Jeannie Walters: 0:10

Welcome to my favorite episode of the month, CX Pulse Check, where I talk to a smart co-host who helps me break down some of the top CX stories of the last month or so. Now, I am so excited about this because my special co-host, who you should be excited about too, is none other than our friend Sid Banerjee from Medallia, Chief Strategy Officer. Sid, we're so happy you're here with us today.

Sid Banerjee: 0:36

Thank you, Jeannie. It's great to be here. Always a pleasure to chat with you.

Jeannie Walters: 0:40

Thank you. Well, first of all, if people somehow don't know exactly who you are and what you've done, can you share a little bit more about where you fit in this world of CX?

Sid Banerjee: 0:51

Sure. Well, I've been a long-term, long time, I guess, CX practitioner. Um, currently serving as the chief strategy officer here at Medallia, but um, over about a 20-year career, I've started CX companies, built them, grown them, sold them, uh, really done a whole bunch of things, uh, primarily in the technology space, building software that helps people improve customer experiences.

Jeannie Walters: 1:13

Excellent. Well, I'm excited about this conversation because when we talk offline, we always have a great time. So I figured it was it was a good idea to share with everybody here. And you're in such an interesting space because there's so much going on around just how we listen to customers, how we tap into really what they want and think, even when they don't tell us that. And then we're also in this world of AI and how much we can do, how we can be more proactive in those customer journeys. And so one of the first things I wanted to uh explore with you today was one of the headlines that I saw off of this is off of CIO Dive. And the headline is banks accelerate AI deployments as agentic tools gain traction. And what stood out to me about this is if you dive into the article, what is really interesting is that one of the explorations that are happening is we're really figuring out how far can we put AI into the business. And in this story, they talked about how in banks there are up to two-thirds of employees now who have access to these tools. So I'm just curious about you know, what are you seeing in this world and how can we kind of embrace this new world of agentic AI and everything else?

Sid Banerjee: 2:35

Yeah, it's it's actually a crazy dynamic uh transformation going on in banks, but not just in banks, in retail organizations and healthcare organizations. I'm seeing AI show up in three, maybe three or four discrete use cases. The first is um as a tool for company employees to better understand how to kind of get better at their jobs, to learn from experience, to get coaching tools. The second is AI is being used to help a particularly customer-facing employee, but also a back office-facing employee find answers to questions or kind of respond to interactions or experiences in the moment when they're trying to solve a problem or they're on the phone or they're trying to basically exercise on a workflow in some kind of capacity as a customer service employee. The third is AI is being used after the fact to analyze, to summarize, to recommend ways to improve things. It could be, you know, feedback on how to build a better product or how to improve a service experience. And then the fourth is just using it to actually connect the dots, right? Historically, connectivity was done through traditional software and coding where you built rules and you did things. And now agentic AI is actually doing that connecting for you. And it's a it's it's a kind of an exploding laboratory of uh kind of just ideas and evolutions. Some of it's being built in-house, some of it's being used uh from companies that are building solutions. I don't think we've seen a stabilization yet, but I can tell you that pretty much every time I talk to a customer that's looking at CX, they are exploring one or more or all of those use cases in their enterprises today.

Jeannie Walters: 4:14

And I think what's so exciting about it is that once we start testing it and piloting it, we start seeing even more and more use cases. That's that's what I see. And and part of that is because the employees, the people who are in the trenches every day doing the work, they go, wait, couldn't I use it in this way? And then it opens up a whole new avenue. And I think that's something that the pace of that innovation is really exciting and challenging at the same time.

Sid Banerjee: 4:41

Yeah, and then I think you know, there there are also organizations trying to figure out at what point am I giving too much up to AI? Am I using AI in a way that's actually improving business outcomes and customer experiences, or am I just creating unnecessary complexity? So I do think we're gonna go through a phase of trying and learning and improving and also discarding you know uses of AI that don't work very well. But there's no question that, you know, to use the the overused phrase, the genie's the genie's out of the bag. Um, and uh there's no putting it back, right? I mean, it's it's it's it's a technology that I think is actually driving tremendous improvement in the way people can be more responsive to customer experience and being more adaptive and learning from customer interactions as well.

Jeannie Walters: 5:24

Yeah, and I think there's a lot around the scale of this too, where you know, there are there are times in the past I remember working with like incredible business analysts, and you'd be like, wow, how did you find that pattern after only four months, right? Like you'd and now we can do it in 24 hours, 12 hours, uh 30 seconds sometimes.

Sid Banerjee: 5:44

Yeah, I mean, I'll give you an example. One of the things that I've sort of concluded in looking at AI in and customer experiences that there's really three things right now that people are using it a lot for. The first is it is a way of accelerating um analysis, right? Taking a lot of interactions, a lot of uh experiences, and saying, what are the good experiences, what are the bad experiences, what are the causes of the good and the bad experiences, and ultimately helping uh a customer experience practitioner or analyst figure out what to focus on fixing, what to focus on continuing to do as well as they're doing, et cetera. The second big use case is using AI to help um automate or at least streamline the experience of responding to customers and to experiences and to inquiries or problems. It is very good at finding answers, it's very good at suggesting ways to kind of basically respond to the customer in the moment. And then the third is in that area of connecting the uh the different systems that touch on customer experiences to create what you know, what people call agentic AI, right? An agentic AI is not just an agent. I like to say agentic AI is an AI that has agency, it can do things, right? So it will actually recognize that when someone needs something done, instead of telling the human how to do it, it'll actually do it itself. And those are the three big use cases I think that are going to be dramatically transforming um customer experiences. I see it in, like I say, I see it in banks automating inquiries and balance transfers and applying for credit cards. I see it in healthcare with insurance companies looking at ways to uh to automate claims investigations, reimbursements, payments, you know, receiving payments, et cetera. And even in retail, you're starting to see people using AI to uh do a lot more online shopping, online servicing, online receiving, or hybrid experiences where you might start online and then pick something up. And the connectivity is AI-based nowadays, it's not more static or or kind of ineffective business rules because it's just more dynamic and more empathetic, and the experience is better.

Jeannie Walters: 7:48

I love the way you say that it's AI with agency because I think that gives context to it in a different way. Because I know there are people who just think it's one-to-one, like, oh, you had an agent, now you have AI. And that's not really what we're talking about. It's so much more robust and connected and all of those things. But well, you set us up perfectly for the next topic here, which we didn't even plan that, but here we are, uh, where you know we talked about all the different industries that are using this. This is from hospitality technology, and it's one of their news briefs. And it is really um, the headline is Red Lobster turns to AI for power phone ordering. And so this is really about um phone ordering agents, quote unquote, uh, as well as just using voice in different ways. And I think that there this is something that is on the horizon, maybe coming faster than people realize as well. And so, you know, this is just another angle where this technology sounds like it's going to make things so efficient and convenient, both for the restaurant workers and the customer. But if we're not careful and if we don't continue to ask customers, is this working for you? And how can it work better? We might be disconnecting there. That's one of the things that I think we need to start maybe highlighting for people is once you roll out this technology, you still have to have those conversations. So, what's your take on that?

Sid Banerjee: 9:16

I think that if you went back four or five years ago, people were predicting the death of the telephonic experience prematurely, right? Um, people wanted everyone to pick up their mobile phones and order on their phones and do everything online on websites. And certainly many of us have done that. That's a big part of how we do customer experience today. But there are still a lot of uh experiences that are pretty effectively done on the phone. And when you add agentic AI and you know, voice uh AI into phone experiences, you can do a lot of things, a lot of things better than you could even with a human-to-human conversation. I'll give you an example before I go to Red Lobster, but a friend of mine is starting a company that actually he's selling AI voice bots to car dealers. And the business problem he's trying to solve is you know, when you try to call a car dealer to schedule an appointment or to maybe ask about a test drive, half the time you go to the one overworked person in the center of the car, you know, the car dealership who doesn't always pick up the phone because they're getting phone calls all the time. And so there's a response lag to get the call back, to schedule the thing. This thing is essentially a voice bot. It picks up all the time, it takes your information, it schedules your car repair, it can look you up and say, Yeah, I see you have a XYZ brand and you can schedule it. Or it can say, here, there's an appointment opening here. And that means every time you call, you get what you want done, done, right? When you're ordering food from Red Lobster, you might want to ask questions, you want to know if the hush puppies come with the lobster. If you have an agentic AI, they're gonna know everything, they're gonna have instant recall of the menu. They're not gonna be overworked trying to deal with answering the phone and working the cash register. It's an effective experience. And arguably, if those voice bots are set up correctly and they're agentically designed, they're actually gonna be a better experience than you might have talking to an overworked employee in a restaurant. So I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I actually think it's a great use case, and I think you're gonna see more voice interactions coming back into customer experiences powered by by AI, very likely.

Jeannie Walters: 11:23

Well, I love that dealership example because we literally just went through this where they contacted us about a recall thing and we had to go in and it took forever because you know, you've got to well, that service person isn't here, or we've got to call you back, or those aren't our service hours, and so we had to keep calling, just kind of hoping for the best. So I love that use case. And I think the whole idea of you know, customers are looking for convenience, and sometimes the convenience is when you're in your car and you want to call, and you can ask your voice assistant in the car to make that call for you. And so if you can't get what you need through that, then you it's that it's that open loop in your brain of oh gosh, okay, I've got to remember to schedule this, or I've got to ask about the hush puppies when I go in.

Sid Banerjee: 12:12

And by the way, you don't want to be using your phone when you're driving either. So there's another good reason for doing this, right? You much rather be using the voice, exactly.

Jeannie Walters: 12:18

Yeah, I I'm still making I still see websites that don't have click to call on their phone numbers. I'm like, it's 2025. Like we should agree that this is the standard, right?

Sid Banerjee: 12:29

Completely

Jeannie Walters: 12:30

Well, and I think that again, we have to remember that like this is a cooperation, this is a collaboration with our customers, and so that means that we have to make sure that we're collaborating with the technology on their behalf, we are continuing to check in with them, we are making sure that when they tell us things, we use those insights and we respond to them. Because if we don't see it that way, it can become very one-sided and it can feel on our end like everything's working fine. And we don't know that these customers want to call even.

Sid Banerjee: 13:02

And let me, yeah, let me kind of touch on that point. When you do replace a human from the company side with it with an AI to handle customer experiences over the phone, that doesn't um negate the need to do quality assurance, right? And to do continuous improvement. Because just as a human can always be coached and trained to get better at their jobs, so can an AI, right? I mean, fundamentally, an AI bot gets trained on experiences, then you may want to analyze how it's doing, and then you may want to coach it or effectively train it or retrain it to get better. And a big part of any AI investment should be doing the customer experience analysis after the fact and even during the fact to make sure that you're making sure that you're generating better experiences, not worse, and that you're continuing to get it make it better as business conditions change, you know, customer preferences change, other things can change. So we, you know, coming from a business, obviously where I do with Medallia, where there's customer experience analytics, is a big part of how we think about improving customer experiences. Deploying AI does not make the customer experience improvement kind of mandate go away. If anything, it just means expanding that aperture to make sure the AI is continuing to grow and get better as well.

Jeannie Walters: 14:14

I think that's a very important point that we need to coach and train continuously, even if it's you know, we can't trust that even the information will all stay accurate if we're not doing that quality assurance just like we would at any other part of the business and with the people involved as well. So it's a really, really good point. And so this last story, it's a little goofy, Sid, but I liked it.

Sid Banerjee: 14:38

Uh so I'm laughing because you told me about it ahead of time, but go ahead.

Jeannie Walters: 14:42

I did. So um, and the site is a little challenging because even the news source is one that I wouldn't typically pick, I will be honest. But this is from the New York Post, which I don't quote very often, but the headline is Long Island pizzeria goes viral with saucy videos giving bad diners a taste of their own medicine. And there's a quote that says, Go sit down. And the whole um kind of angle here is that they were getting fed up with bad customer behavior at this local pizzeria. It's called Phil's Pizzeria in Long Island, and they started making these uh skits essentially and filming them of bad customer behavior. And the owner and some other people, the employees there, they do these skits and they swear in them and they say things like, What are you doing? You're wasting my time, and uh, it's very New York, it's great. But what struck me about it was by starting this, they actually have this now really good viral run. They're getting tons of followers on TikTok and Instagram and everything. And so people are actually physically seeking out the restaurant now when they're in Long Island because they're sassy and they're being kind of in you know irreverent about it. And it just struck me that I think part of what this whole conversation around AI and technology and everything else that is so prevalent and everything, I think customers are also craving that authenticity, they're craving just that one-to-one. So I don't know if you had a chance to watch any of the videos, they're not really suitable for work, so I'm not gonna share any here, but go look those up on your own time, listener.

Sid Banerjee: 16:22

I will definitely, I I read the uh the headline, but I did not get a chance to sample the videos. So, my um my reaction to that is I guess two twofold. One, um, with every new technology, there is an opportunity for you know the uh the outliers, the crazy people, the trolls to take advantage of it to uh to maybe abuse or harass or potentially do crazy things. And I think as an organization, if you're a business, the best thing you can do is not take any of that too seriously. Obviously, use feedback to improve things, but there's a point at which things get ludicrous, and I think the best thing you can do is not not get too upset or too crazy and just have a little bit of fun with it. I'm I was reminded as uh as you had shared that that article with me that um the same kind of thing happened a few years ago with Twitter or now X. Jimmy Kimmel famously would have celebrities on to read mean tweets about themselves, right? And at some point you just have to be like, yeah, what are you gonna do? Right, you use the technology to improve the world, but if people want to do silly things with it, just don't take it too seriously. And I think that does create a sense of authenticity for, you know, in that case, the celebrity, in this case, the the restaurant, which actually is refreshing. It means you know, you can you can take yourself you know not too seriously when when things go a little crazy.

Jeannie Walters: 17:44

That's true, and I think that's a really good message for today's world. Just there are always going to be the complainers and the trolls, and you know, I I produce a lot of content on LinkedIn, and usually I get great conversation there. And a couple months ago, there was somebody who was just throwing bombs all the time, and I was kind of like, What did I do to this person? And I was taking it very personally and I was trying to engage, and I showed what was happening to one of my kids who are now, you know, young adults, and literally without hesitation, they both said, Well, that's a troll, so just block that person. Like, what's the problem? Because it happens, it's just part of their world. And I think that it was a good reminder to your point not to take it so seriously, and also realize that there are people who literally wake up in the morning and that is their plan to troll, to complain.

Sid Banerjee: 18:36

Yeah, this is their purpose in life for that day, at least. But you know, I think it's important also, you know, the the serious message here is you will get feedback whenever you use a new technology. You know, I would imagine that when you're talking to an AI voice bot, because it's not a human, if you know it's not a human, you as a as a customer may actually be a little bit more, let's just say, direct or maybe even obscene, right? And and if I'm a company having to process all those recordings and and and calls, I'm gonna have to not take that too seriously. I have to sift through the constructive feedback with the crazy feedback. And that's just the nature of technology nowadays, for better or worse.

Jeannie Walters: 19:14

So that's a very good point, too. Yeah, we have to remember the context of the people who are you know engaging and they might think they're behind a screen, they're not acting exactly like they would in the real world.

Sid Banerjee: 19:27

That's right.

Jeannie Walters: 19:28

So, well, this was fascinating. I'm so happy that we we got you on here, that you had the time to explore all these things with me. And I know I will see you in February at Experience in Las Vegas

Sid Banerjee: 19:39

This year in Vegas, looking forward to it. And yeah, I appreciate the opportunity to get a little bit off color, if you will, and uh and talk about some interesting um but but unique perspectives on customer experience. So thank you.

Jeannie Walters: 19:51

Well, thank you for being here, and thanks for everything you do for our industry too. There's a lot going on, and I think you uh continue to be a leader there. So we appreciate that as well.

Sid Banerjee: 20:00

Likewise, likewise. Thank you so much.

Jeannie Walters: 20:02

Thank you. And thank you, everybody who is here with us, watching, listening, subscribing to the Experience Action Podcast. I always love hearing from you. Don't forget, you can leave me a voicemail at askjeannie.vip. And I might answer it for you here on the podcast. Thanks to Sid for being here. Thanks to you, and I will see you next time.