The CX Files #30 - Andrew Carothers

Listen to learn:
- Why it took three years to break down data silos for support at Cisco Systems and how to avoid that mistake.
- The transition of AI from its teenage years to a college-educated, mature business function.
- How to move beyond case deflection and start measuring the financial impact of CX in dollars and euros.
- The tire sensor analogy: How to use data to solve problems before the customer even feels the friction.
- Why CX should be the central core of your organization rather than a siloed department.

Andrew Carothers is a 12-time International CX Award winner and a co-founder of the Cisco Systems customer experience organization. With a background at Autodesk and a seat on the board for the University of San Francisco’s strategic AI program, Andrew is one of the leading voices in digital customer success and AI implementation.

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Transcript

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It's not enough for the CS folks to say, oh, we saved $10 million. Like, trust us. This is how we're measuring it. And similarly, what, you know, what's the impact on, on retention rate and, and churn in general, and what's the, what is the financial impact we saved these customers from churning. Here's how much that, or being able to not just look at churn, but also expansion and reaching out to customers and being able to suggest next best product and see how that grows to, to expansion. being able to be focused on the business outcome and being able to then measure how the work has an impact on the business is gonna become more and more important. And then layer onto that, the new capabilities, the world of opportunity that AI provides. Hello and welcome to the CX Files. My name is Ben Foden. Today's guest is Andrew Carothers. He's the global head of digital customer success at Proofpoint. He's a 12 time international CX Award winner, and he loves to create effective digital customer experiences that reduce friction and increase revenue. In addition to being a co-founder of Cisco Systems customer experience organization and having a stint at Autodesk, he's also a published author and on the board of Advisors for the University of San Francisco's Graduate School of Management strategic AI program. Andrew, thanks for coming on. Ben it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Andrew, when you started your career, I guess this would be back in the Cisco days, what is one of the first things that you learned about customer experience that kind of caught you off guard? Mm, important and oftentimes difficult it is for companies to tie together various platforms and data sources. Hmm. a I. larger and harder lift. Then I and my colleagues in the CX function that we were building at Cisco had originally anticipated. In fact, it took us three years to get access to identify and get access to all the different data sources that that related to, to what our customers were doing, what they were buying, renewing their behavior, of that data. So the data is central data's the fuel and it I, in many companies. Like so many things in companies, it's siloed and access to it is guarded. So that was the number one sort of aha moment was like, wow, that was a lot harder than we thought. Yeah, I think it is hard and it is, it is deceptive as well, isn't it? Once you were able to wrangle those data sources and, and sort of connect all the pipes, so to speak. What was the result and, and where did that go? Well, the result of having all that data allowed us to then be able to, it it, it gave us the fuel to be able to have the engine. So that we could get the right information to the right customer at the right time. Meaning? Mm-hmm. Meaning where was that customer in their lifecycle with which product and what info? Because Autodesk like ma, or excuse me, Cisco, like many companies. Proofpoint today sells many products to different customers, and customers need to get the information around specific products when they're looking to adopt or possibly renew, whatever it might be. So there's sort of a an account level look, but there's also a, a contact level look and a product level look kind of overlaid that. So once we had that accurate information, then we could send the right information to the customer that they needed when they were in the adoption phase. For that specific product, in turn allowed us to be hyper relevant to customers so that we weren't spamming them, we were giving them the information that they needed. It showed them that we were relevant. It showed them that we knew who they were meaning not just their name, you know, dear Ben, but also you know who you are, where you had been, what you'd bought, where you'd been on our website. What. You know, where were you in terms of maybe support cases that were open or frustrations, et cetera. Customers wanna be seen and heard. They want to, they want to know that the vendor knows the manufacturer, the company knows, they know who I am. They know, you know, I'm not just some random number. They know where I am in terms of my adoption of, of each product. They know what information I need and knowing that they can then create a, a relatively smooth, frictionless. Journey for me so that I can get value out of it. That's what customers are looking for, and without that data, companies can't provide that value. That's a really good point, and there's this theme I've been thinking of recently. I've been, I've been hearing, you know, people talk about this more and more, but this idea of demonstrating your understanding of the customer. And of course that's, that's built on, on the data that you have about the customer to know that okay, you're at this specific stage in the journey. You're, you know, you've just signed up recently and you're getting onboarded. You're, you're learning the ropes of the product, of the service, right? Or maybe, you know, you've been around for a long time and there's a new feature. Anyone wanna get you up to speed on that or something. So, but tailoring it right and showing that you understand where the customer's at is so important. It goes so much farther than just, you know, answering a question right. yeah, absolutely. And it's. it, it is important for all customers in, in a customer base, meaning customers that have a high touch person working with them, A CSM or whatever it might be called in a company, where there's, there's a personal relationship between the company representative and the customer. They still need. To have the data to show who the customer is for, for a variety of reasons. One, people change, they change accounts. Maybe they leave a company. So there's that institutional knowledge that needs to be documented for future people to, to be able to rely on. even without that component, customer wants a digital first experience, right? So even the largest, most strategic customers want a digital first experience doesn't mean digital only. But Right. So even if I am, you know, Johnson and Johnson, and I have three CSMs on my account, I still wanna be able to quickly and easily get the information I'm looking for. Whether that be, do I renew a, a software subscription, or how do I adopt a certain new feature, you know, or, or a new product, whatever it might be. Oftentimes the easiest and the fastest way for me to do that is digitally go to the website, go to a customer success hub, whatever it might be. And if I can't get the what I'm looking for, that way, then I might reach out to the CSM. But the company can only provide me with an effective digital experience, one that gives me the value that I'm looking for in that moment, as well as overall. If it has the data to, to, to understand who I am, the, and I should say the company has the data. The question is, are they set up to properly use the data to give me the experience I'm looking for? I mean, it's, it's almost at this point customers have given and understand that they have given lots of data to various companies, and I think at Right. most companies are, most customers are willing to do that. But they expect in return that the company's going to have used that data to give them the effective experience that they're looking for so that they can get value from their purchase. Yeah, I, I think that there's, there's this definitely an awareness that there's a sea of data out there, and, and customers are, you know, conscious of their privacy and, and of course concerns about security with data. But, you know, understanding that the business does have the raw data somewhere to make really personalized, really proactive. Communication with customers. What are some of the frictions or, or challenges that you've seen in, in actually taking the data that's available? Let's say you've you've hooked up the systems at this point, right? The, the data is technically flowing where it needs to be. What do you, what do you think is the next step or what are the, what are the challenges to actually acting on it and, and putting it into, to, to practice? And let's, let's add an assumption to what you just laid out in that. The data is in reasonably good shape, right? Because not all data is, not all data is clean data. So let's assume that it is reasonably clean and it's, and as you said, the pipes are connected, the data's flowing, So I think the biggest challenge at this point becomes how do I use that data? How do I separate the, the noise from what's really relevant and how do I do that on a customer by customer basis? Or how do I do that at scale? So. This is where I think there's a world of possibilities available now to CX practitioners that wasn't available certainly two years ago, one year ago, and even six months ago. It was much harder. And I'm talking about ai. So how do we bring in various AI tools to be able to analyze the data, to, to, to which signals are the most relevant so that we can get prescriptive. issues that exist and how do we fix those issues that customers may have without them having to be a squeaky wheel to get it fixed. Right. We can identify them, we can fix them and get predictive. So like the holy grail Right, right. able to predict, alright, this set of customers is having this type of a problem. And it seems to be specific to maybe it's industry regulation related, maybe it's, you know, whatever it might be. We have another set of customers over here that match those characteristics. They very likely, therefore, are gonna have this problem in the coming weeks. Let's solve it for them. Like they don't know that they're in a car heading for the cliff. Let's redirect the car before they even know. Or let's build a bridge across the, you know, the cliff before they even know. Like that's the best thing. Right. Like it's, it's great to fix problems when they arise and do that quickly. It's even better to avoid the problems. So. Right. I think having the AI capabilities and more and more than were being built into existing products, rather than companies have to go and sort of take AI in its own silo and try to apply it so it's getting easier and easier to leverage the capability of AI to listen to signals and analyze data at a, at a massive scale across the whole customer base S with agent AI start taking actions so that the type of work that used to be done, again, only for the, you know, for the largest, most strategic customers, because of the processes are manual for identifying what the process, what the problem might be to try to fix the process, which is usually done just on a customer by customer basis. So it's almost like throwing people at the problem to sort of solve it because this is such an important customer. Like that's great. But that doesn't work at scale. And AI allows us to start to identify process issues, ident, identify gaps in data to solve and cr and, and sort of self solve problems and take the steps several steps forward. so I'll give you just one quick example. We are looking at Proofpoint, bringing in AI to help identify what are some of the churn risks. customers have. And then to identify using sort of AI and data science to understand across our customer base where some of those issues might be. And then using AI agents to take the first several steps of our response playbook. On behalf of our CSMs or directly reaching out to customers that we used to only be able to do for our largest customers because it's a manual time intensive process. Now we're able to do that across our scale. So, I mean, across our customer base. So that's where I think we start to, we, we are at the, at the, really in the early days of a whole new era of being able to improve the customer experience for all of our customers. I think that that is such an exciting opportunity and it represents such a fundamental shift in capability. This is really, you know. As we approach the end of 2025 as the time of recording this and we head into the beginning of 2026 the AI impact is really starting to land, and that has obviously has ripple effects throughout the organization, throughout customer experience. And one of the things that I'm seeing is changing job titles. Changing job descriptions, changing roles in cx. You know, as a reaction to all of this, how do you see the role of the CX practitioner, the role of the CSM evolving in the context of AI that can do all of these things that weren't possible before? That's a great question. I think that it is that that question runs in parallel to the changing role of CX within organizations. A, a couple years ago I used to talk about how I thought that AI was, had reached its teenage years that, that companies had realized like there was a, there, there, it was a real function, right? So sort of the, the child of usually customer support and marketing. But, but recognized that it was its own distinct thing that had reached its teenage years, meaning. Okay, a real thing, but, but now unsure of its place in the world. Like who am I? I, what do I call myself? Am I customer success or customer experience? What am I trying to do? What's my purpose? What value do I have? All this sort of teenage angst questions. I think now AI has gone to college. It's the way I started to talk about it this past fall. AI's now gone to college. It's matured enough. think nothing like a, like a a, a, a crisis in the profession to start forcing kind of reality and that crisis being economic contraction forcing companies to start to realize, okay, now if I have to make, if I'm a CEO or CFO and I have to make decisions between hiring another sales person or hiring somebody in cx, sales, operations, finance are already well-defined, well understood functions. easier to put the dollars there versus in CX, because it's been harder for CX identify the specific results. It's been, trust me, adoption's gonna lead to better business results. Loyal customers is wonderful. That's what CX provides. Now CX is starting to have to kind of put up the numbers and show the direct value. So with that context comes AI and changing roles there. So I think we're going to see. The role of, of CX practitioners, whether they be CSMs or more CS Ops people. But I think there's gonna be more of a focus on tying the work directly to the business outcome in any, in a way that can be quantified in terms of, of dollars or, or euros or, you know, yen pick your currency. So what if you're building out a self-service customer success hub? It's it important to be able to understand. And be able to track what's the impact on case deflection, for example, to customer support, and what's the financial impact of that case? Deflection. So that means working with finance, working with customer support, et cetera, to come up with a sort of corporate agreed upon financial model. To then be able to, to measure this. It's, it's not enough for the CS folks to say, oh, we saved $10 million. Like, trust us. This is how we're measuring it. And similarly, what, you know, what's the impact on, on retention rate and, and churn in general, and what's the, what is the financial impact we saved these customers from churning. Here's how much that, or. Being able to not just look at churn, but also expansion and reaching out to customers and being able to suggest next best product and see how that grows to, to expansion. being able to be focused on the business outcome and being able to then measure how the work has an impact on the business is gonna become more and more important. And then layer onto that, the new capabilities, the world of opportunity that AI provides. And are gonna have to understand how do I leverage AI in order to be able to expand my impact? Because as I was talking about before, now I can work at scale, whereas before I had a very minimal impact. and oftentimes that that opens up the door to measuring impact on a part of the business that a lot of people aren't touching, right? That scale business. Tends to not have people working on it, right? As opposed to an army of people from the renewals team and the sales team and the CSM team that are working on the biggest accounts. So it's harder in that, in those accounts to be able to directly tie the business impact to the work being done. But if you've got a whole set of sort of scale customers that you can now reach effectively and no one else is touching them. It's easier to, to be able to directly show the impact of the work. So I think AI will play a role there. I think it also will play a role in terms of being able to, being able to generate more types of content. For example, just looking at generative ai, able to take a, a webinar, a a one hour webinar and slicing that into five or 10 minute chunks. Dealing with different bits of, of content, right? To be able to create more relevant of content, whether that be short form video or taking, you know, long form documents and slicing those up. So without having to spend a ton of money generating new content, marrying hiring a firm to help out with all of this work that we used to have to do even just a couple of years ago. And there wasn't budget for that or translating documents into multiple languages. So we can use new AI tools to be able to generate a ton more content and localize that content so that it becomes much more relevant for the customers to serve. So I think that's where A, where CS practitioners are gonna have to become, they're gonna have to understand how to leverage these tools. So that they can get more personal when they're engaging with customers, whether that be on the phone or via email or at scale, Yeah, I mean, there's, there's so many good pieces there. I wanna, I wanna touch on a few things you mentioned. You know, first is, is this finally the ability to quantify revenue impact and, and cost impact, right? And, and put the CX department, you know, bring it in from the cold, right? Bring support in from the cold and, and have it be in, in the warm and cozy conversations about. You know, we build this business, here's the dollars that we saved, here's the dollars we contributed. Right? And having, having the leverage as leaders that comes with that as well, right? Suddenly you want to get budget for your new initiative. Well, you look, you point to the last six months or the last quarter's results and you say, Hey, you know, we saved this mu, this many millions in retention. We added, you know, this much in upsell. Suddenly leadership, you know, their ears perk up. Right? But I, I think that. With that leverage, what is the opportunity? Right? And of course, AI is the central part of the conversation today. And if you look at these the use cases for AI in business customer support is, is top two, if not number one. You know, you could say CX generally is, it's not like, oh, by the way, this is one of the things that AI does. No, this is one of the core uses of AI in the world today. And so. Not only is there revenue attribution that's possible now, there's also this, this moment where CX is leading the charge of the implementation of the most important new technology. And so for leaders like this is an incredible turning point. And, and I think that it, it does kind of demand, a rethink to a degree of what is this job actually, what are the responsibilities here? You know, at all levels. It's not only for leadership, but also for the junior positions, the, the leads, the managers. What do you think about this, this kind of, you know, going from teenager to college to, you know you know, the peak of career, if you will, as as an analogy here for ai, what does the peak of the career look like? Yeah. Here, it's a great question. Here's what I, I. Here's the way I view it. We have this, as you mentioned, this world of opportunity out there, this world of possibilities. And I think that can be daunting for some people. Like I, I don't even know where to start. And the models seem to keep changing and leapfrogging each other. Like it all seems so much, that there's the opportunity. To do two things. One, ground yourself in, in the basics, right? You still need to do basic CX work, understand your customers, do the journey mapping, right? Et cetera. Yes. with ai, and this is why I think we get into, what does leadership in the CX world look like? Like who are the leading companies gonna be? Who are the leading practitioners gonna be a year, two, five years from now? it's gonna be those companies that stay grounded in the basics. And then understand it's a blank page out there. So understand. So, so start to free your mind from, from sort of the way things are today and start to look more broadly at what do my customers need, not what changes can I make, which are usually kind of incremental. And those are great to improve the customer's experience today, but rather. do my customers need and how do I reimagine if necessary? Like give yourself the freedom to reimagine on what you, what you do, based on what your customers are trying to achieve. So think of questions like, if I had X data, I could do Y. So I'll give you a very specific example of that. And this is not specifically AI related, but I think it's really, it's really illustrative. There was a company that sold tires. There is a company that sold that sells tires and they were, they, they sell to fleets of vehicles, truckers, et cetera. they knew, they came up with some data points that showed that when tire tread reached a certain level of, of wear out 30% or whatever it was, that actually costs the company more to, because of increased fuel costs. operate using those old tires. So they were trying to get companies to buy new tires earlier than they were used to, to doing. They're like, great, we've got this great nugget of information. And they went to those companies and the company said, I, I hear you. I understand that, but who's going to be the, the additional labor costs required for us to continually measure the tread wear on those tires? Actually negates the, the, the cost savings, right? So great data. So company then had to go back to the drawing board and they came up with an idea. If they could create and implant a sensor like a, like an RFID chip into each one of those tires, and then build a way to send that information to an easy to understand for business user dashboard, they could include that and the, the, the, the customer could then see just, electronically, oh, that truck with the back rear tire, like next time it's into a, you know, for, for repair or whatever it is. Change that tire, right? So if I had X data, like which tire specifically at what time needs, you know, replacing, I could do YI could sell more tires, right? So so AI allows us the opportunity to do that. So we think of a hospital and we think of, well, there's the waiting room. And then, you know, you get seen by a physician and you get whatever treatment, if any, is needed, et cetera. And the, the, the waiting room is usually not a great experience. How to then solve for that, like holistically, how do I just start with the process is the customer walks in and needs help and completely redesign the waiting room. You know, small example, when I go to the dentist now, if I have to, you know, I don't know, have dental surgery, whatever it is, I can watch, you know, I'm leaning back and I can watch movies while it's going on. Much better experience and takes the fear out of, it takes my mind away from the fear and, and instead of hearing drills and all that, I'm hearing, you know, die hard or whatever, it's, I'm watching. Right? So I think those practitioners understand that AI allows the opportunity to dramatically rethink existing processes, enhance those that are working well, but could be better and completely replace those. That don't exist. Those are gonna be the leaders in that we're gonna see in a year or two. Yeah, I, I, I mean, first of all, diehard is the best Christmas movie ever. Is a Crystals movie. I'm with you. and and second yes, absolutely. I mean, I couldn't agree more. I, I think. You know, a few of the things, these examples that you're giving, they reminds me. There's, there's a marketing genius by the name of Rory Sutherland and he's got some great content on YouTube if people are curious. But one of the things that he said was there's a train service between England and France and they're trying to optimize it and, and make more money Of course. And so. They're thinking about rebuilding the entire train line and replacing all the train tracks with a faster train, right? Because they think, you know, people want to get there faster and then they'll buy more tickets, whatever, right? They'll sell more tickets. And, and Rory said, well, hey, wait a minute. You know, if you wanna just get there faster, take an airplane. You know, it'll, it's gonna be half the speed of the faster train, you know, half the time required of the faster train. So why would people take the train at all? Right? Why don't we go the other direction? Let's not. Let's not optimize our numbers here. Let's optimize for psychology, right? Let's really zoom out and think about what is possible, not what is incremental, right? And so he had this idea that he proposed, why don't we put really fast wifi on the trains and put in comfortable working spaces, and then people will be happy to spend more time on the train, arrive refreshed, have gotten something done in the middle. And you don't have to spend the billions and billions of euros it would take to replace the train line, right? You retrofit some of the trains and you're done, you know? And so I think that's, that's sort of an analogy for people of what is possible if you can only zoom out and, and reconsider, you know, where the opportunity is to, to meet the customer in a way that's unique to your business. and, and it's, as I said before, it's grounded. In the, the ABCs of customer experience, you still, I mean, you can come up with these ideas on your own, but much better to engage with your customers, to understand the voice of the customer, to do the journey mapping, to understand what they're really looking for and what is their sentiment in terms of how the journey works for them today. And not just from, well, it's hard for me to find, you know, piece of content to A or B or C, but. What am I actually trying to achieve in this stage? Right? I think it's such an important part of journey mapping is not just what do I do and how easy or frustrating is it for me to do that today, and how can you optimize that? Like that's, that's, that'll get you part of the way that's optimizing. But the, the, what am I actually trying to achieve in this stage allows you to then start to think out of the box with the train example, the dentist example, right? The, the, the, the tire fed example. And then use AI to then create that out of the box, generation, you know, environment. And if you go from that perspective, then it becomes a lot easier to then use AI because you know what you're looking to do. You know what the end goal is? I think where people kind of struggle today is they kind of start looking at, well, which AI tool? As opposed to what specifically am I trying to achieve? And then I'll bring the right tool, right? So they'll, they're walking into Home Depot and they're looking at all the tools and then trying to figure out, well, what's my home improvement project? As opposed to, I'm trying to build this, you know, backyard shed, I need hammer nails, you know, et cetera. Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. I, I, I can't imagine somebody walking into to Home Depot and saying, Hmm, what should I improve on my home? You know? You know, it's, it's like I need to fix my toilet or, you know, I want to add an, add an addition or something. Right. But, but having the sense, I guess that's a question there is, is, you know, what are some of the things that you think people can do to, to get a sense and, and have some kind of confidence when they're making a tool purchase? right. So I, I know this sounds basic, but it is so often not followed. Be very clear on the problem you're trying to solve. Hmm. I. clear on the problem you're trying to solve. That means to do that. almost always have to work cross-functionally, right? Because the Right. affects other teams as well. Right. your change management issues will be smaller if you've, if you have worked collaboratively upfront to have a shared understanding of what the problem is and what's the desired solution, and is this desired solution incremental improvement? Or is it a wholesale reimagining of where we want to go Mm-hmm. and so we've talked about the pros and cons of that a little bit here already, but that, you know, know where you're going. It's sort of like, I know I want to go to dinner tonight. I can get in the car and drive around and try to find someplace that looks good I can do a little research and determine where I want to go and my dinner experience is gonna be better if I've got friends joining me. So I wanna make sure that we all know where we're going and what time we're meeting there, right? So understand the problem statement upfront and what the desired outcome looks like. Then fake your out. What do I need to do in order to fix that? Which teams need to be involved? What technology or tool needs to be involved? And if you know that you're much better able to do the vendor. The, the vendor selection.'cause you'll know what you're looking for, you'll know what functionality you're looking for. You can, you can look at reviews and, and other commentary online from, from existing users to understand, hey, I specifically need that, or these few pieces of functionality. How does this vendor that I'm looking at up against a competition for that specific piece of functionality?'cause that's really what I need. Right? As opposed to vendors that provide everything. Right. So. number one. Mm-hmm. Know what your problem statement is and what your desired outcome is, and, and then stay involved along the way to make sure that you actually get there. I know that sounds like basics, but it's oftentimes the basic kind of step gets skipped, get skipped, 'cause people are, they just wanna get to the outcome. Right. Yeah. I, I think, you know, there's, there's this idea, the, of, you know, start with the, the end in mind and then work backwards, right? And it's sort of another way of phrasing what you're saying. I think of start with the outcome that you're trying to get, and then imagine how to get there. I mean, that's just simple and, and practical advice. I think it's easy to overthink, Yeah. in this world, you know, where we're flooded with information. But, but you know, you've mentioned a couple of times, you know, sort of hitting the fundamentals and sticking by them. And only then, in my opinion, only then can you actually build something. Stable foundation. And it's real easy to get too far ahead of yourself, you know, to, to buy into the hype and, and get something that ultimately is, is not gonna help you or, or it's, you know, not gonna be optimized. It's gonna be inefficient, percent. A hundred percent. Like the fundamentals still apply. The fundamentals of CX still apply. right? to be able to use that as a foundation to like soar with it with the possibilities that AI brings. Mm-hmm. we're also focusing on how do we then. Do that in a way that drives measurable, specific value to the business based on criteria value metrics that the business leaders care about. Right. your company cares about CSAT and your CEO and CFO and head of sales, and they care about CSAT they, they change behavior or adjust behavior based on csat, then measure csat. If not. they care about, you know, sales and retention, then measure sales and retention. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, align with what people want and, and then, and, and then serve that. And, you know, people are always self-interested. Right. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I wanted to, to get your thoughts here briefly. Before we close out the episode, I wanted to ask you about, you know. If you had, for example, if you could wave a magic wand and structure an organization however you like would you have a large dedicated CX department and, and what functions would it have or would you have more of a traditional, you know, here's the marketing team, here's the support team, here's a success team, and then there's, there's a, there's kind of a CX layer that crosses all of them. It's a good question. I would have a distinct CX department. I think it's imp and the reason why I would do that is I, I do think it's important there be a team with a leader. Who are accountable the customer's experience engaging with that company. You know, sales is only, is only engaged with customers up to a point. Marketing tends to be engaged only up to a point. And they tend to be focused on either sort of big picture, you know, brand, what do we stand for and how do we, how do we show up for customers or, or demand gen, right? So all important things. not the completeness of the customer experience. So they're gonna be measured and therefore building their practice based on what they're measured on. And that's not the holistic customer experience. I think it's important to have somebody focus on the holistic customer experience because it's so important to customers. It's the number that the experience customers expect to have. Is the number three buying criteria. Like first is functionality, does it do what I needed to do? Second is Hmm. is it gonna break all the time or is it actually gonna work? Third is, will I get, how difficult or easy will it be for me to get the value out of it? Solving the problem I'm looking for? And then number four is price. So given the the supreme importance of customer experience to customers, I think it's important that somebody internally be held accountable to that because then they'll work on that Now. be effective, a customer experience department has to work collaboratively with sales, marketing, finance, customer support, engineering, product management, et cetera. I think Mm. becomes the only glue function tying together a whole company.'cause every other function can operate in their own silo. So I think that's another value add that a distinct CX function brings. And if they're part of a, if they're a subset of another function. They will understandably be focusing on the overall goals of that function rather than really the overall goals of the customer. Yeah, I mean that's I think that's absolutely spot on. I, I think that there's, I, I would go even a step further beyond the, you know, calling it glue. I, I think it's the heart. I mean, it's the core. I mean, glue. Just to push back a little bit on the language here, but I mean, I, when I think of glue, I think of, you know you know, webbing between these other objects, right? You know, these other departments. And, and I really think that it's more like, it's more like a core, which everything radiates out from or that, you know, this, this, this central piece. Because, you know, people talk a lot about being customer centric, being customer focused, customer first, or whatever you wanna call it. But you know, if you actually had, you know, in a hypothetical organization, if you had CX organ, you know, team in the middle of the org chart, so to speak, and, and everything else is a hub of that, then I think that is the actual correct orientation as far as priority from a business point of view. What do you think about that? I think you're, I think you're a hundred percent correct and. Whether that is a distinct c, you know, whether that's indicated on the org chart with a distinct CX function. I think there needs to be a distinct CX function. But, you know, sort of if you, if you know, people were to put up slides and say, our CX function is in the middle as you just described, or whether it is. a cross-functional operating committee and working groups flowing from that, that do put the customer at the center, bringing in the voice of the customer, you know, se sending that to where it needs to go within the company, close with all of that, right? So whether it's the sort of the discipline or the organization, you are a hundred percent accurate. Yeah. And, you know, well, I mean, glad, I'm glad you agree. I, I hope that there's forward thinking leaders out there in the position to, to make these kinds of bets that, that can hear this conversation and either advocate for this or, or directly implement these kinds of changes because it's, it's more and more a world, a business environment where the business that reacts to the customer fastest wins. Right. And so you're not only, you know, doing something that's exciting and that's, that's, you know, finally possible with ai. But you're kind of required to, if you want to keep pace with your competitors and if, if your competitor adopts this really customer first, really nimble, really fast to react to customer trends and needs, and you don't, well, obviously you're gonna get left in the dust. And I, I think that that is again. It's another challenge, but it's an opportunity again, for for CX practitioners to be leading this charge. Yeah. And it's not to lead that charge. We have to lead with data internally because Yeah. different way of thinking about the, the reality of the business environment before we work for everybody in the company, right? So it's not just CX people. So we have to understand that and we have to evangelize that internally and, Right. the way to do that is to not just tell that story, but to buttress that story with data. This is Yep. are saying. Here are quotes from our customers. Here's data that shows, you know, the, the difference in sales where we've had a pilot, you know, where we've improved the customer experience and, and the customer centricity. And here's the impact that that's had. We're, you know, at, at a minimum, this is what the industry analysts are saying and the data that they're showing, sort of, you know, writ large as opposed to our company specifically. But we have to convince people internally. That it is a new environment. It is a new way of operating. And I think SaaS companies tend to be leaders in this because, especially those that are born as cloud companies because they've needed to be, and other companies are sort of figuring that out. And that's where we're really starting to see laggards versus leaders. Well said, well said. I think you know, for folks out there, if you're in the lead on this, you know, congratulations. I would love to talk to you and hear how you achieved it. If you feel like you're more lagging behind, I would also love to hear why and, and how you think you could move forward. So you know, I think it's a very important conversation. I could not be more optimistic about the potential of the cx. Discipline in 2026 in the context of everything we've been talking about. And, and that's where I wanna cap the episode off on a, on a note of optimism as we head into 2026. And, and for everybody out there, if you want to connect with Andrew, it's Andrew Carothers on LinkedIn. His details will be in the description of the video. And that is all for this episode of the CX Files. We'll see you next time.