Expert Reveals why Global brands are OBSESSED with Customer Experience

If there are people out there right now who haven't figured out by this point in their career that delivering a good experience to your customers is a sensible thing to do, there's not that much help I can give you.

This is James Dodkins, and he is a customer experience rockstar. He is on a mission to help companies craft outstanding experiences for their customers.

The best companies in the world understand the outcome they are there to deliver to their customers and then align everything they do towards the delivery of it.

According to PwC, 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. And the more expensive the item, the more they're willing to pay.

Delivering the successful outcome to the customer should always be the goal. The money is the reward for achieving the goal.

On this episode, we're going to be discussing why the world's most successful companies all focus on customer experience. We're going to be talking about where most companies go wrong with customer experience. We'll also talk about how AI is transforming the customer experience landscape and why you need to be thinking about AI to stay ahead of the game. So as usual, grab a cuppa or a glass of wine depending on when you're listening to this, and let's get into it, shall we? Hey James, how you doing?

Yo, good. I'm doing good. How are you?

Good, mate. Yeah, I've seen you for many years and the one way I remember you is because of your guitar. It's so funny. I remember you because of your— the line, the rock star and your guitar. So the branding is obviously working.

It worked. It worked. Good. Some people call it a gimmick because it is.

What I love is that you actually use your guitar when you're doing speeches, like live. That's so cool. I think that's so clever to introduce music into your speech. I think, yeah, it's wicked, man. Thank you for coming today, dude. Some of my audience might be thinking, top billers toolkit for recruiters and salespeople, why have you got James on who's an expert in customer experience? And there's a reason why. Because I think not enough people spend time looking after their customers and understanding what a good customer experience is. And I think in any business across any industry, that is so important. And so I wanted to bring you on, James, because I know you're an expert just to feed in maybe a different side that people haven't thought about yet of ways to improve the customer experience. So thank you for coming, man. Really appreciate it. We always start the podcast with the same question. What's the number one tool in your toolkit, whether it be a mindset, strategy, or piece of software? What do you think, mate?

In all honesty, I'd probably say my phone.

First, first time we've had that one. Why would you say your phone, mate?

Well, so I make lots of content, lots of video content. I have got all the fancy cameras in the world, all the fancy lights in the world, got a gimbal. I don't even know what that really is, but I've got one. I find that I make most of my video content just with my phone now when I'm out and about. It's a lot more authentic, it's a lot more immediate. So for me, phone.

That's such a good point. I literally did that. I make all my content now with my phone, literally everything. And the quality— the brilliant thing is the quality is good enough to get away with it easily. Like, the quality is good enough, it's faster. So it's really interesting. I think it's a great point. I think people that want to get into video marketing, they assume you need this massive setup with like all these fancy gadgets. And actually nowadays you don't. A phone is absolutely good enough. And I think it's about focusing on the fundamentals, right? In terms of how you deliver and what you're saying. Yeah.

You see the guy that makes like music videos with his phone?

No, I don't think I have.

No, we haven't.

Well, I don't know his name, so I can't help you. But there's a guy that makes music videos with his phone. They're sick. They're so good. And the thing is, he plays with angles and different like lighting things. He does some cool things and it's all just with an iPhone.

So Yeah, man, amazing. Um, just a little, little plug for a software that I use, guys. Uh, InShot is a fantastic little app to edit with. I'm not sure if you use any apps, uh, James, but InShot has been absolutely amazing, um, and it's just really easy to, to use. So I, I edit all my films on that. Um, you can use it on your mobile and it's brilliant.

Not to mention the quality of the actual cameras on some phones nowadays, they're like quite indistinguishable from like proper DSLRs, like high-end cameras. It's nuts. And no, absolutely no one has an excuse not to start doing some form of content because they've got a phone. It's pretty nuts. Um, can you explain to us what customer experience is and why it's important for all the noobs out there who don't really focus on it or don't really pay attention to it?

What is customer experience? It's a good question, and there's lots of different ways to answer that question because arguably there's lots of different ways to ask that question. So we could be saying, well, what is customer experience as a discipline? Or what is a customer's experience? Or what is a good customer experience? Or what is a customer experience professional? Now, when most people answer this question, they answer, what is a customer experience? And the traditional answer in the customer experience world is the sum of the thoughts, feelings, and interactions a customer has with your company. That's wrong, right? That is the least customer-centric way to think about what a customer's experience is. It assumes that the only things going on in a customer's life are interactions with you. Now, people out there, I really hate to break it to you, but customers don't do business with you because they want to do business with you. They do business with you because they're trying to achieve a goal or an outcome. So In my opinion, the true customer-centric way to, you know, define what is customer experience is the sum of the thoughts, feelings, and interactions a customer has along the journey towards the achievement of a goal or an outcome. And when you realize that that is truly a customer's experience, you start to understand that customers are interacting with a lot more than just you, with a lot more businesses, a lot more products and services. Now, Can you influence those? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But do you need to know what they are? Always yes, never no. You definitely need to know what these other interactions with other products and services are on that customer's journey towards achieving that goal or an outcome. The next thing you asked was, why is it important? I've got to be honest with you. If there are people out there right now who haven't figured out by this point in their career that delivering a good experience to your customers is a sensible thing to do, there's not that much help I can give you really. But if there are some people out there, the only way I could probably put it is in musical terms. Imagine you go to a gig and there's two possible scenarios. The artist is awful, plays awfully horrible songs, makes your ears bleed, makes you want to cry. The other one, they are amazing, they play extraordinarily well, and they move you to tears. So the opposite type of Two tiers. One, you're very unlikely to go and buy a t-shirt. You're probably not going to go buy their album. You're probably not going to say nice things to your friends about them. You're not going to share videos online. The other one, you probably are going to go buy a t-shirt and you probably are going to buy their album and you tell the friends how cool it was and you might post videos online and much more likely to become a fan of that artist. So basically the better the experience you deliver, the better your bottom line is going to be.

Bloody good answer, James. Absolutely love that. Great way to explain it as well. I was really— because you caught me off guard there in terms of defining customer experience, because I personally always thought it was actually the interactions that people had with your business. I thought that was the definition. But you said that, correct me if I'm wrong, it's actually that as well as interactions they're having with other businesses. Am I right in saying that?

It's just a part of a bigger picture. So the interactions with your business is a small part of a bigger picture. That is your company's role in a customer experience. But a customer's experience is a lot more than just their interactions with you. Now, don't get me wrong, the interactions that the customer has with your company are the ones that you have most control over, most impact over, and they're the ones you should probably focus on the most. But it's— I don't know if I'm just being a little bit like picky with it, but I don't like the traditional definition because it does leave out so much of what's going on outside of your ecosystem. It's kind of like, Think of it this way. So you guys heard of Copernicus, right?

Yes. I can't remember where from, but I have heard of Copernicus.

So super old dude, dead now, been dead a while. Um, he figured out that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe and that the Sun was actually the center of the universe. It wasn't all of the planets and the Sun revolving around the Earth, it was all of the planets revolving around the Sun, and it was the theory of heliocentricity. There you go, Google that one. And our companies all think that we are the center of the universe and that everything else revolves around us. No, no, no, no, the customer is the center of the universe and we are just one of the planets revolving around them.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And so to put this into like customer experience terms, James, understanding the whole customer experience, how does that change my, the way I deliver my customer experience or my value I give to the customer, if that makes sense.

Well, you start to realize that the customer's experience is gonna start a long time before they ever actually first interact with you as a company. Let's use a mortgage. So a mortgage application with a bank, you as the customer, your experience isn't, doesn't start the moment you make an application. Remember what I said before, the only reason you are making that mortgage application is is because you are trying to achieve a goal or an outcome. You don't, you're not getting a mortgage because you want a mortgage. Nobody wants a mortgage. They want the home, they want the house, they want that place to live, the dream house, whatever. So that is the outcome, the goal they're trying to achieve. Now, your journey towards achieving that goal includes a mortgage, but it includes so much more. It includes whatever that moment is, that trigger that makes you realize, ah, I need a new home. It might be a new job, it might be a new family member, whatever. It could be anything. So you've got that trigger moment, that very first moment that kicks off the entire experience. And then you start looking at different areas and then you start looking at different houses. And then there's all of the interactions with the real estate people, or what do we call it in England?

Estate agents.

Thank you. There you go. I forgot what they were for a second. Yeah, estate agents. You've got all those interactions. All that stuff is happening before you've even started talking to a bank. That, what does that mean? That's not part of your experience? No, it doesn't. That's all part of the experience. And if a bank were to understand that, they would go about doing things very differently. They would engineer the experience in a different way. Maybe they would move the start of their experience a little sooner. Maybe they would start partnering with estate agents, who knows? But just confining yourself to the first interaction and last interaction, it's really short-sighted.

What's just out of curiosity? Yeah, it's really interesting, James. What's the biggest— what's the kind of most common reason people come to you for help? Is it to increase customer retention? Is it because they've had a, you know, they're noticing their customers are dropping off and they want to, you know, make more money? Like, what's that main reason that people come to you for, do you think?

I mean, personally with me, it's usually companies that are already pretty good at customer experience, but they don't want to be good, they want to be great.

Interesting.

So that I very rarely do work with companies that deliver shitty customer experiences. I'm not that guy. I'm the guy to take you to the next level. I'm that guy that helps you deliver rockstar customer experiences. That's what I call them. That's my thing.

It makes sense because I guess they're already heavily invested in it and they've got a mindset around delivering great customer service. So it makes perfect sense that they want to improve that. So I guess if we're looking at like just an average recruitment company, and this may be difficult because I don't know how many recruitment companies you work with, James, if there was like an 80/20 principle on how to improve a customer experience, where would you start? Like what would you do? What advice would you give to kind of small businesses?

I mean, to be fair, this is, this isn't going to rock people's world, but it's first understanding who is your customer? Who is it that you are delivering the service to? So, okay, first step done. We understand the candidates are our customers, but also I suppose you could argue that companies that are getting it.

So you've got two customers.

Yeah, two customers there.

You've got the companies that want the employees and the candidates that want to become employees. You've got those two customers. Cool. Then you need to understand really who they are at a deep level, understand that outcome they're trying to achieve. We spoke about that earlier with that journey towards delivering a goal or an outcome. You need to understand what is the goal, what are they actually trying to achieve from this? And it's probably going to go a little bit further than just get a job. There's probably more to it than that. And a really good way to do that is to understand people and companies, not just from a sort of demographic level, but from a psychographic level, really understanding people to a deep and personal degree, understanding their personalities, their beliefs, their values, their life choices, their influences, all of that stuff, understanding them so well that you can then craft the experiences for them. I mean, I mean, in the business world, there's a, this is a relic from the industrial age, but a lot of companies really double down on standardization, making everything standard the exact same every single time. I think we need to go the exact opposite direction. We need to move away from process standardization and towards experience personalization. But the only way you can do that is understanding who is our customer, what is the outcome they are there to achieve, And basically, who are they at a deep personal level?

So everything you're explaining about the customer experience reminds me so much of the marketing process that we take our clients through as well, about understanding their pains, their desires, what they want, not just a point in time but the whole journey. And then we take that material and then use that to create a better— call it a marketing campaign, marketing experience. And it's just fascinating how similar it is to that, James.

Yeah, I think it's fascinating speaking to you, James, because I don't think there's many people— we haven't seen many people that do what you do. Um, how did you even get into doing what you do? Was it like an epiphany? Did you have like this crazy experience you thought, I'm gonna get into this? Or—

complete accident. So after I stopped being an international rock god— because I used, I used to actually play guitar in a heavy metal band.

Oh really?

Comes from—

yeah, that's so cool.

Play guitar in a heavy metal band, toured the world, released albums, was in all the rock and metal magazines. Good fun. When I stopped being an international rock god, I took the next logical career step and joined an insurance company. And I was— that's so funny. Why would you not? And I was on the phones selling insurance, realized pretty quickly, probably don't want to do this forever. So I sort of worked my way up the career ladder, had a whole corporate career, and I never used to tell anyone about my music career. Because I was, I was almost embarrassed by it, that I thought that they would have like prejudgments and preconceived notions about me and what I was capable of, and all of which would have been correct. So that's why I didn't. In fact, there was, there was one woman at my very first job, um, and I told her that I played in a band, and she was, she was an older woman, and she was like, what, what type of music would I know? That's similar? And I said, well, kind of like Black Sabbath, because I'm from Birmingham, they were from Birmingham, that's Black Sabbath, Birmingham. And she was like, oh, so you used to make money being a devil worshipper? Yeah. I was like, no, no, no, no, you got it all wrong. I didn't make any money. I thought that was hilarious. She didn't. So after that, I was like, I might I might just keep this to myself. So I had this whole corporate career. Now, the deal was I had created this corporate persona for myself, suit and tie, briefcase. I was that dude because essentially everything I'd learned about business was from cartoons. So I was like, that is how you gotta be in the business world. Problem was it worked, it worked well, but I was miserable. I was spending the majority of my energy on any given day desperately trying to not be myself. And there was a quote from a guy called Jerry Garcia that you may have heard of from the Grateful Dead, and it's, don't try and be the best in the world at what you do, be the only person in the world that does what you do. And it kind of all hit me at once. I was like, you know what, I've got this really cool music career that I never tell anyone about. I've got this love of customer experience that's grown organically over the years. Why can I not put them together and teach people about customer experience through the lens of music, teach people lessons from the music world to help them turn their customers into fans. So that's a quick version of how I got from being a real-life legitimate award-winning rock star to being a pretend rock star again.

I love that, man.

That's so cool.

It's funny how— and I've heard this so much— the things that we end up— we, we first are most embarrassed about or scared about end up being our biggest weapon further down the line once we learn to embrace it. I've just heard so many stories like that, and it's so cool that you have a similar one, James, that the thing that you were worried about is now—

well, it makes a lot of sense to me now why I fell into customer experience. I didn't understand it for a while, but when I look back on it, and it's kind of embarrassing that I didn't make the link sooner, but for me, putting on an amazing show for your fans night after night is exactly the same as delivering an amazing experience for your customers day after day. There are very few jobs in the world where you can positively affect millions of people's lives. Being a musician is one of them. Working in customer experience is another. You can work with a business and improve an experience that improves the lives of millions of people all over the world. And I think that's, I mean, it's other than being a real-life rock star, it's one of the coolest professions you can have.

That's awesome. Amazing.

I love that, mate.

Assuming James, that your customer or a business understands their customer on a deep level.

Yeah.

What's typically a bottleneck or common problem that these guys face when they're trying to improve the customer experience? Is there one thing that keeps cropping up for you, or is it very varied?

It's varied, man. There's lots of things. Some of it is about buy-in from the top. Sometimes it'll be like like flavor of the month, do customer, like they'll read an article in Harvard Business Review and they'll be like, guys, we need to start doing customer experience. It's like, well, I mean, you've already been doing it. It's just probably badly if that's the mindset that you've got. So buy-in from the top is sometimes difficult. Lots of companies work in silos. So you've got different parts of the business working all over the place. I think of it like this. Imagine a Rubik's Cube. Okay. And the strategy is we wanna create a fully, you know, corrected Rubik's Cube, a completed Rubik's Cube. So we want to create a completed Rubik's Cube. So that's our strategy. So we go to the blue department and we say, blue department, your goal is to get 9 blue tiles together on one side. We go to the red department, Your job is to get 9 red tiles together on your side. And we do that to all the different colors. So then each department's going away and they're working away on this one Rubik's Cube trying to get all of the colors aligned. Problem is everybody's quite merrily messing up everyone else's work. Whereas you very rarely find a company that would get everyone together and say, everyone, the strategy is a completed Rubik's Cube, work together to make that happen. That's probably the biggest barrier in customer experience. Everybody working in their own color department, doing their own thing with no line of sight towards the customer. We've created an environment where most people in a business think that the customer isn't their job. They think that's someone else's job. That's not my job. That's the job of the customer experience people. And it is a bit of a utopian idea to think that customer experience should be everybody's job in an organization. Maybe we'll never really get to a place like that. But everybody should at least understand how the work they do on any given day contributes towards a customer experience. Because everything you do in a business, the sum of all your internal processes in a business is your customer experience. And everybody has a role to play. It might even, might be a tiny little part, but everybody's got a role to play. And I think understanding that bigger picture, that completing Rubik's Cube and how you contribute towards it is the one thing that's holding customer experience back the most. If I had to choose one thing.

That's really interesting. When you said the people working on their own little section of the Rubik's Cube, I'm guessing a perfect example of that is when you call up a company and you get sent around to like 7 different branches in one day and they're all like, no, it's not my job, try speaking to John. Would that be, would that be something you're talking about?

Yeah, definitely. And it's so I work for a company called Pega Systems. We do software. And the software, some of the software we do is to avoid that completely. You don't ring up one person, explain something and they go, oh yeah, I can't help you with that. I'm going to pass you to someone else and then you have to explain it again. It's just such a wind-up. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of money for the business as well. So the idea of our customer service product, we've got other products as well, but the customer service product, part of it is to allow the context of what the customer is trying to achieve, to follow them along their journey, understanding that outcome, that goal, the thing I've just been speaking about the whole time, understanding, okay, this is what the customer is trying to achieve. It doesn't matter if you've started on a chatbot or if you've started in a WhatsApp message or through an email, the central brain sort of knows, okay, this is a customer, this is what they're trying to achieve. And that context follows them across the entire journey. So you never have to explain yourself over and over again. And it knows exactly where to send you the first time to make sure you get it right. So you don't even have to be passed around, but if you do, at least they know what's going on.

Yeah, yeah. One of the biggest epiphanies— sorry, Sam, I'm jumping in quite a lot on this one because it's really interesting. One of the biggest— I'm not sure if you do this with your clients, maybe you do on a much more sophisticated scale, James— but one of the biggest epiphanies, I think, for me and Sam, for me certainly, with understanding or creating a better customer journey for us was just starting with the basics, which was mapping it out on like Whimsical or Figma and actually just visualizing how the different steps are happening and when they're happening. Like, we had never done that before, but then when we worked with someone that helped us to visualize that, it made it so much easier. And we're like, oh my God, I can't believe we haven't done this before. Do you take your customers through something similar?

Or the companies I work with tend to be larger companies. They don't have like one single experience This is where the personalization thing comes in. So what we try and do is figure out scenarios. So companies think they've got millions and millions of processes. They don't. They've got millions, they've maybe got like 20, right? Even massive companies, even a big bank, there's probably about 20 processes actually. What they do have lots and lots of is scenarios. And it's understanding, it's, there's, there's like a matrix of all the different types of customers you've got. And all the different scenarios they might be— do the simple way to think about this is grocery shopping. Okay. There are loads of different scenarios you might go grocery shopping for. It could be to do your weekly shop. It could be to shop for a party. It could be a last-minute thing you forgot. It could be picking up lunch on the way to work. It could be getting a present for someone, whatever. There's loads of different scenarios. Okay. Now, each one of those scenarios has got its own different journey, its own different outcomes that need to be achieved. But then against every different type of customer, it's all different as well. So I think for smaller companies where it's very one-to-one, journey mapping is great, but it gets very, very complicated when you try and do it for large organizations because there is no one journey. And if you try and force one journey, you kind of end up with a journey map that doesn't really accurately represent anything. It does have its uses, definitely, but it is limited.

I'm sure you've worked with so many different types of companies, James, you know, some with like mediocre. I know now you only do, you know, you work with world-class customer experience companies or companies that have world-class customer experience. I'm sure you've had your journey though. What is, from observing the ones that aren't doing very well, to the ones that are doing it at a world-class level or a really good level, what are the biggest differences, would you say? Maybe not in technicalities, but on a high-level view, is it like mindset? Is it culture? Is it community? Like, what are the kind of key things that are causing them to have a better—

it's, it's all of those things. I mean, if you, if you look at Disney, for example, so I've worked with Disney, they have got customer experience running through every single part of their organization from the top to the bottom. Every single person in that company is empowered to do whatever it takes to deliver a good experience to the customer because that's their ethos, that's their culture. So let me put it, let me tell you a little story about Disney. Disney is a great company for this. I love Disney because of the way that they empower their staff to deliver great experiences. So you're at Disney World or Land or whatever one of the other, whatever the Japanese one's called. You're at a Disney park and you've got a kid and you buy a little box of popcorn that probably costs about £14, right? You give them the box of popcorn. Because kids are stupid, they drop it on the floor and spill it everywhere. And you're like, oh my God, so expensive. Then the kid's crying and you're like, oh gee, I was like, don't, don't cry, kid. But I got the janitor over there sees this happening, right? And they come over via the popcorn stand and they bend down and they talk to the kid and they say, hey, have you just dropped your popcorn? And the kid, yeah, they go, right, well, Mickey, all right, saw that happen and he sent me over with this. And he just gives him a new box of popcorn, right? Now, that's a true story that happens every single day at Disney. Wow. Even the janitor, the person sweeping up, is empowered to go and do that to change the experience. Now, Disney understand that the successful outcome for every family visiting one of their theme parks is this idea of magic. Therefore, everything they do is aligned towards the delivery of magic to their customers. That includes the janitor. The janitor realizes that they can go around just pick up a box of popcorn that probably costs them about 7p to produce, even though they sell it for £14, whatever, that's fine. And give it to the kid and completely change that family's experience. But the question is, when that kid says, hey, how did Mickey know that I dropped my popcorn? What is the only answer the dad can give his kid? Magic. That's why everything at Disney is aligned towards the delivery of magic. The best companies in the world understand the outcome they are there to deliver to their customers and then align and everything they do towards the delivery of it.

I just find it amazing, like how you instill that sense of purpose and direction and love of the culture and the vision in every single member, including the janitor. I think that's incredible. For the companies that are at the top of their game with customer experience, what do they— what results do they tend to see that maybe companies that don't focus on that have, James? Like, what do they see in terms of just everything around the business? So any kind of patterns that you've spotted?

So superior financial results. That is the long and short of it. They, they end up with superior financial results, but there are different reasons for that. So some of it is because of customers buying more stuff. Customers buy more stuff, you're going to make more money. It's customers costing less to acquire. Because there's other customers out there saying, hey, this company is good, you should use them. It's customers staying with you for longer. So they're not churning as much. It's customers spending more of their wallet with you. So financial goals there, but also as an organization, if you're doing things smartly, you're using AI and automation in the right places, you're only delivering the interactions that are necessary towards achieving a goal or an outcome, you actually spend a hell of a lot less money So your costs are a lot lower. So delivering customer experience really well actually costs a lot less than delivering it badly because customers will call in again and have to talk to someone else and this, that and the other. So it lowers your costs, it increases your revenue. Fantastic, better, superior financial results. But also, if you are in an organization as an employee where you are empowered to deliver those amazing experiences, you feel like you belong to something bigger. Bigger than yourself, bigger than the tasks and activities you're doing on a daily basis. So you attract better people, which is good. You have to spend less on trying to attract people to the business. The people that become employees stay for longer because they feel like they've got a purpose in the organization and they can see how the work they're doing on a daily basis is positively impacting people's lives. So that saves you money as well. And it's like a virtuous cycle because the better people you get in, the better experiences they deliver, the better experiences they deliver, the more money comes in, the more money that comes in, you can hire better people, and it just goes and goes and goes and goes. So I mean, like, coming back to the recruitment idea, to allow people within your organization the freedom to deliver those amazing experiences makes recruitment a hell of a lot easier.

So brilliant, how many knock-on effects good customer experience has.

And especially go on about that all day. I could just keep going and keep going and keep going because there is so much stuff that is a benefit of good customer experience.

Final question, James, and I want— because I know you speak a lot about AI and, and I've seen some really insane videos that you posted actually of like certain AI technology reading the brain. That was so weird. Brain imaging and scanning and all that kind of stuff. How is AI changing customer experience, you think, at the moment specifically? Has this been the surge of AI technology?

AI is changing customer service so much right now. It's so exciting because again, it comes back to the emotional and transactional side of experience. The transactional side, it's helping make happen lightning fast. The AI can understand what I'm asking it to do and then just go away and do it without any other human interaction. But on the emotional side, it's acting as like a copilot for agents, helping them along the journey. Because I don't know if you've ever worked in a call center or if anybody listening has ever worked in a call center. It is a bloody difficult job. You're trying to talk to the customer, empathize with the customer, find all the details, write down all the details properly, look at different systems to try and find the article that they've just asked to find out about. You're putting things in, you've got to do like 7 different systems because they were in a— they're a customer that we bought through an acquisition. So they're actually in a— and it's really difficult. And the agent's having to do all of this while maintaining a conversation with the customer. The AI can basically deal with all of that stuff so that the agent can just have a conversation with the customer, can be present with the customer, can be there for them, and can build that emotional bond with them. The AI can listen to the conversation that's being had. And let's say I ask, how do I reset my internet router? It can bring up the knowledge article, it can show it immediately. I don't have to go and search for it as the agent, it brings it up. And then it suggests other things, it suggests the next best conversation to have, or maybe it suggests asks, oh, maybe you want to upgrade to this thing because it's got the 4G backup router. Even let's say the customer's telling me, oh, and I need to change my address. The AI can listen to the address that the customer is saying and automatically put it into the system. And as the agent, I just have to look at it and go, yep, that's correct. Yep, that's correct. There are so many different use cases. With it. But the thing is, it's not just AI in and of itself, it's the unification of AI and automation because the AI can understand things and it can make decisions, but it's the automation that gets stuff done. The AI by itself, it's not useless. I don't wanna say that because it's not true, but it's close to it unless it actually goes and does stuff with the decisions or the content that's been created. There's no point. So you have to have that automation side of it as well. The AI figuring out what's going on, what needs to be done, making decisions, creating content, but then the automation doing something with it. For argument's sake, let's say I send an email saying, hi company, I need to change my address from this to this. Here are my details. The AI can look at that. It can say, right, this is the customer. This is all correct. They want to change it to this and then use automation to go and make that change on my behalf and then create a reply email and automate send it back to me as the customer. Now, for me as the customer, that's brilliant because it gets done in an instant. It's one of those transactional experiences that can just get done lightning fast. It's great for the company because they haven't had to use a human to deal with something that's arguably very boring to do, which is sit there, read an email, make the change, send an email. But it's boring stuff that people don't really want to be doing. And it frees up the agent's time to deal with the more emotional things. So, and there's stuff like that happening in every facet of customer experience right now, in every facet of customer service. It's fascinating. It's— we could probably do another podcast on just all that as well. So next season we've got an episode on why I don't like customer feedback, and then an episode on AI and automation in customer service. There we go, you heard it here.

Awesome.

Thank you for coming today, James. Honestly, I learned so much, and Also, it was a brilliant reminder how important the customer experience is for any business. Like, it doesn't matter what level, any business, if you make the customer the centre of everything you do, like, you'll just see so many benefits in every area and every facet. So it was a really great reminder for me. So thanks for coming, mate.

Really appreciate it.

Hey guys, thanks for tuning into this episode. If you enjoyed it, please don't forget to subscribe on YouTube and Spotify. Tune in for another episode next week, and we look forward to seeing you again very soon. Peace and love.