← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#673: Predictive and proactive customer experiences, with Vinod Muthukrishnan, Cisco
00:25:21
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- [00:02]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
- [00:12]
Greg Kilstrom
Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?
- [00:15]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
- [00:22]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
- [00:24]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Anyways, get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
- [00:27]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty.
- [00:31]
Pura and Strayer University Announcer
The Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University helps you go from I know the way to I've arrived with our top 10 ranked online MBA. Gain skills you can learn today and apply tomorrow. Get ready to go from make it happen to made it happen and keep striving. Visit strayer.edu Jack WelchMBA to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chev and its many campuses, including at 212115 Street north in Arlington, Virginia.
- [01:13]
Greg Kilstrom
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 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. Customer expectations have skyrocketed. People now demand instant, personalized and seamless interactions across every touch point. But are companies truly meeting these expectations or are they still stuck in reactive customer service models? What if AI could completely transform the customer experience into something proactive, predictive and even empathetic? Joining me today is Vinod Muthakrishnan, VP and COO@ WebEx Customer Experience@ Cisco. Vinod is a leader in the future of customer experience, helping organizations use AI to anticipate customer needs, deliver seamless automation, and create personalized interactions at scale. Vinod, welcome to the show.
- [02:52]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
Thanks for having me. Absolute pleasure.
- [02:54]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in though, why don't you start by telling us a little bit more about your background and your role at Cisco.
- [03:02]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
Awesome. I started my career in the merchant marine, which is as far from CX as can be. Did a couple of startups, the second of which was in customer experience management. And Cisco acquired us in 2019, which I thought was the evolution of the contact center into being an experienced business. So I've kind of lived that journey through the lens of my journey into Cisco and beyond. And Now I'm the VPN Chief Operating Officer for our WebEx customer experience solutions business, which is all the technologies that we need to deliver a superlative customer experience across the entire customer journey for our customers. Great, great.
- [03:37]
Greg Kilstrom
Well, yeah, let's dive in here and we're gonna talk about a few things today, but I wanna start by talk evolution of the customer experience. And you've talked about the importance of moving beyond the status quo in cx. What's wrong with the traditional approach and why does it need to change?
- [03:56]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
Yeah, I think the one word answer with what's wrong with customer experience is everything. Because I think it's not for lack of desire to offer great experiences, it's the lack of the technology and the right model to do it in. You know, customer experience is often reactive. You call, you raise an issue. When you get a message around, let's say service disruption, it's an FYI message and now you have to figure out whom to call to get more information. Everything's reactive. You need to seek information, you need to repeat yourself, you need to queue up to get to speak to someone. So a lot of it is not for lack of intent but lack of technology that you have a highly reactive, highly non contextual sort of interaction. And oftentimes, as I always say, when you get someone on the phone who says how can I help you? They have no cognizance about your journey history, sentiment and how can I help you? Often becomes a very unhelpful sort of opening line. So if you really look, put your hat on as an end consumer and you look back to see what's the last truly delightful, intuitive, personalized experience you had, you'd have to think long and hard. And that is a problem statement.
- [05:01]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And so to that point, part of that means that customers are feeling heard, valued and understood. Right. You know, to the, you know, how can I help you? I've been there like, I want the, like, how can I help you with this thing that you're, you're currently experiencing or whatever. Not that that open question. It doesn't make me feel heard, valued and understood. What are some of the biggest barriers that are preventing businesses from achieving that? That, that feeling?
- [05:31]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
You know, at Cisco, our belief is that the purpose or purpose of AI and automation is to make customer experience more human. And the idea really is, as you've scaled as businesses, as you've gone from 1 to 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 touch points, as you've gone from physical to digital touch points, the reality is the, the experience is not human. Delightful and intuitive. We always say that an interaction between you and your brand should be like interacting with your favorite human. And your favorite human instinctively knows who you are, understands your context, understands your channel of choice. They know you're a texter or a phone person, morning person or a night person. Doesn't make you wait, doesn't make you repeat yourself, retains the context of what's important for you. Doesn't always tell you what you want to hear. They tell you the right thing, not what you always want to hear, but they'll tell you straight and all of that. So why isn't the brand interaction exactly like that? So we always tend to say AI will solve all problems. AI is a means to solving these problems. Historically, this has not happened because, as I said, the technologies didn't support it. But if you look at all of the AI innovation that's happened in the past few years, we are now able to do this delivery of superlative customer experience at scale using the power of everything that we've launched. For example, if we have an autonomous AI agent which allows you to have very human, like bidirectional conversation on a customer's channel of choice 24 hours a day, no call queues, no repeating yourself, no having to wait, and always on availability. And we'll talk a little more about it. And we've spoken about the AI agent arming the human with the context that they need to serve the customer the best they can. So ultimately, customers feel heard when they feel that it's a human experience. As I said, like interacting with the favorite human. Our job is to use AI automation and omnichannel technologies to help brands deliver that kind of an experience to their customers.
- [07:29]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, and part of that experience is not only reacting quickly and with the right information, but it's also anticipating the needs of the customers. Right. So can you talk a little bit more about how AI can help here? Maybe the mind reading plugin isn't available just yet, but how can it, you know, how can I anticipate needs and go from, you know, purely reactive to proactive engagement?
- [07:58]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
I love this question because if you see the, our go forward strategy, what we're working on, what we've deployed, for many of our customers, our focus really is we believe the best contact center experience you ever had is one you never needed to have. So the solve for the problem isn't how you handle a customer when they call. You have to do it, of course, is to see why did they need to call to begin with. And therein lies the ability to engage a customer along the customer journey predictively, proactively and preemptively. So they have the answers they need, they have the information they need, they have the alerts they need, so they don't need to call itself. So proactive engagement with customers is a huge part of that fact. The second is using the context from the interactions. Why do they call? What channel do they call on, what's important for them, the fact that an issue is unresolved, using that to preemptively get in front of them and give them the solutions that they need. That is a case of not waiting for a customer to pick up the phone and call. You know, the need is happening. There's a service disruption. So the role of AI omnichannel automation is to do exactly that. We have a very interesting feature called topic analytics. Now, topic analytics does something very simple, which is why are people calling us? What are the themes? What are the topics? Obviously we use AI to abstract hundreds of different kinds of queries, to say people actually concerned about this one additional charge on their bill. I'm just making it simple. And if you know that problem existed, you fix it either with your billing systems or with proactive messaging or on your digital channels. You can pick how you fix it, but we will give you the insight to tell you people are calling for this reason. And the solve for this is not how well you answer the call or the message. The solve for this is to prevent the need for them to call, which means eliminate that problem to begin with. It's incredible. We once did data analytics on a customer. I won't name them wherein they had a billing, online billing thing where on third step they added a small search. It was pennies, it didn't matter. But customers actually felt very betrayed. They said, why is the that it is there? We were able to power up, using experience management, some of those insights back to the customer. And we said, look, either be transparent and add that in step One or eliminate the charge. It's not the charge that is making your customers angry. It's the fact that it shows up in step three. And that's the kind of microscopic insight that eliminates the need for you to call in and not just focus on what to do after you call.
- [10:25]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And I think this is where a lot of people listening, I would venture to say most if not all people listening are using AI in some way in their work, and they certainly experience it as a customer, whether they in some cases really realize it or not. But a lot of people still think of AI even though it's been around for decades. They think of it as like ChatGPT or, you know, something, you know, some, some tool out there that we all use. But, you know, you've, you've, you've said and expressed it as really a foundation of a customer experience center. You've touched on this a little bit. But, you know, what does that mean in practice? And how should leaders be thinking about it in this way?
- [11:10]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
Look, that's such a. The essential question of our times. We've often said this at Cisco about security. And I'll say the same thing about AI. You know, it's not an afterthought or a plugin or a module or a tool or a switch you switch on. It's enmeshed in the fabric of how you build products. Now, obviously you can look at something like the AI agent and say it's a product, of course, but the way it becomes delightful is when you don't think of it as the standalone island, but you use all the power, the depth and the breadth of AI and automation to make the best possible agent tech experience. So I think the example I would give is what you want to do essentially, if you go back to the human experiences. How do I create experiences at scale? Obviously, I can't have a contact center that's open 24 hours a day. But if you do call me at midnight, what can I do to give you a most human like experience? Using the power of AI. Now that's a great use of AI, but there's also AI as it pertains to things you don't often see. For example, you know, when you call a call center, I'm sure you've had this experience. Someone gave me this great example, saying, when I'm stuck in an airport and I need information, I try to look around and see who seems to have most tenure on them because I'll get the answers straight from them. Anyone else will say oh, let me look up that information for you. Now, when you're on a call or you're messaging with an agent, you don't know the difference, right? Who's joined the job yesterday, who's been there 10 years. The point is, your day one agent should be as knowledgeable as your most tenured agent. And therein AI, as I said, is a means to that end. Right. It's not the purpose by itself. If you can listen to the conversation, which AI allows you to do, contextualize what you're asking, go scour the knowledge base and on a real time basis, tell the agent this is what the customer wants, this is what they're looking for, this is the proposed solution. You're essentially removing wastage in the call where you're spending time searching for stuff. You're also allowing the agent to do something that humans do best, which is lean in, pay attention, be present in the moment. Right. And empathize. Sometimes these conversations have, you know, hair to it. So if I'm able to focus on you, Greg, and say, greg, I'm so sorry you lost your credit card, I hope you're okay not having to worry about, you know, I need to finish this call in 30 seconds. Let me look for information. What can I do around replacement card? And the information is popping up like on my, on my dashboard. It is a great way to make that experience more human. So if you look at the way we look at AI products, I spoke to about AI Assistant topic analytics. I spoke to you about AI agent. We don't speak about these as the start and end of it. We talk about it in customer experience terms. What impact can it have? How should you do it and what product powers that experience. And I think that is incredibly important. As you look at AI and customer experience,
- [14:02]
Greg Kilstrom
I want to dig a little more into this, this idea of, you know, making AI interactions feel more human, like, because I think, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of focus. You know, it talks, talking about AI. There's, there's the efficiency play, there's, you know, personalization at scale there, there's a lot of things that are, that are talked about. But I like what you're saying here as far as how can we actually, if the point is to have a better customer experience and often engaged humans are able to create good customer experience. I mean, I'll give that caveat there of when there's good human engagement, there can be really good customer experiences. But AI can play a role here to make it better. Right. It's not even just replace an interaction, but to, to make it more human like or even a better experience. How should leaders be thinking about that aspect of it?
- [14:57]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
So I think there's a few things. One is, look, every evolution is an evolution, which means there's something that happened before. There is a place you're now and you're heading somewhere else. Right. So oftentimes we conflate issues and say, okay, AI should be indistinguishable from humans. While that may be the ultimate pursuit wherein the agentic experience is very human. Right. Now remember where we are. We are in a place where we need to wait in the call queue. Not available after 5pm The IVR trees are essentially like little puzzles, you know, you know those puzzles where you get in and you're not able to get out.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right, right.
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Vinod Muthakrishnan
Sometimes people, I, I know people who've told me they remember the IVR tree because they need to call them again and again. So I know instead of waiting for menu option 1 to 9, I know 8 is my option. As soon as they start, I press 8.
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Greg Kilstrom
Oh yeah, I've memorized those before. Yeah, totally.
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Vinod Muthakrishnan
So that, here's the point. You understand this is where customers are today, right? We are forcing them to memorize your IVR tree. So the first aspect is be present. Being human is not just the voice. AI voice sounding human though there's incredible amount of R and D there. You know, you'll see the AI agent, it actually has very human like tone, tenor and all of that. But it's a little more than just how the agent sounds. You still know you're speaking to AI. The point is, are you available? Do you have the information and context? Do you elegantly handle things you don't know? For example, if I ask if you call your bank and you say, how much money does my brother have in the bank account or what have you, right? Which you're not supposed to have access to. How do human analysts say? So I'm not allowed to give you that information. Can AI elegantly handle those exceptions? So the way to think about it is whereas customer experience today have a really, really aggressive sort of North Star on this, you know, utopian instead of customer experience. But know that it is an evolution and we have to solve the most important problems first, which is being always available, having the right relevance and context, being able to give the answers that customers need in as human like a form as possible, not robotic, and definitely not force your customers to memorize IVR trees. That is A win. And I think what all companies will realize about AI adoption is it is a continuous evolution, which means you'll do something in step one, validate the ROI of what you did. Was there an experiential impact, was then an arrow to doing it, what product powered it, and then add more use cases or add more products and that is how AI is going to be adopted. Anyone who says I'm going to just throw the entire kitchen sink of AI on enterprise and miraculously transform, as my experience, will probably find out the hard way that it won't probably work.
- [17:35]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, well, and I think another interesting part here, and this maybe gets a little more into the automation part, but this idea of closing the loop, of, you know, actually making sure that requests get resolved. And you know, like a human can do a great job at making someone feel great, but if the problem still exists, then, you know, how do you close that loop? So, you know, what's, what's the role of AI driven workflows or other AI augmentation and actually, you know, making sure that things don't just get escalated, but you know, they actually get resolved.
- [18:09]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
No, that is such an important one. Let me take two, three examples. It's amazing how many times the agent tells you three things on the call they'll do and they don't because they just forgot to make those notes because they are here, scribbling, annotating, making sure the right things are there. And then they, you know, everyone's under pressure to lower the handling time, so they click, they forget one request. Imagine theoretically, if you called in from a foreign country, you're going to the first time to your bank saying, oh my God, I lost my credit card. I'm this new country, I don't have my credit card. And I make two commitments to you. One is, hey, I'm going to ship it overnight and free of charge. Imagine I remembered the free of charge but not the overnight. What's more important to you right now? If I mistakenly charged you 50 bucks for it, you can come back home and you can call me and say, I need a refund. But if I forgot the overnight and I shipped it to you like one week, ground shipping, the whole point is lost. So the point I'm making is getting all of it right is critically important. And that's why for AI to be able to listen, to be able to automate a certain flow, hey, send him a message, do this, log this request, reschedule my appointment, send me an appointment reminder that is just incredibly important. I Think AI and automation are almost indistinguishable. I say AI and automation to make sure I also mean automation. But AI sans automation is pointless. You need to automate these workflows, make sure everything that was discussed actually happens. The cost benefit obviously is you take less time. But the experiential benefit is you'll never drop the ball on this. You will always capture these things. Of course there's an agentic sort of human agent oversight to it, which I think is important, but you don't want to miss any of these things. So that's how I look at the sort of mix of AI and automation. And anytime we think of AI strategy, we have to think of end execution systems integrations, closing the loop. The other example I will give you is imagine if you're on a call and something that should not be said has been spoken. For example, I was not supposed to give you stock advice, but I gave you stock advice or I'm selling insurance and I forgot to tell you, you know, the deductible on this. I mean you're a licensed agent so you're not supposed to. I'm not supposed to sell you insurance without telling you about the deductible or premium or exclusions or what have you. And yet it's entirely possible that I forgot to be able to even pick those up and open a ticket inform supervisor. Do what you have to do to close the loop is also critically important. So if all of these go to me in the realm of the system has to close the loop, did I deliver what I had to deliver? Was it done right? Did I commit something? Do I need to fulfill that? And that's why AI automation to me we'll soon stop using them as two different words.
- [20:46]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. And then in addition to the automation component, there's also the intelligence component. Right. So how can businesses then you kind of touched on some of this. But how should businesses be turning CX data into actionable insights to, you know, to not only close the loop but improve customer satisfaction, improve business results, you know, all of the above. Really?
- [21:13]
Pura and Strayer University Announcer
No.
- [21:14]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
I'm so glad you asked because I give it to. I love leading with example because we can all the great thing about our business is we are consumers ourselves so we don't have to visualize. You know, you call. This happened to me my credit card got lost. Thankfully the world has changed now you can do that on your phone credit, I got out of an aircraft. Gotta realize I left my wallet in the. Never do that again in the seat pouch, right?
- [21:38]
Greg Kilstrom
You only do that once, right? Yeah, there you go.
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Vinod Muthakrishnan
You all do that at least once as soon as you cross that gate at end and you can't turn back anymore. And I literally took two steps and I can't. So I pick up the phone and I call. I also need to get to my meeting halfway through where everything is done. Perfect, I got everything you need just to reconfirm. Boom. Call Scott now I'm like what do I do? Have they logged in the request? Have they not? Then I pick up the phone, wait in queue and now I need to get to my meeting and then I get online and like hey, I'm so and so, how can I help you? I'm like oh my God, I'm back to the start of the conversation. Imagine when you call the second time the new agent picked up and said hey, awesome, we've got all your information, sorry you lost your card. Two more questions, let me close your request. That is the features call drop summary, right? So transference of AI context from either an agent interaction or a dropped call or what have you. Now the reason I say that is we have to look at these kind of tangible examples of how data insight and context can help power better experiences. Because when the second call was picked up, if they said hey, how can I help you? It's the most unhelpful opening line because I'm almost expecting you to know what I said. The second context is we have something called the journey data service which is sort of the immutable record of all interactions during the customer journey or the active data. Right. So if you're calling the third time about the same problem, for the agent to know that and to pick up the phone and say Greg and the agent experience was my TV is still broken, I need to speak to a hu. So the agent transfer summary says Greg's angry calling about this thing and my journey data tape tells me it's the third call you made about this again, how can I help you? Is probably not what you want to hear, but Greg, I'm sorry, so sorry we're failing you. You know you should not have to call thrice about your television. You know, I belived myself so just give me a minute to make sure you don't have to call back again. That is a delightful customer experience. So for me, data insight analytics again topic analysis. Why are people calling? They're calling about that small two penny charge on step three. Go back and fix the problem upstream. So you the purpose of data insight analytics and very importantly, the word I use is Context is critical to designing the experiences you want, responding to customer queries the best way and then setting up preemptive communications with customers. We have to see all of these together. Data is not just reporting and dashboards and stuff you send monthly. It is a way to make your experience better to begin with. Yeah, yeah. Love it.
- [24:05]
Greg Kilstrom
Well Vinod, thanks so much for joining today. I have one last question before we wrap up here. I'd 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? Consistently?
- [24:16]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
I spent my my early part of my career in the Merchant Navy, which was a lot of travel. You know, 16 people on ship but like six nationalities. It's kind of extended to I love sport. I love team sport because it teaches it's a very humbling experience to to be in a team and realize you're not the star you thought you were. But also love travel. Just meeting people in different cultures and contexts because the things it teaches you is look, a small team of motivated people who are mission oriented, trained, can do anything. It also exposes you to the nuances of cultural differences that shapes how you sell, what kind of products you design, how you frame your communication and just that exposure to the world for me has been the most active way of staying connected, staying relevant and just staying global. But highly local because we do run a global business. So that's my Travel is my way to stay agile. Love it. Love it.
- [25:10]
Greg Kilstrom
Well again I'd like to thank Vinod Muthakrishnan, VP and COO of WebEx Customer Experience at Cisco. You can learn more about vnode and Cisco's WebEx customer experience solutions by following the links in the show notes. 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@theagilebrand.com that's the 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 company co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time. Stay curious and stay agile.
- [26:19]
Pura and Strayer University Announcer
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- [26:27]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
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- [26:38]
Pura and Strayer University Announcer
Visit pura.com
- [26:42]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
and Doug there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
- [26:52]
Greg Kilstrom
Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?
- [26:55]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Oh no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
- [27:02]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
- [27:04]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Anyways, get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
- [27:07]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.