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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#697: Building the total experience for customers with AJ Joplin, Forrester
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Marine Corps Narrator
To realize the future America needs. We understand what's needed from us to face each threat head on. We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines. We were made for this.
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AJ Joplin
The Agile Brand.
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Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing 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. 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.
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Podcast Host
Does your AI based interface talk to customers the way a real person would? Or is it tech for tech's sake? We're here at Forrester CX in Nashville, Tennessee and hearing all about the latest insights and ideas for brands to create better experiences for their customers. Agility is less about bolting on new features just because the tech is available and more about making tomorrow's experiences feel intuitive and natural to the end customer using them. Today we're diving into Designing for the Future of Experiences with AJ Joplin, Senior Analyst at Forrester. AJ, welcome back to the show.
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AJ Joplin
Thank you. Excited to be here.
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Podcast Host
Yeah. Looking forward to. I know we chatted last year that same event. So good to.
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AJ Joplin
It's like a reunion.
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Podcast Host
I know, I know. I love it. Returning champion, right? I love it. For those that did miss that interview though, why don't we start with you giving a little background background on yourself and your focus at Forrester.
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AJ Joplin
Sure. So as a senior analyst at Forrester, I focus mainly on experience design and what that can mean across a variety of roles and disciplines. You know, design is very cross cutting, so we find that everybody needs to know a little something and some people need to know a little bit more. So I work with CX professionals, digital business leaders, engineers and our other services as well, and then of course design leaders. So that's whom we're talking. That's who I'm talking to the most and what I'm talking about the most.
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Podcast Host
Great, great. So we're going to cover a few things. A lot of this is based on the talk you gave yesterday at this point. And so first I want to start with talking about designing more human, like, interfaces. And as I said at the beginning of the show, there's a lot of tech out there, there's a lot of cool stuff that can be added, but just because you can doesn't mean you should. So from the customer perspective, they appreciate bells and whistles when they're, when they're meaningful, but, you know, they're expecting their interfaces to feel conversational, intuitive, even empathetic. What's the first design principle that brands should embrace to get there?
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AJ Joplin
Oh, wow, that's. That's a great question. The first one for me is always going to be know thy user. If we have to make it sound very principally, throw in some old English, that'll do it every time. Because at the core of all of this stuff, technology, yes, can become more human, like, by virtue of the fact that it's just going to learn, it's going to get better, we're going to make improvements. But what really makes it feel human like for a customer is when it's contextualized to that particular experience, to those particular needs, use cases, goals that customers may have in mind or be trying to accomplish. Right. So that's why in my talk, I was trying to communicate that the onus is on you to understand who your customers are so you can actually implement technology the right way. Because it's not a condiment. AI is not a condiment that we spread over everything.
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Podcast Host
Right, right. You know, much to what we hear.
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AJ Joplin
Exactly. And it really can't solve every single problem. So we still have to get your hands a little dirty.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, I love it. Yeah. And great job yesterday at the talk. Yeah, it was great. So to take that then a step further, this idea from, you know, interfaces being, you know, we could call it reactive, even assistive, but to moving towards anticipatory. How should the design of types of interfaces, I mean, it's by design anticipating something that isn't quite there yet or isn't, you know, the customer doesn't know yet. How do you think about designing those from being merely, you know, moving from merely being helpful to anticipating needs. And maybe without crossing that line of like, wow, that's too much. Like, are they listening? Do they have a microphone in the room or whatever?
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AJ Joplin
Yeah. So I think a couple things there, when I was talking about anticipatory, assistive and agentic experiences, I said, you know, experiences can be one of those, or they can be all three at the same time. Right. So. Or different combinations thereof. And I think sometimes when People think about anticipatory experiences, they start to think, I remember when I watched that sci fi movie and this predictiveness got a little creepy. Right. Which again goes back to understanding what your customers are trying to accomplish and what's actually really, really helpful to them. So one of the examples I gave was when I'm shopping on a website and it knows my site or knows my size. Right. Well, how did you know that? Well, you shopped here before, so we're just going to pre fill that for you. And not only did we pre fill it, based on the data we have about you, most people who buy this size, like this size and don't return this size, like that's really helpful. And so that's assistive and anticipatory at the same time. Right. It helped me make a decision based on contextual data and then based on real time data too. We're watching this whole population, population of people who are buying this item, not returning it, liking it, rating it highly. So I think that's a good way to think about it. Like that's actually really, really helpful.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, well, and, and you know, this requires, you know, getting that purchase or whatever, but once you do and it does fit and it is what you like and, and so on and so forth, it builds trust. Right. And that, that then kind of reinfor, at least with that brand that builds, that builds, it reinforces.
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AJ Joplin
Right, exactly, exactly. Because then the customer's like, oh, okay. They told me most people buy it and they don't return it. And I, it all worked out. So that was actually a helpful bit of information. I didn't have to go to the sizing chart yet again to see if with this particular thing it's going to work this time. You know, it kind of took some of the cognitive load off of me and was helpful.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. One of the other concepts kind of talked about and introduced at this conference was the idea of the total experience. And first kind of want to just get. I know I'm talking with a few people here, so getting, getting some definitions, but we'll love to get your definition of the total experience and then talk a little bit more about it, but why don't we start there?
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AJ Joplin
So total experience at a basic level it is the brand experience and then customer experience and then acknowledging that those two things go together.
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Podcast Host
Sure, sure.
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AJ Joplin
You can win as many customers as you want, but if you can't retain them, then what was the point? And then why have a wonderful customer experience that nobody knows about? So I think it's, it's nothing new in that those things go together like peanut butter and jelly. But the fact is we don't make a lot of sandwiches as companies and we really should because they're delicious. Bring those things together and that. But there's, that's the evidence of like silos and different budgets and P Ls and responsibilities and all of these things. Right. And companies are shipping their org chart, but that's not what customers are buying.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, definitely love that. So then exactly what you built building on that, the org chart that you know, I like. I always complain that, you know, a company's website shouldn't be reflective of their org chart, but what the customer actually wants. So, so building on that and now we're talking about omnichannel experience, we're talking about personalization. What that also involves is those silos within the organizations that generally in large enough organizations rarely even talk with each other, let alone really understand what each other are doing. What do you do there? How does an organization move in the right direction so that everybody siloed as they might be or starting to share that journey?
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AJ Joplin
Yeah, I don't know if it's just I came from a different time. I don't think it is. I think what really fixes things is just communication and people getting together, making things together, coming together with intention. So you are never going to remediate the lack of communication in your company with just more technology or sending more emails or more chats. Like I'm not talking about this communication, that's asynchronous. I'm talking about communication where people come together to have discussions about what this experience looks like everywhere. But there are systems you can put in place, like a quality design system, a perspective on what content sounds like. When we put things in front of customers, we are going to make decisions for the entire customer experience in a connected way. Not just double down on building stuff for this particular bu because they have the budget when there's nothing wrong with their journey. Sort of that part of the business. Right. We're going to put money where it should go. That requires cross discipline, cross functional conversation. I know a lot of times companies will prioritize things and they'll do it according to a certain set of criteria which is advanced in the grand scheme of things. But it's really hard to prioritize if things that they're not all apples to apples to apples. Like if something's just an idea and then this is. We need to replatform. Those are two different things and you can't, you know, evaluate them in the same lens. Things have to be at a certain fidelity which makes them all apples so that we can have that conversation. So, but again, conversation, communication with certain frameworks really makes things better.
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Podcast Host
Well, and that requires an understanding of if people process platform. I always go back to that and maybe even add data to that mix as well. But even just the three, why is it so hard for organizations? I know this is a big question, but why is it so hard for organizations to not think of platform as the silver bullet that's going to change? Is it because it's easier and involves less communication or, you know, what, how, how do you, how do you make the case that this is a bigger, a bigger thing than a, than a platform thing?
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AJ Joplin
How do you make the case? That's a great question. I think we can always point to the things that keep tripping us up over and over and over again. For example, if a company doesn't have a design system, I often invite them to look at where the effects of not having one take place. Usually there's more defects in live product, tons of rework, a lot of indecisiveness. The backlog is so, so, so, so cluttered with all these things we thought we were going to do, but now we're not doing them. We're constantly changing our minds because we can't agree on what things should look like. These are all indicators that you need something. And just having that conversation about those things and not presupposing that the solution, maybe, maybe the solution isn't a design system. Maybe these are all indicators of something else. But a design system usually is the answer. And so for some of these things I will say that, but we just have to have a conversation about the state of the state and what good looks like. And if we don't know, then let's, let's make some time to figure that out.
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Podcast Host
Yeah.
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AJ Joplin
So yeah, we presuppose the solution like a lot I think is the problem.
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Podcast Host
Yeah. So that, and that, that's a nice way to a framework, a design system. It doesn't make it about the, about the. Even though it is about people and communication, it doesn't make it about individuals or roles or teams.
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AJ Joplin
Exactly. Yeah, there should always be. And that's what I love about being human centered or customer centered too. Because this isn't like a debate between you and me. If we don't agree, then let's go test it with a customer.
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Podcast Host
Yeah.
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AJ Joplin
And then so we can move on with our lives. This isn't a personal thing, but I find immature teams or companies often do make it about the person. They don't engage in healthy critique when they're designing things or developing things. They don't let people see what they're working on because they worry about judgment, because they're not really trying to make the thing better for the customer. It's, they make it personal.
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Podcast Host
A lot of the shift of technology is also dealing with, you know, whether it's data democratization or just low code, no code. So, you know, kind of in some sense design and tech are converging marketing. You know, these, these roles that were primarily tech only or data only are now there's, there's this hybrid role. What should leaders be thinking about in terms of talent in the years, you know, in the months ahead? Let's years is too hard to predict.
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AJ Joplin
But yeah, who knows? I think they should be looking for people who are at a baseline curious about other things. So when I describe the T shaped professional this idea, imagine if you will, a capital letter T but a very skinny top T and a very skinny, you know, vertical part of that tee. Whenever we start to have shared frameworks for how we work together, or shared curiosity or believe that we should follow a decision making process that's human centered, we should discover, define, create, evaluate, build and then monitor things. And that's not always linear. We can loop back, of course, but we agree that this is how we make good decisions. So if that's true and we've created something and we need to evaluate it, then I'm going to say, well, how might we evaluate that? If I don't have the skills, I'm going to go to someone else, I'm going to say how do we as a team get this work done according to a human centered framework? And when that happens, then I find that teams can start to get more on the same page that as a T they get plumber. I don't know how else to describe it. You're getting thicker at the top and the bottom and eventually all that white space between you and other people starts to go away and you're working like a functioning team. And so how do you get rid of that white space? In design, white space is a good thing. But in teams where there's just gaps, where nobody's touching anything or talk thinking about anything, that's not good.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, well, and these, the tools allow for knowledge and understanding of processes and connections without the technical knowledge of like I need to write this Python code or this other type of thing in order to do it.
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AJ Joplin
And let's be honest though, if you're a product manager and you don't realize that code has to be written, then that's a problem. Sure enough, you've got all the money.
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Podcast Host
Right? Right.
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AJ Joplin
You're trying to tell people what to do and you don't know how it works. How much should you know as? You should be a little bit plumper than you probably are right now.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, makes sense.
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AJ Joplin
Stick some meat on the tee.
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Podcast Host
Right. So this is, you know, this is a bit of an evolution and you know, certainly there's, there's end customer metrics, there's operational metrics already in place, but are there like how do you measure success here? And kind of growing, growing sophistication here?
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
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AJ Joplin
So what I find really compelling about, think about traditional voc customer listing, all of these programs, like the social listening I see people doing right now when they're building generative products. That has got to be like the fastest loop that you can have in terms of feedback on your product once it's released. So for example, I was at Config Figma's conference a couple weeks ago, months ago, time's flying and they released Figma make. And that code for figment make is not accessible, it does not meet accessibility standards, and so it's not readily usable. It is a great way to get started with ideas and to understand if something's going to happen. But you need to understand the constraints of these tools and these things that you're using. So calling back to the question that you were just asking me.
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Podcast Host
Yeah. So the measurements of success, how would
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AJ Joplin
you measure success as a team? I would think about how fast are we understanding what works, what doesn't work? And moving on from that, in the talk when I was talking about project based funding, where we're deciding everything up at the front what success metrics are, it's just impossible to do that. Right. Sometimes these metrics evolve. We can understand initially what we're hoping to affect, but you ultimately always understand that you start to affect other things. And so this const metrics are also a form of constant vigilance. So what kinds of listening loops do you have in place? Social listening right after the fact, things that we've already made. What kind of feedback loops do we have in terms of measurement while we're building things? And then, you know, you have to have these varied metrics that come from multiple sources in order to understand if you're really doing something well. Like just having an NPS score is not going to cut it. Right?
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Podcast Host
Yeah.
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AJ Joplin
So varied metrics are the key to success, and then those should be based in customer needs and goals. Obviously, business metrics should be closely aligned with customer metrics because that's where we start is with the customer. Yeah, right. There's not really a whole lot of difference if your customer is successful between the business being successful and the customer being successful should be one in the same.
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Podcast Host
Nice. I like that.
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AJ Joplin
That was a long winded answer. I love it.
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Podcast Host
It's good. Well, thanks again for joining today. Just a couple things before we wrap up here. Would love to hear what's been something notable, insightful that you've gotten from this
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AJ Joplin
conference so far, that people are all still very, very human in trying to figure these things out. I think sometimes companies can have a tendency to feel like they're getting left behind because they're not using AI fast enough. And I always tell people like, well, you could go ahead and launch something you don't really understand, or you could end up in an AI incident database doing that. Or you could take a beat and start with the customer. What kinds of challenges do they have? What kinds of internal challenges are you having? Maybe the first place you need to apply AI is internally. But I think we have a tendency to always think that work is about changing things for the customer when really we need to do the work of like putting the mask on ourselves before we try to put the mask on our, our customers when we're on the plane. You know, we just always think externally instead of thinking, hey, Conway's law says that we're going to ship our org chart if we don't clean it up inside. So use all of these methodologies, metrics, ways of working, thinking about things on yourself as a company first.
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Podcast Host
Yeah. And I think just knowing the impact that employee experience has on the end customer experience too. I think that's another argument for trying some of this stuff internally as well. Is like, make your employees lives a little bit easier or give some of those employees that want to play with the fun toys a little more freedom because it's internal only. So it's kind of a win win, right?
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
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AJ Joplin
Well, a customer experience is a conversation between you and the customer. So if you're always like letting the customer journey happen without ever going well, how do we support that internally? What does that really look like? Most of the problems we need to solve to improve customer experience are inside the company anyway. Let's be honest.
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Podcast Host
Yeah.
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AJ Joplin
Yeah.
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Podcast Host
Love it. Well, last question for you. 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?
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AJ Joplin
Just talking to people? Honestly, things are changing all of the time and it's always a good gut check. You know, if there's something that I believe really, really strongly, then my intuition is to go, I should call somebody and ask them what they think about that too. And it's not that I lack the confidence, it's that I don't ever want to fall victim to being overconfident in something. So constant conversation with people, sensing and talking and making things and letting people have a reaction to that, I think that's paramount to being able to be successful long term, no matter what you do.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, I love it. That's why I do a podcast, right? I learn something every conversation, so I love it. Well, thanks again to AJ Joppa, Senior Analyst at Forrester, for joining the show here at Forrester CX North America in Nashville. To learn more about AJ and Forrester, please follow the links in the show notes.
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Greg Kilstrom
Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand. 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.
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AJ Joplin
The agile brand.
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Marine Corps Narrator
With the all new Audi Q3, the answer's always yes.
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Podcast Host
Yes to adventure.
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AJ Joplin
Yes. Yes to escape. Yes to right now. The all new Audi Q3 made for the yes Life
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Marine Corps Narrator
to realize the future America needs. We understand what's needed from us to face each threat head on. We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines. We were made for this.