Experience Action

CX Pulse Check - January 2025

• Jeannie Walters, CCXP • Episode 101

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It's time for the first CX Pulse Check of 2025. Special guest co-host Andrew Carothers, CCXP, joins Jeannie Walters to discuss the evolving landscape of customer experience in 2025, highlighting innovative strategies by companies like AT&T and Samsung alongside challenges posed by automation, as seen in the Waymo incident. The discussion emphasizes the need for empathy, proactive engagement, and a comprehensive understanding of customer journeys to foster loyalty in a competitive market.

Through fascinating examples and anecdotes, they highlight how blending digital tools with the human touch is crucial in orchestrating a seamless and superior customer experience.

About Andrew Carothers, CCXP:
Andrew Carothers, CCXP, is a Customer Experience executive known for developing innovative CX strategies that grow revenue, increase renewal rates, and expedite customer adoption. A founding member of Cisco System’s CX function, he helped build the function with a focus on digital experience and partners. He’s a 12-time International Customer Experience award winner, frequently writes and speaks on CX topics, and co-authored The Publicity Handbook (McGraw Hill), a Fortune Book Club selection. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Advisors for the University of San Francisco’s School of Management Strategic Artificial Intelligence program and as a judge for US and international CX competitions.

Follow Andrew on...
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-carothers/

Articles Mentioned:
AT&T Says It Will Now Credit You for Outages and Long Customer Service Wait Times (Gizmodo) -- https://gizmodo.com/att-says-it-will-now-credit-you-for-outages-and-long-customer-service-wait-times-2000547491
Samsung’s smart fridges will use AI to suggest groceries to buy on Instacart (The Verge) -- https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/2/24334411/samsung-instacart-smart-fridge-partnership
LA man nearly misses flight as self-driving Waymo taxi drives around parking lot in circles (CBS News) -- https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/la-man-nearly-misses-flight-as-self-driving-waymo-taxi-drives-around-parking-lot-in-circles/

Resources Mentioned:
Take the CXI® Compass assessment -- CXICompass.com
Experience Investigators Website -- experienceinvestigators.com

Want to ask a question? Visit askjeannie.vip to leave Jeannie a voicemail! (And don't forget to follow Jeannie on LinkedIn! www.linkedin.com/in/jeanniewalters/)

Jeannie Walters:

Welcome to the first episode of the year for the Experience Action Podcast and it's that episode you look forward to every month. It's our January CX Pulse Check episode for 2025. As always, I am so excited because we have a very special co-host where we will be breaking down a few things in the news that hopefully all of us in the customer experience world can maybe learn from lessons, inspiration, to-dos and maybe some not to-dos as well. So why don't you help me welcome our co-host to the stage here. This is Andrew Carothers is with us. Andrew, how are you?

Andrew Carothers:

Hi, Jeannie, I am doing great. Happy New Year to you.

Jeannie Walters:

Thank you, Happy New Year to you, Happy 2025. And we were joking that it's only been a few days, but we're already kind of like. I don't know if I'm going to buy the trial right?

Andrew Carothers:

Exactly!

Jeannie Walters:

I don't know, we're still kicking the tires on this one. But, Andrew, now you've been in the customer experience field a long time you were most recently with Cisco and you have a lot of experience in digital experience, so I would love for you to share a little bit more about who you are with our audience.

Andrew Carothers:

Sure, I've been in CX for about 15 years. I joined Cisco in a marketing capacity. I think a lot of people in CX come from maybe customer support or marketing. I kind of think of those as the parents of the CX discipline. So I came in for marketing and then when Cisco created a CX function about 15 years ago, I was one of the 50 co-founders of that and 50 may sound like a large number, but out of 65,000 employees it was a very small number.

Andrew Carothers:

So it helped to create the CX function at Cisco and always had an emphasis on the digital component.

Andrew Carothers:

And originally it was digital as a way to scale to our thousands of partners and tens of thousands of customers. But I think over the past certainly 15 years, but I would say even five years, so just predating the pandemic we've seen a shift in the industry of what our customers want. So digital is not just a way to scale to maybe the lowest dollar customer sort of the long tail but rather customers want a digital first experience. We'll get into this a little bit later. They want to be able to connect with humans as well. So I'm not saying digital only, but the role of digital in what our customers experience, not just in tech and not just in B2B, but in a B2C world as well, has grown in prominence as well. So my background in CX is it goes back 15 years and starting the function and really delving in on the digital side. Also because of Cisco's business being very partner focused, very heavily focusing on how to create a CX function that operates directly with customers but also through our partners.

Jeannie Walters:

So important and I think B2B and tech and all of those things there are so many layers right to the customer experience and I think, one of the things that I, I don't know if it's privileged or just because I've been around a while, looking back on the evolution of digital as even a property, even an idea, it's really exciting to see, and we're gonna talk about a few things today that relate to all of this. We're covering a lot of ground today. We're covering how to connect with customers, predictive customer experience, all sorts of things. So I think we should dive right in. What do you think?

Andrew Carothers:

Let's do it. Let's do it. Lots to talk about.

Jeannie Walters:

So our first story today is really right, in line with what we were just talking about. So this is from Gizmodo and the headline is AT&T says it will now credit you for outages and long customer service wait times. Now what this doesn't say in the headline is how they're doing this. This is essentially a proactive thing that they're doing. If you have an outage for more than 20 minutes, they are saying that they're just going to credit your bill for a day's worth of internet service, and if you wait for customer service in their call center for more than five minutes, they're going to send you a $5 Visa gift card.

Jeannie Walters:

Now this may not sound like much, but I was intrigued by how proactively they're offering to do this, and there have been some really great studies lately showing that this does help with longevity. This does help with customer loyalty, but it's a complicated business AT&t. They have a lot of customers, so I'm curious on your perspective of this, on, like the execution of it and the strategy of it and the weighing the pros and cons of this. What are your thoughts?

Andrew Carothers:

Yeah, I think it's a smart move by AT&T. Full disclosure, I'm an AT&T mobile customer, so I think it's a smart move for a couple of reasons. The main reason is AT&T, Spectrum, other cable and phone companies. They're now in a world where they can see competition coming. When the Bells were broken up years ago it created a little bit of competition, but not much. But now, with Starlink and other similar type of over-the-top providers coming, they can see that even in rural areas there are options for their customers and lots of times these utilities have poor reputations in their customers' minds. I think that, and so when they get, when those customers get options to move, I think they're like they're ready to go to try something else. I cut the cord in my own home from a cable perspective a little while ago for exactly the same reason. So therefore I think this is a they're being proactive, but it's also proactively defensive, or the difficult competition that they're going to face in the very close up, you know, in the not too distant future, let me put it that way. So what I think it ties on here is what do customers want? So I don't have knowledge of what the financial impact of this is going to be in terms of potential outlays of cash. But let's assume that they've done the research to determine what they think the likelihood of their rate of not being able to meet the expectations they're setting are and the cost of that et cetera, and they're weighing that against some expectation of what the results on the positive side the return on this investment in building a better customer experience, will be. So let's assume they've done that calculation.

Andrew Carothers:

It says a couple of things. One, there is a calculation for what the return on the expected improvement in customer expectation will be. So I don't want to gloss over that AT&T has probably done that calculation and then made the move to move forward, Because that looks at sort of not only current operational data how many days and how many customers does that affect that we are currently having outages? What will be the impact of this? What improvements do we think we can make? And therefore shortening the number of days, shortening the number of customers affected and therefore the economic impact of that?

Andrew Carothers:

Right, that's going to be hard work on their part to do the backend operational improvements to solve some of these issues more rapidly than they're solving them today and half of the past few years. That is difficult work. So, number one point love that they are presumably looking at determining the financial impact of improving the experience they provide their customers. Number two they've got a long road ahead when it turns to the back office operational improvements they need to make. That's the critical component, in my view, to an improved customer experience or even maintaining an existing customer experience. What people oftentimes focus on is the customer facing component of the experience. What's the journey mapping? What are the moments that matter? How easy is it to navigate information?

Jeannie Walters:

The tip of the iceberg, right.

Andrew Carothers:

Totally important, but cannot be done effectively.

Jeannie Walters:

That's right.

Andrew Carothers:

Acting on that and providing that front-end experience, customer facing, can't be done effectively without connecting on the back end data sources.

Jeannie Walters:

Yeah.

Andrew Carothers:

Um, business teams and the silos associated with those, breaking those down, platforms and people.

Jeannie Walters:

Tools, technology, processes, it all is together.

Andrew Carothers:

It's so hard to do, especially for a legacy company like AT&T, where they are ingrained in decades of databases that don't talk to others.

Andrew Carothers:

So kudos to them for them to take this on. I think they're doing this because, as I said, the impending competition lets them know we don't have a choice, because we're going to lose a lot of customers if we don't do this.

Jeannie Walters:

Right! I agree. I think, you know, the other part of that disruption is they are not going, to your point, they are a big legacy company.

Jeannie Walters:

They are not as nimble as a startup who might be right now trying to disrupt the industry or, you know, popping up from one of the spinoffs of Starlink or something like that. So I think that whenever we think about investing in customer experience, we have to think about it as a way to invest in innovation and innovation only happens to your point, with all the stuff in the background. We have to figure out how do we actually execute this. So I think it's a great move. I am really I'm going to be watching it closely and I'm also curious because in this industry, as you know, people follow right, like other other brands are going to say wait, they're doing what, we need to do what, and who's going to try this out? Who's going to follow?

Jeannie Walters:

But I think it shows how customers are not just expecting the bare minimum and they're not willing to put up with it. They know that there are options. And so if you are not competing against the customer who's about to leave you, then you're really not competing. You are. You're just, you know waiting for them to leave you. And this next story I'm so, I'm so interested in this one because I think it's like we've been promised flying cars, right. We've been promised the Jetsons for years.

Jeannie Walters:

Who doesn't want a robot maid, right? And we've talked about some of those innovations coming out, but this one, I think, is pretty intriguing because it also shows the potential partnerships which you have so much experience with. But this is from the Verge and the headline is Samsung smart fridges will use AI to suggest groceries to buy on Instacart. And essentially what they're doing here is those big, beautiful refrigerators that now have screens where you can literally look inside your refrigerator. Instead of just a camera, they have an AI camera now that basically can identify,

Jeannie Walters:

I think right now the number is not very big, it's like 37 different things food items, including fresh produce, and things like this. And then they have an Instacart partnership where, if you have an Instacart list going, it can say oh, I put, you know, we ran out of eggs. I put the eggs you like on your Instacart order and there's a lot here to love. And it also makes me think about sometimes when we have these conveniences and then we kind of forget and we don't turn them off, and then suddenly we might be getting like oh wait, I didn't want to order the eggs because I'm going out of town or all those things. But I just think the partnership aspect of this is really intriguing, and Instacart is really investing in that partnership models. They have partnership with like Home Depot and a few others now. So what's your take on this? Do you think our refrigerators are going to become sentient and take over?

Andrew Carothers:

I mean I'm giggling because there's so many funny elements to the story. I can imagine, as you pointed out, somebody comes home from vacation. They've got stores and stores of eggs and apples and things. Yeah, yeah, I mean we've all gone on vacation and forgotten to shut off the mail, right? And then you come back. For sure, so like that's kind of funny and also this is sort of peak innovation and peak, you know, laziness too.

Jeannie Walters:

But laziness equals convenience, right, like that's really what that means.

Andrew Carothers:

From a CX perspective and a partnership perspective.

Andrew Carothers:

I do love this, however, because I love a couple of things from a from a foundations of business perspective, which CX is should be interwoven into at all companies because of everything we've been discussing.

Andrew Carothers:

But there's this concept of right there, Samsung looking and saying we're not just selling refrigerators.

Andrew Carothers:

We are, you know, and starting from a CX perspective to understand what is it that our customers want, right?

Andrew Carothers:

Do they simply want a box of a certain size and color that will keep their produce cold, or do they want something else?

Andrew Carothers:

Let's find out, and by talking to customers and surveying customers and, I would assume, using AI to analyze data so they can be more predictive, not just in terms of what you're talking about the functionality of the refrigerator but in terms of predicting what do our customers do, what do they buy, what features, et cetera to then get a deeper, better understanding of their customers, to know they are looking to not just store what they bought at a grocery store, like keep it fresh, but also to you know what the friction points in that customer journey from I need food to I'm getting food, to I'm storing it so that it's fresh when I'm going to use it in my home, and understanding that whole process and the role that the refrigerator they sell plays as part of that process. So, like that's, step one is from a CX perspective, understanding their customers and looking at it holistically, as opposed to in the little box in which the refrigerator sale plays.

Jeannie Walters:

It's a great point. It's a great point and I think the the fault that you're pointing out is how many organizations start like they have product teams out the wazoo right, like they are obsessed with their products, but they think that the product is what somebody's buying, but really it's what we can do with the product, or how it helps our lives, how it's more convenient, easier. It makes me feel a certain way, right, like I can show people look my refrigerator orders my groceries for me. Isn't that cool. That makes people feel a certain way. So I think it's a really important point and it is one of the things that I personally love about the idea of journey mapping, because it forces those questions. It forces us to go through that process and think what is actually happening here with the customer? They're not actually thinking, I mean in you know, if you're doing a remodel, yes, you're thinking, oh, we need a refrigerator. But to your point, I could get that on Craigslist and get an avocado green from the 70s. It probably still works, right.

Jeannie Walters:

So it's a really really good point.

Andrew Carothers:

Yeah, so from a product perspective, you're right. I mean, this helps distinguish them from competitors on a features and function capability, but also I think you touched on something so important, which is the emotional component. It helps them to not only from a features and function sort of say, I want to feel cool, I want to feel modern, innovative, etc. But also they understand what I'm trying to do, which is not buy a refrigerator, I'm trying to, you know I'm busy, I'm trying to take care of the house, the kids, the job, like whatever. I'm trying to simplify my life.

Andrew Carothers:

And I think the focus on simplification is so critical for all CX approaches, as exemplified here. And then to touch on the partner side, I love that they looked at the broader journey and then looked at how can we simplify that? How can we bring simplification, how can we remove friction points in the broader journey, whether that's a direct sort of feature or function we can add to our product, or whether it's by looking more broadly and then partnering more broadly. So bringing an Instacart, which makes perfect sense, from a complimentary service provider, but doing so in a way that sort of expands the footprint they have without spinning up a competitor to Instacart to try to keep it all in-house.

Andrew Carothers:

So I love that it's like when an airline realizes we're not just in the business of flying people and goods elsewhere, they then partner with hotels, rental cars. We're in the people and goods movement business. Even hotels, for example, that we're not just in the sort of short-term housing for people on trips, especially business people, the more profitable customer, but we are in the people connection business. So some hotels, even before the pandemic, set up a sort of conference facilities that also include either individual or group remote meeting facilities.

Andrew Carothers:

So if you're going to come stay the night great, but if you're just local and you need those facilities, great. We've got that too. Thinking more broadly about where they play, as opposed to I'm the center of the universe, my business is the center of the universe, which is not a customer focused approach. That's the, you know, that's an internal focused approach.

Jeannie Walters:

Yep, and I think the you know, in this specific example, Instacart customers are, you know, Instacart customers. They have have it on their phone. They always have a list going there. This is what they do, and so they might not go to a Best Buy today and say I need a Samsung fridge, but they might do that now. They might walk in and say I'm going to request this because I know this is going to help me, because this is the type of customer I am. So there's all sorts of interesting kind of overlaps and it's very human when you get right down to it. It is very human and it's about understanding how do customers behave? What do we really want and how can we best serve them in that moment in their journey, like the way that they're living their lives, they're not actually focused on our products and services, they're just living their lives trying to do things.

Jeannie Walters:

So, speaking of this, this might be my favorite story today.

Andrew Carothers:

It's mine, it's mine.

Jeannie Walters:

We have to get to this one because it's so goofy and fun. So this you probably have heard about this one because it made quite a bit of news. But we're talking about the Waymo, the RoboTaxi, and this happened actually in Arizona, but it was for a man who lives in Los Angeles and the headline from CBS News says LA man nearly misses flight as self-driving Waymo taxi drives around parking lot in circles and if you go to the site or if you just look it up, the video is everywhere because he, his name is Mike Johns.

Jeannie Walters:

He actually recorded himself in this car while trying to connect to their customer service, saying I don't know what's happening, did someone hack this? He couldn't even release the seat belt and he was just going around in a circle in this self-driving car and the point that I thought was I mean, it's a compelling story anyway, but his point, when people have asked him about it, he said there just wasn't a lot of compassion or empathy from the person he talked to and she was basically saying I'm working on it, we'll get it fixed. And Waymo, in their defense, stated that it was only about five minutes. He did make his flight, but it created all this and they didn't charge him for the ride and all those things.

Jeannie Walters:

But, I think we are in a very specific time in our history as humankind right now, where we are starting to experiment with more and more of these automated tools that always required human stewardship, really for decades or even longer, and now we're making this move and the trust level is going up because these are working in a lot of ways, but then we have something that goes wrong and it's like a whole new rule book for how to handle it. So what? What did you think about this one?

Andrew Carothers:

After I stopped laughing.

Jeannie Walters:

It is a funny video. It's like funny and I I had I was like anxious for him too. Yeah.

Andrew Carothers:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I agree with you. We are in a period of dramatic and rapid innovation, and there will be hiccups along the way. I think that, being up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Waymo has been doing testing for at least a year, if not two years, I know there's a lot of testing that takes place before rolling out the car. So, that said, there will still be issues that come up. So the question then right, really the meta question is how do we then respond to those questions? And this is not only sort of a philosophical question when it comes to dealing with problems that erupt with new innovative technologies, but even in our own businesses, our own lives, you know, just old school, things happen, right. So how does the supplier or the vendor or the service provider, how do they respond? So, which goes to the AT&T story at the beginning as well. I think that there is a misperception that innovation or digital or technology is binary with the human element and empathy.

Andrew Carothers:

I think that it's a matter of execution. Sometimes that's how it's implemented, right. We're going to use a company, says you know, internally, they don't say this externally. We're going to use digital tools, a chat bot, simply our website, whatever you know, emails. We're going to use digital channels to communicate with our customers proactively as well as from a troubleshooting perspective. As a way to cut costs, we're going to cut out the human support element and just force our customers right.

Andrew Carothers:

So I think that's a mistake, right, If you make it binary like that. It's a mistake. I think the companies that will provide the type of customer experience that their customers want and expect and given opportunities to leave to go to a competitor demand, those companies that will be successful are the ones that combine the best of human with the best of digital right. So digital provides a much faster approach. So if somebody wants to go on a website and find information or, you know, interact with a chat bot or whatever it might be, it's a much faster way to get information. So that's why a lot of people love it. It's really no different than going to the supermarket and using the you know the self-serve scanning versus standing in line. That said companies that provide a digital channel or multiple digital channels need to build those channels with human empathy in mind. Meaning the actual building, the development of that channel, and the processes that are going to operate it moving forward need to be created in conjunction with the customer. Customer interviews, customer data analysis, et cetera. So upfront, before it even rolls out, It's built with the centered around the customer.

Jeannie Walters:

Yes, Just like we were talking about with the refrigerator.

Andrew Carothers:

Just like that. Exactly. And then you know if something happens and a digital channel is first option, there needs to be a simple, easy and easy to find option to connect with a human. So I'm not sure if that was the case with the Waymo guy, but for most companies just providing an easy way. I've seen companies that do this very well. I've been frustrated with companies that don't do it well at all. And then the other element, which is not new, is when customers connect with those humans. Digital channel as well, but focusing on the inside. There needs to be value provided by that agent. So, I have been struggling to with my car manufacturer, I won't name him who was supposed to send me an adapter for my electric car, and it was. I've been waiting almost a year now for it.

Jeannie Walters:

Oh my goodness.

Andrew Carothers:

And it was supposed to come in October. Then it was December, now it's January. I called customer support. The number says if you have questions about this specific issue, call this number. So I called. Agent, had no information to tell me.

Jeannie Walters:

Oh my gosh, that's frustrating.

Andrew Carothers:

So, you've got to build in the empathy into the process and into the digital component as well as the human component, and you have to have again that back-end connectivity that we were talking about earlier, so that when people connect with you, whether digitally or human-based, that there's value in that process. and

Jeannie Walters:

And they know where you are on your journey, they know exactly what you're dealing with and I think the whole idea that we get so wrapped up in these innovations sometimes that we think it's all going to go exactly as planned.

Jeannie Walters:

And whenever we're talking with clients about how to innovate and plan, one of the big questions we need to ask is what if? What if this doesn't work? What if they can't reach somebody through that channel? What if that? You know? What if the chatbot is down? Where do they go? We have to really think through like what if it doesn't work? And I think that's what this highlights is that we sometimes get, we kind of fall in love with our own ideas and we think it's all going to work and we spend so much time and effort getting it right and we don't think about when things will go wrong, but they will. You know, like that's life we that's how it goes.

Andrew Carothers:

Yeah, so right about that.

Jeannie Walters:

So well, this was so fun, Andrew. I I mean, let's do this again.

Andrew Carothers:

Yeah, I would love to cause. I love, I love the opportunity to talk about sort of the fundamental practices of the discipline of customer experience from practical applications like this. I think it really helps people understand some of the big picture themes and processes that we like to talk about.

Jeannie Walters:

Right. I always say it's really easy to say just be nice to customers, right, like that's easy to say, but when you actually figure out what that means it's, it's a whole you know profession. So yeah, well, this was so fun. Thank you so much for joining me for CX Pulse Check. And if people want to know more about you, how can they reach out to you?

Andrew Carothers:

Best way to reach out to me is on LinkedIn. I'm easy to find. I love talking to people, so please do reach out, connect with me, and then we'll start a conversation.

Jeannie Walters:

Awesome and we'll make sure that link is in our show notes as well. So thank you and thanks to all of you out there for listening, for participating in the Experience Action podcast. Don't forget, you can always leave me a voicemail with your question that I can answer on a future episode at askjeannievip and, if you haven't already, check out the CXI Compass at experienceinvestigatorscom to find out where you are on your CX journey and see what the next steps could be for you. Thank you so much, thank you to our guests, thank you to all of us listeners and I really appreciate you here on episode 101 of the Experience Action Podcast.

People on this episode

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Jeannie Walters, CCXP

Host
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Andrew Carothers

Guest