#657: Augmenting front-line employees with AI for better experiences, with Fabrice Martin, Medallia

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström® – Episode #657

Title: Augmenting Front-Line Employees with AI for Better Experiences
Guest: Fabrice Martin, Chief Product Officer at Medallia
Release Date: March 31, 2025

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Introduction

In episode #657 of The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®, host Greg Kihlström engages in a deep conversation with Fabrice Martin, the newly appointed Chief Product Officer at Medallia. Recorded live at the Medallia Experience event at the Wynn in Las Vegas, the episode delves into the transformative role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in enhancing front-line employee performance and customer experiences.

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Guest Background and Role at Medallia

[02:41] Fabrice Martin:
Fabrice Martin introduces himself as Medallia’s Chief Product Officer, responsible for the company's product roadmap, vision, and strategy. Although he's new to Medallia, having joined five weeks prior, Fabrice brings a decade of industry experience, including his tenure as Head of Product at Clarabridge, which was subsequently acquired by Qualtrics. He emphasizes the dynamic and rapidly evolving nature of the industry, expressing enthusiasm about the innovations on the horizon.

[02:57] Fabrice Martin:
"This is my fifth week on the job, so talk about a great experience in all ways. But I'm not new to the industry... I think it couldn't be a better moment to be in this industry because it's rapidly changing."

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AI’s Role in Enhancing Front-Line Employee Performance

Greg initiates the discussion by addressing the pressures faced by front-line employees who must solve customer issues efficiently and effectively. He probes how AI can support these employees in delivering superior customer experiences.

[04:42] Fabrice Martin:
Fabrice underscores that AI serves as a "superpower" for front-line employees. While these employees excel in empathy and brand representation, AI equips them with comprehensive customer context and history, enabling them to address issues promptly and personalize interactions.

[05:52] Fabrice Martin:
"AI will understand their entire history with the customer and help prepare that frontline employee very quickly and focus on being empathetic and on brand and take care of customers' issues the first time."

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Root Cause Assist: Identifying and Resolving Issues

Greg highlights Fabrice’s mention of "Root Cause Assist" from the opening keynote, seeking deeper insights into its functionality.

[06:57] Fabrice Martin:
Fabrice elaborates on Root Cause Assist, a tool designed to simplify the identification of factors influencing customer satisfaction scores. Instead of navigating through complex dashboards, employees can click to receive summarized insights about rising or falling scores and the underlying causes, enhancing their ability to address issues without extensive data analysis.

[08:07] Fabrice Martin:
"With a simple click we can tell them, hey, your scores are going up or your scores are going down... without having to drill 2,000 times to get the full picture."

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Prescriptive Digital Experience and Coaching Intelligence

The conversation transitions to Medallia’s Prescriptive Digital Experience and Coaching Intelligence features, both leveraging AI to provide actionable insights.

Prescriptive Digital Experience:
Focused on web and app developers, this feature not only identifies issues such as slow page loads or excessive form fields but also offers concrete solutions to mitigate these problems, thereby reducing customer frustration and abandonment rates.

[10:31] Fabrice Martin:
"The marketing team says, hey, we have this campaign, just slap the new picture there... so that's Prescriptive Digital Experience."

Coaching Intelligence:
Designed for contact center leaders, Coaching Intelligence analyzes agents' past interactions to deliver personalized coaching recommendations. This allows managers to enhance agent performance and customer interactions without manually reviewing each call.

[11:35] Fabrice Martin:
"AI gives them the recommendations. So it really increases their ability to be better coaches and saves them a ton of time."

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Intelligent Summaries and Smart Responses

Greg probes further into how AI can aid in post-interaction learning and improvement.

[16:18] Fabrice Martin:
Fabrice discusses Intelligent Summaries, which concisely encapsulate a customer's interaction history, enabling agents to provide personalized and empathetic service without sifting through extensive data. Additionally, Smart Responses leverage AI to craft tailored replies based on the customer's history, enhancing both speed and personalization in communications.

[17:23] Fabrice Martin:
"It uses GenAI to look at the entire history of a customer and then recommends how to close the loop empathetically with that customer."

[18:00] Greg Kilstrom:
"And it's not just fast, it's fast plus it's personal."

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Fabrice Martin’s Approach to Agility in His New Role

Greg inquires about Fabrice's strategies for maintaining agility in his position.

[19:14] Greg Kilstrom:
He asks Fabrice how he stays agile in his role and ensures consistent agility.

[20:11] Fabrice Martin:
Fabrice emphasizes the importance of staying connected with customers to understand their evolving needs and strategic priorities. By regularly engaging in conversations and feedback loops, he ensures that Medallia’s product roadmap remains aligned with delivering continuous value and innovation.

[20:23] Fabrice Martin:
"To stay agile, I need to be connected to our customers... to ensure that we are delivering value to them."

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Highlights from Medallia Experience Event

The episode also touches upon Fabrice's experiences at the Medallia Experience event.

[19:17] Fabrice Martin:
Fabrice highlights the opportunity to meet numerous customers in a short timeframe, facilitating valuable exchanges about successes and challenges. This direct engagement helps him gather insights that inform product strategies and innovations.

[19:47] Fabrice Martin:
"Having that unique opportunity to meet with a lot of our customers at the same time has been great. It would have taken me a year to be able to have all these conversations and I can have them here in the space of a couple of days."

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Conclusion

Greg wraps up the conversation by thanking Fabrice Martin for his insights and participation. He directs listeners to additional resources and encourages them to engage with Medallia and The Agile Brand for further information.

[21:05] Greg Kilstrom:
"You can learn more about Fabrice and Medallia by following the links in the show notes."

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Notable Quotes

• Fabrice Martin [05:52]:
  "AI will understand their entire history with the customer and help prepare that frontline employee very quickly and focus on being empathetic and on brand and take care of customers' issues the first time."

• Fabrice Martin [08:07]:
  "With a simple click we can tell them, hey, your scores are going up or your scores are going down... without having to drill 2,000 times to get the full picture."

• Fabrice Martin [11:35]:
  "AI gives them the recommendations. So it really increases their ability to be better coaches and saves them a ton of time."

• Fabrice Martin [17:23]:
  "It uses GenAI to look at the entire history of a customer and then recommends how to close the loop empathetically with that customer."

• Fabrice Martin [20:23]:
  "To stay agile, I need to be connected to our customers... to ensure that we are delivering value to them."

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a comprehensive exploration of how AI technologies, specifically those developed by Medallia, are revolutionizing front-line employee capabilities and enhancing customer experiences. Fabrice Martin’s insights provide a valuable perspective on integrating AI to foster agility, personalization, and efficiency in customer interactions.

Listeners gain a clear understanding of practical AI applications that drive customer satisfaction and business growth, making this episode an essential listen for marketing leaders and professionals aiming to build agile, customer-centric brands.

Transcript

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[Greg Kilstrom]

Brand.

[Podcast Host]

Welcome to season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, E commerce and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And now onto the show.

[Greg Kilstrom]

We are here recording live at Medallia Experience at the Wynn in Las Vegas and have been seeing and hearing some amazing things about how AI can enhance the customer as well as enable teams at organizations to create more meaningful connections with customers. Today we're going to talk about how AI can help to create better experiences for customers before, during and after their interactions. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Fabrice Martin, Chief Product Officer at Medallia. Fabrice, welcome to the show.

[Fabrice Martin]

Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me Greg.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, looking forward to talking with you. First of all, congrats on your new role as Chief Product Officer.

[Fabrice Martin]

Thank you.

[Greg Kilstrom]

And for those you know just listening in here, why don't we start with you giving a little background on yourself and Your role at Medallion.

[Fabrice Martin]

Sure, sure. So my role is the Chief Product officer, so in charge of our product roadmap, our product vision and strategy. And I'm relatively new to Medallia. This is my fifth week on the job, so talk about a great experience in all ways. But I'm not new to the industry. I've been in the industry for about 10 years. I was the head of product at Clarabridge, a company that helped define at least part of the space. We sold the company to Qualtrics, then I took about a couple of years off to do something completely different. And now I'm back and it's super fun. And I think there couldn't be a better moment to be in this industry because it's rapidly changing. So I think it gets really, really, really interesting moving forward.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, no, totally agree. And yeah, definitely heard a lot of exciting announcements here at Medallia Experience, and we're going to touch on some of those. You know, we certainly. We talk a lot about AI on the show and have talked about it over the last few years, and there's a reason why. I mean, there's obviously a lot of hype, but there's also a lot of real, tangible things that AI can help businesses accomplish. So I want to start with how AI augmented tools can help actions that predict behaviors, as well as help resolve issues or improve customer or employee experiences before or during an interaction. So there's a lot of pressure to get things right when interacting with customers. And frontline employees and customer service agents are under competing pressures to both solve problems quickly, but also solve them well so they don't get that return call or return request. So how should brands be thinking at a high level about AI's role in improving the situation?

[Fabrice Martin]

That's a fantastic question. And you're right. Frontline employees tend to be in a very difficult spot because they need to be not only experts at everything that a customer might throw their way, but they also need to be empathetic. They need to be on brand, they need to be polite, they need to be game on all the time. So it's a very difficult position to be in and one that I totally empathize and respect. Where I think AI and Genai can be super helpful is giving them superpowers, if you will, in the sense that they have already that very human touch and they know the brand, they can represent it, but they don't necessarily have all the context and the history about the customer and understand what the customer wants. How do they like to be talked to, treated and that superpower can come from AI, because AI will understand their entire history by there, I mean the customer and help prepare that frontline employee very quickly and focus on being empathetic and on brand and take care of customers issues the first time, as you said.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, yeah. Because I mean, they can't possibly, even if the same customer calls back again, they can't possibly know everything about them. And they may be sitting in customer support, but there was a sales opportunity or some other thing. So just AI in that way helps them to use your words to give them superpowers to be able to understand all that quickly.

[Fabrice Martin]

Right. Because one of the things that AI is fantastic. It is connecting dots and summarizing in very easy to understand ways. So that's what we need as humans. Okay, just tell me what's going on and I'm ready to help this customer.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, yeah. And so when you were talking in the opening keynote yesterday, one of the things you brought up was, you know, customers appreciate the kind of open ended ability of AI to answer just about any question, but they also like when there's some focus to helping them solve some real tangible problems. And one of those things is finding the root cause of issues. So can you talk a little bit about Root Cause Assist and how it can help do just that?

[Fabrice Martin]

Yeah, absolutely. It's a feature that I'm very proud of and excited about. And it's a little bit what we were talking about, right? Employees, and especially frontline employees, they run stores, they take care of customers, they build cars, they do all these fascinating things. But the one thing that they're not is data analysts. Their job is not to click around the dashboard to figure out what's going on. Their job is to again, run a store or provide great experiences. So Root Cause Assist helps a lot with that because with a simple click we can tell them, hey, your scores are going up or your scores are going down, or a customer complain about a specific. They just click there and they get in a very nice, simple summarized way exactly what's going on and what are the things in their environment driving that score, popping or going down without having to drill 2,000 times to get the full picture. Right. So again, in that theme of giving them superpowers, it's a little bit that the intention and the feedback has been great about our customers using that feature.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah. Because I mean, that's a pretty. It's helpful when you're able to get it right using a tool like that. But there's risk in getting it wrong. If you're pretending that you're a scientist basically in the scenario and trying to do all that yourself. Again, best intentions, but people don't always read the data or they may not have access to all the breadth of data. So this would allow them to basically be able to learn quickly and things like that.

[Fabrice Martin]

Completely. Back to our conversation. Before AI, the state of the art was a dashboard and it fulfilled its purpose and it helped. But now that we have especially Genai, we can move to the next thing. Right, which is no more dashboards and more quick insights and digested insights and actions.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, yeah. And of course, a lot of what customer service agents and Frontline employees are dealing with are admittedly reactions to a problem that happens. So they're dealing with. Again, people don't just call the customer service line for no reason, they're calling for a reason. But being predictive as well as prescriptive in how to help not only in the moment, but also later on can be incredibly helpful. So can you talk a little bit about the Medallia's Prescriptive Digital Experience insights and Coaching Intelligence that can kind of help in real time to help with some of these, these issues?

[Fabrice Martin]

Sure, sure. The features apply in different domains, if you will. So Prescriptive Digital Experience is geared towards web or app developers or analysts. Right. And what it helps them do is not only understand what could be going on in their application or on their website if customers, for example, are getting stuck in part of the process, but also what to do about it. So that's the prescriptive part of it. It's not only, hey, your page is slow to load and everybody's abandoning the form, it's white. Your pictures are very heavy, so you should consider less pictures and a little bit lighter. Or there's like 200 fields that people need to fill in. Consider consolidating into just 20. Right. And your abandonment rate is going to go much lower.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Well, because things like that, I mean, I've been part of these projects. They may start out amazing and clean and uncluttered, but they grow over time. Stuff just gets added or removed.

[Fabrice Martin]

Exactly. The marketing team says, hey, we have this campaign, just slap the new picture there. Or somebody wants two more fields for their research project and suddenly you're app is super cluttered. So that's Prescriptive Digital Experience. The other one is Coaching Intelligence and that one is more geared towards contact center leads so that they can be prepared to coach their agents and their team members in terms of providing more empathetic experiences, being more on point with the brand or whatever. And what's great about coaching intelligence is that again, talking about AI, it looks at all the interactions that this agent has had in the past and how they have done. And based on that, it makes very concrete recommendations for that agent in their context of how to coach that agent to be better.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, yeah, well, and that's another case where again, even the best manager, the best intention manager, can't listen to every interaction to give that coaching advice. Right. So it can augment even those managers play a strong role, but it augments their ability to help their team. Right.

[Fabrice Martin]

Again, superpowers, right? I mean, in this, the state of the art would be as you said, like, okay, listen to Matt's, you know, 10 last calls and you spend two hours listening and taking notes and oh, Matt, you know, could have been better here, et cetera. They don't have to do that anymore, right? They are focused on preparing for the coaching session and AI gives them the recommendations. So it really increases their ability to be better coaches and saves them a ton of time.

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[Greg Kilstrom]

So then kind of moving to the next stage in the experience. You know, after an experience or an interaction occurs, there's definitely a lot of opportunity to learn from it. But teams are often, and again, I've seen this firsthand, they're moving so quickly to the next thing that they don't have time to do that retrospective or really understand the learnings from it. So again, this is another area where AI can help. So at a high level, how should brands be thinking about utilizing AI based tools to learn and improve from their customer interactions?

[Fabrice Martin]

That's a great question. In my mind, where AI can be super helpful is again at looking at large amounts of data, making connections, making inferences and helping understand better. A customer has not just the last interaction, but maybe the last 20 or 30 interactions across different channels. From that customer's perspective, they are all a part of their journey with the brand. As you said, if an agent or a frontline employee or Whoever only has 10 seconds to prepare for that next interaction, they're not going to be able to absorb the entire journey of the customer as much as they would love to. So with Genai and with summarization, that's what suddenly becomes possible. You can quickly catch up on Greg's entire history with the brand and be super empathetic and understand Greg as a person rather than, hey, you know, there's this customer just in line waiting to get something from me.

[Greg Kilstrom]

You can spend the time being a human with empathy and stuff like that versus researching the last, who knows, two, three years in some cases.

[Fabrice Martin]

Exactly. They get to know you much better and again, give you a more personalized and empathetic experience thanks to that AI, giving them that ability to ramp up really quickly on your entire history.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, and so that would be intelligent summaries and smart response as well. Can you talk a little bit about that too? Sure.

[Fabrice Martin]

Well, I mean actual intelligence summaries is a great example. It's perfectly on point. Right. What it does is that it summarizes past interactions. It could be on any channel and if I'm the next agent, let's say in the contact center, picking up contact with that customer, I read up a quick paragraph and I know everything that has happened with that customer, where they've been, what their struggles were, what the requests are. So I'm ready to give that customer a really good experience and take care of their problem thanks to that summarization. Right, so that's a great example. Smart response is about closing the Loop with a customer. Right. And today, same thing. If you want to really be empathetic and you would need to read up on the entire history and experience of the customer. Oh, Greg, we know you love corner rooms with sunlight in the morning.

[Greg Kilstrom]

I do.

[Fabrice Martin]

Exactly. And so we took care of you for this experience. Right. That's what smart response allows them to do. It uses genai to look at the entire history of a customer and then recommends how to close the loop empathetically with that customer. And what's been great is that our customers not only see that empathy coming through instead of using templates that can be, for example, super dry. Right. But also they've seen up to an 80% faster productivity gains in responding and closing the loop with customers. Right. Which is what experience is about in many cases.

[Podcast Host]

Right, right.

[Greg Kilstrom]

And it's not just fast, it's fast plus it's personal.

[Fabrice Martin]

Right? Yeah. Usually it will be, you want it fast or you want it good? Pick one right now. You can get both.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Nice, nice. Love, love it. So let's talk a little bit about the event we're here at Medallia Experience as well as your new role. So again, congrats on your role as Chief Product Officer. What is top of mind for you as you embrace this new role?

[Fabrice Martin]

Well, it's interesting, right? I don't know if you were there at the opening keynote. You saw all the logos of our customers and it's really the who's who of enterprise brands and the best brands in the world. I feel a lot of responsibility to now be the steward of their experience with us. And I want them to see us as strong innovators first and foremost and second, as their long term partner in their journey to provide better experiences and continue being top brands in the world. So that's kind of my mental state at this point. I'm very excited about it, obviously.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Nice. Yeah. And five weeks in, so lots to do.

[Fabrice Martin]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Definitely. So what's been a highlight of the event for you so far?

[Fabrice Martin]

The customers. Getting to meet a lot of our customers. Because we're all here, we are having a good time, talking to each other, exchanging the. The good, the bad, the ugly. Right. So having that unique opportunity to meet with a lot of our customers at the same time has been great. It would have taken me a year to be able to have all these conversations and I can have them here in the space of a couple of days. So that's been fantastic.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Love it, Love it. Well, one last question for you before we wrap up here. I like to ask this to everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?

[Fabrice Martin]

Great question. And before I get there, thank you for inviting me to the podcast as a guest. It's been a great experience and hopefully we can do this again.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Absolutely. Next year, right?

[Fabrice Martin]

Next year. There you go. Exactly.

[Greg Kilstrom]

If not sooner.

[Fabrice Martin]

So to stay agile, it connects with what we've been talking about, right? To me, as the head of product and as again the steward of our innovation and roadmap, I need to be connected to our customers. So what's generating value for them? What is not? What are their strategic imperatives and how can they lock in with them in terms of having the right roadmap to support them? And it's agile because it's constantly evolving. So I need to have those conversations relatively regularly so that again, I am sure that we are delivering value to them.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, yeah, I know the world changes quickly, so got to very fast. Yeah, yeah. Love it. Well again I'd like to thank Fabrice Martin, Chief Product Officer at Medallia, for joining the show. You can learn more about Fabrice and Medallia by following the links in the show notes.

[Podcast Host]

Thanks again for listening to the Agile brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkillstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.

[Greg Kilstrom]

The Agile Brand.

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