The CX Leader Podcast: "Smoothing Out Rough Holiday Experiences": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

The CX Leader Podcast: "Smoothing Out Rough Holiday Experiences": this wav audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Pat:
From toilet paper to microchips shortages are sure to cause some strain this holiday season.

Seb:
Supply issues, we can't get the products we want. There are going to be delays in terms of delivering it if we do go to a store there are staffing shortages. All of that kind of thing is, you know, making us all a little bit edgy. But certainly from a retailer perspective, it's certainly not all doom and gloom.

Pat:
Salvaging customer experience during the holiday season in the midst of supply shortages. On this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Pat:
Hello, everyone, I'm Pat Gibbons sitting in as guest host of The CX Leader Podcast, and thank you for listening. We like to say it's never been a better time to be a CX leader, and this podcast explores topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of customer experience. You know, it's an unfortunate result of the pandemic, and we have all experienced it: supply shortages. Everything from breakfast cereal to new cars, jewelry and the newest name brand mobile phone, even turkeys. And it's hard not to feel some sympathy for front line retail workers as they receive the brunt of consumer anger over things they clearly have no control over. So what can we do as customer experience leaders? Are there tools that can help both customers and employees smooth out these rough times? Well, my guest on the episode today is Seb Reeve, who oversees Intelligent Engagement, Marketing Development for Nuance Communications, a company specializing in conversational AI innovations that bring intelligence to everyday work and life. Seb, thank you for being on The CX Leader Podcast.

Seb:
Hey Pat, thanks for having me.

Pat:
You bet. And let's start off: Seb, what are we in store for, or what are customers in store for this holiday season?

Seb:
Well, you know, it kind of feels like we've we've had a whole year of, you know, doom and gloom in terms of not being able to go and, you know, into stores and physically kept separate from one another from a social, physical perspective. And now all of that's lifted. And now we're hearing a whole new set of challenges coming to the fore, of course, with as you mentioned in your intro, you know, supply issues, we can't get the products we want. There are going to be delays in terms of delivering it. If we do go to a store, there are staffing shortages and we can't get to talk to someone. All of that kind of thing is, you know, making us all a little bit edgy. But I think certainly from a retailer perspective, it's certainly not all doom and gloom. I mean, I saw a great prediction from the NRF, the Retail Federation, a couple of weeks ago that said, actually, this is going to be the highest holiday retail sales on record. So, you know, there's a bit of a juxtaposition, isn't there really? Our expectations are high. We want to get back to it and get shopping, but apparently it's going to be tricky for us. So a lot of challenges.

Pat:
Yeah. And it's just it is interesting because I think that does pose some some questions and issues, you know that, you know, here we are. We're ready to go, ready to shop. And now it could get disrupted again just because the experience might not be as pleasant as we're all hoping for.

Seb:
Exactly.

Pat:
So let's provide a little bit of background because I want the listeners to know why you think about these things while you're qualified to comment on this topic, because I think you have a fascinating business that actually has tools that can help enhance the experience during times like these. So tell us a little bit about your role in your business.

Seb:
Yeah. So at Nuance, we've spent a couple of decades or so trying to figure out how to make the business of being a customer easier. Let's face it, there's there's the expectations versus reality gap again. Isn't it really right? So a lot of brands want to set the best expectation for working with a brand, but then meeting it is a challenge. And so, yes, we're a tech company, but first and foremost, we're an experience-led company. So we figure out really where those gaps are for the businesses we serve and that's the majority of the Fortune 500 really across a variety of industries from banking, telecommunications, retail utilities and others. Figure out where those gaps are and then, yes, we bring technologies, but really through the lens of design and experience design to figure out how they're going to make an impact, right? So impact the customer, improve their experience and drive loyalty up, for example, obviously impact the business, looking to do things more efficiently and drive growth in revenue and other things. And also the employee. Let's not forget the people working in the front line within the business who have a job of, you know, dealing with all of the challenges that get thrown at them every day. So so really, we try and focus on all of those kind of three stakeholders and figure out whether win, win, win is. Yeah, so that's what we do for a living.

Pat:
Oh, that's it's really interesting. And, you know, I feel like almost any report that I've read in the customer experience field that talks about trends and what's coming and all that, you know, A.I. is mentioned in there somewhere. And I feel like and this may be an exaggeration, but I feel like customer experience professionals kind of fall in two camps. There are some that are all over it. They're like, Yes, this is the future. I'm embracing it. I'm learning about it, I'm applying it, and then there are some that are like, I don't get all that stuff, so maybe you could give us kind of a 101 description of artificial intelligence and how that works in the customer experience field?

Seb:
Yeah. I mean, for the uninitiated, then why don't we look through the lens of what it's for rather than what it is first, right? What it's for? There are equations in every business, right? So there are equations where if you're trying to deal with increasing demand or spikes in demand, like the holiday season, for example. Historically, you know the levers you could pull the throw more people at it, right? Throw more cost at the problem, more spend it the problem. And what is really for is breaking some of those equations in a positive way. Right. So so for example, you can use more self-service and automation so you don't need to throw people at your call center to deal with demand spikes. You can use things like targeting on your website to figure out who looks lost, who looks like they need help and be more proactive and reach out with them. Maybe with a chat agent, right? The sales agent on the on the on the front end of a business to drive up revenue. So that sort of breaking a lever there, right? Or if you're thinking about it from an employee perspective, you know, giving the right advice to a sales or a service agent at the right time in the journey automatically. And AI can kind of be looking at the conversation or listening to the conversation and offering advice in real time. Right. So that helps obviously drive quality in terms of the range of answers people are giving. So all points in the customer journey there are there are different technologies or techniques that can apply to that sort of cost or revenue or quality of experience, kind of upsides that we're looking for. So it's about tipping the scales and changing those equations. That's what it's really all about.

Pat:
Yeah, no. That's a really elegant description, probably the best I've heard. So again, that's why we have a guy like you as a guest on our podcast to help our CX professionals. So let's get back to the holiday season a little bit. We've talked about, you know, some of the obstacles that customer experience professionals may need to, you know, either avoid or address or jump over or whatever. Maybe you can share how there's a particular application during this season for retailers and others, you know, involved in kind of this high demand time period.

Seb:
Yeah, I think, you know, thinking about the sort of retail challenges more specifically, I think the big topic we seem to be engaging with our clients with at the moment is it's about bridging sort of the physical and the digital experiences together, right? And this is from both lenses. So how to how to get the best of both? So how do we bring what's great about digital into that sort of physical store experience? And how do we bring what's brilliant about the physical store experience into the digital domain as well? Right? And I think that's sort of two sides of the same coin. And you know, I see some retailers today doing some amazing things there, right? So we've been working with H&M, the fashion retailer, for some time. And you know, they have a chat bot and virtual assistant on their website to help you kind of feel it lost, you know, and you're in the middle of trying to sort of check out a cart or whatever it is. And a lot of retailers are investing those kinds of things. I think they've gone, you know, a few steps further on and they sort of really looked at, Well, can we bring some of the experience you can get when you shop with us into that sort of digital experience, right? Chat bots are normally good at dealing with simple stuff, right? Simple question and answers and that kind of thing, which they're fantastic for. They're not great advice. So they sort of started to look at it and say, OK, from a fashion perspective, we have a lot of people visiting who have seen a product in another store, and they want some advice as to what what our brand can offer them. And so they they took the leap of saying, Well, let's deal with that kind of demand by allowing a user to upload an image. So if I've seen a pair of shoes in a store up up the street, I can take a picture of them. I can go to the chat bot and say, Hey, I've seen some shoes. I like, what are you guys have? It will let me upload the picture of somebody else's pair of shoes and it will do an image search, right? It'll look for things that visibly look the same in the H&M catalog. It'll say, here's what we have and then you can carry on, even have a conversation and say, Oh, I like those, but can I have those in brown right and change the color so conversationally you can start to refine what you're getting and how normally that would have been something you could only do with a store assistant, right? To say, you know, something as as elegant as that. But now that's sort of fully automated and they're available online. So it's those kinds of things which are sort of starting to blur the boundary for those who don't want to go visit the store but still need that kind of advice.

Pat:
Yeah.

Seb:
And that's where AI really helps, right? It can do some things that really computer systems wouldn't have been able to do even a few years ago, so it's pretty neat stuff.

Pat:
Yeah, I'd say so. For those that are going into this store, are there kind of location based things to be able to find out if you know something's in stock or if I should be going to another store? Any any applications there?

Seb:
Well, for sure. And I think so. You know, their virtual assistant, for example, can answer a lot of those kinds of questions. But I think the the important thing is is to inject that experience into the store visit journey. So think about what users do. I don't know about you, but if I'm going to go to a fashion store, not that that happens very often. For me, I'm kind of past my fashion days, but if I if I wasn't going to go visit, you know, my favorite fashion brand, I'm not going to start by visiting their website necessarily and to fight to find out something about them. A lot of people go to Google Maps, right? Find the location. I want directions to get there. And actually the other neat thing H&M did the other way around sort of bring the digital into that physical journey is they is they they injected that kind of Assistant functionality into Google Maps itself. If I search for H&M, you know, near Chicago or wherever else I'm looking for, it will basically show me a message button. I can speak to the bot, I can chat to the bot and say, Hey, do I still need to wear a mask? And I try things on? What are the restrictions right? Do you have a restriction on the number of people in the store at the same time, whatever questions you might have about stock, of course. And it's right then and there in that kind of in that flow to visit the store. So it makes a lot of sense. And what H&M have found, of course, is it stops people then calling and doing other things out of that journey to sort of which increased user friction, but also increase their costs as well. So it's a win win for them. People get to the store ready to go, shop and buy things.

Pat:
So, you know, someone listening to this, you know, customer experience, professional listening to this might say, Well, this is great for retail, but I'm in a totally different industry. But if I'm not mistaken, your business scans all kinds of industries, whether it's B2B or B2C. Any examples you can share from other industries.

Seb:
Yeah, sure. I think well, for one, there's a lot of likenesses to retail in other industries as well. We work very heavily with with a lot of the world's leading telecommunications carriers. And if you're buying a new mobile phone or some other gadget from them, right with a tariff for your spouse or significant other for for the holidays, then you're having a retail experience, right? It's a retail experience with an added complexity of a subscription and sort of financing and other things that go with it. Right. So but it's very much similar. So it's a lot of the sorts of solutions I've just described mapped to telecommunications. But also in banking. I mean, one of the biggest things going on in financial services at the moment again, is is figuring out the role of branches in an increasingly or overwhelmingly digital first banking journey. Right. So since the pandemic, really not very, very far fewer people are visiting branches and they're trying to figure out what is the role of a branch and bringing that physical and digital experience together. So that makes sense, and I can use digital to create an appointment to go and visit a financial advisor or even use voice and video online to have that kind of face-to-face experience. And blending all of those together is what banks are doing a lot of right now. And that's very akin to this sort of physical digital in retail, actually. So, so much as they're different, there's a lot of similarities, actually. The goals are a little different. The conversations are clearly different, but the intent behind them and the situation that's causing those businesses to want to do that and customers to desire it are very much the same. I think what's true is expectations that are set in retail across industries, right? So no question we it's the way we think is consumers.

Pat:
Yeah, no. There's no question, you know, we've done some of our own studies, primarily in the B2B space. And one of the obvious conclusions is that B2C is driving the expectations in B2B. And so I think that's, you know, you look at the things that are happening in retail now, somebody, you know, ordering widgets, you know, for their company, they're going to expect something that has as easy and seamless a process as if they're, you know, ordering things from Amazon. So I think that makes a lot of sense.

Seb:
Exactly. I think the human factors that sit behind it are kind of the same rate. We're the same people are increasingly impatient. We're time for all of those things don't change depending on who we're dealing with, right? We're still impatient and we're still time poor. And those kinds of factors, as you know, as humans are basically driving our behavior, our expectations, no matter who we're dealing with. So what's true for one is true for all.

Announcer:
Hello, CX Leader Podcast fans, Chris Higgins here, producer of The CX Leader Podcast, and I want to take a moment to thank you for listening. Just like any other CX professional, we here at The CX Leader Podcast want to make certain we're offering what you need. Take a minute to go to cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback and complete a short survey to let us know how we're doing. You might even be able to score some CX Leader Podcast swag. Again, that's cxleaderpodcast.com/feedback. We can't wait to hear what you have to say.

Pat:
We're talking with Seb Reeve today, and we're talking about artificial intelligence, its impact for customer experience leaders and in particular, the timing of the holidays and how our experiences as consumers could be disrupted by all that's going on. So Seb, these tools, I mean, obviously, you've outlined many of the great benefits, but I am interested in how consumers are adapting to them because obviously there's a difference between working with a live person and working, you know, with a, you know, a technology process. I think we're getting used to that. But some more than others, there's data issues. People get concerned about how their data is being used. What do you find with that?

Seb:
That's a great question. I think the trust and data question is is a really big one. You know, we're all we're all using internet services pretty freely these days. But you know, putting that into a brand experience means there's a, you know, there's a there's a there's a new trust relationship that has to be established. So if we're using sort of messaging channels, users may not be comfortable dealing with a brand over over a specific channel or, you know, sharing certain data over that channel. So I think there needs to be sort of clear signaling from the brand as to as to what is going on. And an effective way of doing that is to make sure the users have the opportunity to opt in to that exchange, but also just from a, you know, security perspective. Fraud has gone through the roof in the last eighteen months, unfortunately, during the pandemic raised a few hundred percent increase in fraud attempts. I think we're all seeing these kinds of messages to our phone people, phishing and all of that kind of thing. And users want to know that they're dealing with, you know, a brand that that is going to keep them safe. And so honestly, from our perspective, we're we're spending a lot of time with technologies like voice, biometrics and other great use of A.I. machine learning, which you know, lets you use your voice as your password, for example, right? So you can authenticate without having to remember a pin or a password or or someone being able to hack you quite so easily. But the great thing about those technologies is they're easier for you to log in with. They're also really useful because you can not only check the customer's voice, you could check whether that voice belongs to a known fraudster or whether the behavior and the language being used is one that a fraudster would use. So, you know, these kinds of solutions are really a great way of balancing out that sort of we need to make these experiences really secure, but we also want to make them easy. And we also want to stop fraud as much as possible. So again, it's changing the equation between those three things and and that's really positive. I think customers are more likely to do do business with brands that they trust. So it's a great question, Pat, to get into, I think, especially right now. Yeah.

Pat:
You know, there's so many different angles on this and I know we could we could go on, but we have got to that point in the program where we ask you what what we call the take home value question. And that is, we ask every guest for one tip that they can suggest to customer experience leaders, ideally something that they can put to to use right away. So Seb what is your one tip for CX leaders?

Seb:
My one tip for CX leaders is don't just leap into the technology. You know, everyone wants to think of it as a as a, as a technology project. It is really about design and the data you have to drive the outcome you need. So, so really focus on the data. Look for the proof points in your business or the problems and challenges that you can measure that you need to solve and then think through a design lens, which means from the customer perspective, the technology comes last. So I'll leave you with that, and hopefully that's kind of good advice for your users.

Pat:
I think that is excellent advice. So thank you once again. Seb Reeve is in charge of Intelligent Engagement Market Development at Nuance Communications. Seb, thank you for being a guest on The CX Leader Podcast today.

Seb:
Thanks for having me. It's been fun.

Pat:
Yeah, yeah. And if people want to continue the conversation with you, what's the best way to to reach you like through LinkedIn? Or is there another method? What do you suggest?

Seb:
You'll find me on LinkedIn if you if you search for Seb Reeve, but also you could just go to Nuance.com and and look at some great information, collateral and videos and things like that. We can you can really check out the kinds of experiences that we have on offer as well.

Pat:
Oh, that's great, and I recommend it. It's a great company and I'm familiar with it personally. I know some of your colleagues and you know, it's it's certainly one that is on top of and a leader in these issues. So if you want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast, or how Walker can help you with your business and your customer experience programs, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com. You can subscribe to the show and find all our previous episodes, podcast series, contact information and you can let us know how we're doing. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader, and we'll see you next time.

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