← 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
00:28:51
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- [00:00]
Greg Kilstrom
Your brand may be staying on top of current trends, but are you agile enough to stay relevant, resilient and successful as customers, competition and the world continues to change at a breakneck pace? I'm thrilled to share the newly revised version of my first book, the Agile Brand. I'm calling it the Agile Brand Revisited. It's been updated to reflect our continually changing world, and it provides seven principles that form the backbone of an agile brand, offering detailed insights and actionable steps for incorporating them into your business strategy. This is the book that started it all and I'm excited to share it with you. It's now available in print and digital formats and available everywhere. Learn more by going to the Agile Brand guide website at www.agilebrandguide.com.
- [00:46]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
The Agile Brand.
- [00:55]
Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trend, 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. 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.
- [02:34]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
Thanks for having me. Absolute pleasure.
- [02:36]
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.
- [02:44]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
Awesome. I started my career in the merchant marine, which is as far from CX as can be. I Did a couple of startups, the second of which was in customer experience management. And Cisco acquired us in 2019, which I thought was 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.
- [03:18]
Greg Kilstrom
Great, great. Well, yeah, let's dive in here and we're going to talk about a few things today, but I want to start by talking about this 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?
- [03:38]
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 a 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.
- [04:43]
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, you know, at Cisco.
- [05:14]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
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 you know 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 you know 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, 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 he's 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.
- [07:11]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And part, part of that experience is not only, you know, 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, you know, how AI can help here? Maybe the mind reading plugin isn't available just yet, but, you know, how can it, you know, how can it anticipate needs and go from, you know, purely reactive to proactive engagement?
- [07:40]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
Well, I love this question because if you see The Argo 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. It's 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.
- [09:04]
Greg Kilstrom
Sure.
- [09:04]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
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 it 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 inside that eliminates the need for you to call in and not just focus on what to do after you call.
- [10:07]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And I think this is where a lot of people listening, I would, 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, that we all use. But, you know, 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, what does that mean in practice? And how should leaders be thinking about it in this way?
- [10:52]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
No, that's such a great. 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 take 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 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, like I said, 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.
- [13:39]
Greg Kilstrom
Want to learn more and join the discussion about marketing and AI. Attend a premier conference dedicated to marketing and AI. That's Mayakon, the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference from October 14 through 16 in Cleveland, Ohio. Meikon brings together the brightest minds and leading voices in AI. Don't miss this opportunity to connect with a dynamic community of experts, visionaries and enthusiasts. The Agile brand is proud to be the lead media sponsor of this important event. Register today@marketingai institute.com that's marketingai institute.com and use the code Agile150 for $150 off your registration fee. I can't wait to see you there. I want to dig a little more into this idea of 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, in talks, talking about AI, there's, there's the efficiency play. There's, you know, personalization at scale. 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, you know, engaged humans are able to create good, good customer experience. I mean, I'll give that caveat there of, you know, when that when there's good human engagement there, there, there can be really good customer experiences. But AI can play a role here to make it better. Right? It's not, not just, 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?
- [15:26]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
So I think there's a few things. One is, look, every evolution is, 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?
- [15:59]
Greg Kilstrom
Right, right.
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Vinod Muthakrishnan
Sometimes people, I know people told me they remember the IVR3 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.
- [16:14]
Greg Kilstrom
Oh yeah, I've memorized those before. Yeah, totally.
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Vinod Muthakrishnan
So here's the point. You have to understand this is where customers are today, right. We're 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 analytics. So I'm not allowed to give you that information. Can AI elegantly handle those exceptions? So the way to think about it is where is customer experience today? Have a really, really aggressive sort of North Star on this utopian end state 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. IV appraise. 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 there an ROI 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 customer experience will probably find out the hard way that it won't probably work.
- [18:05]
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 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 in actually, you know, making sure that things don't just get escalated but you know, they actually get resolved?
- [18:39]
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 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 you, 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 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 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.
- [21:16]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, makes sense. And then, you know, 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 you know, how should businesses be turning 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? No.
- [21:44]
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 a world, 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. I got out of an aircraft, got. And realized I left my wallet in the. Never do that again. In the seat pouch.
- [22:07]
Greg Kilstrom
Right? You only do that once, right? Yeah, there you go.
- [22:10]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
Not 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, but everything is done. Perfect. I got everything you need just to reconfirm. Boom calls. Cut. Now I'm like, what do I do? Have they logged in the request? Have they not? Can 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. 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 human. 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. Greg, I'm so sorry we're failing you. You should not have to call thrice about your television. I believe it 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 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.
- [24:34]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. Love it. Well Vinod, thanks so much for joining today. I have one last question 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?
- [24:46]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
I spend 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 be in a team and realize you're not the star you thought you were. But also a lot of 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.
- [25:39]
Greg Kilstrom
Love it. Love it. Well again I'd like to thank Vinod Muthakrishnan, VP and COO of WebEx Customer Experience at Cisco. You can learn more about vanode 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 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.crowd greggkillstrom.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.
- [26:49]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
The Agile Brand.
- [26:54]
Greg Kilstrom
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