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 experience 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.
Resources
Medallia: https://www.medallia.com
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Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom:
And now onto the show. 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 experience, 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. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me, Greg. Yeah, looking forward to talking with you. First of all, congrats on your new role as chief product officer. Thank you. And for those just listening in here, why don’t we start with you giving a little background on yourself and your role at Medallia.
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 interesting moving forward.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, no, totally agree. And yeah, definitely, you know, 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 I’ve 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. 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, you know, 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 Gen AI 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, you know, what the customer wants, how do they like to be talked to, treated, and that superpower can come from AI, right? 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 Kihlstrom: 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 it’s just AI in that way helps them, to use your words, to give them superpowers to be able to understand all that.
Fabrice Martin: Quickly, right? Because one of the things that AI is fantastic at 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 Kihlstrom: 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, right? Their job is not to click around a 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 You know, with a simple click, we can tell them, hey, you know, your scores are going up or your scores are going down or a customer complained about a specific issue. 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 it’s, 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 Kihlstrom: 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 also, there’s a risk in getting it wrong if you’re pretending that you’re, you know, a scientist basically in the scenario and trying to do all that yourself, right? Like again, best intentions, but people don’t always read the data, right? 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, right?
Fabrice Martin: Completely. And back to our conversation, right? Before AI, the state-of-the-art was a dashboard. And it fulfilled its purpose and it helped. But now that we have, especially Gen AI, we can move to the next thing, right? Which is no more dashboards and more quick insights and digested insights and actions.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And of course, you know, a lot of what customer service agents and frontline employees are dealing with are, you know, admittedly reactions to a problem that happened. So, you know, 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 and 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 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, you know, your page is slow to load and everybody’s abandoning the form, it’s why. Your pictures are very heavy, so you should consider, you know, 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 Kihlstrom: 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 moved.
Fabrice Martin: Exactly. The marketing team says, hey, you know, we have this campaign. Just slap the new picture there. or somebody wants like two more fields for their research project and suddenly your 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, be 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 agents in their context of how to coach that agent to be better. to be better.
Greg Kihlstrom: 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? Again, superpowers, right?
Fabrice Martin: 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.
Greg Kihlstrom: 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, you know, 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, looking at large amounts of data, making connections, making inferences, and helping understand better, right? So 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. And as you said, you know, 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, right? So with Gen AI, And with summarization, that’s what suddenly becomes possible. Like, 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…
Greg Kihlstrom: Get something from me. You can spend the time being a human with empathy and stuff like that versus researching the last 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 Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, and so that would be intelligence summaries and smart response as well. Can you talk a little bit about that too? Sure, sure.
Fabrice Martin: Well, I mean, actually 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’d read off a quick paragraph and I know everything that has happened with that customer, where they’ve been, what their struggles were, what their 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. I do. Exactly. And so, you know, we took care of you for this experience, right? That’s what Smart Response allows them to do. It uses Gen AI 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 and productivity gains in responding and closing the loop with customers, right? Which is what experience is about in many cases.
Greg Kihlstrom: Right, right, and it’s not just fast, it’s fast plus it’s personal, right?
Fabrice Martin: Yeah, usually you want it fast or you want it good, pick one, right? Now you can get both.
Greg Kihlstrom: Nice, nice, love it, 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. So 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. Nice, nice.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, and five weeks in, so lots to do.
Fabrice Martin: Yeah, absolutely.
Greg Kihlstrom: Definitely. So what’s been a highlight of the event for you so far?
Fabrice Martin: The customers, you know, getting to meet a lot of our customers because we’re all here, we are, you know, having a good time, talking to each other, exchanging 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. You know, 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 Kihlstrom: 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. Absolutely, next year, right? Next year, there you go, exactly. If not sooner. 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 I 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.
