale. We are part of Omnicom, and we’re a brand strategy, design, and experience firm. And thank you for having us, Melissa.
Hi, Maureen Doyle-Spare. I lead the financial services team at UST — 25-plus years’ experience in this sector, leading consulting and solution teams across many of the service providers. And thanks for having me today.
Good morning. My name is Mike Small. I’m the president of Akkodis Americas. In this role, we focus on IT and engineering, consulting and services. And I’m also a dual-hat role: the Adecco Group is our parent company, and I am the chief executive of Adecco US.
OK, thank you all for being here. So let’s dive right in. We’d like to start with some audience participation, if we can do that. We do have a poll. All right, so we want to talk about how the autonomous enterprise has an impact on experience. We heard the last panel talk quite a bit about getting your infrastructure right so that you break out of silos — knowing your interactions and processes, having leaders understand their data, know their data, and all these things that lead toward efficiency, working smarter, more intelligently. But what sort of impact does it actually have on experiences across the ecosystem? So: significant impact — improvements to processes will elevate experiences across all types of stakeholders; or very little, because it’s more about cost and efficiency focus; or just some impact — processes must be carefully designed. OK, I was waiting for some impact to come in. Now we’ve got a quarter at ‘some impact.’ Well, it’s unanimous that there is going to be some impact, it looks like so far. So let me get your thoughts on this. What do you think about the question and the responses?
Well, I agree. I think there’s going to be significant impact. I saw the question and I thought, absolutely. And I really think it is an opportunity to elevate experiences. If companies don’t do that, they will fall behind competitors. So I think it’s an absolute imperative that companies are looking at elevating their experiences.
I agree with that assessment. I think the interesting variable is over what period of time, and it’d be very interesting to take this as a snapshot and then do it at other intervals, because the pace is so much faster than we’ve seen — at least the pace of the hype — than with other developments. The way I think about it is along two dimensions. The first, as was discussed this morning, is around efficiencies: how can our customers — or, as I prefer to say, people — have better experiences with brands that are more efficient, less friction, more useful? So that’s in one bucket. The other bucket is around effectiveness: how can the technology be deployed to better predict or anticipate people’s needs? Those are the two areas that I think about as a framework — where the impact is going to happen, how it’s going to happen, and the unknown is when.
Fantastic. Maureen?
Yeah, so I think it comes down to both the data quality and the back-end application systems. While the customer experience itself can be elevated, if the friction still resides in the middle, in the back office, it’s kind of garbage in, garbage out. The frustrations of the experience really come out when the integrity of the data isn’t there, there’s latency in applications, and the whole ecosystem isn’t really working together.
I couldn’t agree more. When you think about the back-end, the middle office, the integration and data quality, the opportunity that we have there is immense — there’s no question. But just one quick example: we just put an autonomous maintenance program in place for a fleet management software company. Just listening to the client and the friction points that were being experienced in their legacy system, and applying those learnings to this fleet management software, the impact has been tremendous — their entire revenues generated from this platform have increased now 2X. It’s been implemented for three months. It’s a completely autonomous system where their fleet management software is now predicting where their fleet needs to be and the effectiveness of the maintenance programs they have in place. So when you’re listening to the clients and they’re seeing the value, the power of the systems that we can implement is tremendous in this area.
Great, and that’s a really good segue, because I wanted to talk a little bit more specifically about how leaders themselves can take some steps to think about experience when they are actually implementing autonomous enterprise solutions and so forth. So maybe, Maureen, I’ll ask you to start on that one.
Yeah, thanks very much. So employee and customer experience are really basically two sides of the same coin. Human and autonomy are not independent of each other; it is together. One is never going to replace the other, and it’s understanding when the human interaction is important — usually it’s in that last mile. And then, from a leadership perspective, how do you integrate that into your organization? Often you look at clients — and many of the service providers — where customer experience is a silo within the organization. It’s not tightly woven with the domain, as well as the intelligent automation, and really being able to look at it from a true customer experience. Many times a lot of firms have a technology that is looking for a use case, rather than changing the paradigm. We’ve kind of gone a little too much toward chasing the hype and looking for the use case for the technology, versus trying to go back to the roots of the fundamental problem — the experience and the friction — and figuring out which technologies really make sense to weave together to improve that experience.
Yeah, very good point. And around friction, because it’s all about reducing effort, in particular customer effort. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can think about this in a more holistic way, because we’ve seen some data — and we have some more to share today — about how connected employee experiences are with customer experience. So when you’re looking at this from a big-picture standpoint, how do you develop something where these experience programs actually align?
Maybe I’ll get started on that. I think the guiding principle is along the lines of the service profit chain, which is to say, if employees are having a good experience, it gets reflected in the customer experience. So it begins with: what is the guiding principle that informs the strategy? And, to Maureen’s point, a lot of people are looking for ways to use the tech and not doing the analysis to discern what people need. So starting at first principles, I think, is vitally important. The other aspect, from my vantage point, is around your brand. What does your brand stand for in the hearts and minds of all people — be it employees, customers, stakeholders, users — because very often the one who buys your product isn’t the one who’s using it? That’s a particularly common phenomenon in B2B. So really trying to identify what we want to stand for, and how we can be useful. I would say that’s one of the most powerful questions to any stakeholder: how can we deploy technology, or any other methodology, to be more useful? Because when you’re more useful, you’re inherently removing friction, and the people are having a better experience. I think the real opportunity is to begin at the beginning. People are somewhat beginning in the middle, or being seduced by the technology and trying to retrofit it, but beginning with, as Maureen said, the humanity — I think that’s an important starting point.
I completely agree with that, but we’re in the human capital business, and in the human capital business, if I’m not deploying human capital to projects or solutions or clients, I have no product, I have no revenue, I have no means of driving my business model. One of the things we started with at the beginning was the candidate experience, which in many cases in our businesses was horrific. So you start by listening to the candidate, and what they basically said was, we want the opportunities — these types of projects, these types of experiences. When you’re able to understand the candidate’s needs up front, guess what? Our success rate, our fill rates are going to be a lot more increased when we’re putting them on projects that they’re actually passionate about, that they actually want, as opposed to being spammed every two minutes on LinkedIn to fill up potential roles. So that was the first thing we did: we digitized our front-end experience associated with the candidate. The second thing we did was listen to our clients and said, if you want diversity, equity, and inclusion in terms of a roster of candidates, we can provide that, but there’s a way of doing it where we can marry your needs with the candidates’ needs. By listening to our clients, we’ve been able to increase diversity in our candidate populations that we’re putting in front of some of our largest enterprise clients, and actually strike up partnerships. Most recently we’ve done a partnership with OneTen and Delta Airlines, where we were able to listen to the client’s needs, understand their diversity goals, and automate capability where we can drive more candidate throughput for Delta Airlines that’s going to give them a more diverse roster of candidates. This is where I’d like to see it: how would we have this fully automated, so it’s not building it specifically for each client, but being able to have more of a repeatable process across the board? This is where technology plays an instrumental role.
Yeah, that’s a great example. I worked in staffing for quite some time, and I remember our focus in marketing was to the candidates, not to the clients, even though technically they weren’t paying us — they were the product, so to speak. But that pays off in spades, because they’re the happy ones, they’re the ones that get a great experience, and then they go to work happy and make the clients happy. So let’s talk a little bit about what motivates people. In this particular study, we looked at employers as well as employees. On the left-hand side of the screen is what employers thought was most motivating for workers, and on the right is what the workers actually said. The top response for staff was being empowered to make decisions. A couple of things I want to point out: it seems like there’s a bit of a disconnect between what employers think is motivational to employees — they think the top ones are access to tech and being recognized for accomplishments, which of course are very important things, but not the top ones — so there’s a bit of a gap there. The second thing, which came up in the last panel, is: how are generative AI and automation benefiting employees? Are they replacing employees? Are they augmenting? Are they actually helping them be more empowered to make decisions? So I’d like to hear from the panel on what you see as the role of tech around empowerment for decision-making. Mike?
Yeah, sure, I’ll start. I think examples and storytelling are the best way to illustrate this. What we heard loud and resounding in our organization is: if you’re not going to develop me, we’ll find an employer who will — flat out. So our number one focus is on colleague development, and that’s where we’re making investments, trying to build specific curriculum around what our colleagues and candidates want. The second thing we heard was, what are you doing for the second-place candidate? Great that you placed the first-place candidate, but what are you doing for the second- and third-place candidate? Are you giving them information on why they were the second- and third-place candidate? What we did there — I’ll just use one area that we do a lot of work in, development — is, globally we place thousands of development engineers around the world, and when we specifically test for areas of competency around coding, depending on the technology, we can pretty clearly see through these tests where the developer needs work. Instead of just saying you were not the chosen candidate, we’re now saying, here are two or three areas you need to work on, and, by the way, here’s the technology and the learning modules that can address those gaps. Now, you do that, and they’re going to continue to come back to your ecosystem. How did we connect those dots? It’s all through an autonomous system working behind the scenes, grading them as they’re coding and linking it back to our learning modules in terms of where they do need to develop. So again, an example of listening and connecting technology to help improve the overall ecosystem.
Good example. Let’s talk a little bit about measurement. Fiona, I want to pick your brain on this one, because I know you have quite a bit of experience in how you measure this. What are some practical ways that companies can measure experience, as well as the investments they’re making in tech around experience?
First of all, I think many companies are already doing some measurement. For example, we’ve just spoken about Delta Airlines — we’ve had the pleasure of working with them, and I know they’re really big on diversity, so that’s good to hear. They would send an email after you’ve gotten off a plane, and you’d answer a little bit about that experience. So many companies are already picking up some of that information after each experience somebody may have had. What’s more difficult is to look at the total customer experience, and that’s really where we come in to fill a bit of a gap, because we ask people to tell us whenever they see, hear, or experience anything to do with, for example, airlines. Then we understand: what percentage are using the app, what percentage are speaking to a friend or colleague about where they’re going to fly, what about the email coming in, what about the TV ads, what about all those different touch points that people are having? This is something we’re finding is helping on the question that came up earlier, which was on silos — because you’ve got people measuring the CRM program, people measuring the PR, people measuring the media efficiency, people measuring the TV ads. But actually what you want to see is how all of this is fitting together. If you do have what we think of as small data — participants who are capturing these experiences every day and feeding back — it means you can then speak to your organization and say, look, this is where social media’s fitting in, and this is how positive those experiences are for our brand versus a competitor. But let’s look at the TV — well, it’s doing something different. So I think that’s an area that will become important in the future. There was a brilliant article written in Harvard Business Review quite a while ago now, where Keith Weed, who was the CMO of Unilever at the time, wrote that share of experience would be the most important marketing metric of the future. So that’s where I think things will go. But there are also lots of very simple ways of monitoring things: if we’re looking at metrics to do with employees, then your retention rates, or if you do a survey once a year to find out how people are finding the experience — all of these metrics are really important to take note of.
Yeah, it’s a good point. So it’s about not looking at it in a vacuum — about one particular interaction or one particular experience — it’s about how I’m experiencing the brand as a whole.
Yes, I think so. I think you should do both. Let’s understand the individual bit — that’s almost easier, so do try and do that. If you’ve got an event… I was thinking, when you were talking about the employee experience, we did something called our Meshiesta last August, because we work remotely now, but we wanted a way of everybody getting together. Measure those things individually, but then start to have a look at the total experience. Because, of course, thinking of financial services, somebody could have just seen some negative news about branch closures, and then they’re interacting, or they’re seeing a TV ad, or they’re going onto their app. Those earlier experiences are going to impact how people feel at the time they’re having an experience, for example, on an app.
Yeah, good points. And talking about how people feel, there’s another point I want to get to, and Margaret, I think I’ll ask you to weigh in on this one. I didn’t think of it while we were looking at this data point, but now that I’m thinking it through, I want to get your thoughts on purpose — being connected to the values and mission of the company. We were surprised that that came in pretty low on motivational factors. So, either from an employee or a consumer standpoint, what are your thoughts on how brand purpose fits into this whole experience thing?
It’s an interesting time for brand purpose. You referenced OneTen and Maurice, and all of those folks have a tremendous brand purpose, particularly around DEI. I think in the last two years we’ve seen purpose shifting from ‘yeah, every brand’s got one, you’ve got to have one’ to ‘oh my gosh, it’s all about brand purpose.’ Brand purpose, to define the term, is essentially why an entity exists in the world. Back when many of us went to business school, the conversation was around shareholder value — it was all about Wall Street returns. The premise was, if we look after Wall Street, if we return profits, everything else comes together. That primacy of shareholders was deemed to be the glue that dictated the success of the firm, and that dates back to Milton Friedman in the 1970s and much of our training in business school. Well, over the last two years in particular — with George Floyd, the pandemic, the deep concerns around the environment — that conversation has been in flux. There was a time when the conversation became all about stakeholder value: not just the shareholders, but the employees, the regulators, the community. So brands were rushing to articulate a brand purpose that was very inclusive. The point of view was that employees, particularly Gen Z, but of all generations, want to work for a company that’s doing good in the world. Curiously, I’ve observed in the last six months or so a bit of a shift, particularly in the capital markets, where there’s a notion that we may have over-rotated on purpose. Someone mentioned Keith Weed — it’s interesting, a seminal article in the Financial Times talked about a Unilever brand, specifically Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Hellmann’s was leaning in strongly to the environment, and the investor community was saying, wait a second, you’re a premium brand, your purpose is to make leftover chicken sandwiches taste good, and that’s why you’re commanding a higher price than the generic in the supermarket. So we’re in a really interesting place, Melissa, on purpose. It’s shifting. Where I net out is: it’s not the holy grail, but it’s essential to have an ownable purpose. It’s just not the be-all and end-all.
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with that. I think there’s a little bit of ‘prove it to me’ from our colleagues. We heard, especially in high-tech examples, ‘culture, culture, culture — we have a great culture, we’re absolutely the place to be.’ Then in the last three to six months, it’s ‘culture, culture, culture’ where I got a text message saying I don’t have a job. So there are some legitimate areas where we, as employees and employers, can just take a pause and take a step back. The purpose in the Adecco Group is to make the future work for everyone. If we’re not living that every day, then our clients, our colleagues, and our stakeholders will call us on it. Believe me, I believe there are times where we live it every day, and then there are times where it’s like, yeah, that was really dumb. In those times when we do things that are really dumb, it is so critical to actually acknowledge it, be transparent, and then tell our colleagues what we’re going to do and what learnings we’ve taken from it. We just did our latest eNPS survey results — eNPS and NPS for our colleagues — and I looked at the number and the numbers looked pretty good. But then I dug into the numbers and looked at the comments, and the comments were absolutely brutal. It took me a little bit aback, because it’s like, why are the numbers at 8.6 or 8.9, but yet our colleagues are telling us we’re full of, you know what, in areas that are really linked back to our purpose? We spent the last three or four months going through that data and trying to understand it in more detail — round tables and all that good stuff — and what primarily came out is that we’ve done a very poor job, in this new hybrid working environment, of continuously communicating the importance of our business, the importance of what we do to change lives. We’ve taken steps to try to address that. So, going back to measuring how we do things: prove it to our colleagues, prove it to our stakeholders. When we actually get the gift of feedback, internalize it and then come back and demonstrate that we’re actually listening.
And I think the employees then buy into that. If you’re measuring them on that purpose, then they believe in the purpose, and they deliver to that purpose. At UST, one of our ethos is transforming lives through technology, and we actually measure that at the employee level, so you get the employee bought into the overall experience — and what you’re transforming not just within the organization, but for the end client. So important.
Great. You brought up the hybrid environment piece — that came up on our talent panel yesterday, where it seems as though hybrid is the norm, but we still haven’t quite figured out how to do it. Malcolm mentioned that we have a generation of managers that aren’t used to remote management, and listening to those comments, using the data to help train and develop those managers so that hybrid can work better, is something I think all companies should be thinking about right now. So, back to a little bit more around the tech pieces: the autonomous enterprise, as we’ve defined it, is about getting humans out of loops that they don’t need to be in. Each of you sort of described this human-centric focus to designing experiences, so we know we put the human first. So how do you know what people need to still be in the loops for? What are the things they really need to be part of, and what are the things that we can automate, self-service, or have them self-ameliorate? Fiona, you can go first.
I’ve got an example, actually, from retail banking. In the UK, we’ve been measuring people’s experiences with retail banking for the last five or six years. In 2018-2019, 40% of all the experiences people had with banks in the UK were what would be called owned channels — going into a branch, going online, going onto the website, phoning the call center. Today, that’s 60%, and that is because of apps. What’s interesting is, when we look at the impact apps are having, it’s not just that they are many times more important in terms of the number of experiences people are having with them — they are also the biggest contributor to some of the positive changes in brand perception. They’re empowering people to take control of their finances. The ability to do a transaction while you’re getting the children ready for school — we see those kinds of comments: ‘great, it was all done, sorted out.’ So it’s really transforming people’s lives. I would say some of those transactional things are brilliant. But where we need humans — we noticed that at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the first thing everybody did in the UK when they were worried about whether they could pay their mortgage, they got on the phone. That was a major problem for the banks, because they had to immediately get geared up with staff at home taking those calls. So I suppose it’s when there are more complex issues, issues that involve empathy, that people feel they need to speak to somebody. But some of these other areas, businesses are empowering customers, and they’re loving it.
Maureen, you want to weigh in on this one?
Yeah, absolutely. In financial services, it really comes down to a couple of things: there’s risk, there’s regulation, and there’s culture. I look at the ultra-high-net-worth in wealth, I look at the hedge fund side of it, and they’re very high touch. Do they need to be high touch? Probably not. A lot of that is cultural — a lot of it could be automated, but they still feel that need. Then there’s your risk tolerance. You look at suspicious activity reporting and case management, and a lot of firms are still reluctant to put in AI and more sophisticated technology to resolve those cases automatically, where they could be done, in fear of audit. So I think as firms culturally change and evolve, we’ll get better. On the alternatives specifically, I think they’re having to change right now, because the equity markets are down and everybody’s moving into the private markets, so you get into scalability issues. Events bring people to automation — COVID was one of those, and the market disruption and instability pushing things to the private market is making the alternatives get more automated, where it was very high touch and that high touch wasn’t required. It was cultural.
Mike, I want to ask you about something specifically, because we both spent a lot of time in the contact center world, and designing experiences for interactions is one piece — you both just touched on this. In some cases, there were technologies implemented that perhaps weren’t ready, or weren’t well designed, and the one that comes to mind is these kind of failed chatbots, which created quite a bit of chatbot fatigue in our industry for quite some time. They were glorified FAQs, or they were broken, or they were actually just a hurdle to getting to a real agent, and it wasn’t actually deflecting any volumes — it wasn’t improving experience, in fact it was making it worse. So it was basically a failed attempt at deflection of volumes, which ended up being a fail-fail in some cases. I’m not saying across the board, but I’m interested in your thoughts on moving forward — where this is going, in particular with a lot of the Gen AI and LLM discussions we’ve been having the last couple of days, where that technology could really make a big difference in being able to address experience, as well as deflection, and just overall improving experience. So we’d just like your thoughts on that.
Yeah, I’ve moved industries in my career. I started in technology, then I moved to BPO, CX, experience. My premise for that move was that automation and technology were ripe for disruption, ripe for innovation. And now I’ve kind of got back to technology as well as the human capital. So why that change? It changes because I think many colleagues, many customers, think they know — they think they know what process they want to automate, they think they know what’s going to work. I’ll just use one quick example, on the health-and-wellness personal side, for me. I thought that I needed a personal trainer, right? So I went and contracted a personal trainer. The problem is, I travel about 90% of the time. But I thought I needed a personal trainer. So then I changed to wanting a hybrid, technology-type approach. I got a recommendation from a colleague, and he said, well, you’re a busy CEO, you’ve got to work with this individual. I spoke to this individual, and I’m working with him right now, and it’s a game changer, because he knows what I need before I even ask — because he knows what other CEOs have been struggling with. I’m listening to the struggles and I’m like, yep, check, check, check. So it comes back to knowing your employees and knowing your customers. If you know your employees — back to the ‘Carol’ example — then you can apply technology to address the areas of friction that can be automated. But it starts with understanding your employees and clients, and then understanding whether the actual friction can be removed through automation. I’ve seen countless examples of chatbots being deployed where those two questions aren’t well understood, and it’s just, we’ve deployed technology for the sake of, hey, we want to say we have a bot on our website. I do believe that what we’re seeing with the revolution of the buzzword of the day — not metaverse; it was metaverse three or four months ago, now it’s ChatGPT — I’m very optimistic that this technology is a game changer. I really am. I’ve been working with it, testing it, trying to deploy practical, grounded, operational examples of where the technology can make my recruiters a hell of a lot more efficient and effective, and/or predict outcomes in terms of candidate placement. So far the actual examples we’ve seen are very interesting, very telling — not enough to get HFS in for a briefing yet, but definitely going down that path. Which means, as long as you are focused on the employee and/or the client, and understanding specifically the areas of the process that are ripe for either efficiency and automation, or able to drive a metric like fill rate or ratios that increase, then I think this technology will disrupt many industries, including our own.
Fantastic, keep us posted. I’d like to open up to the audience to see if there are any questions for the folks on the panel. Oh, sorry, right here, please. Thank you.
Hi. It’s very interesting to hear how you guys are thinking about experience, but isn’t experience a lot perception-driven as well? You’re trying to do something — it might be a great experience for somebody else, but the other person who has gone through something might come back and say, this is not a great experience for me. So how has the measuring structure evolved as you look at experience per se?
Perhaps I can take that. Thank you for that question — and you’re absolutely right. Even with the same person, you might go onto the website the first time and have an amazing experience, but the next time you don’t find what you need, and that’s a frustrating experience. That’s why we would say you need to try to measure these experiences as they happen, because just asking somebody in general, ‘how do you find a website,’ it’ll be good one time and bad another. There’s also that sequential aspect. What we tend to find in measuring is that an experience somebody has — and it doesn’t matter whether it’s advertising or online or conversation — will be more positively received if they are a customer than if they’re a non-customer. What that says to me is exactly what you’re saying: it’s the perception. You believe, before you’re meeting that brand and interacting with it, that it’s going to be positive, and if you have that halo effect — equally, it’s the opposite way around, maybe if you’re a prospect or you’ve had a bad experience in the past. So that perception is very important, but it is experiences that create that perception.
And I think demographics have a lot to do with it. Somebody recently asked me about — I guess in the UK they’re consolidating multiple branches of firms down into a single location, and it’s for the elderly population. My mother, I guess, is my ‘Carol’ in this case — she still needs to go into the bank. She will not pick up the phone, as seamless and as easy as an app that we loaded on her phone and prefilled everything for her. Absolutely not. So that’s where ChatGPT… you know, I’m not one for technology looking for a use case, but I think that becomes really important, because you look at that demographic, and that’s an engagement they understand: a seamless app versus a conversational one. So I think when you look at things and measure at that experience, you have to also look at the demographic side of it as well.
I think what you just said is fascinating, because actually Halifax Bank in the UK created a special proposition at the start of the pandemic, which was a phone line for the over-70s. So they knew that that was a problem. But I think that also had a positive impact on younger people thinking, at least my mum and dad can get hold of somebody. So that was really thinking customer-first on the experience.
And, just to build on that, the core is to give the customer choice and to really challenge your assumptions. What I’ve observed is that when people make a mistake here, it’s often the wrong assumptions — we may even be making a generalization based on demographics. But you must decide: is this a target market? What is our strategy? What is the message we’re sending to the market? And is that congruent with the experience the customer has? Very often the challenge for companies has been, and continues to be, that the folks making the promises — the marketing, the advertising — are not the same folks keeping the promises: the product designers, the call centers, the frontline employees. And when you have that dissonance, that’s where problems occur. Marketing tends to be a little aspirational — it gets a smidgen ahead of the reality — but if that gap is too large, then you get a frustrated customer. And very often, you touched on it, Adam, it’s around the incentives: how are people rewarded internally? What I’m rewarded for in marketing may not align with what the call center is rewarded for — call times, or handle times, whatever it is. So there’s a lot of heavy strategy lifting that no AI can do, that has to be done as a precursor to effectively implementing these tools.
Great points. Any other questions? Oh, this one.
I have a curiosity question. My businesses are all B2B, so I was just wondering, how do you get to the user experience of that B2B’s customer? Like, do you coach your client on that business you’re selling to?
Yeah, I’ll maybe start with that. The short answer is, absolutely — the closer we get to our customer’s customer, the more value we’re going to be able to provide in any type of solution that we deploy. I think of one example: we have a customer today — and we talked about UnitedHealthcare, right? One of the things that UnitedHealthcare is really leading on, from my perspective, is that they don’t measure their call center agents based on average handle time, because they want the actual member to be serviced. And one of the other things they know about their customers is that many of them are different demographics, as you just spoke about. I don’t know about you, but I don’t care what demographic I am — when I call a call center, I’ve exhausted all other opportunities. I’m going to the app first, I’m going to their website or any type of digital solution. When I call, please don’t deploy conversational AI and then, once I actually tell you why I’m calling, route me to some queue — that’s not what I just said — or, even worse, ask me to repeat what I just said. It drives me absolutely nuts. One of the things I like about UnitedHealthcare — our employee healthcare is with UHC — is I get to speak to somebody. I just spoke to somebody yesterday at a utility company, and I was dreading this call, I was dreading it. I called and somebody picked up, and I actually had to look at my phone. I’m like, wow, hello, are you real? And for me, I like that. Knowing your customer — I value that. I was calling to cancel the service, so I felt bad at the end, but I still valued that interaction. So knowing your customer, your point on demographics, is absolutely critical. Understanding how they want to be best engaged, in terms of how you support them, is critical. If we know more about that for our end clients, we’re going to be able to service with technology to help our clients.
Great, thank you. All right, so we just have about a minute left, so I’m going to ask you guys to do a speed round here. A couple of our panels have asked about what’s one wish you would have — I’m going to switch it up and ask, what’s one prediction you have for experience in the autonomous enterprise, or even going further, the generative enterprise? Let’s start with you, Fiona.
I think people will measure experience more.
I think simplicity will matter — keeping it simple for the customer, the candidate, all stakeholders.
I think ChatGPT will be transformational, but I think we have a long time to figure out what the right use cases are, where you can get that ROI and not try to put a square peg in a round hole.
I think we have to think through trust models between our colleagues and our developers of technology like ChatGPT — understand how trust can be formed and brought together between both human interaction and the technology, because I think there’s going to be a lot of fear, especially on the human side.
Excellent. Well, Fiona, Margaret, Maureen, Mike — thank you so much for being with me today and sharing with our audience. Everybody give it up for the panel, please.
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