Welcome From Adobe Summit

Jeannie Walters 0:00

Welcome to this special episode of the Experience Action Podcast. And thank you to my partner IBM for inviting me to the Adobe Summit to speak with some of their leaders. Now, today we're diving into personalization and customer experience at scale with agentic orchestration. What does it really take? At Adobe Summit, I had the chance to speak with leaders from IBM about what it means to deliver consistent, connected experiences and how organizations are starting to orchestrate that across teams, data, AI, content, you name it, all in the name of customer experience. Let's start with Betsy Rohtbart, VP, Digital Experience and IBM.com.

Betsy Rohtbart 0:47

I'm Betsy Rohtbart. I am the vice president for Digital Experience, leading IBM.com, our public-facing uh digital experiences and our campaigns.

Jeannie Walters 0:57

Excellent. So you're really dealing with the people who are interacting with IBM.com and trying to serve up exactly what they need in this age of personalization. And we've heard a lot this at this event about personalization at scale. And so, how do we do that when we're thinking about trust and engagement and things like that? So tell us a little bit about personalization at scale.

Betsy Rohtbart 1:23

I really try to think about every visitor to IBM.com and perhaps any of our digital surfaces as having a need or task in mind. And it is my job to make sure that pays off. So rather than thinking about it, what platforms are capable of, what our teams are capable of, to start to think about what we want our customers to be able to do. And then designing experiences to make sure they're able to do those things. I think the other piece that when you say personalization at scale, people start to think about is how do I do this en masse?

Jeannie Walters 2:00

Yeah.

Betsy Rohtbart 2:00

And I think about how do I do it asynchronously. So I have multiple people who might interact with us at different times that need to do the same thing. And I want to make sure that thing they do is consistent each time.

Jeannie Walters 2:13

Yes.

Betsy Rohtbart 2:13

So we're not doing the same thing for the first time every time.

Finding Journey Gaps By Secret Shopping

Jeannie Walters 2:17

Sometimes we design these things and our customers experience them a little differently. They don't necessarily experience the beautiful touch points that we've designed. They actually experience some of the gaps that are happening. And so that can be handoffs, that can be all sorts of things. So, what are those gaps that leaders should look for and how can how can we do something about those gaps?

Betsy Rohtbart 2:38

So I actually um I'll tell you a little anecdote. I have a great respect for our sales leader, Rob Thomas. He challenged all regions at the beginning of the year to secret shop their products. And he, you know, I gave him, he said, sign up for the trial on board, experience the whole thing, and now walk it back.

Jeannie Walters 2:59

Yeah.

Betsy Rohtbart 3:00

Where did you experience something unexpected? Our customer expectations, even our own, are set by the market. Our last best experience is what we need to reach every time. So when you actually looked at it full scale, you're actually able to identify where you were there and where you got let down.

Jeannie Walters 3:17

Yeah.

Betsy Rohtbart 3:20

That is the gap in the work. And if we identify it really well, what I don't want to have happen for my internal teams is the toddler soccer game. Everyone runs to the ball. I talk a lot about the uh, you know, the old-fashioned real life race.

Jeannie Walters 3:35

Yeah.

Betsy Rohtbart 3:35

Where you pass the baton and there are their four or eight legs, whatever it is. If you think your job is catching the baton and passing it to somebody else, I can guarantee the full experience will be broken.

Jeannie Walters 3:46

Yup.

Betsy Rohtbart 3:47

Because you need to ingest the context of all the baton passes that happened before you, as well as understand what's going to happen afterwards.

Jeannie Walters 3:54

As leaders are looking at this, as they're trying to figure out, you know, what should I do to make sure that we have these seamless experiences, that we understand our customers in the right ways, especially in this age of AI and everything else, this, you know, wonderful orchestration we keep hearing about. So as you're talking to those leaders, what are some of the first things or the top priorities that they should have?

Betsy Rohtbart 4:18

Going back to what I originally said about consistency, we want to make sure that we are executing the next action at the best possible way using the data we did before. We're gonna look at which one of our um executions worked the best, and we're all gonna try to um to use the best exemplars. And we keep going down the chain from touch point to touch point and understanding what good looks like now and making sure that every time we have a new opportunity, we're resetting the bar for what it looks like.

Jeannie Walters 4:53

  Yeah. So if delivering great experiences means connecting all those touch points and truly orchestrating them, how do we actually make that happen at scale? I also had the chance to speak to Jay Trestain, who leads marketing transformation for IBM Consulting in EMEA, about what it really takes to bring those experiences together across an organization.

Jay Trestain 5:17

Can you explain kind of what is agentic orchestration? So, agentic orchestration is um a fancy title for effectively um enabling agents and AI technology to work harmoniously together, to be orchestrated across an enterprise. And what that means from a marketing perspective is really um enabling agents to be subject matter experts in their particular domain, but be friends with each other and get along and shake hands and have a great time and deliver value across an entire workflow, across an entire enterprise, across different domains. But it's basically agents being friends and working harmoniously.

Jeannie Walters 5:58

One of the things that came up in that session you led was how we have to align around, you know, who are we and and how do we show up for our customers and how do we get our internal processes, our people to work together. So, what are some of the things that you think organizations might not be thinking about when they're talking about, oh, let's just, you know, have agentic orchestration. What are some of those things that they need to focus on?

North Star Vision And Experience Alignment

Jay Trestain 6:22

So I think um one of the guiding principles is just because you can doesn't necessarily mean you should.

Jeannie Walters 6:27

I love that.

Jay Trestain 6:27

And in order to help um coalesce around a vision to make really good quality decision making, is to find where you want to go. And one of the really impactful ways to do that is to visualize um your North Star. What do you want that experience to be for your target um users, whether that be your customers, your B2B um uh buyers, whatever that may be, maybe it's even your employees. But if you can visualize that and identify those touch points through that journey of where value exchange happens, then you can start making really good quality decisions around technology, tooling, around processing um redefinition, around the KPIs and how those KPIs are going to mature. So um again, it's understanding where you want to go and why, how you tend to measure success across the um entire experience to drive uh ambassadorship, buy-in of all of your domain of um stakeholders, and then taking people on that emotional journey. Because if they can see it and feel it, they'll they'll be on board.

Jeannie Walters 7:32

There you go.

Jay Trestain 7:33

And that's part of the adoption and and um the magic source behind successful transformation.

Jeannie Walters 7:38

When we look at customer experiences, we have to appreciate that part of it is deciding who we want to be and how we want to show up and where we're actually taking them first.

Jay Trestain 7:48

Absolutely.

Jeannie Walters 7:48

So all of that is so important to get that foundation right.

When Agents Bypass Your Website

Jay Trestain 7:51

The way in which agentic technology, as consumers are engaging with it, is fundamentally changing the way brands turn up digitally. Um, and where historically we might be spending a lot of money on brand awareness through your own digital real estate, agentic technology doesn't care about that. If you're if it can't understand your data, your tone of voice, your products, then you don't and are not represented in the way it's returning searches back to those consumers. Similarly, when the agentic capability pushes your consumer back into that acquisition lifecycle, you bypass a bunch of that real estate that you might have invested heavily in. So whilst that in itself is a frustration, that same frustration, the technology that's creating that frustration, gives us real good opportunities. Because in the same way that you're bypassing um your home page, your product description pages, whatever, it also enables good quality to sales, to service, to warranty, to other parts of your brand's ecosystem that for the consumer represents value exchange. Yeah. So for as much as there's frustration in a traditional Martech experience perspective, it presents incredible opportunities around brand experience and value exchange and the consumers that previously have been quite difficult to reach.

Jeannie Walters 9:07

And I think you bring up a great point that we can lean into the agentic to help us in ways that maybe, you know, we couldn't scale that way before. We couldn't actually find those needles in the haystack like we can now. So part of it is just kind of leaning into the technology that's available to us as well.

Jay Trestain 9:24

Absolutely.

Jeannie Walters 9:25

And so if you're talking to a leader today and they're kind of like, ah, this sounds great, but it's overwhelming and I don't know where to start, or I don't know exactly what the first step to take, what would your recommendation be?

Jay Trestain 9:37

So um this is a really common question, and unfortunately, there is not one thing to do. There's actually a collection of principles upon which to align um to ensure that you are not just delivering a great quality MVP or pilot, that it moves beyond that into scales, translation. Um, but if I was going to hang my hat on one critical difference is governance. Um because with good quality governance, the rest should flow. So governance should be a real enabler to very, very quick effective decision making. But in order to enable that to happen, you need some other pieces. Clear vision, clear KPIs, clear ownership of those KPIs, and a really good quality set of roles and responsibilities on what to happen if and when stuff goes wrong, because it never is never straightforward.

Jeannie Walters 10:25

That's right.

Jay Trestain 10:26

So governance for me is the difference maker between success and failure, not in the boring sense, but in rapid, high-quality decision making for the long haul that shows it's value realization throughout the whole journey.

Jeannie Walters 10:40

So whether you're designing experiences or working to implement them across your organization, there are clear opportunities for agentic orchestration. Personalization is, of course, a big one, but you have to plan for it. And that's where consistency, connection, and alignment across every part of the journey comes in. Thank you so much to my guests, Betsy Rohtbart and Jay Trestain, and thank you to my partner, IBM. I'm looking forward to the next conversation. See you next time. If you're ready to turn insights into action, join CXI Membership, our community for customer experience investigators just like you. Get the tools, support, and inspiration to move from ideas to true impact. And don't miss my book, Experience is Everything: Making Every Moment Count in the Age of Customer Expectations. Available wherever you order books. Until next time, keep asking questions, keep improving, and keep leading with experience.