AI that’s blowing the minds of CX Leaders

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“The speed at which Gen AI is changing the customer experience space is mind blowing.” This was the consistent sentiment from my guests on the latest episode of the Customer Smarts Podcast recorded at the Qualtrics X4 Summit in Sydney.

I had the privilege of interviewing some industry legends including:

Bruce Temkin also known as the godfather of customer experience, because he pioneered the whole industry. Bruce shared many pearls of wisdom about driving customer centric change and how to approach KPIs.

Brad Anderson President at Qualtrics who not only shared some amazing perspective on the new Gen AI features but also some great advice on driving customer centric change. He has a great perspective on the challenge as he advises many CX leaders around the world

Also featuring Steven I. Former Chief Digital Officer at Australian Digital Health Agency, Ashley Taylor from Flight Centre, Melanie Disse from Ecosystem and Steve Bennetts , Head of EX at Qualtrics

This episode is a compilation from the 6 conversations. Jam packed with a broad range of insights about:

• How new AI features are changing the CX game
• How to drive customer centric change
• How to approach KPIs in the CX space
• EX is critical in driving CX
• Closing the insights to impact gap.

If you would prefer to continue reading the core insights, scroll past the video

Top Insights

1) The AI features blowing the minds of CX leaders

a) Conversational Feedback & Adaptive Surveys

When was the last time surveys have been truly transformed? Is the question Brad Anderson President at Qualtrics asked me. Certainly a very long time. The problem with digital surveys is that customers often give one word or dead end answers which aren’t very insightful. Qualtrics have applied Gen AI to this problem so that when respondents give dull answers the AI can adapt and ask more probing questions to drive more robust insights. Essentially doing what an in person interview could do. They’ve found that when their AI askes additional questions 40% of the time people respond. This is helping them increase the amount of topics identified by 87%, essentially doubling their amount of insights.

b) Process and organise insights in a day not months

The challenging part of being in a research centric role is absorbing all the information, identifying trends and then distilling it into insights that stakeholders can understand. The larger the data set, the longer it takes to process, often taking weeks or months. The new advanced natural language AI capability with Qualtrics Assist can essentially do this task in an instant. This certainly blew the minds of Steven I. and Ashley Taylor thinking about how much time this would save them in the future.

c) Identifying Insights that humans can’t

AI’s ability to recognise patterns in enormous databases is amazing, truly needle in a haystack kind of work a human simply can’t do. Ashley Taylor from Flight Centre shared an example using the new Qualtrics Assist feature where they were able to identify a customer issue, which surfaced through online comments that typically would be too hard for humans to scan through to identify. Over a year this world be a million dollar problem. They were able to make some simple changes and reduce the impact of the problem in the next month by 60%. Pretty amazing stuff.

2) AI helping mangers, manage better

Gen AI is also doing amazing things on employee experience side of the coin. In my chat with Steve Bennetts , Head of EX at Qualtrics we talked about how many people get thrust into management positions because it’s the logical next step, yet they don’t have the skills for it and often there is little training provided. Qualtrics have extended their AI offering into the EX side of the equation for organisations. Using all the data collected via employee surveys it can then provide insights to managers to better understand their employees and help them make better decisions. So basically it’s like a manager coach, which many managers could do with.

3) You need customer centric KPIs to drive real change

Many organisations are still struggling to fully move away from legacy product centric mindsets and ways of working. In order to truly drive customer centric change you need to change how people are rewarded. The celebration system needs to include the customer experience. Brad Anderson shared how the primary KPIs for his enormous engineering team is not delivery of product but high quality customer usage. Their entire metric celebration reward system centres on customer usage and that puts the customer at the centre. You have to change the reward system (KPIs) to drive customer centric behaviours. Many organisations are missing that point.

4) Improving CX starts with improving EX

Chatting with Bruce Temkin was a true pleasure, known as the Godfather of CX, because he founded the field. He said when he started defining the field of CX he always felt that it needed to start with the culture and employee experience. If you can’t connect employees to the vision and motivate them to work together to drive change for the customer then it’s really hard to improve customer experience. Many organisations are still skipping this step and heading to the shiny CX toys (new tech, innovation teams etc.) but really need to get the fundamentals right to drive real fundamental change.?

5) Compliant or committed to change?

The first thing Bruce said was “change is hard”. Many organisations fail because they try and force change, making employees comply with a new way of doing things. This never works simply because they’re not committed to it. So, once the heat is off they tend to go back to the old way of doing things. Getting commitment requires taking employees on a journey, helping them understand the big picture, why the change is necessary and what their role is in the change and how it will benefit them. It’s important because getting commitment lasts much longer than compliance.

6) How to approach KPIs in the CX Space

I couldn’t resist getting Bruce’s views on KPIs in the CX space as it’s such a polarising topic. Is NPS and CSAT good or bad is a common topic. Bruce said he both loves and hates KPI’s ultimately NPS has done great things for the CX field, it’s help galvanise teams and align executives. However, the problem is that when KPIs like NPS are used as the goal they become problematic because employees lose sight of the big picture and get to focussed on the numbers. They need to be more focussed on the business improvements and the indicators that drive NPS. Organisations shouldn’t solely focus on NPS.

7) Why driving emotional connections at scale is important

Brad Anderson raised an interesting point, in recent research conducted by Harvard they measured the lifetime value of a customer who was emotionally connected to a brand versus highly satisfied. It revealed that emotionally connected customers are 52% more profitable from a lifetime value perspective, compared to someone who's highly satisfied. So, as we move more to digital and automated experiences, the question organisations need to be asking themselves is how do you drive emotional connection at scale? AI is the only way.

8) Making customer testing real & visible is key to cultural shift

The question plaguing many CX leaders is, how do you shift the culture of an organisation to focus on the customer? In my chat with Steven I. former Chief Digital Officer at the Australian Digital Health Agency he shared how they built a customer experience centre where customers come into a realistic environment to test new products, innovations and experiences. It allowed them to get great insights from customers but more importantly it helped drive interest from the rest of the organisation and drive a significant shift in the culture of the organisation to be more focussed on the customer. Making your customers pain real and visible for execs to see is also key to unlocking more funding.?

9) Unstructured data is where the gold is

In the past, most insights have been obtained through structured forms of data via surveys, etc. AI is now changing the game enabling organisations to scan unstructured data in their social media pages, review sites, in web chat conversation threads etc to pull out insights. As Ashley Taylor from Flight Centre explained structured data helps give you a score and a metric that you can follow but it doesn’t really tell you what you need to change. Unstructured data is gold because scanning over real customer comments helps give context on why something is not going well, so you can solve it. The new AI features have helping them unlock this new capability.

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About me

I’ve spent the last 20 years working on digital transformation and CX projects all around the globe with brands like Samsung, Virgin, Lexus, eBay, Australian Air Force as well as being Head of Brand and Digital CX at a professional football team. If you would like to get in touch or have any questions:

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