The Journey of/to the Future - Powering the #HumanExperience #HX by Embedding #AI #ArtificialIntelligence Invisibly in #InfiniteJourneys

The Customer Journey of the Future

Caveat: I always refer to XM=CX+EX (+some other small Xs; but the two >90%) - but for this article I will just make reference to CX/Customer; just take it that they’re interchangeable as in both generates Experience Equity (ROX) - if you’re interested link here. The global Covid-19 pandemic changed the landscape of sales and customer service overnight.?

Caveat: I prefer to depict XM and XI (Experience Improvement) in journeys- these can be lifejourneys, service vs customer journeys and most recently the #InfiniteJourney spanning, phasing in/out of the phygital and metaverse (alternate realities) - that will be my next chapter, talking about the #metaxm #metacx & #InfiniteJourney. I have a strong POV that sales/marketing/service silos are constructs from the past - 1960s to be exact - at the peak of the Industrial Age where we saw factories sprouting up like mushrooms after the rain. Infact, 200+ years ago in Austria, factory schools were introduced to train future generations(children, our children) to be amenable, working in regulated order, to man all these machines/factories - the start of the 9 to 5 ratrace.?

As businesses were forced to adjust rapidly to a new reality, digital interactions almost completely replaced physical interactions; we called this the Low Touch Economy (which is I predict, an epoch long ‘segment’ at the very least of the Experience Economy).

Quite suddenly, for companies in Asia and around the world, contact centres became the dominant face of their customer experience. I also have strong opinions on what I call Experiential Debt - akin to Technical Debt - the problem e.g. bad design of product/services, lack of innovation resulting in not nailing a customer’s ‘jobs to be done’? ‘upstream’ is pushed downstream, placing too much emphasis on #custserv. Here I propose that in a Journey-led Organisation, everyone/’dept’/’silos’ are equidistant from the customer; instead of e.g. sales acquiring topline/revenue -> commissions, only to have the ‘bad experience’ ie. friction, lack of simplicity/ease in the product/service lifecycle? presumably blamed on #custserv. This ultimately leaves us, ie the org/brand/co with a ‘leaky bucket’ - another way of saying Experience Equity (ROX) is not created, but destroyed. Another (long) topic - but sales, service, marketing (just a subset of a co); they’re not even measured on the same thing! These old #orgdesign popularised in the 60s 70s and 80s did good sweating assets (humans) in a factory line - when it was more about efficiency, command and control - whole generations of leadership were trained on being #PresentForward - short term capitalism that stifled innovation and experience. Like I said, another (long, long..)story/chapter on that.

Let’s use #CustServ #cctr #ContactCenter as an example in this article: (1) it’s more ‘old school’, it’s phygital - and (2) it’s what most of us have dealt with before (inter-generational - boomers, gen X, Y, Z). I find myself saying ‘Ok Boomer’ as a retort to most polarising comments/pov on : #metaxm #metaverse #InfiniteJourneys #JournedLedOrg #Experience#Equity #DeFi #crypto #btc #altcoin (as a store of value in #metaverse) - I strongly believe this to be generational friction - alot of things have to change: present to (more) future thinking, short to longer termism, RONA (Return on Net Asssets - and going ‘asset light’ to ROX (Return on Experience(CX, EX)). Anyway I digress, but you can feel some of my angst :)?

Back to the contact center.?

For some, this was a source of relief; without the operational agility of an effective contact centre, they would have struggled to keep their customer services functioning efficiently. For many others, however, this exposed an uncomfortable truth.

Millions of customers experience this truth every day, in the form of endless self-service menus, repeated questions, robotic responses, misdirected calls and stonewalled feedback. Far too often, today’s contact centre is inward-looking, focusing on KPIs that bear little relation to customer satisfaction. The plain reality is that the majority of companies are not delivering on expectations.

And those expectations are growing.

Customers are becoming ever more informed and, rightly, ever less tolerant of bad experiences. A strategy consulting firm’s (starts with B) survey found that only 8% of customers described their experiences with companies as “superior”, while 69% switch brands because of poor experience. It costs a company six times more? to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one, and 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a good experience.?

Caveat: Shep’s brilliant “Always Amazing” analogy - getting from good to great = getting from sometimes -> constantly -> always amazing. What that means is the sum of experiences/interactions/transactions in all journeys (there are many, many, potentially infinite strains..) are approaching/approx. (+) or net accretive less all the (-) destructive Trust moments. Ok, another long, long article on the Science of Magical Experiences ->? a primer link here. These days it’s called fancy things like Customer Journey Orchestration, I called it Journey Science, whatever - the idea is to have vector vs scala directional measure if Purpose is being ‘monetised’ (yucks, cringe), is being translated into strategy/execution, and if it’s resulting in net positive/negative ROX. Positive ROX will become a leading indicator of a brand’s/company’s success - it’s what I call the dark matter in the (current, today) balance sheet. How else do we relate to the customer-centric P&L?? It’s definitely 100% lip service to say ‘we are customer obsessed..(replace with corporate vision & mission spiel here) - but where rubber meets road = ROX.?

Clearly, there’s a gulf in logic in the way companies are approaching customer interaction. This is now a serious business risk, because lackluster service will no longer fly in a world where customer experience is the biggest differentiator. Businesses that can build experiences to match these expectations will be the ones that retain and win customers.

A Phygital->Meta MetaPhygital Future - We are all Alices falling into the Rabbit Hole (#Metaverse)

So, what will that future look like, and what must companies do to successfully shape the customer journey?

One thing is particularly clear: the future is digital. Data, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly be used to forecast, design and mould the customer experience. Customers will expect that experience to be consistent, regardless of the channel through which they engage the company: online, voice, or face-to-face.

Caveat: I believe the future is meta. It’s hard for most to accept, believe, fathom. But it’s inevitable - think FutureBack. InfiniteJourneys r like wormholes between phygital <> meta. We are in alternate realities, simultaneously, common laws/physics of XM and XI no longer holds. Consider buying a loaf of bread - walking to the store, going to the online store, and ‘teleporting to a patisserie in the metaverse. Consider how the exchange of value/experience happens in each. There’s no #endgame without #DeFi #NFTs in #metaxm #metacx, there are no realities in 2041 without this eventuating. Hence I thought of a term: #InfiniteJourneys. They’re circular, phasing in/out between worlds, intertwined and ultra individualised (no longer even hyper-personalised). I often relate it this way - ‘time moves differently in the meta - how ROX is generated between worlds will fluctuate vastly/violently. Some may choose to live out their lives/immortalities in the meta.

While too many customers today find themselves starting from scratch when dealing with different channels of the same business, technology will be able to knit that journey together into one seamless experience.

Caveat: the experience is channel, omni, agnostic. There may be preference (inbound) vs authenticity, but make no mistake - the journey is agnostic and assumes parity of channels (actually it’s not even a consideration in the #metaverse) as a prereq.?

“The infusion of #ArtificialIntelligence? - actually i prefer how it’s EMBEDDED as INVISIBLY as possible - INTERWOVEN - into the customer journey will mean organisations will always be one-step ahead of the customer. This really is greek geek speak for getting us from predictive to preemptive experiences. Yes, like precog. Yes, like ‘delighting customers bcos they themselves aren’t even aware yet what they want/desire. Using AI to track and predict sentiment will allow companies to proactively solve problems before the customer even realises there is a problem

?Actually, side note and shoutout to Kaifu Lee for depicting this utopian/dystopian future in 2041 - I implore you to read all his 10 wonderfully written? stories in #AI2041 link here - it’s mind blowing! Probably one of the best reads (to me) of the decade - he topped his prev work AI Superpowers, which I thought was fantastic to begin with.?

Asia is well-placed to ride this transformational wave. Firstly, the contact centre business is rapidly expanding. The industry grew 8.4% in 2019? – outpacing other regions of the world – and employed 6 million people, compared with 3.7 million in 2012. Another Bain study found that companies in Asia have the world’s highest adoption rate for customer experience tools .

Implementing a customer-first culture is not straightforward, however. Many companies don’t have a good understanding of what drives their customers’ experiences, partly because they suffer from disjointed or missing data. Add to that the persistent problem of organisational silos, and you have a recipe for a company destined to frustrate and drive away customers.

According to Forrester, nearly 40% of companies that are focused on customer experience cite a lack of cooperation across their organisation as a key challenge.

First Steps

Listening empathetically enables the company to measure its customer journey experiences across all channels and touchpoints. Analysing helps break down silos, encourage employees to take ownership of the customer journey, and drive greater accountability.

IDC, a global provider of market intelligence and advisory services, predicts that by 2025, “AI-powered” enterprises will be able to achieve Net Promoter Scores 1.5 times higher than those of their competitors.

Quite simply, the more a business spends on customer happiness, the more money (actually - experience equity) it makes. Be clear, short term (cash is trash, cheap capital) is detrimental to the long-term/future (ROX).?

Optimise Your Customer Journey Orchestration With AI

Insights to action. Mapping to orchestration. We can map/understand all we want. but until we take ACTION, nothing comes out of it. This section describes 'earlier' use cases for AI adoption to supercharge CX - as such distinct references to sales, service and marketing still persist . To ensure we deliver exceptional experiences, we leverage marketing automation powered by artificial intelligence powered by customer journey orchestration, making it quicker, simpler, and more reliable. Here is how.

1. Make data-driven decisions?

A traditional marketing approach requires a certain amount of guesswork: you are relying on humans to decide when to send out the campaign, what conditions to set, how much time to wait for the conditions, and so on. A data-driven approach takes the guesswork out of the equation. AI is able to suggest the optimum customer journey settings with decisions based on hard data, rather than intuition.

Think about when you spend your own money. You do research, read reviews by both experts and other users, consult friends and family and so on before making a purchase. You do not just take a guess on whether a product is worth buying. So why rely on guesswork when spending your company’s marketing budget?

2. Understand customer intent and pain points

Leveraging deep learning can help you analyze customer behavior at every step of the customer journey, giving you a better understanding of customers’ intents and pain points. And you can do this in real time, analyzing billions of customer data points across multiple owned and third-party channels. This data will help you identify patterns signifying preferences and the likelihood of conversion, by evaluating the recency and frequency of certain online customer activities. It will give you a true understanding of your customers’ habits, leaving you better positioned to address their needs and solve their pain points at every step of their journey.

3. Create a seamless customer experience?

To create a seamless omnichannel experience, you need to know a customer’s preferred channels for different actions, such as using a tablet for searching and a mobile phone for purchasing, in order to best serve them at that particular stage. With all channels working together fluidly as part of a customer-centric approach, you will be able to deliver personalized content or service exactly where they are and where they need, whether they are converting, onboarding, renewing, or at another stage.

4. Personalise your marketing and product recommendations

By leveraging first- and third-party data, AI can help you better understand customer behavior and interests during the customer journey, and tailor your marketing messages or product recommendations to create bespoke content on an individual level, hence more likely to result in a higher level of engagement.

5. Optimise the best timings for engagement (contextualising 'customer time')

If a customer places an item in their online shopping cart but does not complete checkout, it is common practice to send them a friendly reminder. The question is, how long do you wait before sending it? Too short will turn off the customer, but too long will be a wasted opportunity. Instead of a human guessing how long to allow, AI can predict the optimum time by analyzing historical behavioral data.

Engaging with your customers in real time like this will increase the effectiveness of your promotions and boost conversions by only targeting those customers most likely to convert.

6. Test and improve

Today’s customer behavior is constantly evolving. You need to continually test and improve your journey mapping in order to adapt to those shifts promptly. The beauty of AI models is that they are constantly learning and refining to become more accurate as you feed them more data. It means your customer journey mapping will become an ever more reliable resource for improving the customer experience.

Every business should aim to create great customer experiences. It is only by gaining a deep understanding of who your customers are and what they want, as well as how they currently engage with your company and how that process can be improved, that you can hope to transform their online experience for the better.

Rehumanising The Digital Customer Experience

Today's advanced AI technologies are increasingly becoming capable of offering empathy. Thanks to advanced machine learning and natural language processing, they're able to detect keywords and a customer's current mood and respond accordingly. In other words, they're capable of bidirectional human-like communications that pinpoint a customer's exact needs and decision-making drivers.

With Gartner, Inc. predicting that customers will soon manage most of their relationships with companies without human intervention, many orgs are already leveraging AI technologies to cut response times and deliver the high-quality personalized customer experiences today's consumers demand.

With AI technologies now able to sustain humanized two-way conversations in exactly the same way as real customer service agents, delivering real-time one-to-one support that customers can access 24/7 isn't a pipe dream; it's already an achievable reality.

However, the human aspect of AI — or the "humanoid" touch — is far broader than delivering a great experience for customers. Introducing AI into the workplace will also require the sensitive upskilling and retraining of employees to ensure they can work confidently in collaboration with these technologies. As processes are automated, jobs will evolve — and customer-facing AI operations will need to be transparently managed, both from an employee standpoint and to ensure customers aren't surprised at encountering conversational AI assistants in digital channels.

Giving customers a choice of options has long been the key to building their trust and confidence that you have their best interests in mind. With AI delivering customer experiences with a human touch, the role of human agents is more important than ever.

Let’s stretch our thinking beyond #XM and #XI in the next section - and think #AI. Specifically AI in 2041 (as Kaifu has teased us with).?

Safer, more efficient transport

AI will also make people’s lives better on the road, where autonomous vehicles will bring about a transportation revolution. On-demand cars that take you to your destination with lower cost, greater convenience and better safety. Autonomous cars will become the safest drivers on the road, eventually reducing 90% of traffic fatalities.?

The average American drives eight and a half hours per week, so in the future that is time that can be used productively in transit. Future ride-sharing autonomous vehicles will be redesigned as minicars, since we tend to ride in cars with just one or two people. But even a single-person car may be equipped with a reclining seat, a refrigerator with drinks and snacks, and a large screen.?

Autonomous vehicles will be part of a full smart-city infrastructure designed to host autonomous vehicles as part of an interconnected transport system. As automation rates increase, cars will be able to communicate with one another instantly, accurately, and effortlessly. For example, a car with a blown tire can tell nearby cars to stay away. In addition, consider a car passing another can communicate its movement path precisely to nearby cars, so two cars can be two inches away, yet with no risk of collision. Or, if a passenger is in a hurry, their car can offer an incentive (say five cents) to other cars for slowing down and giving the right-of-way. These improvements will create an infrastructure of mostly AI drivers, eventually.

Rethinking the ways we work?

Let’s start with the idea of work. In twenty years, nearly all data will become digitized, making it possible to use AI for decision-making and optimization. AI and automation will replace most blue-collar work and “make” products for minimal marginal cost. Robots and AI will take over the manufacturing, delivery, design and marketing of most goods. AI service robots will do almost all household chores for us. These robots will become self-replicating, self-repairing, and even partially self-designing. Houses and apartment buildings will be designed by AI and use prefabricated modules that are put together like Lego blocks by robots, thus dramatically reducing housing costs. On a smaller scale, 3D printers will make sophisticated or customized goods (like dentures and prosthetics) to be produced for minimal cost. For all of these applications, AI will work 24/7, won’t get sick, won’t complain, and won’t need to be paid. As a result, AI will reduce the cost of most manufactured goods to a small increment over the cost of materials.

But it won’t just be blue collar manufacturing jobs at risk. AI will also provide, assist or replace many white-collar jobs, doing the work of capable assistants, but with infinite knowledge. AI can help assist research analysts, lawyers, and journalists by scouring every piece of data in the world, compiling this data, giving time back to professional workers to think about more strategic and complex issues. While professional jobs are amplified by AI, routine white-collar jobs like telemarketing, entry-level accounting, or “paper pushing” will be displaced by AI. These technologies will start as assistants but take over all routine jobs completely over time. Within a corporation, AI will gradually displace entry-level routine jobs throughout each department.?

All this implies a massive change to the way we work and it will be necessary to put in place measures to counteract the job losses. Retraining the workforce, rethinking how entry-level jobs work and taking advantage of the countless new jobs created by the merging of AI optimisation and the human touch will all be required. It will be a huge shift, but, I believe, a positive one.

Revolutionizing healthcare

At the same time AI is upending the workforce, it will also be improving our lives in meaningful ways—including by making us healthier. Right now, healthcare is being digitized, with everything from data from patient records, to radiology, wearable computing, and multi-omics moving online. This creates an opportunity for AI to redefine healthcare as a data-driven industry, revolutionizing the entire healthcare value chain from diagnosis and treatment to also health alerts, monitoring, and long-term care.?

This revolution will start with radiology, pathology and drug discovery. For the latter in particular, AI will help human scientists invent many drugs at much lower costs, thereby finding cures for rare diseases. AI will empower the field of “precision medicine,” an area of applied science that tailors individualized treatments for a given patient, instead of treating with blockbuster, one-size-fits-all drugs.?

As more digital information for each patient becomes available—including medical history, family history and DNA sequencing—precision medicine will become increasingly feasible. AI is ideally suited to deliver this kind of individualized optimization. Diagnostic AI for general practitioners will emerge later, one disease at a time, gradually covering all diagnoses. Because human lives are at stake, AI will first serve as one tool at doctors’ disposal, or will be deployed only in situations where a human doctor is unavailable.

Enhancing the education experience?

So far, we’ve mostly talked about the impact AI will have on adults. But kids will feel the effects, too. AI will become our children’s most effective teachers, grading exams and answering common questions with greater precision and patience than human teachers. Unlike human teachers who have to consider the whole class, a virtual teacher can pay special attention to each student.?

An AI teacher will notice what makes a student’s pupils dilate or eyelids droop. It will deduce a way to teach geometry to make one student learn faster, even though that method may fail on a thousand other students. AI will give each student different exercises, based on his or her pace, ensuring a given student achieves a full mastery of a topic before moving to the next. With ever-more data, AI will make learning much more effective, engaging, and fun.

In this AI-infused learning, teachers will be human mentors and connectors for the students. Human teachers will be the driving force behind stimulating the students’ critical thinking, creativity, empathy and teamwork. And the teacher will be a clarifier when a student is confused, a confronter when the student is complacent, and a comforter when the student is frustrated: roles AI cannot play.

Augmenting our home lives?

When we leave school and work, AI will be waiting for us at home—opening up new worlds of immersive entertainment and delivering a virtual experience indistinguishable from the real world. Combined with technologies like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR), the boundaries between real life, remote communications, games, and movies will blur. By 2041, we will be able to teach children science by having them interact with virtual Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, and use VR to design specialized treatment for psychiatric problems, such as PTSD. AI will make great toys and companions—in VR they will be fully photo-realistic, and as robots they will become increasingly realistic. AI won’t, however, be able to truly love us back.

Some longer-term, futureback thoughts..I couldn’t resist (as it’s a much larger, pressing topic). AI in 2041 will truly transform our lives, through and through. It’s not IF, it’s WHEN. I believe Humanity & AI will be force to be reckoned with, throughout the multiverses, galaxies, and the Universe.?