CX Pulse Check - February 2024

Jeannie Walters: 0:09

Hello, hello. It is another episode of Experience Action Podcast and this is my favorite time of the month the CX Pulse Check when we check in with customer experience stories that are happening in real time and we bring in special co-hosts to discuss these topics with us. Today, I'm so thrilled to have with us Maria Villablanca, CEO of the Future Insights Network. Maria, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me here. I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to this conversation. I know we're going to have fun, but before we get started and dive into the topics that we selected today, I would love for you to share a little bit about what you do in the world and your background.

Maria Villablanca: 0:54

Thanks, so much. So my the thing I love talking about is supply chain transformation. The Future Insights Network is a network of over 130,000 senior supply chain leaders worldwide that get together to try to find ways to transform themselves to deal with the world today. And, so I have a podcast, I travel the world, I speak to a lot of people, and effectively talking about supply chain transformation is what makes me happy.

Jeannie Walters: 1:25

That's fantastic. Thank you so much, and I think today I would love your perspective on that, because one of the things that I think I don't know if it was the pandemic or just that time I believe that the connection between supply chain management and customer experience, like all the barriers, had to come down during that time, and now we realize the influence that everything has, and I know that the customer experience leaders that I talked to really have worked at creating relationships with their supply chain leaders, understanding the whole supply chain lifecycle and the expectations and everything else. So I think we're going to have fun today. So the first topic that we're going to talk about the headline, and this is from CNBC, is "Machine.

Jeannie Walters: 2:12

Customers Are Already Among Us And They Number In The Billions," and this really caught my eye because when we talk about AI and customer experience, so much of that we're talking about on the organizational side. We're talking about AI, bots and all the different ways that AI can help with customer analytics and things like that. But this is really about, you know what, we're going to start having "customers quote unquote that are driven by AI, and in some ways, this is already happening, and the more that I read into this. I thought this might be really nice for customers, right? Like? I don't want to sit on the phone and wait, I don't want to have to call back a zillion times. What are some of the ways that you think this could impact customer experience moving forward?

Maria Villablanca: 3:02

I think this is a really interesting topic because of the fact that AI we talk about it from an enterprise level. That's what you've been saying. We're talking about gen AI and how that's going to impact businesses. But as individuals, as humans, we are also utilizing this to make our lives easier, and if AI can enable us to not sit on the phone or not waste time, then of course, we're going to take advantage of it. I use chat GPT and, by the way, I want to say something else. It isn't just something for Gen Z or for Gen Alpha or for Millennials. I'm a Gen Xer and I use chat GPT. I chat with chat bots. I find the quickest way to try to resolve my problem. So I think that this is going to be something that is going to fundamentally change the customer experience, how we see things, and I think that companies need to be really in tune with what's out there and the expectations that customers have to fast-tracking the things that they want to get done.

Jeannie Walters: 4:07

Yep, and I think you hit on a really important point there, because one of the things that we see with customer expectations over and over again is that they keep getting more demanding when it comes to time and convenience. We want things on our terms as customers, and I think that over the last several years what we've been seeing is that a lot of our clients now are from the business to business space, they're from manufacturing, they're from less traditional kind of customer focused organizations. Because they're catching up, they're starting to realize you know what people have choice. There is so much less of the pain of switching.

Jeannie Walters: 4:46

It used to be remember switching a bank and how painful it used to be. Right? Like well, I already have my box of checks, so I have to get through my box of checks before they can, before I can leave this situation that I don't like as a customer. That all has just gotten more and more minimal to customers.

Jeannie Walters: 5:06

I think one of the things that really struck me about this was if we had, think about just you know the, the little touch points in our daily life I'm always talking to my smart, smart speakers, right, I'm talking into my watch to set timers and whatever, and think about that in like five years and how we will just have things that kind of know our patterns and so our machines will be able to do things for us in ways that we can't even see right now. And what struck me about this as a customer experience person is we have to start thinking about customer journeys differently, because even though these machines are there, they're still serving somebody, some individual person. So, like, how do we weave all of this together? I think it's a big opportunity, but right now it can feel like a challenge.

Maria Villablanca: 6:00

Jeannie, I think it's important to realize that this isn't just five years from now. I mean my there's a term I use quite a lot, "We've been Amazon-ed. That's the reality. We've been Amazon-ed and that that has led us to position where we expect things even before we know we want things. And that's what say wearable devices do, and assistants like Amazon Lex or Google Dot or all of these things Google Echo, I mean all of these things.

Maria Villablanca: 6:25

What they do is that they will order things for you before you even know you need it, because they know you need it because it's speaking to your fridge and your fridge tells them that there's no milk, and so that means that these customers are not you per se, they're people serving you, and so I think that this is stuff that's happening. It's not stuff of science fiction, stuff of science fact today. Yeah. And, that's just going to continue to get bigger and better as we have more wearable technology, as we have more interaction points with electronic and AI devices.

Jeannie Walters: 6:58

Mm-hmm, I think you're totally right and way back when we used to talk about and we still do like humans are not always logical right, like we rely on emotions to make decisions more than logic and our friends can predict our behavior better than we can. And when I was reading into this, one of the things that struck me was exactly what you're talking about. These machines are going to be able to predict kind of our needs, our behaviors. Our rationalities.

Jeannie Walters: 7:29

Yeah, exactly, exactly, and it's like what will that mean and what are the control factors that we need to also allow for people to feel empowered by this and not kind of overrun by this, and that that whole data privacy part is really important and all of that. And I think that when we're talking about these things, it's very easy to stay in that level of like this is so cool and we're all get, we're gonna have things delivered before we even know. That data privacy thing, I think you know customers are becoming more and more savvy about that. They want more control, and I think we're going to have to develop ways to really be transparent about that and help people feel empowered so that they know that they're still they're still the one in charge, even if the machines are filling their fridge.

Maria Villablanca: 8:35

I mean, the toilet paper fiasco was a very important one that it had an impact on supply chains. Who would have predicted that during COVID, toilet paper was going to be the one thing that people were going to be hoarding? And yet, here we are.

Jeannie Walters: 8:48

Very interesting. I know it's really funny to think back on some of those moments now that we're, you know, somewhat on the other side and think about all the things we used to kind of I and I think you know what that reminded me of was there. There are moments in your life where you don't have control over certain things, so you try to have control over other things, and that's what that felt like to me, like so many people felt like we were out of control. We didn't know what was going to happen. We had never been through something like this, most of us, and to really have control over well, I, I know I'm going to have toilet paper you can take away a lot, but I have that. 100%. Well, and the flip side of this, right, when the other thing that we want to talk about today is an article out of the Economist I'll pull it over here and this is the let it's called "the last stand of the call center worker.

Jeannie Walters: 9:47

And you know, in the industry right now, in customer experience we are, there's a lot of hand-wringing over this.

Jeannie Walters: 9:55

There's a lot of anxiety over the idea that and the subtitle here is "AI is poised to eliminate customer service agents. We'll miss them when they're gone," and I really feel like part of, part of this article was not just making the case about there are certain things humans can do that we will miss when we don't have that. But the flip side of that is customer service agents, call center agents those are jobs that are available to people who might not have other options in certain parts of the world, in certain parts of the country, and so you know, this is kind of like what do we do with all those workers? What can we do to help people figure out what their next step is, if AI is going to take on so much of this work? And I think it's a really important question that maybe we're not asking enough. So I'm curious about your perspective here, because you again, you're coming from that supply chain and that a little more back end. So what are you seeing here?

Maria Villablanca: 11:00

Look, I've got mixed feelings about this one, because, from a process perspective or efficiency perspective, anything that improves customer service is a good thing, right, irrespective of who does it. If we find that the machines are more able to, or quickly able to, discern facts or crunch through information, connect the dots, as it were, mimic to some degree some of the better behaviors that we have, you know, if that all leads to better customer service, then it's a win. That's a win for the company, it's a win for the customer, it's a win for efficiency, it's a win for connectedness as well, right? So, where you can have again looking at it from a back end perspective, if AI is dealing with this and that's data that's being pulled back into the business, pulled into, you know, better decision making. So from that perspective, I think it could be a big win, right. But then there's the big moral dilemma. Like you say, a lot of customer service roles are taken by a lot of people that maybe don't have other options, people that need to work from home, people that are perhaps from diverse backgrounds, from you know, different types of scenarios that they have, that that lead them to these positions. What are we going to do with them? And here's why because, unlike other revolutions whether they are industrial revolutions that take over take a period of decades to really take change into effect. This is going to happen over a very short period of time, so re-skilling is difficult to do in a year, you know, for such a huge number of people in the workforce. So I think that there's a lot of questions that aren't being asked about.

Maria Villablanca: 12:46

Okay, AI and I'm a big proponent of AI because it enhances people's work it means that it frees me up and frees my team up to do things that really they love and adds value. Right, but what about the people that are replaced? You know we keep hearing about? Well, AI is not going to come to take your jobs. Don't be a fear monger, but the reality is it is taking some jobs. That is a reality. We're seeing that across tech at the moment. Right, with a lot of jobs being made redundant because board level, C level, decision making people have a responsibility to create profitable businesses, and if AI creates that efficiency that allows for us to have fewer people, then of course they're going to take advantage of it. So what do we do? What do we do with that? What do we do with all, with re-skilling people.

Maria Villablanca: 13:36

Fortunately, I know that there's a lot of endeavors to re-skill and retrain people, but equally, I also remain hopeful. I remain hopeful that humanity always finds a way to innovate, to evolve, to reinvent itself. So if you look back to the last Industrial Revolution or look back to our own ancestors, your great-grandparents, my great-grandparents, their parents, they probably mostly had jobs in manufacturing or in farming, right. But yet think of the jobs that exist today that didn't exist 100 years ago. Manicurist, social media expert, influencer, podcaster. There were a lot of jobs that didn't exist in any way, shape or form. A lot of jobs that existed then that don't exist today. And I think humanity has found a way to fill those gaps and create jobs, create demand and things. So who knows what these people will have an opportunity to do? Maybe they will create a new fantastic job in something completely different.

Jeannie Walters: 14:40

Yeah, I love this optimism and you know, what you're making me think of is kind of the sometimes the thing that happens with cities, right, when they're kind of reborn, when the main industry goes away or they run into trouble and you know it just doesn't work the way it always had and there's usually a dip and then they come back and they come back as something else. They come back. I mean, we didn't have Silicon Valley, right, we didn't know what that was. That wasn't a place for a really long time. It earned that name because that's what became of that location.

Jeannie Walters: 15:19

I look at what's happening in Detroit, Michigan, right now. They're having, you know, kind of a rebirth, an evolution, because they had to figure it out, and there are so many examples like that where you know it might have been textiles at one point, or steel mills or all these things that maybe we don't have as many of, and so we kind of adapt and I always say, like, humans are amazing, they really are. They figure things out, they solve problems before they even happen sometimes. So I agree with you on this. I also think that one of the things that we're just starting to see a little bit is that AI can go wrong. Right Like, AI doesn't have all the answers.

Maria Villablanca: 16:07

Did you, sorry interrupting, did you see recently chat GPT started speaking in Spanglish?

Jeannie Walters: 16:11

Yes, Just out of the blue. Yes, exactly, it started going and it was quoting Shakespeare incorrectly. It was doing all sorts of things, and that's because, you know, the machines are only as good as the input that they learn from, and so we need people who understand these very human situations and understand how to actually prompt the right things and train the machines. So I think there's opportunity there as well. There aren't as many opportunities granted, so some jobs will simply be replaced, but I agree with you that there's something here that we're at the cusp of, and I think we're going to see that. As we move into this now,

Jeannie Walters: 16:59

I think there's so much enthusiasm and excitement about AI, and when I talk to different customer experience leaders, one of the things I ask them is like, have you organized and kind of taken inventory over all those mundane, repeatable questions that you get? Because AI is perfect for that. But you know, when it comes to nuance, we still need humans, and if somebody is calling in crisis because they can't you know, they're locked out of their bank account or something like that, we might just need to have dedicated people just to have empathy with them, just to really be there. There's data coming out now saying that sometimes AI actually shows more empathy in certain circumstances, because empathy is a finite resource. So if you are being, you know, tackled with customer complaints all day, you might not have as much empathy at the end of the day as you did in the beginning. But I think that there are certain circumstances that we still need to reserve for highly trained, empathetic people who can be there and show compassion and understanding for the customer.

Maria Villablanca: 18:12

100% I mean we, when things are tough, we want to know that people get us, that people understand that I'm upset about something and you know, as a customer, I'm calling you because I've got this issue and it's bothering me and it's upsetting me and, as a human, you know that well, maybe you're talking to a young mom who's got three yelling kids in the background and you can empathize with that because we've all been there and you can say look, okay, let me solve this for you. And a machine might not be able to do that. Right, that's right. But but at the same time, you've got to also think about the fact that humanity is resourceful, right, and so AI is based on data, data that has existed, right, so it had to exist to create the output, right. So what I mean by that is AI only knows what exists, and what humans are really good at is knowing things, creating things out of nothing, out of scenarios that have never occurred.

Maria Villablanca: 19:13

Data AI works on scenarios that have occurred or maybe could occur, based on data that it's familiar with, whereas, you know, you could see all of a sudden again, I'm going to use an example you know, you could see your kid climbing up on top of the fridge to go get that cookie, because you know, you know, you know that somehow that's something that was never expected. An AI program could never have written the fact that a two year old or three year old is climbing on top of the fridge, but you know what to do in those situations. AI wouldn't know what to do because it doesn't have the data in the back to tell you what to do. That's an example I always use of the limitations for the moment of AI that it only knows how to work with data from existing scenarios. Right?

Maria Villablanca: 19:58

Humans though, humans though, we could see I don't know some sort of hugely weird thing happen and you know how to deal with it, or at least you improvise and you are resourceful enough. But humans will always need to be able to be there for those moments that AI can't predict, that AI can't fathom, probably is the better word. So it's a question of empathy, resourcefulness and a question of being able to use that wonderful brain power that still exists in most of us, right, to be able to deliver better value for everyone around us. But again, going back to your point of, you know, the general worker in customer service that may be out of a job today or tomorrow or in a couple of years time, I think it's going to be about re-skilling, it's going to be about thinking about what is possible. You know, we saw that during the pandemic as well. There's been a lot of migration from jobs, from some jobs to other jobs, you know. And again going back to jobs that didn't exist, the job Prompt Engineer didn't exist a year ago, that's right.

Maria Villablanca: 21:07

But yet today, they're highly paid people. People are Prompt Engineers, and so I remain again hopeful that humanity will always be resourceful enough to find a way to do well, to thrive.

Jeannie Walters: 21:22

Yep, I'm with you on that one. All right, this last topic this is a little bit of a doozy, a little bit of a left turn, because, you know, I struggled with even putting a spotlight on this because the person involved has said some absolutely atrocious things. We're not a fan, but what is interesting is what has happened with, with the brand. I guess that's the best way to say it. And, we are talking about Kanye West, and Kanye West had a Super Bowl ad in, a couple of weeks ago. He shot it on his iPhone. It was a very low quality production value and spent $7 million on the spot and then decided that or and then reported out that that sparked $19 million in sales of Yeezy, his brand of clothing and shoes.

Jeannie Walters: 22:29

What really struck me was that one of the things that he did during this time, one of the things that the brand did, was they made a whole slew of products $20. Everything was $20. So when people saw the ad and went to the site, they selected things based on kind of what they really wanted. He also set expectations that everything was going to take four weeks for delivery at least four weeks. What I saw in that was that he probably is getting really rich data about what products are spiking demand, because everything else is equal with that $20 cost. By setting expectations for a four week turnaround there was no inventory, so now they're producing as they get the sales and they don't have that outlay or risk of too much inventory.

Jeannie Walters: 23:30

So it's a really interesting case study in kind of unexpected innovation. Unexpected innovation about the low quality ad that you paid $7 million to show the world, the $20 for things that are usually much, much pricier(So So bringing that price point down),. and then the supply chain aspect of this of figuring out okay, we don't want a warehouse full of stuff that maybe doesn't have the demand. We're gonna figure out what the demand is. So I'll be watching this a little bit in the coming months, because I think number one, "Will they deliver is a big question. There's a lot of trust here that people are providing and I'm not sure that has been legitimately earned yet. The second part of this is will other organizations kind of experiment with this and figure out what will have the most demand with like a short window of time, so that then they know what to produce? So what are your thoughts on this? It's such an interesting, bizarre case study, right.

Maria Villablanca: 24:42

It's a fascinating case study and it's a good selection to talk about this, because and there's a lot to unpack here I'm with you. I'm not a Kanye fan. I've not been a Kanye fan, I don't like him, so. But let's separate the person from the case study, right? Which is why you're doing this, and I think it's a very important thing to do. There's something to unpack here in terms of disruptive thinking.

Maria Villablanca: 25:07

Number one the idea to just go against the grain and just completely, there's no other word for it, disrupt the way that normal things are done. You have to imagine how much production, money and time goes into the Super Bowl ads. I mean, you know, I've been watching Super Bowl ads forever, right? And you look forward to the Super Bowl ads, right? So imagine that the investment, the money, the time, the effort that goes into producing a Super Bowl ad. So to actually take that thinking in other words, people must have looked at it and said what are you insane? So to do that is to disrupt the thinking and taking a big gamble and a big chance.

Maria Villablanca: 25:51

Now the second thing is whether it's paid off. We're yet to see. You know it's paid off from a sales perspective. It's paid off from, according to his reporting, from the revenue perspective. But let's see, as you say, if it's delivered. Let's fast forward to and hope that it does, for the case of, say that, arguing this business case. If it does deliver, then it's a game changer. It's a game changer from a marketing perspective, it's a game changer from a messaging and branding perspective, from a sales, inventory management, demand management, forecasting, pricing perspective. I mean, he might have done the analytics here to figure out okay, I might sell this at 20 bucks, but at the same time, from a production perspective or inventory management perspective, I'm lowering my costs here. So it all equals out. So you know, I think it's could be a genius move from a business perspective, from a sales perspective, marketing.

Maria Villablanca: 26:47

There's also another element which is, I think, this sort of in this world of, I don't know, so much hype right, having someone who's genuinely putting themselves out there in a low budget but genuine way to say I'm just selling shoes, I'm just selling, this is what I wear, this is what it is, and I can shoot this on the iPhone because I think what's more important is you. You're more important than the production value. That's a lesson there as well in customer service. That's a very big lesson. That's interesting. Again, we have yet to see if it's going to pay off, but if it does, I think it will completely upend the notion of supply chain, demand, forecasting, supply, how we handle supply and demand. It's a complete game changer and it's novel, very novel, if it pays off.

Jeannie Walters: 27:38

It is, I agree. I think it's interesting that you talked about it's not about me, it's about you, the customer, because I can't think of a person who maybe is more self-absorbed. It's interesting that, by experimenting this way, that might be one of the things that people learn from that. It also a couple months or years ago, it was probably just a couple months ago. One of the things that they're starting to experiment with in real estate is actually 3D printing of houses and to solve some of the housing crises and different things for climate control and things like that.

Jeannie Walters: 28:21

One of the things I read about that they were saying part of it is we can know exactly what supplies, what we need to do. We have four lots. We say who wants them? If you want us to print your house, here's how much it is. It's all very straightforward, but they don't actually build it, they don't invest in the house until they get the demand for it. I think that there's something happening overall there that customers are starting to really just feel like they want more customization and more personalization. In some ways, some of this might lead to that as well, by saying, okay, you can order it and you can customize things, because we're not going to actually have that inventory in the warehouse or we're not going to build the house and hope to sell it. There's something overall there that I think leaders should be paying attention to as well.

Maria Villablanca: 29:15

What it is. Again, I hate to keep using the term disruption, but one of the things I'm seeing is the upending or I don't know how you want to call it of business models, when this is, and maybe historians or economists or social economists will talk about this in 20 years' time. I can't tell you when it was, but we will have been seeing for a while now a trends towards, like you say, personalization, trends towards direct to consumer. For instance, I'm seeing manufacturers that traditionally had nothing to do with the consumer go direct to a consumer. You could buy, for example, paint. You used to need to go to the hardware store to do that. Now you can buy it directly from the manufacturer of the paint.

Maria Villablanca: 29:57

These business models are completely changing. The norms and the standards of economy are changing. There's different behaviors, whether it's a generational thing, whether it's an economic thing. There's just so many different pressure points in business right now that are causing traditional business models to rethink how they work. We're at this turning point, I think, with the influx of technology, with the changing pace of consumer behavior, changing pace of technological advancement, All of those things are coming together into one big pressure cooker, which means that business leaders that are disruptive and maybe take a big gamble, like Kanye did here, could get a huge payoff for thinking differently. I talk about this quite a lot as well in terms of leadership. Those leaders that are able to question themselves and the learning that they've had, maybe even unlearn some of the things that we learned back at business school that might be counterintuitive could also be in for a good payout for taking that risk. I think all of this is just a perfect example of our times that sometimes disruption pays off really, really well.

Jeannie Walters: 31:16

I love it. I hope everybody who's listening thinks of themselves as a disruptor, because one of the things I talk about with customer experience is that the ultimate goal is experiential innovation, because that's what wins today.

Jeannie Walters: 31:33

That's what puts somebody ahead of the pack. If we're not focused on innovation, then we're missing opportunities to really get ahead, to provide something that's never been provided before, to meet customers where they are all of those things. Maria, we could seriously talk all day. Thank you so much for being here and for sharing your wisdom. For those of you who don't already, I totally recommend follow Maria on LinkedIn, Maria Villablanca. You produce great bits of content. You share a lot about your own journey. It's fabulous what you do there. I hope everybody takes advantage of that. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Oh, my goodness, my pleasure. Thank you for going down these very different rabbit holes that we went down today, but they're all important. For everybody listening and watching. Thank you for being part of our Experience Action community. I cannot wait to answer your next question. Don't forget you can leave me a voicemail at askjeannie. vip. Until next time. Thanks for being here and I'll see you next time.