Tech-Infused Customer Experience

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SPEAKERS
Michael Hinshaw, Taylor Fitzpatrick

Taylor Fitzpatrick  00:08
Good morning, Michael. How's it going? Hey, Taylor.

Michael Hinshaw  00:11
Good morning. I'm doing great. How are you today?

Taylor Fitzpatrick  00:13
I'm doing well. Thanks. Thanks for joining our coffee chat. Coffee. Great. Good. That means we can get set then if we have coffee. I know today we want to talk about tech infused customer experience. And I also know you've written a couple of articles lately, but just as a quick reminder, maybe for folks who haven't joined us before, can you do a little quick intro on why you're the person to talk to you about this topic?

Michael Hinshaw  00:42
So I'm Michael Hinshaw, founder and president of M corpse CX. And the reason why technology as part of customer experience is such a big deal is because that's the direction that customer experience is going. I mean, it has been for quite some time. But today, the trends are pretty exciting, pretty interesting. And as a consumer and as a business leader, highly compelling.

Taylor Fitzpatrick  01:08
I love that let's not waste any time. And then let's start talking about some of those trends in technology. And I'm just going to start with it because it is just it is what it is like let's talk AI what what is AI doing. And as far as its transformation in the CX space, from your perspective,

Michael Hinshaw  01:28
AI has the potential to change a whopper was really interesting is in the last? No, no, since Chad GPT came, came on the scene a year or so ago. It's really caught the general interest of everybody, right? Business businesses, leaders, executives, consumers. But the reality is AI has been used for last four or five, six years, right in CX by professionals like us and like our clients. What the biggest difference is, is it's more accessible. Now, certainly. And it's more obvious, I think, where the application is, it's easier to use. Mike, we've been using AI to better understand customer service chat, for example, right? And then pulling pieces of that and understanding the trends and and what are the issues that customers are having. But today, you can actually use it to take that information, customized recommendations, build up knowledge bases, definitely speeds customer service, you can actually engage in multiple languages in ways that are much less complex than they than they used to be. It's pretty interesting.

Taylor Fitzpatrick  02:37
That piece to me is really fascinating, because we use a lot of language around like automation, and this idea of kind of omni channel delivery of messages. And it does feel like it's something that's been being done for a really long time. And then you have this interesting, like, AI overlay. And everyone's like it's brand new. And you've got these people sitting in the back going, Wait a minute, we've been doing this forever. So in addition to kind of thinking through just the the uniqueness that brings AI around accessibility, is there anything that it does that it hasn't done before that like, is it? Is there anything overly revolutionary that we need to be thinking about? Or is it really that access piece and optimizing what you've been doing before using this tool? Now that is available?

Michael Hinshaw  03:27
I mean, you think about Yeah, just those two things, access and optimization. Those are non trivial, right? Fair. So. So just those two things alone are massive, massive shifts in the ways that we do these things. And, and to say that we've done those for many years is absolutely true that we kind of utilize utilize technology like that. But what this allows us to do, you know, back to the accessibility piece of it is we can do more faster, better, the same kinds of things. And so from that perspective, answer your question absolutely is revolutionary because you no longer require as much development expertise, for example, to code and build out the analysis tools that you utilize to go in and query databases of recordings to pull information out. It's much easier for people without technical expertise to do that kind of work today. And now to integrate that into existing systems. Obviously, technical expertise is still a huge piece of it. But there are many organizations where actually I was talking to had a customer success for a company recently said that their organization, for obvious reasons, I'm not going to name this company, but their organization has has forbidden the use of chat GPT or any generative AI platform in the company's database, you know, within within the firewalls of the organization. So what this customer success leader did was he actually personally purchased cheaper TLI instances for, like 11 people in his organization. So they could begin using these tools outside the governance technology governance framework, the organization is working for his head, it's silly for us not to be able to leverage this. So that kind of accessibility simply would not have been possible. Three years ago.

Taylor Fitzpatrick  05:19
Oh, I love that. I also think you're hinting at something that I've come across in a couple of different spaces. And it's like this, there's an intrigue for sure. But there does seem to be kind of an undercurrent of fear. Is there from your perspective, anything in the CX space that people need to be fearing from this technology? Or is it like, how do you best leverage the benefits and recognize maybe the the dark side of technology? Oh, no, I'm just curious kind of what that what you think about that?

Michael Hinshaw  05:49
No, I mean, there's was it this is something that I think I included my articles like, Spider Man, with great with great power comes great responsibility. The reality is, we need to be aware of what pitfalls might exist, and we have to take steps to ensure we don't fall into them. As with any technology, or frankly, almost any, you know, customer facing interaction. And there are myriad ways that can go horribly wrong. And it's not just tech, right. Customers are treated poorly all the time. Things happen, that shouldn't happen, again, with unfortunate consistency. Excuse me. So the challenge is understanding what the issues are, and how this might apply to you mean, it ranges from, you know, potential bias. That's, you know, embedded in, in AI, the lack of human oversight on what AI generates, anybody that's just purely looking at AI and saying, Great, we're gonna take exactly what it does and put it straight to our customers runs pretty significant risk of messing things up. So you think about, you know, inaccuracies? misinformation? I mean, and I'm sure we've all read about some pretty bizarre interactions that people have had with with AI.

Taylor Fitzpatrick  07:08
Between, from like, deep fakes all the way to Yeah, interesting conversations, there's definitely that you can tell sometimes to that, like a content, for instance, that's written by a robot, like it has a robotic flavor to it. If you get if you're able to consume that information enough, it feels like when I'm reading, and I'm like, Hey, can we make this human and not written by a robot, you're able to start to detect that. So there's a little bit of that, like BS meter to that will start to happen, I think, if we don't have that human oversight and human overlay as we start to embrace technology. But I did not mean to interrupt you please continue where there's more.

Michael Hinshaw  07:46
But there's a this is, this is a conversation, right? Yeah. And these are conversations that are being had in organizations and in management consulting firms around the world, because it's, you know, how do we how do we leverage what's out there today? Recognizing there are risks. There's also significant opportunities. There's a I was chat with somebody else who said recently, unfortunately, it is still more efficient and less intelligent than we'd like. Yeah. And exactly your point about these things. So if you're using this as a content generation engine to pump stuff out, then then maybe, but when it comes to customer experience, you want you want and need to be able to personalize, create things that are highly relevant, connect with your customers in real ways. And in generative AI a of any kind can help you to do that. But exactly your point, we need to make sure the human overlay is still in place, at least in the foreseeable future. That's still important. I don't know how long that will matter. But it matters today. And it matters a lot.

Taylor Fitzpatrick  08:49
I think it really does. And what are some ways that you've seen companies or rec, would you recommend companies, you know, kind of take in order to create that kind of tailored, customized experience with technology? Are there sort of best practices that they can lean into and, or anything like that, and what we've been talking about,

Michael Hinshaw  09:07
you know, loosely is AI generated content and interactions directly with customers, there's also an entire world of of AI that applies less to that direct communication. And he was talking about journey journey optimization, journey, orchestration, just, you know, as two examples where AI is actually able to analyze and see what customers are doing in real time and make near real time changes to the journey to optimize it for customers, right. And that's something where the human overlay maybe, you know, less critical on ongoing basis, obviously critical upfront to help design and guide what the AI is doing. But the ability of of AI of technology to deliver that kind of real time relevance to online journey is pretty mind blowing and actually just the omni channel their journey, not just an online journey, right?

Taylor Fitzpatrick  09:59
Yes. Don't get me giddy like when I started thinking about all of the potential there does a customer and as someone who is journey obsessed, like it is really exciting to think about that omni channel real time meeting my need experience, and just a really real tangible way. Whether that's like, I'm, you know, I'm looking at flights. And then I'm like, oh, you know, you get the rental car email. I'm like, cool, but what if dot dot? Like what could it really look like if you were to start dreaming and thinking about, you know, that in more real real time and using AI informed stuff? So I think that's really exciting.

Michael Hinshaw  10:38
Yeah, I mean, interesting stuff, exciting stuff. I mean, still, you know, the story is yet to be fully written.

Taylor Fitzpatrick  10:47
To be to be continued in this conversation. Well, thank you so much, Michael. I know we're our time together today, but just really appreciate you taking some time with me. And talking about AI and all that in that space. We will make sure we share some article those articles that you we referenced earlier. So folks have have that to reference and I look forward to talking to you next time. That's

Michael Hinshaw  11:11
great. Wonderful. Thanks so much, Taylor. Have a great day.