CX Pulse Check Kicks Off

Jeannie Walters 0:09

It's the Experience Action Podcast, and here we are at my favorite episode of the month. It's time for CX Pulse Check. This is where I invite a special co-host to go over customer experience news that we all should be aware of. I'm thrilled today to invite my special co-host, Deb Reuben, who is the CEO of Tomorrow Zone. Deb, it's so nice to have you here. Thanks for joining us. And I'd love if you could share a little bit more about yourself.

Deborah Reuben 0:37

Absolutely. Thank you so much for inviting me to be on your show, Jeannie. I have been really looking forward to the conversation. I'm Deb Reuben. I'm a human-centered innovation strategist and the creator of the Tomorrow Zone system. And in my work, I work with leaders who are often facing really big shifts, like AI, digital transformation, or even considering new business model changes. And I help them to step back just long enough to get true clarity and see more possibility so they can make better decisions about the future they want to create. My background is in equipment finance and enterprise software. And I spent many years there designing systems, leading transformation initiatives. And that experience taught me that technology alone doesn't transform. People do. And leaders really need shared clarity about the problems that they're solving and the future that they're trying to build. Often those things are missing. And through the Tomorrow Zone system, I work with those organizations who are tackling complex challenges to help them get that clarity and align their people around what really matters so that we're designing the future that we want to see rather than just rebuilding the past. And those are some of the ideas that led me to write my new book.

Jeannie Walters 2:08

Yes. Tell us about the book. It's very exciting.

Deborah Reuben 2:11

Yeah, um, it is exciting. Here it is. It's actually real.

Jeannie Walters 2:15

Nice. So Enter the Tomorrow Zone, right?

Deborah Reuben 2:19

Enter the Tomorrow Zone. Yeah. It's um how to inspire breakthrough innovation and shape your future. And in the book, I explore how leaders can just really expand their thinking and make better decisions when the future's not clear yet. Um, and so I'm really looking forward to this conversation today because I think a lot of what you teed up for us, it really um ties back to a lot of the thoughts in the book.

Agentic Commerce And AI At Scale

Jeannie Walters 2:45

Well, I am excited as well. And uh I I read and reviewed your book already. So I highly recommend it. One of the things we talk about in the work we do around customer experience is how important experiential innovation is. We that's how we stay ahead. And so I think a lot of the principles that you walk through in that book absolutely apply to customer experience leaders, which is why I'm excited to have this conversation as well. So let's jump in. You will not be shocked to know that one of the topics that everyone is talking about is a little thing called AI. And this is pretty much showing up in much of what we're gonna talk about today, but in different ways. And that was one of the things that really attracted me to these stories. So the first story that I want to share, it's from the National Retail Federation, and it's called Own the Agentic Commerce Experience. This is the study that they released. They just had their big, huge show in January, which is always enormous. And that's where we hear from a lot of brands about the plans that they have around innovation and around what they're offering for customers and things like that. So this really uh got into a little bit about, you know what, we have to figure out not only our side as brands, but also what are the consumers doing with AI? Now we're getting into this world with bots and all these other things. So I mean, there's so much to pull out of here, but I would love to know what really stood out to you about this and what do you think are the lessons we need to take away from this idea that it's going to be a bot-driven place in a little bit?

Deborah Reuben 4:26

Yeah. Um, well, I think it one of the things I took away is um that we really need to remember that technology is an amplifier of what already exists.

Jeannie Walters 4:42

Yes.

Deborah Reuben 4:43

And so do you really understand your customer needs? Do you really understand what matters to your customer? Do you know what is meaningful to them? And and does everybody within your organization understand that? You know, I think that you have to really get clear on deciding what experience AI is representing for you and what does that mean for the customer or the end user? And if an agent is acting on behalf of you, what experience should it deliver? And how are they representing, how is that thing representing you? Um, is it bringing convenience? Is it really helping to develop trust? Yeah, or do we have trust theater? I don't know if that's a new thing that we have to battle today, but you know, it, you know, is speed actually going to deliver what's meaningful to the customer? I think sometimes we reward speed, but that's not always the value. And so I think you really need, you know, clarity on what is the future you're trying to shape here before you even start. Otherwise, you know, the the thing I saw here is the the same trap as other technology hype cycles where we were thinking technology first,

Jeannie Walters 6:09

yes

Define Experience Before Deploying Tech

Deborah Reuben 6:09

and completely forgetting the customer in the process. And and the other thing is um really understanding and deciding in that journey and in the processes that you're reimagining. And I think we really do need to reimagine, otherwise, we're just using that copy-paste method. Let's just copy what we've always done and paste it onto new sexy tech. Well, you know, we saw some examples where that just didn't work very well.

Jeannie Walters 6:39

So oh, sorry, go ahead.

Deborah Reuben 6:41

Well, I was just thinking, you know, we have to really understand like where is it essential for humans to be involved to convey that trust that you're trying to convey in your brand so that you're not losing that if you're adding technology into the mix.

Jeannie Walters 6:57

Yeah, and I think one way that I've been thinking about this is um, you know, AI is incredible at scale, right? Like it it can do things at a pace and at a scale that humans simply can't. Um, and that part is really exciting and energizing, I think, to a lot of organizations. But AI still needs leadership. And I think when we kind of hand over the control without thinking through what what does that leadership need? What how do how do we want to show up for our customers in this way? Then we are kind of letting, I mean, it's it's Skynet, right? Like we are letting the robots take over at that point. And so I think when when we talk about it as an amplifier, it really is. If you are looking at customer um support or customer experience as a cost center, as something to control the cost, then your customers will feel that when you introduce AI. If you're if you're viewing it as, you know what, we are trying to do things to make it more convenient, to make it more helpful, and we know what those triggers are to do that, then that's going to show up based on the technology. But I think, I mean, we've lived through a few of these tech hype cycles, as you say, and some of them are absolutely life-changing. And some of them we blink and they're over. Remember, what was it web 3.0? Like we talked about that for a hot minute.

Deborah Reuben 8:28

Yeah, and everything's gonna move to digital reality, yeah. Oh, yeah, digital reality, and blockchain's gonna be all the things, yeah. You know, I think I so I'm often reminded of and I talk about this a lot, but but one of the movies I enjoy is my big fat great wedding, and the dad, he he thinks that you know everything is fixed by spraying Windex on it.

Jeannie Walters 8:52

I had forgotten about that part.

Deborah Reuben 8:55

Or if you remember, like way back in the day, like um, I don't know if you're old enough to remember, but when like Windows and Word for Windows came out and they had this feature called sparkle text. Oh, and like everybody was like sparkle texting all the things, yeah. And I mean, you have to be old to remember that example, but that's I know that's how I feel about AI. Like just put AI in it, you know, like everything has to have AI in it. Is it actually adding value or is it making things worse? I've gone back and forth with product teams for for tools that we're using where they added AI and it actually broke the primary capabilities. Yeah, you know, like so. What are you amplifying? You know, AI is really great for scaling, but step back and get really clear on what is it that you want to scale.

Trust Plateau And Measurement Shifts

Jeannie Walters 9:45

Right, right. And I think the the other part of that is, and you talk about this in your process and your book as well, but you know, we have to kind of know who we are and what we want to deliver first. And if we don't know that, and we talk about this in the context of what we call a customer experience mission statement, right? Like we have to be really clear-eyed about what are we, where are we going and what are we really trying to accomplish before we start with the tools and tactics. And I think that's that's the tension, excuse me, that I think we're seeing right now is that people are very excited because the tools are incredibly powerful and AI is here. Like you can't deny it. You can't say that we're not going to use it. Everybody's going to use AI. Um, and so when you start there, instead of starting with what is the problem we're trying to solve or where are we going, then it just creates all this kind of dust up instead of this clear path forward. Um, but you mentioned trust, and that's the next thing I I want to explore a little bit. So this next piece is from CMS Wire, one of my one of my oft-sourced uh uh publications, but uh it's a press release essentially about a bigger report. And the title is the 2026 Brays Customer Engagement Review. AI innovation meets the trust plateau. And that phrase really caught me, the trust plateau, because I think that goes to back to some of what you were just saying about, you know, we are living in a world where everything is kind of hyper-paced right now. There's a lot of attention on certain things, but we as the people on the other side of that, the customers or the users, we're starting to see some things, right? We're starting to see like these aren't working as well as we wanted. Or to your example, things break. So now we're starting to get a little cynical, a little skeptical about it. And I'm just, you know, that phrase particular is what caught me, but what caught you about this?

Deborah Reuben 11:57

Um I really was is thinking about this because you know, we're thinking about um agentic experiences. And and we run into this a lot in the industry I serve in equipment finance. So, you know, my clients are those companies that are leasing or financing capital equipment um from you know iPads to airplanes and anything in between. So it's pretty diverse, but trust is vital. And, you know, we we talk a lot about where does it make sense to bring AI into the process. And the one thing that you don't want to break is trust. You know, when we are it takes a lot to get a customer, it takes even more to keep that customer. There's a a huge value to keeping and going deep with a customer, especially in in our world. And so, you know, customers do appreciate convenience, um, but they also need to understand and they need to feel comfortable with how you the way that you're implementing technology actually impacts them. And I know in in my world, one of the things we run into is um mismatched definitions of what success looks like in the customer experience. So, like if we're dealing with somebody in accounting, they want the numbers to be right. If we're dealing with somebody in sales, they want speed, get the deal off the street as fast as possible. And you know, maybe somebody in the middle is dealing with legal documents, it's about precision and language. And if if we don't have a shared understanding about what we're trying to deliver, we can get off track really, really quick and take off the customer in the process.

Jeannie Walters 13:47

Yep.

Backlash Lessons And Narrow Use Cases

Deborah Reuben 13:47

Yeah, you know, ultimately, trust is a very human thing, and I still don't still skeptical about whether you can actually automate that because it is so uniquely human. And you know, technology may change the interface and how trust is facilitated, but I don't think it changes the psychology of trust and the way that humans work. And so, you know, humans, I actually dug into this and I'm like, well, okay, well, how do humans build trust technology aside? And and I, you know, to build trust with you, I need to know that you're capable, I need to know that you're honest, I need to know that you're predictable, and I need to know that you care about the outcome just as much as I do for both of us.

Jeannie Walters 14:37

Yeah.

Deborah Reuben 14:38

How do you convey that and translate that to machine intelligence, especially if we're thinking about agentic commerce and if AI becomes the home page versus like you know, the assumption of the past is clicks and you know, you know, searching on a website or whatnot? Um, now we have to be thinking differently about how we still attract the humans, but now we have machine intelligence in the mix. And so, you know, I have more questions than answers.

Jeannie Walters 15:08

You're not the only one.

Deborah Reuben 15:11

But ultimately, people still want to know, can I rely on you?

Jeannie Walters 15:14

Yep. Yeah.

Deborah Reuben 15:15

Does this technology understand my situation? You know, um, and I often, when I get caught up in those AI-driven VRUs, I'm I often find myself saying, Let me talk to a human. Yes, the AI is just not getting it, you know, because I think a lot of these systems are built on unchallenged assumptions about how how humans behave, or they're not thinking at all about how humans behave.

Jeannie Walters 15:37

Right. They're thinking about their process, their

Deborah Reuben 15:39

yeah, yeah. And so it there's there's a lot to unpack here.

Jeannie Walters 15:44

There is, there is, and I think when I think about, you know, I you mentioned the mismatched uh definitions of success. That is, I think, the number one thing we see. And part of that is never bothering to define what success looks like in the first place. Yeah, and yeah, we use something called a CX success blueprint because we want people to really think through that. And one of the things that just is really striking me right now about all of the ways that we measure customer engagement as well, that is going to shift, right? Like, how do we know if people are happy if it if their bots are talking to our bots all the time and we are not actually connecting with the human on the other side, who then gets a report from their bot that is completely off, right? And so they make a different decision as a consumer, but they don't we don't have access to that behavior anymore. So I think we really have to think through what is that customer journey that we are trying to deliver? Where is the best use of AI? Where can we scale with purpose? Where can we make sure that we are delivering with speed when speed is important? And how does that actually build or erode trust? So I think that this will be the currency of the future. I think that trust will be absolutely the way that people, it's already going in that direction, but now it's going to be tenfold. Even on like social media right now, they're saying, well, there's so much AI slop out there, right? All these crazy videos that they're saying don't don't like polish your videos if you're making videos right now, because people want that authenticity because they want to trust that this is real, that it's not an AI person. So, as far as I know, you and I are still human, which is great. So

Deborah Reuben 17:32

Last time I checked.

Generational Views And Purpose First

Jeannie Walters 17:34

So uh for anybody watching or listening, this is the real thing, just so you know. Um, but this kind of goes into the next topic incredibly well. So here is the next one I wanted to talk about. This is from Support Ninja, and it's AI Backlash and Public Perception, how AI strategy shapes customer trust. And this one was interesting because they named some names and they talked about different things that maybe hadn't gone as well as could have been planned with AI and the backlash about that. So we are kind of in to use another phrase that we talked about in reference to your book and everything else, is uh we're in the messy middle with this, right? We are right in that there's a big ball of spaghetti that we're all trying to kind of pull out. And so I think this is a symptom of that, personally, that we're going to see more missteps. We're going to see things and learn from them. But what, you know, based on the discussion we just had about trust, what do you think those moments of backlash will do for either the brand or even for us as customers and the ones who are learning from this as well?

Final Takeaways And How To Connect

Deborah Reuben 18:45

Well, man, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is smart companies will do just that. They're gonna learn from it. Um, but the other thing, you know, was, and I'm thinking back to one of the examples from one of the earlier articles. Um, I think it was urban. Um the example there when they were bringing agentic technology into the customer experience, one of the things they did that helped them to have some success in it is they really clearly narrowed down the focus of what they were doing. And and I think that that's that's a really smart strategy because you're starting, like you said, with purpose. You know, what is it that we want to scale and why? And I think the you know, identifying the right problem to solve, of course, is the first step, not by the tool, but

Jeannie Walters 19:41

right

Deborah Reuben 19:41

what are we trying to achieve and what up what opportunity are we trying to capture, what problem are we trying to solve, but even more importantly, why and for whom? And what does it mean for them? And so that definition of success is so important to get right off the bat. If we think about the um the the Klarna example, um, this is one I've been following because I speak about this in executive roundtables and such, and that was one of the examples that we were talking about in the headline a while back was oh wow, Klarna replaced all of these customer service reps with AI and now they can do X number of of calls, you know, with much you know, fewer people, and isn't this awesome? And if you're only looking at your bottom line numbers and you're only looking at cost savings, wow, awesome, you succeeded. But if you actually care about all of the customers that are traumatized by your experience,

Jeannie Walters 20:53

yeah,

Deborah Reuben 20:54

did you really succeed? And you know, and that shared definition of what success looks like is so important, especially when you're bringing in a technology that that is such an amplifier. And so this really, really um spoke to me, you know, that that making sure that you're bringing in multiple stakeholder perspectives, including different types of customers and situations and scenarios, as you're thinking about what is the real problem that we're solving, for whom? And then, you know, really um I think pressure testing, like where are those moments of truth that really do matter to the customer? Because when a customer is coming to you, typically you know, in my own experience, going to customer service is my last resort. I've exhausted all other options, and that's why, and now the stakes are high. And now I want a human.

Jeannie Walters 22:00

Mm-hmm.

Deborah Reuben 22:01

And when I can't get that, my trust in the brand doesn't just erode, it evaporates instantly.

Jeannie Walters 22:10

Well, and I think we're at a very interesting moment in time from a um population perspective as well, because Generation Z is actually leading the idea that, you know what, they're good with AI. As long as it does what they want it to do, they've actually reported that it can build trust. So we have this generational wave happening too that I think we have to consider as we're building these things. But ultimately, I think what all of these stories tell us and this moment in time that we're in, it's really about strategy. It's about vision. It's not always about the tools and technology. And again, we have to lead here. We have to make sure that we are not just, you know, plugging it in and hoping for the best. We have to actually really define what that looks like, have that clear vision, and then understand how to roll that out in the right way. And as we wrap up here, Deb, I would love to know what is, you know, you spent your the majority of your career talking about innovation and really being future focused. So what is kind of one thing that if you're a customer experience leader today or if you're a business leader today, what is one thing that they can take away and and focus on doing innovation the right way, not just innovating for innovation's sake and not just introducing a new tool and calling it innovation.

Deborah Reuben 23:34

Yeah. Um well, I think it gets back to purpose. And you know, in a nutshell, it's clarity first. Then technology, um, innovation will backfire for companies who lead with tools instead of experience. Yes. And if you're if you're tech first instead of purpose first, you're gonna get in trouble because technology should be an enabler, it should expand the value that you're creating for customers, not contradict it. And, you know, when we think about what happened in the Klarna example, that's that was the problem, leading with tech and and solving the the wrong problem. And so I think, you know, I think a lot about what sort of backlash might we see in the future. You talked a lot about authenticity and you know, and and we can create artificial at scale to the point where now people want the flaws in the videos, they want authentic human connection. And I think that when we're seeing backlash, it's not really it's not really anti-AI. It's we're reacting to experiences that stop feeling human.

Jeannie Walters 24:44

Yes, well said, well said. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And I know that our audience got a ton of value from this. If they want to learn more about you, if they want to connect with you, if they want to order your book, what are the best ways for them to do that?

Deborah Reuben 24:59

Um, so to connect with me, I'm I'm on LinkedIn, pretty active there. You can just find Deborah Reuben. My website is tomorrowzone.io. The book is out on Amazon, so you can find Enter the Tomorrow Zone on Amazon. And I created a short guide called Break Free from Yesterday's Thinking that kind of helps you overcome that tech first thinking trap that we were just talking about. And uh you can find that at enterthetomorrowzone.com.

Jeannie Walters 25:30

Excellent. Well, thank you for providing all those resources. And like I said, I've I've read the book. I know it's worth your time. So please go ahead and check that out. I think there's we both talk about purpose a lot. We both talk about the why. And I think there's a lot of alignment here for customer experience leaders to learn. So thank you so much for joining me here and thank you for sharing your thoughts about all these cool things. And I cannot wait to keep following you and keep our discussions going. So thanks, Deb.

Deborah Reuben 25:58

Thank you so much, Jeannie.

Jeannie Walters 26:00

And thank you for being here. All of you that are part of our audience, we so appreciate you. And of course, if you have questions, that's what I do most of the month. I answer your questions on the Experience Action podcast. You can leave me a question at askjeannie.vip. And after you read Deborah's book go ahead and pre-order Experience Is Everything which is coming out on April 14. So I cannot wait to share more incredible leaders like this with you on the Experience Action podcast. Keep up the great work, and I will see you next time.