The end of the CX trade-off: How AI powers loyalty AND efficiency

I'm Greg Thomas from Genesis and I'm sitting here today with Pette Twinton who is the vice president of experience orchestration for EMA at Genesis. Pette, thank you so much for being here. — Pleasure. — So, let's talk about this myth, if you will, of this long-standing trade-off in CX between things that deliver efficiency for the organization and loyalty on the side of the customer. How is AI and AI powered experience orchestration starting to change that conversation and change how organizations think about that tradeoff? — Yes, if I think about when I started um a million years ago in banking um it was a trade-off if you thought about kind of the customer experience um versus efficiency. You had to choose um these days AI is a silver bullet I think. um you actually can get efficiency, improve customer experience, uh also employee experience, which is very important. Your employees are the people that talk to your customers every day. If they're not happy, um then your customers won't be happy. So um it is actually, you know, a situation where you can do all of those things. I think also you can um drive revenue. You know, a happy customer buys more. Um, if you're very efficient in dealing with a customer query, it gives you the ability to um have a conversation about the next thing. You know, how — how can we help you with a new with a lending proposition or a um savings or something? You can have that conversation if you satisfied that customer request. — So, organizations often talk about being customer obsessed. Um, but it doesn't always maybe get fulfilled. Um, it stays at the level of intention. How do you see AI changing this and making customer obsession like really operational and not just aspirational? — Yeah, I think for businesses to be customer obsessed, they really have to understand the customer. The biggest issue that we've had historically is that the data makes no sense. Uh you can't see half of it. What you can see, you can't um interrogate very well. You have to identify or create a hypothesis which is based on experience and you know a best guess. Um the future though is clear. You know, you are um able to get complete transparency of total customer journeys, total customer experience that allows you to make decisions um and understand the journeys that work for customers and don't and therefore be able to um deliver efficiency but great empathy and experience. I shouldn't have to repeat myself um tell you information you already have. Uh really very frustrating if that happens. So AI governance, responsible AI, these are shifting from nice to haves, from compliance checkboxes to these are real board level priorities particularly in regulated industries and in markets like AMIA where there are data sovereignty rules and other regulations that are coming to the four. How should organizations think about advancing AI and CX without increasing risk or taking on undue regulatory compliance burdens? I think um so my expertise is financial services. I've done that my entire life um except for the last five months where I've joined Genesis which is fantastic. I mean you know banks are risk-taking businesses. That's what they do. Um many other industries the same. You know it's kind of part of the DNA. So all of these things I think is about balance. Um clearly you need to understand the regulation and the rule. You also need to understand the intent of the rule even if the way it's written is um you know unclear to some way. So what you need to do is balance the risk and the reward. Understand um where are the risky processes and where you know where is it not risky. Um being able to leverage think leverage the data and the capabilities to um answer the simple questions the ones that require much less um you know vulnerable data and those kind of things. Um but the great news is we're in a position where we manage all of that data today. So we can mask PII, we can extract data that you don't want to be public. European sovereign cloud has just you know come to the four. Uh we're in the process of delivering that and it will give that ability for the data to remain exactly where they you know want it to be. We have a Swiss customer whose you know data uh restrictions were you know very intense which we were able to match because we understood fully what you know their ask was what the regulation was. their ask was actually, you know, greater than some of the regulation, but nevertheless, we were able to utilize our capabilities to give them the management of that data and encryption that they needed. Um, but not everything requires that level of due diligence. The good news is we've done this lots of times. We've supported lots of customers to do it. So, we have lots of the um answers to the questions that we know that the governance forums and organizations will ask. And I like the I like the way you laid that all out

because you're right, every business is taking some level of risk, that's how one has a business, right? But when you pick the right partners, when you understand sort of the regulatory environment, you can move forward with some level of confidence. And if you've got a platform where the governance is baked in, the auditability, the transparency, etc., then that alleviates some of that concern. — Yes, 100%. Regulators don't create regulation for the sake of it and they want businesses to be able to succeed. Um the regulation often is about improving customer experience. So yes, how do we um understand that regulation and deliver the transparency, the data, the um ability to really audit and see those total customer journeys so that we can uh demonstrate both to you know our customers and their customers that we are utilizing their data for their greater good and in a way that is appropriate for um the legal uh environment in which they work. When you imagine customer experience 3 to 5 years out, what will truly autonomous AI orchestrated CX look like and what does that mean for what organizations should be doing now to prepare for that future? — The future is amazing. It's so exciting. Um, and it's here today. I think that's the thing. The ingredients that you need to bake the cake of your, you know, your brand experience are all available right now. Um, so really it's about understanding your journeys. Where do you want to deploy? How do you deploy? I think we talk a lot about contact centers. You know, it's been our DNA for a long time. Um, but if I think about organizations, 75% of the population in an organization um are probably customerf facing in some way across some form of channel. If you think about field sales or relationship managers, private bankers, you know, they're out and or in the office at home talking, messaging with customers every day. We can utilize the technologies to support everybody that interacts with customers, giving you greater quality of data, greater insights to define your products, define your business. So the future really is about understanding uh where do you want to utilize humans? Where do you need uh that human touch um but actually how do we enable customers to get their jobs done um so it's really defining your brand and defining those journeys. — What advice do you have for people or best practices do you see around building the business case for AI in CX and measuring the value of those investments? Yeah, I think no matter what role you have in a business, um there are opportunities for AI to support you and to help you and often some of the roles that we don't necessarily think about uh marketing, fraud, some of the compliance areas. Um so if you think about um the ability to understand totally that customer journey um all of those interactions understand the detail of those things you can much more easily um understand that you have said all the things you should have said for compliance um you treating customers fairly identified um those vulnerable customers etc. So the joy now is that we have the data um the petri dish almost the starting point you know the starting point of the customer experience is your situation today. If you have the data for the situation today then we're able to measure as we implement capability uh the difference that is making completely transparent. There's no debate. Um I had a team where um uh we didn't understand before we put Genesis Cloud in but 30% of the customers that were phoning our complaints team were being told is this well 100% a new complaint or an existing complaint. If they told you that it was an existing complaint they could remain. If you said a new complaint then they were told you don't call this number for a new complaint we're going to transfer you. Can you imagine here I am a customer that is really annoyed and I've made the effort to phone to complain and I'm told that I can't speak to the complaints team because it's a new complaint madness. So we were able immediately to make a change into the system so that those complaints were automatically um diverted to the right team first time. So that's something that you can measure in real time. Uh you can do AB testing. So the data gives you the ability to completely see what's happening um and then to make the decisions, process improvements, policy improvements, whatever they might be to make the change and then you can see that change has had an effect straight away um both in time and holds or transfers or um efficiency into you know the relationship manager etc. So having the ability to see that then you know it's a simple mathematical calculation. What difference does this make to the customer? What difference does it make to that team member? Um and then you

know it multiplies up. — Yeah. So let me ask you a follow up on that because I think data is it's sort of one of those things everyone knows data is important. — It's also tricky, right? It's tricky to get it right. It's tricky to govern it. It's tricky to make sure that it's all in the right place. uh and this is one of the areas where having a platform strategy versus a series of solutions can help you. But what advice do you have for people around data to make sure that they are thinking about it and managing it in the right ways? — So data is crucial. It's the lifeblood of um insight and decisions. Um but in a world where you have multiple players um multiple channels that are disperate uh then the ability to actually understand a customer experience you know from the public website from your digital applications and so forth through all of the different channels that might connect to um and then into the back office. If you have disperate channels, disperate um data sets, disperate identifiers, it's almost impossible to measure and to see. I think there are some people that you know think we need to fix the data before we go on the transformation. You'll spend your life trying to fix the data. It's not the right approach. Um but by moving to you know a uh full orchestration a full platform um that takes you end to end then the identifier carries through. So you're in a position where you actually understand that total customer experience in a way that you never could before. Um and you might be sitting in one team thinking we're doing a great job. Our customers love us. but in reality they're interacting with another team that's not associated with you and having a terrible time which is tarnishing the brand and tarnishing the you know service you're delivering. So my message on data would be just turn on Genesis Cloud as much as you possibly can. you know, maybe there are parts that you have um you know, a particular vendor you're locked into or something. The platform allows you to connect that data to. Um but the more that you can go all in, the more that data will flow. And not only does it support you in making your um strategic decisions, but actually in the moment, the agent uh whether it's a virtual agent or a human agent has all of the insight to understand uh and be able to personalize that experience. How does AI powered experience orchestration help to elevate the customer experience that a brand delivers to something that truly is organizationwide and can be sort of managed and understood as such and not just this series of interactions but this arc that they go on from beginning of their journey with you as a customer to the end or even you know in s from an intent to an outcome. What is AI and what is experience orchestration doing to elevate CX as a function and as a thing if you will inside organizations? If you really want to understand the customer experience, you have to enable every single individual um that interacts with customers with the technology. And even if they're interacting secondhand, so you know, back office um this the query, the data, whatever it might be must flow. So your on boarding team, your KYC renewal team if you have that, your fraud team, your compliance team, your marketing team, you know, everybody that interacts with a customer has to be on the same technology and the data flow because otherwise you have hotspots and you don't know. you believe whatever the hype is of your silo. You know, I'm in this world. Our team's doing a great job. The surveys when they finish a query, everything's brilliant, but nevertheless, maybe the NPS marks, the external benchmarking, it's not moving as you want it to. And that's because there's blind spots. So um my paradigm is every single person um every single channel that touches a customer needs to be orchestrated leveraging AI so that we can give the best possible experience to that customer no matter where they start finish. Our goal should always be first touch resolution. Often a call is not first touch. First touch is the public website um the digital app whatever it might be. So we need to give empower the customer to um start and finish where they wanted to start and finish, not force them into a journey that takes them into another channel. That's not their preference. They started somewhere. And if they started digitally, they're valuable. We really want customers to be digital first. But if we if they start digitally and then we create journeys and experiences that force them into human channels, not only is that costly for us, it's frustrating for them. So if they start digitally, you know, we have to keep them there. That's what they

wanted to do. Orchestrating it all is the power of the future and yeah, enables your brand to be, you know, really what you want it to be. — Well, Paul Twain, thank you so much for joining us. — Pleasure. Thank you very much.