AI & Customer Experience: Why Human Skills Matter More Now

Bob and Jeremy share what they learned at a three-day London customer experience (CX) conference and why AI now sits inside almost every customer journey.

As AI takes care of more of the routine work, the human conversations left behind are often the difficult ones – emotional complaints, complex problems, retention calls and moments where judgement still matters.

Bob and Jeremy also challenge some of the thinking currently shaping contact centres, customer experience and customer service strategy.

Across the episode they discuss:

• Why AI and customer experience are now impossible to separate
• The rise of AI agents supporting both customers and frontline teams
• How far conversational AI can realistically go
• Why Net Promoter Score (NPS) is becoming less trustworthy
• Using AI to analyse customer conversations instead of relying on surveys
• The gap between AI demos and what companies are actually implementing
• Why human roles are shifting towards more emotional, high-stakes conversations
• The importance of smooth AI-to-human handovers
• The cost, complexity and training challenges behind AI adoption
• Where the line currently sits between automation and human judgement
• And why customer service conversations are becoming more important commercially too

If you work in customer experience, contact centres, customer service, sales leadership or CX strategy, this episode will give you plenty to think about.

To find out more about our work and to see what we could do to help your organisation, visit www.realitytraining.com.

Transcript

Why AI Now Shapes Customer Experience

Jeremy Blake 0:28

Hello, listeners. You are with us for the reality of business. We're going to give you a very interesting, very harsh, modern, current reality based on an experience we've had last week, which has led us into some lovely research. Bobby Boy, my fellow listener, in his booth. What are we going to talk about today?

Bob Morrell 0:51

Well, today we're going to talk about the current state of the world of CX, customer experience. Jeremy and I attended a three-day conference on the world of CX last week in London. And of course, customer experience is all about contact centers and various ways in which a customer engages with a brand in a certain way. And of course, with the current technological advances that are taking place, customer experience, customer service is being affected hugely by AI. So we thought it would be a really good idea to have an episode all about this conference and some of the key messages that we took away from this subject so that listeners can see what's happening in the world of customer experience and think about how they might apply an AI solution to what they're doing and also how it might change the humans that they employ as well.

Jeremy Blake 1:57

And if I come in, I think the big thing to note is that AI and customer experience are now connected. They're not separate because the customer experience more than likely begins now in any channel with some form of artificial intelligence, either retrieving data, beginning the conversation with the customer, siltering, uh sifting, filtering. It's part now, if you look at the whole holistic experience of customer experience, AI is going to be involved at some point. We'll come on to some stats later of what companies have invested in, where they are on the journey. But even a company dabbling on the fringes, you may experience some form of AI as part of your overall customer experience.

Bob Morrell 2:41

Well, it's interesting. This conference was all about contact centers and other ways that customers might interact. And there was a gentle, a gentle nod to retail, and there was a gentle nod towards actual human conversations, and there were thoughts of other channels to some degree, but the vast majority of the sessions and the sponsors and the exhibitors, because there was also an exhibition there as well, were focused on the technological implementation of artificial intelligence for the customer experience. And in the majority of cases, that was using an AI agent to deal with the demand, whether it be incoming calls, outgoing calls, web chat,

What The CX Conference Focuses On

Bob Morrell 3:40

etc.

Jeremy Blake 3:41

It's also sometimes an AI agent supporting your human agent. So the agent that you're talking to is accessing a supportive agent in a sense who's like, you know, they're double agents. They're both working together to give you better support. I think one thing that is very important is the whole thing was largely about inbound, you, the consumer, or you, the business customer, calling into the company. We did have a brief chat with an interesting Canadian one evening who is working on outbound and he sees the future in you getting calls that are relevant based on something they've learned about you, and it's actually a very handy nudge that they know that you might be running out of this, or would you like to buy this new product we've developed? And that's very new. I mean, all of us for years have loved putting the phones down at home when we're being interrupted during our favourite series. We don't like, you know, outbound and turning off TPS and telemarketers has become a huge trend to turn them off. Uh, but he thinks that that done well is a future. So, what are some of the headlines, Bob? Because we've both written down a few headlines of some of the topics to cover. So if we outline that, and then we can dance around the schedule a bit. So, what's what's one of one or two of your areas?

Bob Morrell 4:53

Well, I think as a kind of general note, lots of the companies and organizations that were there were there to assess what was available, what could be done, what more could they be doing using an AI solution that would help them deliver a better customer experience? And in one particular presentation I was in, the extent of what this company could offer was so comprehensive, it was incredible. And we actually had a presenter who showed us how this system largely worked, and then there were little questions we had to answer, and he came and joined our table. And what was really interesting was that whilst the different companies around the table were thinking about the bits that they could easily allow an AI agent to do, like admin, changing names, billing details, you know, the kind of automated things that AI could do quite easily, he was pushing it much further. He was saying this thing will go much further than that. It will ask questions, it will create value statements, it will handle objections, you know. He was pushing the idea that the AI agent was really verbally dexterous and had real talent and charm. And I thought that was really interesting. And I also thought that, you know, there's lots of very talented people in contact centers. Some of them don't have a great deal of charm and verbal dexterity, and maybe your AI agent might be so much better than some of the people you're actually employing if you're not careful. And uh that's a really interesting perspective.

Jeremy Blake 6:32

The other thing that we'll we'll talk about is, as I've said in the intro, you know, where where are we in the world with these investments and AI that you're likely to come up against? But also what's happening in terms of recruitment? Is AI currently generating uh business and wealth or is it seen as a cost thing? And we'll also want to talk about how Bob and I think uh as a training business, we are poised in quite a good position to help brands with the challenges and opportunities as they go through this. So, where would you like to kick off?

Bob Morrell 7:06

Well, I think the other uh point about this presentation that was really interesting

The Rise Of The Verbally Dexterous Bot

Bob Morrell 7:10

was that this guy was showing how advanced this AI agent was, and it was impressive. And yet I look around that room and I would say at least 60% of the people in there who were listening with intent at what he was showing were thinking this is way further than we had thought. Yeah. Now, whether that's a wake-up call for them and they'll they'll move towards it is another matter. But I thought that was the first thing. People know they want to do this, they know it makes sense to do this, and they know now's a good time to do it. But how far you go with this is is, I think, more surprising for people. Now, on the same presentation, though, they gave an example of a company they'd worked with, and they said what was great about our AI agent was that it achieved a 33% increase in NPS than they'd previously had. Now, there's two things here. First of all, 33% increase in NPS. Well, net promoter score for those of you. Okay, so a 33% increase. Yeah. How shit was their customer experience before that the AI agent could increase it by 33%? So that's the first question, okay? But the second and much more important question NPS, net promoter score, which is a measure used to find out how good someone's customer experience is, is so old and so outdated and so manipulated and so in many ways discredited. How is that being used now as an authentic measure for something that is really advanced and technological? It's just beyond me.

Jeremy Blake 8:55

Well, we liked one person. Bob asked this question in the room at the end of a session, and all the other questions were dull, but this actually got the room all jumping about and they liked it. And one person gave a very good answer. Said you no longer need to do any NPS. Your AI will go back through the conversations, the web chats, the email exchanges, the everything, and can pull out from that the truth. Did the customer go, What are you talking about? And then at the end, because they had a discount, gave them a nine, it would have picked that up. It would have gone right, disloyal bonding taking place here, here, here. The truth of your customer experience is this. So we just thought that's a lovely way of actually getting AI to do some really useful um data compiling on the truth of the experience. As Bob said, I like the use of the new word, Bob, discredit. It is. Uh the I mean, what we do know is it is discredited by a number of people, although it's still used, but it's manipulated by individuals each and every time because they are bonused on it. Whenever you put a financial, an extrinsic reward against a measure, people will do anything in their powers to hit it. They will cheat. Um, and we of course met a few people who were defending it who, when we looked at their job titles for head of organizations, and we thought, oh, you get probably 10 to 15 salary based on this.

Bob Morrell 10:16

Of course, we will do a separate podcast reminding people about the issues with MPS because yeah, MPS 2020 is outdated, and it's so poor. Now, just think about it. You have been in a shop, you've been on a phone with someone, and they've said, Oh, can please fill out this survey, or you'll get a thing at the end of this conversation to answer some questions just to let you know nines and tens show I've done a good job, that sort of thing. Okay. So that is somebody manipulating a net

Why NPS Breaks In Practice

Bob Morrell 10:50

promoter score from the customer experience. That's not true, okay? So anybody who is bonused because their staff are saying, Would you mind giving me a nine or ten, please? Yeah, they are getting a bonus for no reason. Okay. So that's why MPS is a crap metric. The other reason it's crap is that if I ring you and I have a good experience and you give me what I want, of course I'm gonna give you a nine or a ten, okay? If I ring you and you can't give me what I want for reasons of integrity, I may mark you low. But actually, you defended your brand with professionalism and integrity. I'll give you a five out of ten, and you're gonna get told off by your manager. It's absolutely crap.

Jeremy Blake 11:33

But I didn't discount because he'd been with the brand for 40 years and realized he wouldn't need it, he just wanted a discount. But I sold him the well, he scored you at a six. I'm sorry you're a bit marked down.

Bob Morrell 11:42

I'm sorry, MPS is an appalling measure. Now, we have customers who use it, that is their choice, okay? But uh, trust me, if you are now gonna start giving your customer experience, 50% of it to a machine, that's what AI is, it's a machine, okay? Why bother to measure MPS at all? Okay, why bother to do that? It's a machine. The machine isn't gonna go, oh, you're right, I should have shouldn't have asked for the nine or the ten. The machine isn't gonna go, oh yeah, maybe I should have been a bit kinder. It's ridiculous, okay? The machine has no emotion. It will just do what you've told it to do. It'll ask the questions you've programmed it to do, and it will learn from its experience, because it's AI, how to do it better and better and better. But you're gonna need to watch that because even an AI system will pick up on dislaw bonding, you know, manipulating scores. If if you start telling the AI, I'm gonna be measuring your net promoter score, you watch the way it makes sure it gets a decent net promoter score. Okay. Gotta show you.

Jeremy Blake 12:45

Right, we must stop, or we're gonna dedicate too much time to our distaste. Um, so I'm just gonna go bigger picture on this. So if you imagine all the brands in the world, Bob, um, and if people have been listening already, they'll have already had a clue to one of the answers. So if you imagine all the all the big major brands in the world that have customer experience conversations, what percentage of them have fully implemented an incredible AI system embedded, automated across all their core customer interaction, um, brilliant with their digital sectors, their e-commerce. So, what percentage of the world has done this? Um 20%. We're gonna give you 25, um, 25% to 34%, absolute maximum. So who's so how many people are experimenting and piling up piloting with it um and playing around with it?

Bob Morrell 13:34

Probably another 40%.

Jeremy Blake 13:36

Yep, up to 47%. Yeah, so that leaves the last very partial surface level dabbling 26%. So that could be a standard sort

How Far Brands Have Really Got

Jeremy Blake 13:45

of frequently answered asked questions chat bot, drafting suggestions for human agents, but not really reimagining the end-to-end full customer journey. So if you're listening to this and think, oh, we've hardly started or we've bought a little add-on, a lot of systems of people are buying add-ons like software bits to stick on because they haven't really redesigned the entire customer experience. Um, so other things that um are worth talking about because I think it's uh an important part is why why do this? So why why even embrace AI? Um, why not just have humans doing what Bob actually coined during the conference, a form of advanced search? So if you imagine a very good agent, you can hear my fingers, who's pretty good at getting into your account and going, oh, I can see in right, in 1991 you had that, then you ah, then we annoyed you. Can you see the problem with that of somebody continually searching your back history and the customer going, do you not understand me? Yeah, you want to come in here, Bob. What is he gonna say?

Bob Morrell 14:54

Okay, so this is this is the bit that is so important for our listeners to understand. And I think this is absolutely vital. You have people right now in your contact center who will take different types of call or different types of conversation, different types of web chat, but they'll be within well, they'll be within a few percentage points of each other, okay? And some of those conversations will be more difficult and more intensive than others. So there'll be certain things they that they do which are quite simple. I just need to change my address, I just need to buy something, I just need to transact quickly. And they like those nice, simple, positive interactions, which it's very easy to get a good score for, and it makes them feel good about what they're doing. There is no doubt that AI is coming for all of those little interactions, 100%. So, what does that leave you? That leaves you with the slightly more difficult, slightly more emotional, slightly more complex, slightly more um intensive in terms of your verbal need to placate this person. It could be complaints, it could be um cancellations. We are going to be needing humans to use empathy and skill to handle more difficult conversations because trust me, AI will soon be dealing with half of what you're currently dealing with.

Jeremy Blake 16:24

So I think let's just break that into two parts. So by me beginning and then Bob coming across there, you can see how it's ludicrous for us to not hand over to machines to find something quicker and more efficiently and to give us the number or the date or the invoice or the back statement or whatever it might be. But the complexity and personalization, we still require humans of more advancing levels. So the first thing to

The New Human Work After Automation

Jeremy Blake 16:50

determine for this is now the entry-level jobs with inverted commas around it are slightly less entry-level, they're slightly more than entry-level. It's somebody who's a bit more verbally dexterous, a bit more empathetic, a bit more good at giving real attention to a customer, understanding what they're saying as well as what they're not saying. So we would say that the front line will be replaced by machinery, and the second line, or the pie, it's not a second line, they the calls that require the depth of human skill and understanding are going to need to increase in level.

Bob Morrell 17:23

So, what these AI agents have now, and I heard this in uh quite a few different um demonstrations, the AI does what it has to do up to a point, it answers questions up to a point. When the AI agent realizes that it cannot deal with this particular question or this particular query or this particular type of customer, it will then say, Please bear with me, I need to transfer you to a colleague. Okay. Now, if you think about that, the AI agents are pretty good. They're pretty good at handling loads and loads of things. By the time the AI agent goes, No, this isn't for me, this is for a human, okay, you are going to be faced with a pretty complex situation. You, handed that, are going to need to very quickly understand from the AI agent where this customer is, because God knows they don't want to go through it all again with you. They don't want to go through the whole thing they've just been talking to the machine about with you. So the AI has got to summarize this to you very quickly and clearly so that you can pick up that conversation and bring it to some kind of resolution using true human empathy and understanding. Now that is a step up for lots of individuals right now, and that's where there needs to be some work.

Jeremy Blake 18:49

Yeah, and the way that recruitment is working with these individuals, these people doing these jobs, is they haven't necessarily cut huge amounts of the workforce out. Um, there's a stat I think from Gartner, only 20% of leaders have successfully reduced headcount, the rest are trapped in training cycles. So they're going round and round training the human beings to work alongside the AI, it hasn't necessarily fully replaced it because you can't just cut it and rely on it yet. So, you know, there's a problem with that. But I think leading on to that, the attraction of it straight off the bat is drastic cost reduction. Can I get a hundred people less taking calls of this more basic type that we've explained? And if I could serve way more customers through machine learning and interaction, I would save headcount.

Bob Morrell 19:41

Now they can do that. They can do that, and that's doable. The cost is still extremely high. So there was one lady who worked for an insurance company, and she was saying the cost is extremely high. They've got to be really careful about what the implementation of this um AI agent is costing them. And they think they can see over

Implementation Costs And Payback Pressure

Bob Morrell 20:10

a medium-term business cycle when they're going to start getting the payback, because they will eventually. But she also referenced that if it doesn't start to pay back when they think it's going to, there will have to be some changes made at that point because all of these AI agents are not cheap solutions. You know, you've got to invest quite a lot. There's a lot of pre-work done as they load up this software effectively with all the stuff and the language that's required for your brand. That takes time, there's testing, you roll it out. It takes there's a lot of effort that goes into this.

Jeremy Blake 20:47

Well, yeah.

Bob Morrell 20:49

There is. And it's it's extremely costly. It costs in many cases.

Jeremy Blake 20:53

But I don't know if people pull back. I think it's probably what economists call sunken cost fallacy. I think once you've once you've put your money in, like HS2, you don't pull it out. So you are sometimes, it's probably the wrong expression, but put spending good money after bad because the initial money was good, good money. Uh, but I think once you've begun the journey of AI implementation, you're unlikely to pull out because you you're in for the penny. Um you've got to get it, get it back. But I think maybe well, yeah, maybe what will happen.

Bob Morrell 21:28

Maybe what will happen is that you have to accept that you um the full extent that you thought it could offer you may not be quite right for your organization at this point. Yeah. And then you uh incrementally adapt over time.

Jeremy Blake 21:48

Yeah. Yeah. Because because what you what you have largely for all of us, and I I'm trying to sell a car at the moment using an app and it doesn't really work, and then the agent rings me and then says they've tried to. To ring me, you're having what they like to call fragmented journeys, and people are trying to solve that. So end to end, it seems good because what happens is in a competitive marketplace with a number of people offering that similar services, you you probably go to the one that the customer experiences the easiest with. And if you think about um you know huge companies that invest enormous amounts to try to get us to do things that are easy for us, you know, we buy any car, don't give you the most money for your car, but you take a photo, upload it, and it's easy.

Bob Morrell 22:32

Yeah.

Jeremy Blake 22:32

I was dealing with a competitor of theirs trying to sell my car, but their thing broke three times. I had to take hundred forty photos of my car, and it's not easy. So their journey isn't good and it breaks down. So the customers will simply choose different providers of products and services based on the customer experience in the journey. So if it's if it's slick and quick, and I suppose if you think of our children, Bob, who will be buying a lot more online and doing apps more than us, they probably already stick with the user experience journeys that uh you know that work. You know, my children can flip allegiance between one clothing selling website and another based on the ease, ease of experience.

Bob Morrell 23:17

Well, I think that's a little different to what we're talking about here, because in that instance it's almost entirely an online journey.

Jeremy Blake 23:24

Yeah, and and purely AI.

Bob Morrell 23:26

Yes. Whereas what we're doing here is really thinking about larger organizations who are receiving multiple inquiries through multiple channels, including Outbound, and they're

Fixing Handoffs And Fragmented Journeys

Bob Morrell 23:40

desperately trying to work out what the machine can do and what the human can do. That's what they're currently conversations about that.

Jeremy Blake 23:49

Well, let's get right into that because that also leads on to what we want to talk about of where we come in. But if we think about, I mean, the language that you were using is you you talked about a line, an idea of a line. Um that there's a line, and the way I thought of it was a bit like in a hospital, a a kind of heart monitor, a bleep. And at some and if it and if it works, it works, but at some point it it stops working, and the human comes in at that point on the on the line. So do you want to talk about what you what you feel either it's an analogy or it's more or it's the truth of it. Just talk a bit more about your perspective on that.

Bob Morrell 24:27

Well, we talked a bit about the fact that the human is going to be dealing in the end with the more complex conversations of certain types. Okay. So that's the first thing. But then if you think about what that line might be, um, let's keep choose something really simple, like holidays. And uh the AI deals with lots of customer queries about their holiday, both before it and after it, and answers various questions and dizzles all sorts of things. And then there comes a point where the customer says, I'm calling to complain about my holiday. There were aspects of it that weren't very good, and I'm looking for a refund. Now, even then, the brands that we saw at this conference would argue that AI could deal with lots of those sorts of queries because, as you and I know, these sorts of complaints go back and forth, costing a company lots and lots of money and end up with a 200 pound voucher against the next holiday. And the AI would be perfectly capable of delivering that message. So it could deal with lots of those. However, when it's more intense, when it's more emotional, when it's more money, when it's more crucial, then that's when the human element needs to be able to pick that up. Now, I think there is a gap between where people are broadly in contact centres now, and that ability to understand that when that call's coming through to you, there's already been a 10-minute interaction that you weren't party to, where a person is in a certain state, and the last thing they want is to have to go through the whole thing again and prove their worth to you. They need someone who understands, can see very quickly where they are, and then resolve that in a professional and solid way.

Jeremy Blake 26:16

With with, you know, you're talking about the EQ, the emotional intelligence. So it might be that very good AI determines early on that this person's gonna be much better off with a human and actually does an earlier transfer. Yeah. Um, you know, they talk about warm transfer, cold transfers, handovers, whatever you want to call it. As Bob says, if I've now got to go back over it again, this is where the AI agent may bring up a tiny brief thing right in front of the eye of the human agent saying this person's already said this and is really frustrated with this. I can see this is not working. I want to put you can come straight in with real skill. Yeah. Um, but what we're feeling is that certainly this conference didn't talk massively about growth, it talked a lot about retention of these customers who, because if you, you know, the the classic phrase, a complaint is a gift. If you can save somebody who's in an emotional state, pissed off, um, aggrieved, whatever, and turn that around, and then you really understand them and say, right, I'm gonna do this for you now. I'm gonna do it, then that's worth huge amounts because they'll tell everyone how wonderful you were, they'll be um a big advocate and the retention will stay. So, so if we talk about the line, we think it is in the ability to have a group of people with higher human linguistic language empathy skills to handle these calls. And we don't think companies are thinking enough about this at the moment. They are more focused on the the cost reduction and the recruitment opportunities at the lower transactional end.

Bob Morrell 27:52

I think they're getting there because conferences like this make it very clear that this is exactly where things are going. Yeah. And you'd be a fool not to look at that and go, wow, that could really make a difference to us uh fundamentally. But at the same time, there's this immense fear of change. And I've I felt that a lot in a number of the people that I spoke to that we know we need to do this, we know it's important, we know that it's getting easier and easier to do this, even though the costs are still relatively high. But we're terrified that we could actually shoot ourselves in the foot if we get this wrong. Yeah. And I think that's what a number of the companies are trying to get across is that what they offer is a it's more of an enablement of you getting yourself on this AI journey. A lot of talked about this AI journey.

Jeremy Blake 28:41

Well, yes.

Bob Morrell 28:41

And if you partner with the bright brand, they'll help you onto it, and then it'll slowly morph over time into something quite substantial.

Jeremy Blake 28:50

Well, there were some companies that had very much set out their stall that they will create AI agents to support their your human agents. Their stand was don't remove the human, we will just make the people you've got much better. Which means that they're being supported in real time by current data, mood, what what they might not fully pick up on. There are companies who will build you that supportive AI agent to support your real agents, making them just that much, much better.

Bob Morrell 29:19

Um and also it may be that current team leaders may find themselves team leading a group of AI agents. If you've got, you know, a system that is dealing with lots of different conversations at one time, then as a team leader analyzing their quality, then that becomes quite an interesting perspective.

Jeremy Blake 29:41

And not just their data, their channel. So there's also research that shows that, say, a customer's on hold, they might fire up the web chat and begin in that channel also, and they might even be sending emails into customer service. So what somebody call cross-func cross-functional empathy, um, to try and remove the silos so that AI can run across and say, oh, they've already been talking here, and I can see that you've tried and good, all right, you know where I am in this. Um, you know, that's that's appealing. So, okay.

Bob Morrell 30:16

Um Well, look, I've got one more thing to say on this.

Jeremy Blake 30:18

Yeah, and then I've got one more angle, which is I think just even just spelling out some of where we where I think we're we're we're useful.

Bob Morrell 30:26

I I think that we talked about the line, we talked about where is that link between the machine and the human. I think what would really help brands is understanding for them, and it would be different for every organization, exactly where that line is right now, but then realistically, let's say over five years, where that line will move to. And then it once you have an idea around that, you can say, right, our five-year plan is that we're going to start AI up to this level, we're gonna train our human agents to deal with these sorts of queries that come from that, but we are understanding that this is going to move to something more further on down the line. Now, what that means is you take your frontline people with you. And interestingly, lots of people at the conference said people should bring their frontline people to these conferences. There were hardly any. Okay. If any senior people listening to these conversations, but actually, frontline people who deal with these conversations on a day-to-day basis, they are very able of seeing what the current line is, and they can help you manage over time the change that is definitely going to be happening.

Jeremy Blake 31:36

One thing was going around my head, which is one of John Seddon's

Turning Service Conversations Into Revenue

Jeremy Blake 31:40

um expressions, is which is the variety is in the customer. And I think the attraction of AI is that it doesn't matter how long it spends with that customer. As AI gets better, it could actually spend a little bit longer with the customer and not automate them quite so much. So that's attractive as well. But because of the variety being in the customer, I think the other thing that we will help companies do, the three things they want, you know, whenever we have a conversation with a brand, they say, we want more customers. Yes, we want to keep who we've already got, we want more. We want them to spend more when they talk to us, and we want them to come back and buy more products and increase how often they spend with us. That understanding of what you're doing with your voice to be prepared to sell, you know, there's a lot of, you know, we're at a customer experience conference, but we're a sales training business. I think we need to remind businesses that the commercial realization of that opportunity to influence at source with your voice is worth a huge amount because, you know, some of our clients just don't get that opportunity enough. They'd like to talk to their customers, but they're served by marketing at a distance, email, and so on. But when you have an opportunity to review a customer's business, their account with you, whatever it might be, ask really brilliant personalized questions, discover the solution they have is only the bronze level. They could buy the silver or the gold. That's where a company like us comes in. So I think it's two lines, Bob. It's not just the AI line, it's the customer service to sales line. Moving the thinking of an agent who just thinks their job is to keep customers happy, but actually let's get some bloody revenue going. Let's sell customers more products and services that will improve their lives. And that's, you know, often what we're doing with our job, where with whether we're helping a retailer or we're helping someone whose channel of choice or for the customer's choice is a contact center. So I think the the line that we will help you cross is those opportunistic conversations where you can just sell somebody a lot more. They've got the wrong level of commitment, wrong product, wrong service. You know, as I said, if you want the analogy of gold, silver, and bronze, they're currently buying bronze, but they'd be a lot happier if they owned the gold.

Bob Morrell 34:00

So, ladies and gents, that is our summary of our uh attendance of this CX show and where we see the AI solutions of the future um coming to bear uh on this very, very important marketplace. Uh, we will be seeing you soon with uh some follow-up um podcasts on this subject. Um, and we've also got some um new things we're going to be looking at as well. But in the meantime, thank you for listening to The Reality of Business, and we will see you on another one very soon. This podcast comes from Reality Training. For the last 25 years, we've transformed the customer interactions of many leading UK businesses and developed thousands of managers to be better at what they do. To find out more about our work and to see what we could do to help your organization, go to realitytraining.com.