Have you ever wondered how digital experience and AI can transform your customer interactions?
Andrew Carothers, CCXP, a senior digital experience leader in the CX area at Cisco Systems, shared insights from this multinational leader’s industry-leading portfolio of technology innovations, including networking, security, collaboration, and cloud management.
🎧 Check out the latest episode of The Delighted Customers Podcast where Andrew answers these burning questions:
👉 How can businesses seamlessly transition from digital to human interactions to meet customer needs?
👉 What are the challenges and benefits of expanding the digital component in customer experience?
👉 How can companies leverage AI to not only enhance the digital experience but also create growth opportunities?
Andrew’s expertise in building and scaling customer experience teams is unparalleled. Tune in to get actionable insights and drive your business forward!
About Andrew Carothers, CCXP
Andrew Carothers, CCXP, is a senior Customer Experience leader helping companies build and scale organizations that increase customer adoption and retention, improve renewals rates, and drive growth. A founding member of Cisco System’s CX function, Carothers has built extensive strategic and tactical CX knowledge, including digital CX, partner programs, voice of the customer, customer-centric culture, and journey mapping. An eight-time International Customer Experience award winner, he frequently writes and speaks on CX topics, and co-authored The Publicity Handbook (McGraw Hill), a Fortune Book Club selection. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Advisors for the University of San Francisco’s School of Management Strategic Artificial Intelligence program.
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Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Mark Slatin:
Well, everybody seems to be talking about artificial intelligence and how it can be used to increase revenue, to reduce costs, to improve profitability. How are companies going to utilize it? And one area in particular is the digital experience. And that’s the topic of our discussion today. I’m excited that I’ve got Andrew Carruthers, who’s a certified customer experience professional and a senior customer experience leader helping companies build and scale organizations that increase customer adoption, retention, improve renewal, and drive growth. And he does that for Cisco Systems, who he’s been a founding member of their CX function way back. And he has built extensive strategic and tactical CX knowledge in the world of digital and helps his customers. He’s done all sorts of speaking and writing. He’s co-authored the publicity handbook for McGraw Hill, and he’s won numerous awards in the world of CX. Andrew, welcome to the show.
Andrew Carruthers: Thank you, Mark. It’s great to be here. I love the show, so I’m excited to have an opportunity to actually talk with you.
Mark Slatin: Well, excited to have you on the show and hear more about kind of a it’s become both an opportunity and a little bit of a pain point, I think, for companies who are trying to not fall behind like this FOMO, this fear of missing out on AI and how they can use it to do the things I talked about, which are typical financial goals for companies. But there is a bridge and you’re going to help us get there, right?
Andrew Carruthers: That’s the goal.
Mark Slatin: Well, before we do that, would you mind sharing with the listeners a little bit about what got you into CX and what you’re doing now.
Andrew Carruthers: I’d be happy to. So I started my career years ago in public relations, which is when I wrote the publicity handbook that you mentioned. And I broadened that from sort of straight up PR to corporate communications. to marketing writ large. And that’s when I started working at Cisco as a marketing function. And then when Cisco made the shift from purely a hardware company to looking to build it into a recurring revenue-based business, we realized that we needed to bring in and build a customer success function or customer experience function. And so I was one of, as you mentioned, I was one of the founders of that. And so for the past 13 years, have really had a front row seat to the growth of not only the discipline of CX into a recognized distinct function, but also to the growth of that function in one of the top global tech companies. We’ve gone from 100 people initially to 3000 people now. Through the years, it’s given me the opportunity to play many different roles in the CX function, in particular, in our digital customer experience function. Right now, I’m leading the development within the digital customer experience team on the development of our strategy around leveraging AI to improve the customer experience, and then the implementation of that. And then coincident with that, I’m also on the board of advisors for the University of San Francisco’s School of Management strategic AI program, where I’m helping to develop that program, but also take some of the learnings from that and bring that back into Cisco.
Mark Slatin: Got it. Okay, so AI is such a big deal. And we’re talking specifically today about the digital experience. So tell us, what is the big deal? What is the why is it such a big deal?
Andrew Carruthers: Well, I’ll start with digital experience, and then we’ll go into AI specifically. Digital experience is a big deal because in 2024, every customer wants a digital-first experience, from the smallest customer to the largest. When you think about it, when was the last time any of us called up an airline or a travel agent, we just go online to Kayak or United.com or whatever the airline is. There’s some people who don’t even go to the store anymore. They just want a digital experience when it comes to their shopping. Every customer wants a digital-first experience, not necessarily digital-only, but digital-first. And that means that we have to have, as organizations serving customers, we have to have an excellent digital experience, one that is personalized, it’s simple, it’s fast to get customers to the value they’re looking for, whether that be troubleshooting or simply looking to find information or trying to adopt. And then there also has to be an easy handoff to humans when the customer desires that. And then the human has the information that that person needs in order to help the customer. It’s complicated, it’s complex, but it’s what every customer wants. If an organization is not offering a positive, strong digital experience that gets customers where they’re looking to get as quickly and as simply as possible, they’re not providing an overall customer experience that is going to drive customer loyalty.
Mark Slatin: Okay. All right. So you touched on a point, which is that customers want a digital experience first in nearly every industry, but then also want a human involved at a certain point. So how would a company go about or how would a CX leader go about helping a company determine when is the right time where you’re actually hit the point of diminishing returns on the digital and you need a human?
Andrew Carruthers: Right, right. Well, and that’s sort of the tricky part because every customer has a different point in time when they want that conversion from digital to human. For some, it’s right up at the front. But for many, it’s somewhere along the process when they’re getting stuck digitally. Most people want, as I mentioned, the customers want a digital-first experience where they’re So that means meeting those customers where they are in the channel where they are, and providing the opportunity to easily connect to a human in that channel. So whether that be on a company’s website or an organization’s website, or peer-to-peer communities, or social, whether that be LinkedIn or Reddit or whatever, email, whatever the channel is, having the opportunity for customers to engage digitally, and then also make it very clear to find and simple to access a button or whatever the actual touchpoint is going to be to then connect to a human, and ideally, providing multiple options. Because some people want to connect with a human via chat, others want a phone, others want to just fill out a form and have somebody call them back or contact them later through another method. Other people want to just be able to reply to an email. So you have to make all of those options available. simply, right? So UI becomes important at this point. So essentially, while it’s complex, the easy answer is you need to provide every option for customers to connect with humans. You need to provide it in every channel where you’re engaging with customers, and you should be engaging with customers in every channel where the customer wants to engage with you. And then you need to make it easy to actually find and access that connection point, that handoff point.
Mark Slatin: All right, so let’s double click on that one gem there, which is, it’s really important. They talk about the omni-channel experience. The idea that customers may want sometimes to do self-serve, sometimes to do a call-in to a call center, sometimes if you have an in-person option, in-person. et cetera, email, chat, whatever. And so Omnichannel really says they want to get it seamlessly across the channel. So even if they start the transaction in one channel, they could finish it in another channel and the company would know, they wouldn’t have to start all over again. If they want to do almost anything, I think customers are realizing there’s something very secure like a wire transfer or something. they realize that between midnight and 6 a.m. might not be realistic in some cases. Ready hit that gem. So omni-channel is important, understanding how and when it’s unique to each customer, but to understand how and when they might need to migrate in to another channel, a more costly channel for the company, like humans. And so I just want to, just want to be a little bit more clear than I was earlier about the benefits. If you’re in the C-suite by expanding on the digital component, kind of obvious if you don’t have to call into a call center and serve a customer at your contact center person. those people cost more money to employ, to train, et cetera, than if you have a self-service function. And even more so if they’re in person and you’ve got a, that’s an even more costly channel, right? So there’s some costs they could take out.
Andrew Carruthers: Yeah, there’s definitely that level of cost that can be taken out of the business. I would say in addition to that, there’s the growth opportunity. It makes sense, and we have plenty of data to back this up, and we within Cisco have specific data to back this up as well. The farther customers adopt, the more likely they are to, A, renew, and B, upsell or cross-sell. And I’m talking about customers upselling and cross-selling themselves through a digital first experience. Certainly, they have the opportunity to connect with a human if they want to have those conversations. But they can also do that in a digital opportunity. So upselling to a different level of service, cross-selling to a different product or a complementary product. We see this every day in the way people engage with Amazon. So it’s the same thing no matter what the business is. And even up front, as I mentioned, sort of the first area is driving customer adoption through the channel that the customer wants to engage in to drive that adoption is really step one in getting customers to renew and to upsell and cross sell. So along with the cost savings of providing a digital experience, there’s the opportunity to drive renewals and to drive growth.
Mark Slatin: So there’s a revenue side as well.
Andrew Carruthers: Yes, the revenue side as well.
Mark Slatin: So what in this, in this process of companies who really have an interest, it’s a win-win, right? Cause they, they give the more customers what they want, which is a digital experience and they, they can reduce costs or grow revenues, get, you know, get more referrals. Like you said, more share wallet expand. What are some of the common mistakes that companies make in their journey to get there?
Andrew Carruthers: Well, there are a couple of things that I’ve seen companies do sort of wrong. One is value digital as really just a scaling mechanism or just a way to save money. That’s focusing in internally as opposed to being customer focused. The customer focused approach is digital is the experience is the first experience that every customer wants. That change is more than just semantics. It leads to a different strategy and different development. Are you looking to optimize the experience for customers, or are you looking to optimize your own cost savings? So that’s one, is sort of how it’s viewed. A second one is thinking digital is easy. We’ll just take everything we’ve got, digitize it and drop it online, call it a day. Digital requires connecting data, platforms, processes, people, tools, connecting all of that across an organization where it typically revives in different silos, even in small organizations. Because if you don’t connect all that, the data, the people, the processes, the tools, then you’re not going to be able to deliver the type of connected, smart, personalized experience that customers are looking for. When a customer has a digital component and then wants to connect to the human, that human is less likely to have the information needed in order to help that customer. information like, what issue is the customer involved in right now? And we’ve all had the bad experience of being transferred from digital to human or human to human and having to repeat ourselves, what we’re trying to solve, let alone any historical information about that customer, what they’ve bought, where they’ve struggled, whatever it might be, that can provide context to the conversation. So connecting digital requires a lot of IT and other operational elements. It gets to the point about CX is really an organization-wide function. It touches all different parts of the organization. And digital is a component of that organizational-wide approach. So that’s another big, big mistake that I see.
Mark Slatin: So what I’m hearing, Andrew, is that we start with the customer experience and design the technology to support the experience that we want to achieve. If that’s, you know, one that comes to mind is a new account opening that, you know, if it, and I’m thinking specifically when I worked at the bank, so at a bank, you’ve got someone who may already have an account and you’ve got a lot of information about them, so they want to open another account, typically you’d have to walk into a branch. you’d have to find a branch. Second best would be if you can call the contact center and they can open account, but a customer might want to be able to self-serve in that. In order to do that, you’ve got to pull together, there’s a security check, Because banks have regulations they’ve got to deal with when someone is wanting to sign up and is it a business, is it a residential or consumer? There’s the pulling in any contact information, personal, public data, and then there’s private data. So there’s all this information that has to be pulled together. But what we’re saying is what comes first is really the experience we want to achieve.
Andrew Carruthers: Exactly. In CX, we spend time journey mapping. And I would posit that part of that journey map needs to include not only the different steps of the customer’s journey, but also what information needs to be provided to the customer along each step, as well as what touchpoint that’s going to include, specifically which digital touchpoints that information is going to be made available on, which channel, and then what are the structural elements here? I’m talking about tools, systems, et cetera, whether that be IT-related systems or whether that be processes internally that are touched and need to make sure that are in place and aligned in order to support that journey from a digital perspective to support the overall customer journey. So that initial journey mapping needs to include the digital element.
Mark Slatin: So let’s talk about another potential mistake that comes to mind is if you don’t think all the way through it, and let’s just use that example of customer onboarding, a self-serve function, new account opening. If it doesn’t work all the way through and the customer gets stuck, you know, even if they were able to do 90% of it, there might be a frustration level that that is so high, because they’re not comparing it to what you used to be able to do. Yesterday, they’re comparing it to what Amazon can do. Right. So same same more about that.
Andrew Carruthers: Well, so that is such a great point. Organizations need to understand that their competitors that they’re being measured against are not just their competitors in whatever industry they’re in. It’s from an experience standpoint, it’s any organization that a customer has an experience with. And for many, Amazon’s the gold standard and we’re all being compared to Amazon. Well, Amazon can do this. So a couple of things, the implications for that and the implications of that when it comes to the C-suite. There has to be an investment in the digital function in order to be able to resolve some of these problems. My first suggestion or remedy is to understand what your existing customers are doing, where they’re struggling in particular, where they’re stumbling when they try to maybe open up a different type of it. So go to the banking example. If you have a savings account, you want to open up a checking account or you want to open up a CD, whatever new product that you want to onboard onto, where are people getting stuck and can that apply to wholly new sort of net new customers to try to then solve for those problems before the customer, the net new customer even has them. So that’s number one. How do we avoid these problems from even coming up? And that involves having conversations with existing customers. So I’m talking about traditional focus groups, etc., to get the voice of the customer, to understand from them, especially newer customers, what problems did you encounter when you were just starting off? What can we do better? I’ll take it to a different sort of Consumer may not be the right example, but another example, I’m actually working with my mother right now at her church in Los Angeles, where they’re trying to grow their flock. And so I’ve been talking to her about a lot of these principles, and how do they go and reach out to potential members of their flock? How do they identify them? How do they, whether it be geographic or age or children, whatever their personas are that they’re looking at, How do they identify those people? What sort of questions to have with them? And also looking at new members of their church, in particular for their concerns, new members with young children, and then have conversations with them to understand how they were attracted, what motivated them, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it’s important to listen to our existing customers, both digitally and sort of humanly. to try to understand how best to head off problems before they exist, solve them when they occur. If we see digitally then a new customer trying to do something and getting stuck, making sure that they have an easy, quick way to connect with a human, as we’ve already discussed. And then also monitoring those digital pathways, because to see where are they getting stuck from a digital perspective, right? Using the digital tools to analyze that, as opposed to waiting for them to reach out to somebody. Because some people may just get frustrated and not reach out to anybody for help. They just walk away, go somewhere else. So it’s tracking that and then being able to reach out to them, ideally in real time. If you can track them in real time when they’re struggling with something on your website or if they’re posting comments on a Reddit group or in your peer-to-peer community and be able to respond to that quickly, then you still have them when they’re experiencing that problem and you can solve it for them in the moment.
Mark Slatin: Helpful. And so what I’m hearing for you is find the friction. Right. Find where the pain is and go after that.
Andrew Carruthers: Exactly. Find the friction. Every time I’ve said customers want a simple experience, you could replace simple with frictionless.
Mark Slatin: Yeah. So we’ve talked about digital experience, and I also want to talk about AI, leveraging AI to improve the digital experience. So help lay the difference out for us just from a definitional standpoint between AI and digital experience.
Andrew Carruthers: Yep. I view AI as a tool, I’ll just broadly call it a tool, to improve the digital experience. So the digital experience is any engagement that a customer is having with a company or an organization digitally. And as we’ve talked about, that also includes tying together on the back end of the company various processes so that that information is going into a company’s CRM system or whatever it might be, right? So that’s all of the components on the front end and the back end to have a series of connected digital touch points. AI is a way to improve the digital experience by using various different technologies under the umbrella of artificial intelligence. Whether that be more traditional predictive or data science or machine learning element of analyzing data and trying to drive understanding from that and to try to predict behavior, as well as the more recent democratization of AI through generative AI, which is more around generating content or other elements that can be used as part of the digital experience. So I think of, to get specific, three key pillars to leveraging AI in order to improve the overall digital experience. And one is understanding customers, Second one is use this understanding to personalize each customer’s experience. And then three is looking for ways to improve operational efficiency. And when I think about understanding customers, it’s using more of the traditional data science approach to understand things like, whom do we contact? Through what method? Which channel? When’s the best time to contact that person? Predicting the likelihood of various behaviors, such as adopting or renewing or whatever the company wants, is looking to understand what the customer is doing. So it’s understanding and then predicting. And then being able to take that knowledge and being able to personalize a customer’s experience. And that’s through things like using GNI for content, whether that be creating new content or leveraging existing content and creating different versions of it, maybe by language, maybe by form factor. For example, taking a one-hour video and cutting it down into a series of three-minute videos, or maybe turning it into an FAQ or an infographic. maybe taking documentation and parsing it into different versions based on the level of technical skills. Some people want more of a business-level overview and others want an in-the-weeds technical guide. So there are different ways to take existing content or create new content using Gen AI to be able to do something that most organizations simply just don’t have the bandwidth to create multiple versions of this content. But doing so allows you to provide that content for customers in the format that works best for them. Additionally, you’re able to provide it to different channels. You’re not going to post a one-hour video on TikTok, but you might be able to post a three-minute video on TikTok or LinkedIn or figure out your platform. The other way we can personalize the experience is with AI assistants or bots, right? So, we’re developing an onboarding assistant, a renewal assistant. I think of this as the, you know, for those who may remember, maybe a decade or so ago, Microsoft had their little paper clip that came with all of their Microsoft Office functions, and it was there to help you do things. This is a much better version of that. You know, that that you can just ask simple questions in simple language and get an answer right on the spot. You don’t even have to go to a chat. That is your chatbot. You don’t have to go searching for information on a company’s website. It’s just right there for you, your own little assistant. So that helps personalize the experience because that bot or that assistant is trained on information relevant to what you’re looking for, as well as informed by who you are, right? So what you’ve purchased, right? So you don’t have to start off by saying, I own this. It’s your bot, the bot knows what you own, so it’s taking friction points out. Those are two ways that are customer-facing to leverage AI to improve the digital experience. And then the third way that I mentioned is operational efficiency. So this is things like using AI to do journey mapping, or using AI to make sure that humans have the information at their fingertip. It’s their assistant, whether that be a customer success manager assistant, or whatever it might be, so that it’s easy for them. We’re using AI for operational efficiency within our team for things like A-B testing of subject lines or posts for our community members in the Cisco community. So, Instead of optimizing our journeys by doing various A-B and A-B type of testing, maybe once every quarter or six months, and doing one level of testing, we’re now able to optimize any time we want. Within a given hour, we can run 30, 40 different tests to see what’s going to work best for our customers, whether that be specific language or whether that be the actual journey itself. Operational efficiency is a third area.
Andrew Carruthers: That’s a great question. Number one strategy is get your data in order. And by the way, as I said, I started in public relations. I’m not a data guy. But what I’ve learned through the years is data is the fuel. But not all fuel is clean. So you’ve got to identify the relevant data sources in your organization. You’ve got to get access to it and aggregate it in something like a data lake. You’ve got to clean it up. And you’ve got to make sure that it’s essentially ready for primetime to do analysis on, or to train your own internal models. If we’re talking about AI and large language models, or small language models that are more specific and focused, but sort of garbage in, garbage out, dirty fuel in, dirty results out. So number one is data’s the fuel, and you’ve got to make sure you’ve got it, you can access it, it’s clean and ready to use. Number two goes in a different tact. This is have a responsible AI policy for your organization that is put together by different functions across your organization, including IT, including whoever’s responsible for privacy, legal, branding. You want to make sure that you’ve got a policy that outlines It essentially provides the guidelines, or I should say the guardrails, for people within your organization to use AI and to use it responsibly in a way that protects Your customers, you want to make sure you’re not exposing customer data out to the broader internet, which some companies have had happen to them. But you also want to protect the company. You want to protect the company from legal risk and from other potential risks involved, right? Because if you’re communicating bad information to customers and they’re acting on that, it could cause problems that cause them harm, opening you up to legal risk. So you need to form that policy, a responsible AI policy. You need to communicate it internally and train people on it to make sure that they’re following it. And you need to communicate it externally, because it goes to something you mentioned earlier, which is the importance of trust. I think customers expect in 2024, that AI is in broad use. And I think a lot of customers, I think most customers are okay with some of that, but it’s important for them to trust the organization. If they’re going to give a company their data, they want to be able to trust that the company is not going to misuse it. Misuse it from the standpoint of either sort of in a benign way, spamming them constantly, but in a more in a more egregious way of exposing that data, right? So it was some sort of a leak. So it’s important to have that AI policy and to communicate it externally to help build trust. And then the third way of three is simple. It’s get started, right? The best time to start was five years ago or one year ago when it came to Gen AI. The second best time to start is today. Because even if your organization isn’t ready to implement AI, If you start to test it, play with it, get a Microsoft Copilot account or a chat GPT, or pick a model or pick two, and just start playing with it for non-work things. Just create images, write articles, whatever you want to do. And that way, you’ll start to get the hang of it. You’ll understand that will then unlock ideas for using AI. And then when your organization is poised to implement AI, you’ll be ready to lead the charge internally.
Mark Slatin: Great tip. So I’ve got get your data in order, have a responsible AI strategy, a policy and get started. Get started. Yep. Get started. Any particular idea on what to get started with first?
Andrew Carruthers: Well, here’s what I would say, whatever you’re interested in, so assuming that we’re talking about non-work related uses, whatever you’re interested in, if you love to travel, build out a travel plan for a trip you’d like to take tomorrow or someday. If you like art, go to Midjourney or DALI or pick a tool or several tools and start creating AI-generated art. Think about a picture you might want to have the wall of your office And then start playing with it. And it’s by the playing with it that you’ll get better at what’s referred to as prompt engineering, which is simply how to ask the tool the right questions so that you get the output that you’re looking for. It’s really no different than back in the early days of the internet, figuring out how to how to ask queries of Yahoo or Google or whatever of search engines. So it’s the same type of concept there. You’ll start to look for ways that you can use it in your personal life. Menu planning is a great one. And then when it comes to work options, it’s whatever you’re looking to do from a repetitive, whatever repetitive tasks you have. Figure out how to use AI for that, again, within the guidelines of your company, but do you have to do call summaries? If you’re a CSM or whatever you do and you’ve got to do call summaries, use AI to record those calls and create the summary, and then you can review it to make sure that it’s accurate before putting that call summary into action, whether that’s something you send to customers or you put into CRM, whatever it might be. So you can look at it for some sort of easy entry into AI options for use cases within the business environment as well. Excellent.
Mark Slatin: Boy, so many great tips, so many great gems, Andrew. We’re going to have to land the plane. But before we do, let me ask the question that I ask all my guests at the end. What advice would you give to your 20-year-old self?
Andrew Carruthers: Well, I’ve given this some thought lately, and there are two big things I wish I’d known then. One is breathe. Everything is going to be okay. So if you look at everything, even setbacks, as an opportunity to grow, to learn, then everything that happens is okay. And in the end, things will work out. So number one is breathe, know that everything’s going to be okay. And the number two thing is related to that, and that is feedback is a gift, but it’s only a gift if you listen to it, if you think about it, and if you take whatever appropriate action might be on that, whether it just be to absorb it or to take certain steps, whatever. If you look at feedback that you’re getting from somebody as a gift as opposed to a negative criticism, then you’re more likely to be open to receiving it and then to thinking about it, acting on as well. So breathe, everything’s going to be okay. And feedback is a gift if you use it.
Mark Slatin: Yeah. Great, great advice. Great advice. Andrew Carruthers, CCXP, Cisco Systems. Thank you so much. If people want to get ahold of you, what would be the best way for them to reach you?
Andrew Carruthers: Mark, that’d be great. I’d love to engage with folks. Best way to reach me is LinkedIn. Just reach out to me there, connect with me, send me a message. I’ve actually used that as an opportunity to get together with multiple people that I had not known before. So I very much look forward to that. And if we’re ever in the same town together, we can get together in person as well and share a cup of coffee. That goes for you as well as other people, by the way.
