Episode 6: What if AI makes your customer experience worse, not better with Steven Van Belleghem and Michel Stevens

In this episode of CX Matters, host Bram De Vos sits down with Steven Van Belleghem and Michel Stevens to explore one of the most uncomfortable questions in customer experience today: as AI moves to the centre of the customer relationship, what happens to trust? Does it get easier to build, or does it become more fragile as the decisions get more automated?

From the massive adoption of consumer AI tools to the slow crawl of corporate customer service, the conversation digs into why, three and a half years into the generative AI era, almost no incumbent has a chatbot that matches the quality of the assistant already sitting in their customers' pockets. Steven challenges the idea that AI will magically solve customer experience, makes the case for deep loyalty as the next real differentiator, and argues that the winning companies of the next decade will compete on emotional connection, not operational excellence. Michel warns that AI is a megaphone, not a fix: it amplifies whatever sits underneath, so weak data and broken processes only get louder.

Through stories about an airline chatbot that promised a refund the company did not want to honour, a parent snapping pictures of recipes and asking an AI assistant to convert them for a kitchen gadget, a politician caught quietly using AI to reply to constituents, and tourists complaining to a city tourism office because the place did not look like the AI generated Christmas pictures, the discussion reveals how AI is quietly reshaping the contract between brands and the people who buy from them.

A candid and forward looking conversation about trust, differentiation, emotional loyalty, and what customer experience starts to look like in a world where programmed friendliness is beginning to outperform the human kind.

Key findings from the episode

• AI adoption in customer service has disappointed. Three and a half years into the generative AI era, no major incumbent has reached that level of conversational quality in their own service. The technology is ready. The organisations are not.
• The blockers are not the model. Legacy systems, fear of legal exposure, slow internal processes, and regulation are what hold large organisations back. Early chatbot liability rulings have not helped.
• Real change takes longer than the hype. Driverless cars, augmented reality glasses, and the smartphone app ecosystem all took roughly a decade to truly mature. Customer service will follow the same curve.
• AI risks widening the distance between brand and customer. When your agent talks to my agent, the direct relationship quietly disappears, and with it the chance to build any real connection.
• Operational excellence is becoming a commodity. Companies that only invest in transactional perfection will end up looking like everyone else, and they will be undercut by cheaper alternatives.
• Emotional connection is the next differentiator. Deep loyalty, belonging, and community are the things AI cannot copy at the speed of a model release. They are also what people choose to be part of.
• The bar for human interaction is rising. Programmed friendliness is now consistent, patient, and pleasant. Human staff in stores and on calls have to be noticeably better than that, not the same.
• Authenticity has become harder to prove. When something is genuinely impressive, customers now assume it was made by AI. Effort no longer earns automatic credit.
• Customer centricity must be seen to be done. Companies need to show customers what their feedback actually changed, not just process it quietly in the back office.
• AI amplifies what is already there. Bad data, weak processes, and unclear positioning do not get fixed by automation. They get louder and more expensive.
• The old marketing questions still matter. What makes you different? Why should anyone be loyal to you? AI will not answer those for you, and that is the point.

Learn how Hello Customer turns feedback into business improvements: https://www.hellocustomer.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:16

Hi, welcome to CX Matters, the podcast powered by Hello Customer. My name is Bram de Vos, and I am your host today. At Hello Customer, we help customers listen to their customers in a deep way. We help them by collecting and analyzing customer feedback, reviews, customer interactions, and so forth. We use all that input to understand what really drives customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction, of course. Most importantly, we help companies prioritize on what to act first. Now, in doing all of that uh work, we see how CX is evolving. And of course, there's one topic that keeps coming up in the recent months and even years, and that's artificial intelligence. We know that artificial intelligence is changing customer experience. It's changing how organizations uh process things, it's changing in how organizations are deciding things, but it's also changing the way that customers are conducting their business with companies. So it cuts both ways. So the question we're going to explore today is the following. As AI becomes more and more central to everything we do, and therefore also to customer experience, what happens to trust? Does it become easier to build? Or does it become more fragile, more vulnerable as decisions become more automated? And to delve into that topic, I am joined by two guests, two people who are going to approach this topic from different angles. Stephen von Bellingham is an international keynote speaker on customer experience, a celebrated author of multiple best-selling books, and he's currently working on a new book about AI and customer experience. Michelle Stevens is course director at CXM Academy and he's managing partner at Go6. He's working in embedding customer-centric transformation in organizations across Europe. Stephen, Michelle, thank you very much for joining me. With pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Absolutely, Bram. Thank you for inviting me.

SPEAKER_02 2:22

You're very welcome. Glad to have you on board. To kick it off, I'd like to ask you a personal question. That is to the both of you. As I am, as everybody who's listening, probably also and watching this, everybody's using AI for certain things. What are your tools that you use when you think about AI? What do you use and what do you use it for? I'll start with you, Steven.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

I think my best friend is ChatGPT. I think that's my go-to place most of the time. Um I also use Gemini. I also use Perplexity. Those are my three, my top three tools. And what do you use them for? Um privately, ChatGPT is my sous-chef in the kitchen. I'm an amateur chef at home. And since I have ChatGPT, we're working closely together to create some new some new dishes. I use it for my travel plans. Uh very convenient there. And um professionally, I use it to to translate. I use it as a research tool. Um, like at Perplexity, you can create your own agent. And that agent is sending me an email at eight o'clock in the morning with the latest CX updates on specific topics that I'm interested in. So it's I'm outsourcing part of my research to it. Like now, as you mentioned, I'm working on a new book. It's going to be published in October. It's about how to create value for customers in an age of AI. I I decided not to write with AI because I want to do the writing myself. It's going to be my seventh book, and I know that part of the experience of writing a book is the learning journey. So I want to go through that. But of course, it's it's an amazing assistant researcher and editor during the writing process. Uh I make less spelling mistakes. I double when I'm finished with a chapter, I ask, do you think this makes sense? Am I missing something? Do I need evidence? Are you missing evidence somewhere? Do you have a source of research that could help me here? So it's my personal research assistant that is always on during the writing process. Yeah. Those kind of those kind of things. Fantastic. And images for presentations, of course.

SPEAKER_02 4:30

And images for presentations, I can imagine. Yeah. Also in ChatGPT, that? Yeah, ChatGPT and Gemini. And Gemini.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

Okay. What about you, Michelle? Uh, my poison is uh Gemini and uh man is for more complex things. So Gemini is um my evil twin, as I always call it. Uh, because uh, whenever I write something or I'm thinking about something, I frequently ask it, so uh what's the other side of this coin? Because yeah, every story, every story has two sides, apparently. And uh the problem is that these days we are so caught up in our bubbles and in our echo chambers that we don't see what we don't see, right? And uh so I asked uh Gemini, so what would uh Anti Michelle say about this, right? That's a good one. Yeah, uh and then Manus uh for more complex things like fetching information from uh here and there, and then um actually also giving me my my morning briefings basically. So it's more of an an agent than rather than a uh a tool, basically. Okay, thank you.

SPEAKER_02 5:35

How about you, Broom? Huh. I'm I don't know what to use. I see so many things. I'm following it from from very uh from very close by. Um chat GPT has been my my best friend for a long time, but now I'm being very unfaithful to ChatGPT. Yeah. I I have discovered Claude and it is mind-blowing for me. Um it is is totally, you know, it does things that I haven't seen ChatGPT do, but it's it's a race where you know now they are ahead, the other ones will catch up again. But then there's so many things. There's there's gamma, and there's there's uh of course Gemini, and there's Kimi, and there's and there's so many things, and it it feels like you want to use the right thing and you keep switching things. Um so that's why I asked the question. I wanted to know what you guys are doing. I I like the idea of having somebody send you an email, as it were, in the morning, like this is the new the new stuff. That's really interesting approach, never heard of, never heard of that. Um Do you think that you know, if you look at the evolution that we've gone through with with ever since Chat GPT came onto the scene, because of course AI is much older than that, but ever since that happened, are there things that um that still surprise you today? Are there things that you still find mind-blowing, like I found Claude mind-blowing when I discovered it a couple of weeks ago? Do you think still see things that really uh yeah, give you give you the goosebumps?

SPEAKER_01 6:59

I don't know about goosebumps, but I know that sometimes I go like, hey, I never thought of this. Um and and I think that that is the most fun thing. Like you look at everyday things and and all of a sudden people actually do something fun with that. So my my mother uses AI, right? And I was amazed by that. Not because I think badly or about my mom, but so she has this uh she has this kitchen robot called a Thermomix, and you need some special recipes for that. And very often these are in special cookbooks and everything. What she does, I was like, that's so cool. So she takes an everyday recipe, takes a picture of it, sends it to her ChatGPT, I think it is, and then says, Turn me this into a Thermomix uh recipe. And I was like, that's so clever. I'm like, I was like, how did you come up with that? And she said, uh just trying something, and I think that that is the most coolest thing. That really gives me goosebumps, and it's not necessarily technology driven, it's more human-driven, but that I it's great to hear how how people, you know, what people do with it, you know, things that you didn't think about.

SPEAKER_02 8:03

It's um yeah. Are there are there things that you would have expected by now that you're disappointed that that hasn't happened yet? I mean, you know, when you follow media, it's like AI is gonna eat the world, it's gonna change everything, it's gonna be everything is gonna be different. It's been around for a couple of years. Some voices are saying, well, at the end of the day, it does disappoint me. Have you had that feeling?

SPEAKER_00 8:26

Yeah, I'm um I have an enormous amount of disappointment um when I look at how customer service evolved in the past three and a half years since we had ChatGPT. I mean, we're we're all used to having conversation now with our AI platforms, and we know the quality of that and how we can keep on asking and all that. You would have expected that three and a half years later, I mean, that most companies would have completely transformed their customer service into chatbots of that quality. And that hasn't happened. I I actually don't know any example of an incumbent that has a chatbot of that quality in place right now. I would love to to learn about it, but I'm disappointed. And it's it's not the technology, uh, it's the the back office of the large organizations. Data isn't ready or they're afraid of the of the chatbot uh since the Air Canada case, where a chatbot was talking with one of the customers and the chatbot said, Did we actually do that? Yeah, you did. Oh, that's terrible. You know what? We're gonna repay the full flight. I mean, that's our mistake. Apologies. And then the human side is that we're not gonna repay that. I mean, that's that's not in the small letters in our agreements. And then a judge actually said, if your chatbot is speaking on your behalf, the decision of the chatbot is what you will actually do. It's the voice of the customer. That's when they invented the human in the loop terminology, which I think is terrible. Um, but but those reasons, being afraid, data not okay, being slow in changing the processes, created the fact that we haven't evolved yet in customer service. And that's a major disappointment for me. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

But isn't that because we are trying to make a um Formula One car out of a racehorse where it is just a different animal, and we have this, we have legacy and we have uh legacy data systems and we have history and we have uh processes that are just old and we're trying to put something new on it and expect that things happen. And I know this is oversimplifying uh a lot of things, but sometimes I feel like we got we are kind of stuck in like we have the curse of knowing what is, but we haven't we haven't figured out yet what can be, actually. And I think that is this weird fear.

SPEAKER_02 10:44

There is fear, there is uncertainty. That there is also I you know speaking um from my position as as CEO of Hello Customer, there's also the the regulation. I mean, regulation doesn't make it easier. In the European Union, uh with all good intentions, we are really you know at a point where we could we could miss we could miss the train, you're gonna miss the boat here, uh, because there's so many rules and regulations which in turn are also scaring companies. Like, oh, we mustn't be caught with our pants down. You know, if we do something, how is that going to affect the the data protection shields and everything like that? And I understand it, you know, as an individual, as a citizen, as a civilian, I understand all of that. But it's, you know, I think that's part of the reason why it's not going as fast as we would have hoped. Um, but do you see differences if if you look globally, Stephen? I mean, you you you see things happen in the States, maybe it goes faster there, or do they have the same problem?

SPEAKER_00 11:38

I I see the same problem in the US. I I I haven't seen any cases. And and if people are listening and they say, Stephen, you're completely wrong. Look, this bank in the US or this insurance company has Chat GPT quality customer service. Please let me know because I would love to learn more, but I haven't seen it yet. I uh probably in China they're more advanced because they are much faster and more pragmatic in their implementation. Um, but in the US, it's also going very, very slowly. So the technology is there, but the adoption isn't. That's that's interesting. And I I heard a conversation with Mark Andreessen recently. Um, and and he said everyone is so afraid of the major disruption of AI and it's gonna change overnight. He said, because of regulations and because of the fear of larger organizations, it's not gonna go as fast as the technology companies think it will go. And and maybe that's true.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

Yeah, I'm I think it's absolutely true because change has never been really fast. I mean, think about uh self-driving cars, for instance. Um longer than what we thought. Exactly. And I think that that is how fast things will go. Um, yeah, we won't have uh, yeah, okay, we might have robots in our homes uh by the end of the year. Uh that's uh but but adoption will not go that fast, and and there are still a lot of things and ifs and maybes that we need to figure out while we are flying this plane, basically.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

It usually takes about a decade longer than what we anticipate, is my experience. Driverless cars is a fantastic example. I remember going to Silicon Valley in 2013 and we saw those Google driverless cars, and we were in them, and we said, Oh, by next year, they'll be all over the place. Now they're all over the place in certain US cities, and now you see how fast adoption can and will go, but it took just a decade longer. 14 years longer than what we than what we thought. Think about Google Glass. How crazy we were about Google Glass. Now everything will become uh augmented reality. Now, 14 years later, we're starting to see a few things. So it often takes longer than what we anticipate. Even when the iPhone came, that's almost 20 years ago. That's 19 years ago that the iPhone was introduced. It was 2007. It it's not like in 2009 that we had all these cool apps on our phone. It's usually in the second half of the adoption curve that the really cool things show up. So if you look at the apps on the homepage of your phone, most of them were not there before 2014. So it took about seven to eight years before we matured on mobile. I think we're going to see the same thing with AI because big organizations are by default.

SPEAKER_02 14:17

And the same thing for customer service. Yeah, for exactly. The same thing is gonna happen. So it's going to happen eventually, but it just takes longer.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

I always I would say that things need to become boring before they become interesting. I mean, uh, let's say, for instance, um in the 70s you had these chess computers, and that was AI that was super intelligent, that was beating uh all the grandmasters. By now we know that it's just algorithms and it's actually something really dumb, right? It's something that we now fully understand how it works and we can actually use it in our daily lives as well. If you want to create an algorithm, I I would assume that you can you can do that, right? And I think that technology needs to become boring uh because then you know its boundaries, you know what it can do, what it can do, where its limitations are, and only then you can actually start using it because you know its use and its place in where does it fit and what will maybe happen or maybe not happen. So yeah, and we need to go through that process, and we're heading straight towards it with regulations, with rules, with all these ethical questions that we have. We're heading straight for that right now. We're finding out what are the limitations, and once we are there, then we can actually build something.

SPEAKER_00 15:28

That's what I uh And on the other hand, some things go extremely fast. Like I was in San Francisco in September, and in January, so let's say half a year in between. The big difference in those six months is vibe coding and coding through through bots and and algorithms. In September, there was little talk about it. In January, everyone's like, we don't write code anymore. It changed and we went 10x in terms of productivity, and suddenly it was like, Why didn't you tell us this six months ago? And it was because Cloud came with a new model, and since that moment, all those developers changed in just a few weeks' time.

SPEAKER_02 16:04

Yep. They they are early adopters, these people. I mean, they they're on the forefront. They're on the forefront, and they they are now teaching us. Yeah, I I see it happening at our company as well. It's it's amazing the speed with which that is taking place. So things can go fast, and yet there is that incumbency happening, there's that thing. But I'm I'm absolutely convinced that it's going to make a change. The question I want to raise here today with with you guys is what do you think is going to be the effect of those changes, of having more AI, more automation in the um the loss of the connection with the customer? Do you think that AI can help or is it is it a threat? Because I I heard you say earlier, uh Stephen, human in the loop, I really don't like that expression. It it it ties into that.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Well, you know, the the distance between customers and brands will increase. There are a few things that will happen. On the one hand, we're gonna see an a massive adoption of AI tools. Massive. If you know there's a study in Journal of Marketing that says the less people know about AI, the more excited they are about AI. That's interesting. It's new technology, which means that someone who doesn't know anything, they will go to ChatGPT and they will think it's a magic wand. So massive adoption. We're gonna see um the easiest way ever to look for cheaper alternatives through agents that customers use. We're gonna have a CX paradox that people invest in CX and customer service, but it's gonna become the most normal thing in the world. It's gonna become a commodity. And on the other hand, we have a situation where a lot of companies didn't invest enough in their differentiation in the past two decades because they were addicted to the dopamine of short-term results and they don't have a strong differentiating position. Those four items together are an enormous threat on the customer relationship. It means that you're gonna have a massive amount of people with a tool to look for cheap stuff at the same time, fantastic customer service is gonna become mainstream and we don't have enough differentiating brands, which means that you have some sort of a ground zero to start from. And I think if we're not careful, that the first investments that I see that companies make today with AI are actually increasing the distance between them and that customer. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 18:31

So could you elaborate on that?

SPEAKER_00 18:32

Yeah, how do they do that? They put agents in between. Okay. So I don't talk to the company anymore, I talk to the agents of the company. My agent will talk to the agent of the company. That's a big distance between me coming to you and buying directly from you. So that's gonna be an issue. I I see now that most companies put all their eggs in the basket of transactional perfection, which is great. You need it. But they forget that the relationship with the customer is gonna be the differentiator. And that's why I really believe in this idea of deep loyalty. It's gonna be the title of my new book that comes out in October. Deep loyalty is about creating a feeling of belonging, reinventing belonging where I want to be your customer, where I want to be part of the group, where I want to show the world that I'm part of your organization. And that will become the differentiating factor. It's gonna be more emotional. Whereas now companies focus completely on operational excellence. I think the winning companies will be those that focus on emotional connectivity. And that brings deep loyalty then. That is the thing. That's my hypothesis. Yeah. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

And this is absolutely something I very strongly believe in. I mean, we can all go for efficiency and that functional thing. I think we by now we understand what customers want from us on a functional level. That is something that we, I hope we have figured out, right? But but then there are two other things that are very important, which is the emotional side of things and also the social kind of things. I heard you talk about communities. Yeah, absolutely. If you have a community around your brand and with an emotional connection, yeah, absolutely. That is a very strong defensive line that you have in your customer experience that will be very hard to copy because that is typically unique for yourself or for your brand. Uh and yeah, let them come. I mean, even if there is a technological wave that makes the other product uh superior or whatever, yeah, bring it on. You buy yourself some time. You buy indeed your uh your deep loyalty.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

Yeah, and and you know, you you will always have a friendly source to go to. Chat GPT is super friendly, super nice. Never gets frustrated if I ask the same thing for the seventh time. They say, Can you tell me do it again? And always it with great enthusiasm. So the consequence of that is that the bar for human businesses will also increase. If I would have if I will have to choose between a programmed friendliness or no friendliness, I will go for programmed friendliness. And that changed 10 years ago. We said, no, no, no, we don't want the fake stuff, we want real stuff. Today we know that programmed friendliness can be really good. So that means if I then have the luxury of being in business where I have a physical presence, like a store, in a store, the bar for the humans in the store will be higher. Yes, because there is a super friendly programmed alternative.

SPEAKER_01 21:36

Yeah. But then again, you need to think about uh about that up front. You need to think about how do we sound as a brand? What yeah, what what what is typical for us as a brand? How do we sound basically? And that is something that where a lot of organizations today are failing massively. That I think like, yeah, why do why don't you steer that conversation towards a more natural flow uh that actually starts. Strengthens whoever you are as a I was I was buying shoes uh recently and I was using the chatbot obviously just to see how far it would go. And then I asked, so uh yeah, do you have it in in size uh nine? And I said, Yeah, we do have it in size nine. Fine. Follow up with me. You the the black ones are going super fast and it's ideal for whatever. I mean, make it a conversation, just don't give me the information I'm looking for, but build on what I'm saying. Don't just repeat what I'm saying, build on what I'm saying and and help me figure this out faster.

SPEAKER_02 22:36

But this is also, I think, a reason for optimism. If if I listen to the both of you, I think you know we can look at it in two ways. You can say, oh, how how awful it's going to be when when everything is going to be frictionless and how are we going to differentiate? But there's the opportunity to differentiate. Because if if the bar is raised, then companies will also, as as you said, you know, when you go into a store and you have a physical meeting with somebody, you actually see somebody, the bar will be higher. But that means that companies will also have to empower that person, allow that person to bring a real experience, to bring a real connection. Whereas now, most of the times they are reduced to not doing that. Think of you know the story of all the people in the call centers. Do it fast, don't interact much, just try to sell something while you're at it. That's the story. I think that maybe, and this this is me being optimistic, but um optimism is a moral duty, as we all know. Um I think there's there's an opportunity in that. Because if if the bar is raised, then the bar is raised. You know, companies ignore it at their peril. So yeah, and what one of the things that we see uh from the side of Hello Customer is if you look at what companies do with feedback, they have learned that in feedback there is functional lessons to be learned. What should we fix that we are not doing well? So far, so good. Increasingly, they understand that there is also an emotional layer. But my thesis is that, you know, you you said in the beginning, Stephen, Chat GPT, you call them jokingly your friend, right? And your partner or your your poison, you said. That's another thing. But we're talking about these things as if they are people and we're doing it jokingly, but still, there is that kind of friendliness there. That is an emotional layer. And so I think that that is raising the bar. But there's the third aspect, that's the social aspect. When we see what companies do with feedback, I think there's one thing that they are forgetting to do, in my opinion. It's forgetting to tell the world, to tell their customers what they're doing with the feedback. Because research shows that if you investigate this, what people want when they give feedback, yes, they want to be helped functionally if possible. Great. Yes, they want to feel like they are human and they count, they want to have that emotional connection. The third thing is they would like their feedback to mean something for other people. That's the social dimension. And I think that AI can probably help enlarge that, help strengthen that, help that account and help that be broadcast by customers, uh, by companies more towards their customers. It's one of my sayings. I I um as you know, as the both of you know, I have a legal background, and there's uh there's this um 100 years ago, there was uh a British judge who once said, uh, justice must not only be done, it must also be seen to be done. And I simply replaced that with customer centricity. Customer centricity must not only be done, it must also be seen to be done. And my hope is that AI can help in make it more seen, make it more visible, show it to the world, you know, be proud of it. In fact, if you're not proud of it, you'll just be one of the bland mass, you'll be in the mediocre masses of companies. It's gonna be your your duty, it's gonna be your obligation, it's gonna be your only chance to do it.

SPEAKER_01 25:50

Yeah, so the question is uh will your AI be helpful or hurtful? There was this um case uh with a um a uh British member of parliament. I don't know if you saw that, it's a while back now, uh, where he was caught answering um the emails of constituents via ChatGPT. And there was a huge backlash on that, obviously, because um yeah, of course, he was writing emails, and you could ask yourself, is that data protected and everything? That for me is secondary. What is primary is that people were really upset about it because he was using a chat GPT, where there might be a very rational decision behind that, but it was about intent. What kind of effort are you putting into that human that human dialogue? Are you automating that one as well? Just the other day, I had uh a conversation with a business leader who was doing automated outreach on social networks, and um, and so there is this AI bot uh and that sends uh connection requests to other people, and then there is an automated flow behind it. All right, fine. But then all of a sudden, those people start responding to the those connection requests. And he's he looks at me and he says, Yeah, but I'm not going to touch it because then I'm going to interfere with whatever is coming next. And I was like, Isn't that weird that people are reaching out to you and and you are saying you're now telling me I'm not going to interfere with that because the bot will do that. I found that a very uh dark uh place to go to.

SPEAKER_00 27:23

But one of the one of the challenges that we're gonna have, not just in customer experience, but everywhere, is that there's this been this evolution of something wonderful happens, or when you see something truly impressive. Two years ago you said, wow, wow, I'm super impressed. Today you say, Is this real? You know, I'm I think one of the things that I try to do is when people email me with professional questions, I try to be fast. I think that almost everyone who sends me an email will get a reply within 24 hours. So you think it's automated. And in the past, people were like, Oh, thanks for the fast reply. Now one third of them is saying, hello, Steven's chatbot. And I go, No, it's not Steven's chatbot, it's me. But people don't believe it anymore. They say, Yeah, prove it that it's you. That's tragic, isn't it? It's tragic. You're doing something, you're putting effort in stuff. Or it's like I saw a video with acrobots a few weeks ago, is and people were like, half of the people below said, I don't think this is real. Exactly. Imagine that you are that acrobat. This is impossible. I don't believe this anymore. So you're training, training, training. Then people say, It's AI. Clearly, AI, clearly. That's very sad. That's very good. We can't be amazed anymore, and that's gonna be an issue. Also with customer experience, one of the basic rules in customer experience is expectation management, right? Now, what we do is we rise the bar of expectations way too high. Like at Christmas, there were a bunch of pictures online of Amsterdam in the Christmas spirit. People went to Amsterdam and then it didn't look like the pictures. It looked like that. Yeah, the weather was different, the lights were different, and they were like, man, this is this is a boring city. And the tourism department at Amsterdam actually got complaints. So, how difficult is it now to really surprise people?

SPEAKER_02 29:20

And and that in an age where authenticity is being hailed as that's the solution for everything. Try to be authentic. Yeah, I mean, if you're authentic and you're just okay, then you'll be well, not very impressive because you're competing with something that's been created by AI. If you're truly exceptional, you're not believed. Yeah, because people say that's probably AI.

SPEAKER_00 29:40

That's probably it's too good to be real. I mean, that is a but this is something very difficult to deal with as an organization. I can imagine.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Isn't that isn't uh one of the answers uh curation that you become more um conscious about what you do and you don't do? I mean, it's not I don't have the answer to that either. I mean, but uh the more I I read things, the more I go like I I nav I gravitate towards things that feel really genuine, where somebody really put effort in it. And that yeah, because I had this uh I read an article, which was a brilliant article. I really liked it, but at the start I was like, this feels off. It sounds like a chatbot that some AI wrote this, and mentally I was already, you know, I was already distracted. I was like, I don't know if this is actually real, or am I putting myself out there and trying to read something that somebody didn't actually care to write in the first place? And so I think about curation. Well, not necessarily, yeah, the effort as well.

SPEAKER_00 30:44

Like you're writing your own book. You want you want to do it. But that's more for me. I don't maybe it would be better if I outsource it to AI. Maybe this is just me trying to do this. Yeah, that is I don't know. It's more about we'll see that people will not believe that I wrote it. That's the that's the thing. That's that's the whole thing. Yeah, how how can you how can I prove it? Yeah, I can't. I mean, I I remember it's trust. Who film it? And on the other hand, who cares if people like the content and if it's good if it's created by something else in you better than what I would have done, maybe I should have used AI. Maybe now I'm I'm creating some suboptimal stuff. Who knows that this is the worst mistake in my life?

SPEAKER_02 31:21

I doubt it very much, but but yeah, we we'll we'll be uh we'll be the judge of that come uh come the end of the year. But I I doubt it very, very much. I yeah, again, it's it's the optimist in me, but I still believe in human creativity, even though I see that it's under threat. And at the same time, you know, AI is nothing but something that's standing on the shoulders of giants, right? I mean, it can only be smart because it has read your books and the books of other people, it's it's seen your keynotes, it's processing all of that. So yeah. Anyway, we we've got to take a look at at the time. This there's two small questions that I would like to have a short answer to from the both of you. Um that's a challenge for the both of you. That's a challenge for the both. Maybe we'll only be able to ask one. Maybe. Um what's one mistake you think companies are likely to make with AI in customer experience? I'm gonna start with you, Michelle.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

Um AI will not solve your problems. I think that that is the biggest mistake. That we look at AI and and go like, yes, tomorrow all our problems will be gone. Uh, if you want to achieve anything, uh it will take hard work and dedication. Um yeah, it's the old saying, right? Uh garbage in and garbage out. Uh if you start with rubbish data or if you start with bad uh processes, things will not change because of AI. You need to change the underlying structure if you want different outcomes. Uh AI will give you a megaphone or an amplifier, or or it will help you speed things up or make things uh less expensive, but it won't change what is in the fundaments of your organization. That will just amplify it.

SPEAKER_00 33:00

Thank you. Steven. The biggest danger is that you end up being mediocre in everything. Average in service, average in communication, average in trying to surprise people, that you just follow the AI, focus on efficiency, and because of that, you are super mediocre and under threat for price players. Okay. And your solution to that is making sure that you know what your key strengths are, making sure what your real differentiators are. Uh AI will not solve your problems. Fully agree with that. AI will not help you to differentiate yourself. Know what your key differentiators are and go all in on that. Thank you very much to the both of you.

unknown 33:44

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

He only asked one of the two questions. Yeah, what was the second question? The solution was the solution.

SPEAKER_02 33:51

Okay, I wanted to hear the solution. I was like, where's the second question? That's it. Yeah, I wanted to end on a good note and something not just some bleak and dark and somber message. I think I think we should we should look at the future with uh with great hope and expectation. So that is the solution. And you know what? The interesting thing about the solution is I mean, in this day of artificial intelligence, is that it's a very old solution. It is. And that's one of the things that I believe in very greatly. And I I you know we don't have the time to go into that maybe in the next podcast, is to focus on just for once the things that do not change. Because they can contain a hell of a lot of answers. And and you know, what you said at the end there, Stephen, is you know, what is going to differentiate you? It's an old question, it's the old marketing question. And so let's revisit those old questions, let's ponder about them, let's discuss those, and not forget or not lose ourselves in every innovation that there is, no matter how interesting and fascinating they are. So yeah, great. Thanks, gents.

SPEAKER_00 34:52

Thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_02 34:54

That's it for us. Thank you so much for attending. If you'd like to keep posted uh of what we do, do visit us at hellocustomer.com or drop me a line, brahm at hellocustomer.com. I'd love to hear your feedback. Of course, we do believe in feedback. I'd love to hear your questions. Feel free to reach out. For now, thank you very much. Have a good day. Until next time. Goodbye.