Customerland
Customerland is a podcast about …. Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
Customerland
AI-Driven Solutions for Modern Customer Challenges
What if you could revolutionize customer interaction with cutting-edge technology and enhance loyalty like never before? Join us as we uncover the secrets with Jay Patel, SVP GM of Webex Customer Experience at Cisco. Jay offers a unique perspective on the dynamic intersection of customer service and loyalty, sharing insights into how platforms like Cloud Cherry and advancements in the CPaaS space are redefining seamless customer experiences across multiple channels.
Journey with us through the shifting landscape of customer communication technologies, from the nostalgic days of direct mail to the sophisticated AI innovations of today. Jay and I delve into the complexities businesses face in catering to a diverse customer base, balancing the needs of tech-savvy users and those preferring personal interaction. Discover how AI and machine learning are not just buzzwords, but essential tools optimizing every stage of the customer lifecycle, and how Cisco Webex is leading the way in integrating these technologies for consistent, effective communication.
Peering into the future, we explore the exciting possibilities AI holds for customer service. From the AI agent studio to virtual agents mirroring brand values, Jay gives us a glimpse of a world where automation meets personalization. This episode promises to leave you inspired and eager to embrace the technological strides set to revolutionize customer interaction, driving efficiency and satisfaction to new heights.
there's a whole bunch of loyalty vendors that all they do is loyalty at a particular point in that customer life cycle and again you've seen the lines blur between um, yeah, loyalty can obviously be loyalty offers and loyalty packages, but you can also get longer customer life cycle by delivering a better customer service, by being more accessible on more channels. So I just think what you've seen is you've just seen a huge blurring of internal demarcations between different functions.
Mike Giambattista:Jay Patel is SVP GM of WebEx Customer Experience at Cisco. Did I get that right? The sequence is correct. Yes, you did.
Jay Patel:Yes, you did, I look after. We sell software and platforms to organizations to help them communicate better with their customers better with their customers.
Mike Giambattista:That's a hugely simplified version of what I know to be a very, very intricate and detailed operation over there. But first, Jay, thanks for joining me. I really appreciate it. Whether you know it or not, our teams have been working feverishly to put this together and there's been all kinds of back and forth, so I'm just really glad we finally made it. So maybe you could elaborate on your role there at WebEx Cisco. I absolutely want to get your perspective on what's happening in the broader world of CX, because I think your perspective is going to be invaluable there. But just to start us off, add a little context. Describe what you do day in, day out, what your remits are at WebEx.
Jay Patel:So at Cisco we have a collaboration unit where we're very focused on the idea that experiences matter and that there's two really key types of experiences that in collaboration we look after.
Jay Patel:One is employee experiences, so the experience of communicating within an organization using tools like WebEx, like Zoom, like Teams how do we communicate better within an organization? And we have devices and we have the WebEx app and we call that EX employee experience. We have another part of collaboration that is all focused on customer experience solutions. So, essentially, where we provide software, platforms and tools for large organizations, brands, helping them communicate with their customers Everything from simple messaging solutions so, for example, when you get an SMS from a bank about your balance or pass notifications we do that all the way to something like a contact center where you might call into a contact center and have a conversation with an agent. And obviously we have a lot of more complex use cases around or complex technology around, using AI and virtual agents also to automate some of that communication. So we sell platforms to help organizations communicate and interact with their customers better.
Mike Giambattista:In an earlier conversation several months ago with one of your colleagues, spoke with Vinod Mudukrishnan about his journey from the beginnings and, honestly, I don't recall the name of the company he was helped form.
Jay Patel:His company was Cloud Cherry. Yeah.
Mike Giambattista:Yep, that's right, thank you. And how the vision evolved into an acquisition by Cisco, but then, beyond that, how the product and vision for that product evolved once the acquisition had happened, which became a much more sophisticated approach. Obviously, as you've described your purpose at work, so to speak, that has so many different legs, it has so many different ways to be interpreted, so many different tool sets to enable that, and I've taken a look as best as one can from the outside as to your offerings, but it is hugely broad and hugely deep, and so you sit on the product side or you sit over all of that.
Jay Patel:Yeah, so I sit as the general manager of all of those customer engagement and communication solutions. Cloud Cherry Vinod's business is part of our layer where we take data across different parts of the journey and utilize that data and communication. I also myself joined Cisco through an acquisition. I had run a business in what's called the CPaaS space, which is the communication platforms and service, very much focused around messaging and two-way interaction with customers over digital channels. But what we see is that the market in general, over a period of time, has converged to a lot of organizations wanting one platform or one main hub through which they would do their communications, especially digital and voice communications.
Jay Patel:The experience you want your customers to have a consistent experience of your business, whether they talk to your contact center, whether they message you on an app, whether you message them.
Jay Patel:So in order to get consistency of experience, you do need to consolidate all the ways in which you communicate with them. So you've seen over the years, vendors like ourselves and others basically bring together a bunch of different channels. So whether it's voice email, sms, push notifications, whatsapp, so that we allow our customers to use any channel of communication, we bring together data across, whether you're looking to buy something on the website, whether you're looking, whether you've got a problem with your service, an outage or something, whether you're looking to call a call centre, there may be a variety of reasons why you also want to communicate. So a lot of that consolidation has been happening over the last few years, and at WebEx we do have a portfolio that appeals to small and large businesses across a variety of industries, and our main thrust there is to make sure that we can help our customers with the vast majority of reasons for communication.
Mike Giambattista:I'd love to back the conversation up just a little bit, zoom out if you will, because our perspective here myself and a handful of colleagues who started this thing, handful of colleagues who who started this thing uh see, saw a convergence of all of these customer interactions into technologically, but also kind of strategically, conceptually as well.
Mike Giambattista:Um, as I mentioned before, we hit the record button.
Mike Giambattista:Um, loyalty stood alone, as you know, kind of the source of rich customer data for a long while, and then it became pretty obvious that you could find customer data in all these places, but that that began and still continues. Uh, a convergence in this space of the way people think about customer interactions and, um, as you mentioned you know you're the way people think about customer interactions and, as you mentioned, the way Cisco has assembled the technologies is one impact. But, in your view, because you've been in this space probably longer than I have been looking at it, what is maybe the question I need to ask is what were those points of inflection where, where you saw wait a second the space looked this way recently and it's about to change over here, and I'm I'm thinking of, you know, like what you just said, ccas and cpass, and I think you know, like what you just said, ccas and CPAS and I think CS kind of assumed all of CX for a period but CX has now exploded into all these kind of adjacent disciplines.
Jay Patel:So it's a rambling thought and not much of a question, but I'd love to get your thoughts on it, I think. Look, let me say this as a slightly broader sweep as well. Organizations have always had a need to communicate effectively and engage with their customers, and if you trace it all the way back, you know the technology has always driven innovation in this space. So 20, 30 years ago, you had the idea of direct mail, right. So when direct mail first came along, you know it was huge and everybody and personalisation within direct mail and then within direct mail as well. You then started getting email after that and you know, in in that desktop era and we got bombarded with email and in each, you know, in each innovation and that has spawned a whole bunch of vendors. So, so, so you had, in the direct mail industry, a bunch of vendors. Then you had a lot of email providers, and then there was an inflection point when smartphones came out of a range of SMS vendors, because SMS became a medium of communication. And then you had the app economy. So suddenly, again years ago, there was this idea that everybody will be having push notifications and in-app messaging, and then in recent years you've had the explosion of things like WhatsApp as a medium for communication, and every generation has spawned vendors, and actually the challenge with it has been the organizations have had to essentially have lots of silos of communication in their in their organizations and different teams essentially using different mediums to, at times, achieve the same objective, and what you've now seen in the last few years is a consolidation of channels, and you've then as well as seen, as well as that happening, you've had the fact that interactions, historically, or communications, used to be either outbound or inbound and again, and the two-way conversations always happen in a contact center. Now, contact centers can be expensive, as we know, because it's based on agents. Now, contact centers can be expensive, as we know, because it's based on agents. But what you're now seeing, especially with AI, which I think is the biggest inflection point that we've had probably ever, is the ability to have two-way conversations with virtual agents, which are obviously not the same cost as human agents, and that, in and of itself, is going to create a huge change in our industry. So, yeah, I think you can see the internet era, the mobile era, now the AI era, all creating different modes of communication and different possibilities.
Jay Patel:Now, I think, the challenge for the larger organizations is how to incorporate the fact that these technologies and mediums vary according to their customers whether you're young, old, technology savvy, whether you've got a cool smartphone or not a cool smartphone, whether you like using AI, whether you want to talk to a human. So in order for them to cater to that diversity, they do need essentially technology solutions that cover the basis, and I think that's why you're seeing this. But that's why you've seen consolidation. That's why you see organizations have such broad offerings, because you need to be able to service all end customers, need to be able to service all end customers.
Jay Patel:And, like I said, I think the other big change is historically gathering data, which drives communication. You have marketing data, so people who are not even your customers yet, and marketing has got a lot of data around potential customers, existing customers. You've got the process of raising awareness of your brand, the acquisition process of acquiring a customer and, essentially, the purchasing process, and then you've got the service. Then you've got customer service, you've got renewals. So the whole customer lifecycle cycle typically has also had different vendors at different stages of that life cycle.
Jay Patel:So you mentioned loyalty. There's a whole bunch of loyalty vendors that all they do is loyalty at a particular point in that customer life cycle. And again you've seen the lines blur between loyalty can obviously be loyalty offers and loyalty packages, but you can also get longer customer lifecycle by delivering a better customer service, by being more accessible on more channels. So I just think what you've seen is you've just seen a huge blurring of internal demarcations between different functions and an explosion in the proliferation of channels. And with AI you now have the ability to apply a lot of interesting machine learning to actually optimize all this. So we live in incredibly interesting times to actually focus on what does the business do best and what the customers want and essentially tie the two together.
Mike Giambattista:And I think I see our role at Cisco WebEx providing our customers with the tools to do that across the PC, across the different channels and across the customer lifecycle um, so I I think your, your visual analogy is better than mine, because you see it as a blurring rather than a series of, you know, easily identifiable, identifiable inflection points. I completely agree with you. Everything has continued to blur and converge, which brings us Go ahead, go ahead.
Jay Patel:What's interesting, mike, is it's interesting actually in the world of entertainment and it's interesting in the world of communication in general, which is nothing ever quite replaces what happened before, and so everything coexists. So you have a world. It's all additive, you right? I always think that, um, yeah, I remember there was a song years ago called video killed the radio star right.
Jay Patel:Um, and it was when tv I'm not old enough to know that, but I've heard yeah no, but, but, but what you know, every generation of entertainment it's like well, it's going to destroy the previous generation. It never quite has. We still listen to radios, we still watch TV, we now also obviously have YouTube and we have shorts and everything else. Similarly, in communication, we still get letters, we still get emails, we still get SMSs, and the next stage will be AI, virtual agents. Everything will coexist. It's just, at times, it just makes it a bit harder for organizations to manage it all efficiently. And again, I think you can use tech for that, and that's really what I see is that kind of it's a continuum that you've got to be prepared to be additive and you've got to hit all the bases. You've got to be prepared for it to be additive, and you've got to hit all the bases.
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Mike Giambattista:If you're ready to take your product, service or brand to market, it might be time to think about a groundswell strategy. Visit groundswellcc to learn more. I'm misquoting you, I'm sure, but AI is likely the biggest inflection point, certainly of the ones that you mentioned, but I think in any technology-related endeavor, AI is having an impact that is beyond describable right now. I think we're all just beginning to wake up to how giant this idea really is really is. I'd love to hear a little bit about how Cisco is looking at AI across the spectrum of how you create and deploy it, as well as, more specifically, within the CX world within the CX world.
Jay Patel:So, firstly, I don't think again. I think a lot of organizations maybe over-index on AI and actually I think the thing that, for me, is our main aim is still ultimately helping our customers build trusted relationships with their customers, and that involves them better communicating, better interacting, being more thoughtful, more effective and more human in their customer interactions.
Mike Giambattista:So that's our goal.
Jay Patel:Ai is a tool to help us get there and help us get there faster. So what we've done is we've essentially put AI across all our different bits of software, in some cases, helping developers and our clients embed or suggest code that allows them to integrate some of their internal systems faster. In some cases, I'm helping them with transcribing conversations so they can get insights into those conversations, so agents can actually save time answering customers in real time. We have AI looking at sentiment analysis in these conversations. We have AI looking at how you might improve and suggest responses in a live conversation. So we've embedded AI essentially across all parts of our software stack in the customer experience portfolio. In terms of how we built it, we've taken the view that we have a series of design principles the Cisco AI principles that I'm sure we can send you afterwards which really focus on the idea that we will be totally transparent with customers as to how the pipeline of data and information is going to flow between all the different entities that need to supply the service. We have security at our heart. We have privacy at our heart, so it's a range of things that basically we know that we need to do in this AI world. We use some of the foundational models we have. We've got some open source relationships Cisco had invested in Mistral, an open source business. We've got some of our own AI that had been acquired years ago Voisier, babel Labs so we're using, essentially, insights from everywhere for the use case, and our use case is to help our customers communicate better, and I think that we will remain flexible going forwards as to whether customers some of them are making decisions on which foundation model they want to double down on. We will make sure they have the tools to actually use that foundation model within our solution as well. So flexibility and transparency, I think, are at the heart of this how we're going to use AI with our customers. You're right in the sense that it is a profound change. I personally think that we don't need many more technical advances in AI to actually solve a lot of the problems we have today in AI. So I think even today's generation of LLMs solve a huge number of customer communication, customer service problems. I'll give you an example Often, customers abandon self-service chatbots and other tools because they're not understood.
Jay Patel:And they're not understood because maybe they just use poor language, maybe the line isn't particularly good when they're calling. What LLMs do is LLMs can fill in the gaps and actually, you know, with a bit of context, they can really kind can fill in the gaps and actually, you know, with a bit of context, they can really kind of fill in the gaps so that a machine can then understand exactly what the customer was saying. In a similar fashion, often customers don't like using an AI agent bot. Historically because it sounds robotic, because you have to actually code every response. Historically, again, with the LLMs they can generate a more natural language conversation and again, I think the let's call it the reticence that customers have in using some of these self-service tools will disappear because they're going to be understood much better and they can have a natural language conversation.
Jay Patel:And then also, with all the what you're seeing, with things like reasoning and the agentic AI kind of movement, you also have a situation in which the LLMs and some of the reasoning can actually go and carry out the tasks for you. So you might want to process a refund. It's a pretty straightforward task. The virtual agent can be trained to have a conversation with you to gather a bunch of parameters that need to actually fill the objective, which is I need to process a refund and then process that refund. And again, I just see that LLMs I've said LLMs were the missing link to actually solve a lot of problems. And I think they are. And I think the technology is ready today and it's a question of deploying it. Deploying it carefully and making sure that we bring the end customers with us on this journey, but I think we can. You know, it's deployment now rather than any technical advances.
Mike Giambattista:It'd be interesting to see how that kind of gets worked out over the short term. There's still just an awful lot of hype around the idea of AI right now. I mean, look at any metric that would evaluate hype. Look at any metric that would evaluate hype. It's probably at the top of every wave graph right now.
Jay Patel:That being said go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, well, but I think that hype is because of the I think you said at the very top of the conversation about just the possibilities, and people are extrapolating possibilities around AGI and lots of other things that actually are interesting. But fundamentally, for what we do, what we help our customers with, you don't need that level of AI, you need what we probably have today. So I would, on the one hand, also caution against the hype because, having been in the tech sector for 30-odd years, we've seen many cycles. So I'll caution against the hype. And, as you say, all the signifiers are saying we're at the top of the cycle. All the signifiers are saying it's we're at the top of the cycle. But in in the area that we're involved in, I think that we can achieve so much with what's already there. We don't. We're not going to need agi to to to make this area much, much better.
Mike Giambattista:There is, though there has been a shift from just a wow factor it's the shiny object of the moment, and I think now there's a much more mature perspective on AI. There is actual utility. Let's get down to it, correct?
Jay Patel:Correct and that is a. That's the hard work, that's the the hard work of use case by use case gathering data. Um, I'm looking at um. You know it's an ab analysis of what's worked. What's worked really just doing the work, and that is that you can't just do overnight. You have to take time and for us and our customers, the most valuable thing for any vendor or service provider or any organization is their customers, so they need to handle this very carefully. But, like I said, I think there's hard work now in deploying it and the deployment will take time, for sure, and it may be that the hype cycle comes off and suddenly everyone's not talking about AI as much. But I think the results from the initial deployments will be so good that it will just again. It will come back again and do and then have that classic hype cycle yeah, but yeah it's just going to be a giant hype cycle.
Mike Giambattista:It's just yeah, correct exactly, yeah, exactly.
Mike Giambattista:I'd like to shift the conversation uh towards really the, the, what was the original hope for this whole thing? And we've kind of danced around it. Which is your view on what's happening near-term, medium-term in CX? I'd love to hear if you're willing to make some predictions because, again, I think your perspective, from where you sit at that altitude, allows you to see things. That perspective, from where you sit at that altitude, allows you to see things that, uh, you know, uh, mere mortals and street level people like myself really don't have that kind of perspective. So your thoughts, what?
Jay Patel:are we going to see?
Jay Patel:I'm not sure. That's true. I'm I'm sure, with all the people you've been speaking to, you probably got a, a great view and an aggregate view on what's going to happen. I think, um my thing in terms of near term and long term. I think that undoubtedly, the hype cycle means that you may see some cooling off around the hype, the very hype of it. But but I but I know, from conversations we've got with our customers, the launches we have coming up next year. So we are launching our AI agent studio that allows customers to build these virtual agents. We're also launching our AI assistant that is a co-pilot for contact center agents. So, and initial feedback is great, initial results are great and I just think it's just like I said, it's a question of deployment of those to get some results out, and I can see this happening across the piece. I think you're going to see next year a lot of situations where you are going, as a customer, engage with a virtual agent and you're going to go and talk to your friends and family about it and say, actually that was great, it worked, and I think that that wow moment is once that starts happening, everybody starts copying. So, you know, I'm hoping that we will, with some of our customers, launch something that delivers a wow moment in a sector and then our other customers in that sector will say wait a minute, why are we not doing this? And we'll say, well, we did tell you about it and let's get going.
Jay Patel:And I think next year is the year of that, the consumer acceptance of the wow moment. Because even today, I think there's a bit of, there's still a bit of okay, well, where is it? You know, beyond a bit of summarization or a bit of research on chat, gpt or whatever, people are wondering where actually the use case is. Where is it being used? Where is it delivering value? I think next year you're going to start seeing I think next year you're going to start seeing that I think you're going to start seeing some of that value delivered. And ultimately, the judge will be the end customers, the end customers. If they start using channels that they know are virtual agents, then I think that will just spread and, like anything in business, once somebody sees somebody else do something and it works, people will jump behind it, and so I expect that that's going to happen next year quite quickly, by the way, I think anecdotally, there's evidence that it's already happening.
Mike Giambattista:I mean, I in my own experiences, in there's data that that that indicates that the consumer acceptance of chatbots and the like virtual agents and assists are are that resistance is coming down and acceptance is on the rise. You know, maybe, maybe this year is the is the year where that universe we hit that kind of universal critical mass, whatever number that is.
Jay Patel:But, um, there's lots of evidence to say it's, it's already happening so the the big change there, I think, will be acceptance, obviously on digital channels, but but I think the historic IVR voice stuff was also okay, not great, but I think next year you're going to see voice agents. Just, you know we've been working on this. We've got some interesting launches on that. You know we've been working on this. We've got some interesting launches on that. Natural voice conversations with little latency yeah, the voice agent understanding you. You've been totally surprised how fluent the response is going to be. That, I think, is also something that's going to be a bit of a wow moment and I think that's the near term and I'm pretty excited about that. The thing that's going to be really interesting in the medium term is that I think you're going to see more consumer side agents as well. We typically work, obviously, with organizations banks, retailers, government organizations. We supply them with technology for them to do this work. But I think that you've obviously seen the start of something with Apple Intelligence and you've obviously seen the start of something with Google and Gemini. And've obviously seen the start of something with Google and Gemini and some of the things they're doing, that you're going to see more AI on the consumer side. I think how much access you're willing to give, as a consumer, to an agent, to your own agent your Apple agent, let's call it that can read your emails, can track your behaviors and then act on your behalf. That, I think, will be a very, very interesting development, because what I think that's going to allow everybody to do is, firstly, federate the use of data, because it will be something which you, as a consumer, will say yeah, I'm happy for you to read these, to share this data, to book me a train ticket from London or fly from London to New York, but I don't want you reading this data. I'm happy for you to track or have certain bits of information that you can share with a service provider to get me a better deal or to get me a reservation at a particular set of hotels. So I think, the consumer side of the AI agent world I also see that medium term being an incredible growth engine for how we automate and ultimately improve customer experience, both from the organizations we service, but also consumers using tools to improve their customer experience. And, yeah, this world of agents on the consumer side and the organizational side talking to each other to actually ultimately get to a resolution faster for something you may want. That I see as something which is going to happen medium term.
Jay Patel:And the other thing that I think is really fascinating and it's kind of something which is how will organizations think about their virtual agents in terms of brand and values and personality and purpose. When anybody joins an organisation, you spend months getting imbued with the organisation's values and you learn practices, you learn how to behave and that, I think, in the best organizations, reflects itself in their culture and how they deal with situations. Obviously, this virtual agent world is new for a lot of people and I think, again, you're going to see virtual agents also embody and whether it's agencies, whether it's us, whoever's going to help do this, will embody the values of their underlying organization and I think you're going to see that as a trend as well, and it may be something which is the competitive edge that organizations will need to improve customer experience. How do they differentiate in a world that is going to become more automated, is getting faster? So, yeah, it's going to be a pretty exciting time for sure.
Mike Giambattista:That one's going to be fascinating to see how that gets worked out. You know, brand voice is a very touchy, hard to define, certainly really difficult to imbue, correct and how virtual.
Jay Patel:And that's where the whole issue of how you build these virtual agents. You know what will they do, what will they not do do. If you're a brand that's got a great view on customer experience but then your virtual agent is short and sharp with customers, you probably need to change that. But if you have a brand that, again, there's a high-value brand, or even the agent that works for a low-cost value brand, it will need to be built slightly differently. And it's something which I think is going to be an interesting business challenge, an industry business challenge. And, again and similarly, once the once, consumers have their own agents, that's also going to create different business opportunities for vendors and organizations to work out how best to service these. You know, service the customer, but you're servicing the customer through their agent, which is also going to be quite an interesting way to see how the value chain shifts when that happens.
Mike Giambattista:So I've got enough notes here to fill up another three or four conversations just like this, but I think maybe we save those for the next round. Honestly, there's so much to talk about here. I think, and I do think your perspective is very unique. I'm an aggregator of perspectives, but I don't actually have the perspective. On the other hand, you really do, and I think you've said some really interesting things here and I think you've prompted some really interesting ideas for what the next Actually, mike, what I find interesting is the actual set to itself.
Jay Patel:Some of this stuff is just very obvious and I think that everybody, broadly, is saying the same things and, to be fair, I think most people can, most people got it right. It's just, it's like we're all saying the same things because, um, we're all right, this is all going to be able to be embedded in, we're going to reduce costs, we're going to increase automation, and we're all right, this is all going to be able to be embedded in, we're going to reduce costs, we're going to increase automation, we're going to increase customer satisfaction. There's a I mean, I think that's. It's kind of these are all ticks in the box that I think we'll get right.
Jay Patel:Next year will be the year, um, that I think it comes to the market. But but the medium term perspective, I think, is super, super interesting because you, you do obviously have a set of very large businesses with incredibly talented individuals who are creating that future. And for me, at least, that's where I find it all very exciting and interesting because it goes back to the possibilities. The possibilities are great and the world will look like a very different place in the next five years.
