From Automation to Orchestration: Rethinking CX with AI

Overview

Brian Betkowski and Ed Haines welcomed Brittany Christian, leader of Jabian’s Customer Acquisition and Retention Service Area, for a conversation on how AI is reshaping customer experience. This podcast explores why simply automating customer interactions often amplifies fragmentation. The discussion dives into scaling one-to-one personalization, breaking down silos with internal AI agents, and aligning culture, data, and omnichannel strategy so AI enhances human connection rather than replacing it.

Brian Betkowski:

Welcome, everyone, to Jabian’s Strategy That Works Podcast. My name is Brian Betkowski. I’m joined here in our studio by my friend and colleague, Ed Haines. We’re your hosts today. We got a really fun topic. It’s kind of an interesting combination of our work lives and our personal lives because we’re all consumers of lots of things, whether that’s an app, a service, or a product. And the AI world is definitely changing that. And sometimes we’re delighted by things that happen to us in the world of being a consumer. Sometimes we’re disgusted by that or something in between. And AI is definitely changing that and shaking that up.

And another thing that has been really interesting in the customer service realm over the years is how it’s transitioned from somebody owning customer service. Like traditionally, you might’ve heard in the past where maybe customer service or customer experience was owned by the customer service organization or by a customer experience organization. And that seems to be really changing over the years, especially with AI being able to stitch things together, and have such an interesting, integrated experience that seems to be really changing. And so we’re excited to talk more about that today with our guest.

Ed Haines:

Excellent. And to get back to the why we’re talking about it and the value, I’ve got some stats. Because we always…

Brian Betkowski:

I love it. I love stats.

Ed Haines:

Thought it’d be useful. So one thing I thought was really interesting is that 70%, I think it was between 70 and 80%, there was a study done that said 70 to 80% of executives have really got this as a top priority, customer experience in their space, but yet only 20% believe that the organization is structured to do it. So there’s a disconnect there that’s kind of worth talking about.

And then I think also when you look at the value, what the value get out of customer sat and the improvement of customer sat, there was another study that was done that said, I think over a decade, the average for those CX leaders and those companies that were really good at the CX piece, they increased their value of their stock by about 3.4%. 3.4, times 3.4, which is huge over a larger period of time. But then, when you look at it from a more specific range, a 20% increase in customer satisfaction, that can yield like 5 to 10% in wallet share. And so the numbers are real. It’s not just about making your customer happy. There are real kind of numbers that are associated with this, which is kind of exciting for us to think about and dive into here.

Brian Betkowski:

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s a good segue to our topic today. We have an awesome guest joining us today. Not only is she a senior executive in our Dallas-Fort Worth office and a shareholder in our firm, but she also leads our customer acquisition and retention service area. And so welcome to the show today, Brittany Christian.

Brittany Christian:

Yeah. Thank you, guys. I’m glad to be here. I could talk about this for hours.

Brian Betkowski:

Well, we will. Well, maybe not hours, but at least for lots of minutes. Yeah, let’s start it off.

Ed Haines:

So when we were talking before, Brittany, you said something that I thought actually really struck me, and I thought we’d start with the first question. I’m going to have to look over and read it exactly as I wrote it down. You said, “AI can enable orchestration, but without a strong customer-focused culture, it just automates fragmentation.” Start us at the 100,000-foot level. What does that mean, and what can we do?

Brittany Christian:

Yeah. I think one of the things that we’ve seen, I would argue that the customer care space, customer sales in particular, has led in AI and automation over the last 10 to 20 years, where they’ve always been looking to optimize and take cost out from a cost center, which is traditionally how customer service is viewed.
But I think in the new advent of generative AI, we have the opportunity to think about that a little bit differently and expand beyond just automation and really think about how do we connect to the customer outcome, whether that’s in B2B or B2C. In B2C, you’re having millions and millions of transactions on a daily basis. But AI really gives now, the new generative AI gives us a chance to, well, I just can’t stop thinking about what if we use that to scale one-to-one. So you’re still having your customer care and your sales organization, but how do we use that to scale for the customer experience, which is ultimately an outcome that you’re trying to drive as a company.

So yeah, that’s when we start to think about it. And then how do we do that? Well, I think it’s thinking about the actual AI enablement. And that’s what a lot of the conversations right now are is how do we enable the sales force or the service team to provide better support for customers? But ultimately with AI, you’re still, to my point, we’ve been doing this for decades. So now, how do we start to connect to what the customer’s trying to accomplish? And that has to be led by more than just a process or a chatbot, which again, we’ve been using for a long time in the call center space.

Brian Betkowski:

We definitely hear a lot of clients, because we talk about automation and AI with a lot of clients, and hearing this often, which is like, “Well, we don’t just want to automate bad processes.” And so that’s definitely a concern of a lot of folks. And then there’s the personalization aspect that you were referring to, I think, a little bit in the one-on-one. So I’d love to hear more maybe examples or things that you’re hearing when you’re talking to clients about things that… What are they doing to account for these issues?

Brittany Christian:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think I’ll share that in just a minute, but I would say a specific example I’ve had recently where it was a B2C experience, I was ordering from a home improvement store. And I would say it was a two-month journey that I went through. And it wasn’t just a single transaction. It was installing flooring in my house. And I went in and said to the salesperson, “This is ultimately what I’m trying to accomplish, to put the house on the market by this date.”

But through that journey, I had single interactions with the sales team, the inside sales team when they did my quote, the install scheduling team, the actual installers. And each one was fine to not good. And ultimately, we missed the date because the original carpet we ordered was back ordered, and the installers couldn’t get us in for two weeks.

And when I think about that, that really erodes the value proposition of that company. So I’m sure many smart consultants over the years have said, “You need to bring quoting into a single centralized operation.” That’s right. That’s good because that scales, right? But then how do we make sure that the individual customer product or service that you’re offering doesn’t get eroded through that process? Because if somebody had called me and said, “The carpet’s back ordered,” I would’ve said, “Great, I don’t care. Pick a different color. Anything to get me in by the original date.” But it just followed through their process. So that’s one of the ways I think that we can see this improvement.

And this is part of what we’re talking with a lot of clients about is using AI as orchestration. So creating internal AI agents that aren’t necessarily taking away the customer interaction, although I do think there are use cases for that, but are connecting to at scale the original customer interaction real time on the phone, providing data and feedback and questions that an agent can ask if it’s a phone-based interaction to follow-ups and proactive tailored communications after the fact. And I think there’s this world we envision where, again, we could really scale to the orchestration of AI is enabling Ed’s individual need in that moment on a retail or consumer basis, not necessarily massive projects only.

Ed Haines:

So part of that process you’re talking through there is there’s, I imagine, a lot of different people involved in it, and a lot of different people with different things going on in their lives and different jobs. And so that-

Brittany Christian:

Incented differently.

Ed Haines:

Right, exactly. Yes. And so that culture becomes such an important part of it. How can AI help string that together? Because 10 great experiences get outweighed by one bad one at the end of the day. And one bad experience within a larger process can also kill that.

Brittany Christian:

Yeah. I think AI can definitely monitor at a bigger scale than we’ve ever seen. And again, I think the care space in particular has been doing this for a long time by necessity. But I think, actually, I would say AI can’t solve the culture problem. That’s really going to be on the leaders of the company to say ultimately what’s most important is a culture of customer experience.

Because one of the questions we often get is who owns the customer experience? How do we bring that into one central organization? And I think what I would say is you need the capabilities of customer experience in a org. That you would have a team of people that maybe that is their role is to monitor the orchestration, provide feedback, optimizeze, connect across the organizations. But the actual execution and delivery of that is everybody’s responsibility.

And so if my only goal is to drive the most sales possible in a quarter, that’s what I’m going to do, but it might be at the cost of a fragmented customer experience. I’m going to call my sales rep for some things, and then I might have a negative experience with the customer care team because they’re really ultimately disconnected and siloed.

So I do think that AI can enable those things at scale, again, to have a agentic AI potentially experience where what if there was an AI tool that had been, they had put in from when I entered the store, they’d put in my ultimate goal, that AI enablement is essentially tracking my journey throughout. That’s been one of the challenges is that we do all this customer journey work, and then we try to embed it within people, process, and technology, but nobody is really able at scale to measure the end-to-end interactions and report back on that. And I think now we have the opportunity to be able to do that and provide feedback in a way that customer care reps on the frontline when they pick up the phone have actionable intelligence to have a conversation with a customer.

Brian Betkowski:

You were mentioning, well, there’s that old adage of if a lot of people own something, then no one owns something. And I don’t know what year it was, but a while back when there was the CX as a role, even as a C-level role, started to come into favor. What have you seen? Is that still in favor? Has it moved to somewhere else in the organization? Is it more shared now? What’s the trend there?

Brittany Christian:

Yeah, we are still having this debate, I would say. So we do have a lot of chief experience officers out there. And I do think you need, again, that capability of defining the customer experience and measuring it and knowing how it flows throughout the organization. But ultimately, you can’t have a single organization that is accountable for delivering that customer experience because you have to rely on a sales organization and a service organization and a fulfillment or manufacturing team that is enabling that.

And so I think maybe that has been the disconnect is you do need the central ownership over definition, monitoring, and that capability. But I think we can’t say that, well, that’s the customer experience team’s problem. They need to solve for it. And say, no, no, no. We all own the customer experience and we all own… And that’s when you think about what truly makes the great companies great, I mean, everybody loves to talk about Disney or Amazon being their mission is the most customer-centric organization on the planet, I think.

So that ultimately says, yes, we sell goods, we sell things. Disney is we sell experiences, memories. But how do we do that? Well, in each interaction, whatever I’m responsible for in the company, my ultimate goal is to provide for my customer, and make sure that they’re excited and happy, or whatever the thing is that they need at that moment.

Ed Haines:

And think about technology, and when you put technology into a process like that, sometimes it can take away from that human part and people can step back. But what I think I hear you saying is it should enable that to happen. But what kind of things can you do to make sure that suddenly all these agentic, all these agents managing and orchestrating the process, people don’t rely on that so much that they miss that real human connection.

Brittany Christian:

Yeah. And I think that’s the risk, right? I think the risk of going too far to removing customer interactions or calls and essentially treating it as solely a new channel. The way that we would talk about self-service or IVR self-service back decades ago. I don’t think that we want to do that where it’s solely you’re interacting with an agentic AI solution. I think it can be a channel option, but I think that you ultimately, the bigger vision for me is that you’re enabling at scale that single rep where you may not have a dedicated, often, there’s no dedicated team supporting unless you’re in a B2B space. And even then, you’re still going to be using a group of people.

So it’s that connectedness, it’s that real-time engagement. And that’s, I think, what we’re seeing, particularly with our B2B and B2B2C clients, is that they’re building internal AI solutions that are enabling connectedness across their ERP and their customer facing portal and providing that information real time while they’re on the call. And then also that personalization after the fact where now where I might have only been able to do a certain number of customers or amount of work in a day, that scales 10X when you add an AI agent in there that can actually go look up the last interaction Brittany had with her account manager in the field, and then provide some context to that. So I do think it has the opportunity to break down some of those barriers between sales and service and provide that connectedness of what’s the actual experience.

Brian Betkowski:

Yeah. So it’s interesting, we’ve been talking about the experience and the people that provide the experience. If we took a second and we just transformed and we played the role of the customer for a second, what would you say is the voice of the customer these days? I mean, one thing that’s very challenging is that customer is so different. The baby boomer customer versus the high schooler or just out of college person. I mean, night and day difference. But what would you say is the voice of these customers? What are they saying about these experiences that we’re talking about, and where would you say you see that going over the next maybe five to 10 years?

Brittany Christian:

Yeah, it’s a great question. In the perfect world, you would not… And I would say, I think most of our clients, what they’re working on right now are things that should not even be noticeable to any customer. And that is, again, the perfect world. But I think when we think about the different generations of customer, ultimately they still want to have their need met. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish.

So in all of these cases, generative AI should be enabling that faster. I would say for most people, what you’re probably hearing and what we hear from customers and clients on the flip side is, “I don’t want to just talk to a machine.” And it’s the same thing we heard when IVR came out with automation years ago. But I think that people are really surprised when it ultimately is able to meet their need.

And I think it’s the same debate we’ll end up having where we talked about how long do I wait in the queue when I call in? And some companies were going towards, oh, 30 seconds, and you have to pick up the phone. But actually a customer’s willing to wait a little bit longer. All the research shows the customer will wait a little bit longer if you can guarantee that you’re going to meet their need the first call. If I have to call you back twice, we’re going to have real problems. And I think we’re going to see the same thing in these cases where I actually don’t mind if I’m talking to agentic AI if, one, you’re able to meet my need in that call, or if we get into trouble, I’m able to automatically get to a person.

Ed Haines:

Right. And quickly as well. Not, yeah.

Brittany Christian:

Yeah. So I think the other research I think would probably show, of course, there’s different channel preferences with different generations of customers, mostly where the newer generations don’t really want to talk to anybody if they can avoid it altogether. But I think ultimately it comes down to that you’re able to meet the need to begin with. And that the agentic AI, whether it’s customer facing or not, and I think that’s a big strategy question that companies are going to need to answer, are able to meet their needs in the first place.

Brian Betkowski:

Yeah. I’ve noticed this about myself because I’m obviously really into AI. So when I call and it’s an AI agent, I get kind of excited about that. But what I’ve noticed about myself is that as it feels more realistic, my expectations on the experience go up. As in I lose patience for pauses or things. So that’s something that, as we try to use these more fancy technologies, we have to make sure that they keep up with the expectations of customers or else that could be.

Ed Haines:

Yeah. I mean, I’ve seen some of your AI prompts, so I totally understand why you lose patience. But I was thinking of something similar as well as there needs to be some mistakes or some sort of human element to something as well. I had an experience the other day where I could have sworn this person was an AI chatbot, but I don’t think it was because I asked her to write some Python code, and she seemed very puzzled by it. But it was like at some point it was too good, and they were being too nice in a way. There’s this sort of balance between, especially as we go forward in the years with this, the balance between what’s real and what’s not.

Brian Betkowski:

Yeah, make it feel more human.

Ed Haines:

It needs to be real. Well, sorry, go ahead.

Brian Betkowski:

No, go ahead.

Ed Haines:

I had another question though around this. I suppose when you mentioned all this stuff coming together and all these different channels, so omnichannel and omnichannel strategy is a must in that case then, right? I mean, before you even really start thinking about AI, you really need to make sure the way that all your customers are communicating with you are coming through and all joined up in a way that makes sense, not just on the surface of it, but integrated internally. I mean, is that the first step in all of this?

Brittany Christian:

Yeah, I think it can be parallel. Because I think you can start to enable and improve some of the things from an automation perspective with AI at the same time as you’re defining your omnichannel strategy. But I think from an omnichannel perspective, that there’s really two places where clients seem to ask us the most questions. One being, how do I decide what interaction goes where in what channel? And then the second that we are often talking about with clients is how do I make sure that when I move between channels, that’s ultimately what we’re talking about, that it’s seamless and that my information and my maybe now sentiment when we think about AI enablement, that that is carried forward.

There is nothing that infuriates me more than having to repeat information between an IVR… And I have a lot of patience with an IVR interaction. But when you ask me something, and then I get on a call with an agent and they ask me the exact same thing, and this is not even AI, this is basic blocking and tackling of the experience.

So I do think you need to have a perspective of what are the needs and intents that the customer’s trying to accomplish? Again, back to the outcome that the customer’s trying to drive. Through which of my channels am I mostly trying to solve and serve? And then how do we, and I think that’s the AI orchestration piece, how do we enable a retail storefront experience if I’m on my app, on my phone while I’m in there to be connected so that I’m not having to repeat. And I think that’s maybe where we start to see the scale of AI.

Ed Haines:

Yeah. And AI is only as powerful as the data that you have is really what you’re saying, right? At the end of the day, you need to orchestrate it.

Brian Betkowski:

Well, this has been great. If I had to ask just a closing question, if you fast forward 10 years from now or more, what’s unrecognizable in this space? What do you think might be the biggest disruptor or change, other than AI as a technology thing. But what do you think that when we’re experiencing businesses and as a consumer, what do you think’s going to be the most just radical change, radical difference 10 or 15 years from now?

Brittany Christian:

I do. I think the biggest thing will start to be omnichannel experiences will be more connected. So right now you get the sense that you’re being followed, so to speak. But I think it’ll just be more seamless and more natural, and our expectations will increase significantly in that time. But I think you’ll start to, I would hope, see more connectedness and empathy in those interactions with real people, whether it’s a B2C transaction or B2B, moving more to the proactive account management space. But that, yes, I think you’re going to see individual interactions that are just with AI. But again, that’s no different than what we’ve seen in the chatbots of the last couple decades.

Ed Haines:

Or AI to AI. Because you will interface with AI, but what if you have your own AI that you’re…

Brittany Christian:

Yeah.

Ed Haines:

There’s a classic example they give of you want to make a restaurant reservation, you want to call 500 restaurants. Well, you can’t do that and you really need an AI to do that. And if they all have AI agents, then it’s just basically one big communication thing. And then really does customer experience then not matter in that process? It’s actually really more about outcomes in some ways. We take the human out of it. That’s just scary.

Brian Betkowski:

Well, we could easily go down a big rabbit hole right now. So to avoid that, I’m going to say thank you so much for joining us

Brittany Christian:

My pleasure.

Brian Betkowski:

That was really fun. We’d love to do that again sometime and go a little deeper on some of these topics.

Brittany Christian:

Definitely. Yeah.

Brian Betkowski:

Thanks for joining us.

Brittany Christian:

Thank you, guys.