Welcome And Guest Introduction

Jeannie Walters 0:10

It's time for CX Pulse Check, where I take the pulse with a special co-host of what's going on in customer experience today. I am truly honored to have a special co-host today because this is somebody I've known for a while in a really interesting segment. I am delighted to bring to the stage Vincent Davis, Chief Customer Officer and Senior Vice President of Customer Experience at Pacific Gas and Electric, otherwise known as PG&E. Vincent, I'm so happy you're here. Welcome.

Vincent Davis 0:41

Thank you, Jeannie. It's so good to be with you. I'm excited about our conversation that we're going to have today.

Jeannie Walters 0:46

I am too. I am too. And we've been talking for a while. We actually met when I was honored to present a keynote for a big uh event for your organization. And I remember afterwards you came up to me and said, Well, we have to keep talking.

Vincent Davis 1:01

That's right. That's right. Well, and I have to say that was one of the best keynotes we've ever had. And the meeting that we were having that at was the officer and director meeting for Pacific Gas and Electric. So it was all of our leaders, and you smashed it out of the park. So well done.

Jeannie Walters 1:14

Thank you so much. That's so nice to hear. Thank you very much. And I am thrilled to have this conversation because I feel like some of the conversations we've had, we should have had an audience. We should have been sharing this value. And part of it is I've really been able to hear a little bit about the journey that you've taken and some of the um big changes you've made there to really focus on customers in new ways, but also what you're doing inside the organization, which is the part that I think a lot of leaders think about, but it's harder to execute on than we give it credit. So, you know, can you share just a little bit about that journey before we jump into our stories today?

From CX Team To CX Company

Vincent Davis 1:55

No, absolutely. So maybe one of the first things I'll do is just kind of just set scope in terms of like my overall responsibility. Um, so currently, uh again, chief customer officer and senior president of customer experience. Uh I'm responsible for all of our digital channels, contact centers, our billing and payments, uh collections, customer communications, insights and strategy. All the things customer effective. Right. And so the thing that's really exciting to me is that you know, as we continue this journey that you and I are going to talk about, we've evolved from just being a customer experience function to being a customer experience company. Right.

Jeannie Walters 2:32

I love that.

Vincent Davis 2:32

And that's the idea that is a very exciting moment in our history. And um everyone's all in for it. So we'll talk more about that.

Chewy And Empathy With AI

Jeannie Walters 2:39

I love it. I love the way you just phrased that because I think that we are in a moment in time where people are having some questions about how do we make this all work? How do we operationalize? How do we make sure that we're using the right tools? And that leads right into our first uh article today. This is a brand that I think people will be familiar with in the customer experience space. We talk about them a lot. This is from Inc. magazine, and the headline is Chewy's CEO is Chasing Empathy at Scale. And this is an interview with their CEO, and I hope I'm saying this name right, Sumit Singh, uh, really talking about how they're leveraging and optimizing AI. So, one of the things I liked about this article and the take that this CEO has is Chewy is really well known for really connecting with customers, with really taking advantage of special moments. We know that when somebody cancels a you know pet food subscription because their pet passed away, sometimes they get condolence flowers or things from Chewy to remember their pet. They get uh portraits sometimes. And really, they had always let their reps have freedom to do that. And people really appreciated it. Customers raved about it, they were in story after story. We talked about them on this podcast. And now with AI, I think there's some fear of how can we keep up that empathy? How can we deliver on humanity with AI? And what I really loved about his take on this was that he's seeing a balance of AI can help us do things at scale that otherwise we couldn't do. Like he mentioned writing haiku, which is something they've done for pets. AI can do that really well, and it still feels personal and meaningful. But he said we're also giving our reps the same freedom to make those decisions. So, so what did you take from this? And also, what's kind of your angle on this debate between delivering empathy at scale with AI?

Vincent Davis 4:47

No, it's a fascinating uh subject to probe on a bit. Um, and so one of the things I want to share with you, I was excited about this as a topic because, as you might guess, I I mentor a fair amount of people. And one of my mentees actually is a young man who lives in Africa from Africa, and he happened to be here in the Bay Area for a meeting on a completely different topic. And uh, we met and became fast friends, and he asked me what I serve as a mentor to. So over the last two years, you know, we've connected every few months and just had check-ins and discussions about um life and about work and so forth, and he's just doing phenomenal work in Africa. Um, but I was sharing with him this concept of empathy because that's one of our virtues here at Pacific Gas and Electric. Uh, and I was explaining to him, you know, the old mantra of um, you know, take off your shoes and so forth and so on. And he was listening uh very politely as he always does. And after I finished, he said, Well, um, Vincent, um, one of the things that I think about when I think about empathy is yes, take your shoes off, but then there's another component to that. And so what is it? He said, once you take off your shoes, put on that other person's shoes, right? And once you put those shoes on, walk in them and see what it feels like. Because there are moments in time when that walk may be uncomfortable, and then you'll know what real empathy is. And it just really struck me in a very heartfelt way that as much as I talk about empathy, the concept of walking, truly walking in a pair of shoes that may not fit, haven't really struck me in that way. So share that as a foundation for the work that I'm leading at PG&E in partnership with all of my peers at the company because that I believe that we're all in, we're in this together. There's a lot of interdependence with my fellow senior officers on this topic. And what we started a few years ago was this whole concept called customer at the heart, right? And customer at the heart is a very simple mantra and it basically means putting the customer at the center of all of our thinking and our decision making. That will not change even with the advent of AI. As a matter of fact, double down on the concept of customer thought. We're gonna double down on the concept on what it means to deliver a 10 out of 10 experience in every interaction with our customers. And we're gonna use AI as the accelerant, right? Not as a replacement, but as the accelerant to accomplish those types of things.

Jeannie Walters 7:04

That's and that's exactly I think where we're going, right? Like we need to make sure that I think there's a conversation that keeps happening in kind of the greater ecosystem that just makes me kind of shake my head because I'm like, AI is here, folks. Like we can't, people are like, oh, we can't, we can't do that. What about the humans? And I'm like, well, if if you're not using AI by now, and if you're not thinking about how to actually use it exactly as you said, as an accelerant, as a way to scale, as a way to actually improve the quality of the employee experience, right? How we can support the people who support customers, then we're really missing the boat. And so that's what I thought was so interesting about uh what the C the CEO said, and also what you just shared, is we have to strike that balance. And it all comes back to knowing exactly who we are and the values we have and having that strong foundation. And if we don't have that, then we're just releasing tools in the wild and kind of hoping for the best.

Vincent Davis 8:08

Right.

Jeannie Walters 8:09

But if you know where you're going and you have that strategic vision, the tools actually help support that in greater ways than we can deliver today.

Vincent Davis 8:18

Absolutely. And when I think about this, if I I think about some of the elements of our system, our ecosystem and the utility business, uh, one of the biggest communication tools that we have today is the bill itself, right? But bill is not just a bill, it's actually a channel, right? An outage is not just an outage, it's it's a it's a moment in time where we're not delivering the product in the way that we had promised, right? A service request is not just a transaction. These are all experiences that affect families, businesses, and daily lives. AI is not a replacement for those interactions with our customers. And so I'm a firm belief that customers do not experience our intentions, they experience what it feels like to do business with us.

Jeannie Walters 8:58

That's right.

Vincent Davis 8:59

Right? Yeah.

Jeannie Walters 9:00

My mother had a phrase she loved about good intentions. Do you know this one?

Vincent Davis 9:05

No please tell me.

Jeannie Walters 9:06

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Vincent Davis 9:09

Oh, yeah.

Jeannie Walters 9:11

Because sometimes uh, you know, you can say, Oh, that was what I intended, or and it's like that doesn't really matter unless you show up and do it, unless you are actually delivering, unless you are actually being intentional about the experience that you're delivering, not just having good intentions around it. So I think that's a really good point too. And

Planning For Chaos Before It Hits

Jeannie Walters 9:30

all right, we're gonna move on to another version of this

Vincent Davis 9:33

Let's do it.

Jeannie Walters 9:33

because we have, you know, we need to provide empathy at scale, we need to figure all that out. And hand in hand with that is around accountability.

Vincent Davis 9:44

Yes.

Jeannie Walters 9:45

And I'm I'm gonna pull up, it's actually more of a blurb than an article because it's actually from an announcement from after uh CCW, which is a big customer event, uh customer care event. And so the the part I wanted to talk about was this, which says the airline that deployed it first. And it's about United Airlines presenting their full story about um how they built this multimodal agentic automation. And the part that stood out to me was what it was built for. It's built to handle scale around irregular operations. Now, that sounds like such a boring thing, but as a passenger, what that means is when everything goes haywire, right? When you've got the weather happening, when things are delayed, all of those things, what they're trying to do is prepare for when things go wrong. And I think that a lot of organizations can learn from that. Because right now, today, when I go in and work with different organizations, sometimes I say, like, okay, show me, you know, what what what is your journey map around XYZ? And everything is like the happiest, most ideal. It's only when thing, and it's with the best customer they've ever had, right? Who never complains. So I like to say, think about your worst customer on their worst day. Um, and how can we really map around that so we can be as prepared as possible? So that's what stood out to me about this. I'm curious your take on this. And also, you know, you you have to prepare for the unexpected at PG and E, right? So, what are some of the things that that you're doing to lead around that to?

Vincent Davis 11:31

Yeah, you know, it's a really this article or this this um, I guess blip from this article really fascinated me because a lot of the work that we focus on are on those customer journeys. And embedded in those journeys are moments in time, moments of truth, right? Um, really matter to our customers. And some of those moments aren't the ones that we really want them to experience. So I touched on this a moment ago, but anything from storm-related outages, uh high bills, other types of issues that may cause service interruptions, these are almost all moments that either can build or break customer trust. Right. And one of the things that's been really fascinating in the utility business is that even in a moment of crisis, uh, we can actually build trust by how we show up.

Jeannie Walters 12:13

Yeah.

Vincent Davis 12:13

Being in a very strong posture from an communication perspective, um, knowing that when we say we're going to restore at a certain time, it actually happens within a window, it makes sense. All those things that matter along the way to our customers are critically important. We can't simply react to customers when they're making frustrated. We have to be proactive and think about accountability before a crisis occurs. And so at PG&E , that's a lot of the work that's in flight. Again, it's working across the entire ecosystem. And what I love about what's happening at our company now, um, and I mentioned this earlier, is that no longer is it, okay, customer experience team, take care of that for us. No, we all own the customer experience together. So I have partners in electric operations, gas operations, and our strategy function and our finance function, all thinking about the customer impact of their actions. It's making a huge difference. And that accountability before a crisis is a real thing for us. And I'm just so pleased to see the progress. Now we're not done yet. You know, our CEO, Patti Poppe, has often been known to say, we're not done yet. Great progress. We still have work to do, and then that's the journey that we're on now.

Jeannie Walters 13:18

Yep. And and you know, will we ever be done, Vincent? I don't think so.

Vincent Davis 13:23

Not with AI, not with the advent of AI. I'd have to say that the world is going to continue to evolve at a very fast pace.

Jeannie Walters 13:28

Yeah, I totally agree. I think that, you know, when people ask for predictions for like 18 months from now, I'm like, well, I, you know, I would love to see that crystal ball, right? Because if you look at the predictions that were made 12 months ago or 18 months ago, it's very hard to keep up with the pace of just the world. And I think that when we talk about customer experience, one of the most important things, and you mentioned this word, is accountability. It's around making sure that whatever we can prepare for and control, we own it. And I think you've reached that point, which is um a very good moment in your journey where people are coming to you, right? And saying, I'm noticing this. We could fix this together, we could make this better for the customer. And once you start having that lens, you actually get more creativity, more innovation, and more accountability. Cause then people will say, All right, I'm gonna own this part. I'm going to do it and make sure that we get the results we want. And that's a really special moment on the kind of maturity that you're on. So, and not many people get there, not many organizations get there.

Vincent Davis 14:36

It's amazing. Yeah, it's amazing to see it and to feel it and experience it. And just to know that my peers now are coming to me with ideas. Um, it's been fantastic. And I could not do any of this without their support and their ownership of the customer experience.

Peggy The IVR And Call Containment

Vincent Davis 14:51

Um, you know, Jeannie, one of the things I did want to mention to you as well, when we talk about AI and technology, um, we have lots a pretty comprehensive IVR interactive voice response system um in our contact center. Um and her name is Peggy, right? PG&E program. Um and so one of the things that's happened with Peggy is that she is now taking 100% of our calls to come into the contact center. Where containment rate, Peggy, is probably floating at around 55 to 60 percent. Um, we believe best in class is probably closer to that 75 to 80 percent for us for what we want to accomplish without wrapping a customer in the IBR system itself. We want to have an off-ramp. And so we still think there's an opportunity to tweak the uh machine learning language a bit more and the and the AI component a bit more to have a higher degree of containment. But we're on a really good track there, and the um customer satisfaction results that we're getting from customers that are in the Peggy component there um has been very positive. It's on par slightly lower than a live agent, but it's not that far off. And so we continue to kind of work through that. Uh, I'm excited about it. And that frees up our agents, our live agents to do other more impactful work. And so all this leads to a bigger purpose for us.

Jeannie Walters 16:02

Absolutely.

Customer Obsession Starts With Coworkers

Jeannie Walters 16:03

And you just set us up perfectly for the final thing I wanted to talk about. Because one of the things that I think is so important, and for some reason, this is not always addressed, I think, in customer experience work is simply understanding what progress looks like. Like you might have that big goal of 75%, but you know that you're getting there, right? Because you know what to measure. And over time, I think people sometimes underestimate the amount of just work around we've got to replace some legacy systems to get this done well. We have to, you know, introduce new tools, we have to train differently, we have to make sure all of these pieces are in place. And this next piece is about a regional bank, Key Bank. Many people I'm sure are familiar. And Key Bank uh is essentially saying, you know what, we are making the progress that is most important. This is from Banking Dive. And the headline is Key Bank bets on relationships over tech budgets. And essentially what that means is they want to make progress, but they also understand they can't really compete at the pace of technology of some of the larger organizations. So, what can they compete on? Well, they invest in the relationship. What I really liked about what was explored here was the idea that it kind of goes back to the conversation we just had was we have to know what we're trying to do with this technology. We have to make sure that we're making progress in the right way. And there was a stat that they mentioned about how much progress they had made. So it says the consumer bank makes up about 32% of loans and 60% of deposits. Um, but this has grown consumer deposits by over $14 billion over the past seven years. And that's just consistent dedication and work and innovation around this idea of customer experience. So I felt like you could probably relate to this.

Vincent Davis 18:14

I definitely can. You know, it was a wonderful article. And I think for me, when I kind of put that into the context of what's happening at PG&E , one of the things that we're on is this relentless pursuit of excellence. And so I'm going to introduce some new technology, new words for us in our ecosystem here that I've been talking about for the last several months, which is customer obsession. And so customer obsession, from my vantage point, really is about the pursuit of excellence on behalf of our coworkers and our customers. So we talk a lot about customers, but the coworkers are really a part of the magic sauce here, and you know that better than most. Um and so what we see now is looking at simplifying our internal processes, making it easier for our coworkers to actually serve our customers. And one of the threats that we've really been pressing on or pulling on a lot is think about the coworker who's serving the coworker who's serving the customer. Right? It's so easy at one point in our history to say, well, I don't work directly with customers, so that's not really something that I can really touch. Well, no, we're gonna reframe that. If you're serving a coworker who's serving a coworker and serving customer, then you are a part of that thread. That's right. And so simplifying processes, no matter where you sit in this company, makes a difference to our customers.

Jeannie Walters 19:27

Amen. Amen. Because I think that when we think about how different the standards can be too like the promises we make customers, and then when we don't live up to those promises inside the organization, employees feel that disconnect. They understand. And so they're like, oh, well, you're not going to get back to me in the 24 hours that you promised the customer, but I'm the customer then is depending on me for this information. So it puts everybody into a bad spot. One of the things that this article talked about that also stood out to me was that part of this journey was deciding how to simplify. How do we actually make sure they went from eight origination platforms down to four? And that was partially to make it easier for employees. They shaved about 15 minutes off of consumer account opening and uh 30 minutes off of small business deposit applications. So all of these things, they looked at real markers of success.

Vincent Davis 20:27

Yes

Jeannie Walters 20:28

but so much of that was actually about what was happening inside the organization and how they served one another and how they respected the processes and simplified what how they did it. So I do think that this is a great example. I think what you're doing is a great example of just how much we have to treat customer experience like any other part of the business. We have to have a plan and measures of success and all those things. And we can't do anything without everyone.

Vincent Davis 20:58

Right. That's right. No, it's well said. So well said. You know, I often share with my um my peers and my teams um very simple premise, which is customers are no longer are no longer looking at um other utilities to compare us against. They're looking at all their other experiences in their lives.

Jeannie Walters 21:16

That's right.

Vincent Davis 21:16

Right. And so we don't have the luxury saying, well, we're better than this other utility. This is really being about are you as good as Amazon and all the others that are out there creating these experiences for their customers.

Jeannie Walters 21:27

Yep.

Vincent Davis 21:28

And so that's where we are today, and that's the space that we're operating in.

Customers Expect Uber Level Transparency

Jeannie Walters 21:32

Yeah, I'll I'll share a quick story about a client I worked with who was in the medical delivery space. And one of the things they were perplexed by was out of nowhere, they started getting people saying, Well, why can't I see the truck on my phone? I want to see exactly where you are. And that's because they were looking, you know, when you order an Uber, you see where it's coming from. When you, you know, have a delivery, it often tells you where it is on its route. So people wanted that transparency so that they could just know. Because I think sometimes humans just, you know, we fill in the blanks with lots of bad stuff when we have a lack of information. And so the more information we can give to customers in a really transparent way, that not only relieves some of that anxiety, but it builds that trust of here's where we are, here's what we're doing. I think your example earlier of, you know, if we make a promise of when things are coming back, we we have to live up to that promise. But you're you're telling you're inviting the customer into that conversation in a way that in the past, I know when I was growing up, you know, you would just wait. Hope for the best.

Vincent Davis 22:39

Right. Yeah, you just have to wait, but now then things are different now. There is no waiting.

Jeannie Walters 22:45

Right. Right, exactly. Exactly.

How To Connect And Final Takeaways

Jeannie Walters 22:47

So well, I am you know not surprised that we had so many great things to cover. And I'm I'm so grateful for your time and your insights. If people want to know more about you or PG&E or the work you're doing, what are some ways that they could maybe follow you or or find out more?

Vincent Davis 23:06

Yeah, well, there are so many ways for us to stay connected. I mean, obviously, we've got a pretty robust web website, so please feel free to visit PGE.com. A wealth of information is out there. I'm on LinkedIn as well, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Always happy to connect with those that have a focus on customer experience. And I'm just here. I'm I'm available and would love to talk to people and to speak helpful in any way possible.

Jeannie Walters 23:26

Well, I appreciate it. And if you ever have a chance to uh I know you do some speaking as well at different events and things like that. So uh if anyone has a chance to go hear your story and and hear you speak, I encourage them to do that as well. So thank you so much for being here, Vincent. And thank you for being here with the CX Pulse Check. As you know, you can always ask me a question at askjeannie.vip and I might answer your question on podcast. Until next time, keep up the great work and keep fighting the good fight on behalf of your customers. We'll see you later.