Shawn Cordner (00:13.166)

Hey everyone. Thanks for joining the amplitude of tech podcast. I’m Shawn Cordner, chief marketing officer of Amplix. Today I had a great conversation with Steve Blood. He is the VP of market intelligence at five nine. we hit on all the big trends and topics in the CX space, where it’s been, where it’s at and where it’s going. I think you’ll find this conversation as interesting as I did.

 

Shawn Cordner (00:38.368)

Steve Blood, thanks for joining us today. are you? Good. You get the luck of being the first guest that I’ve worn a collared shirt for, for the podcast. Usually I’m wearing t-shirt, so I got dressed up for you today.

 

I’m very good, thank you.

 

Steve Blood (00:53.336)

I’m saying I put a shirt on as well today.

 

Well, I’m glad you were A-sure. That’s right direction. I’ve seen you on some calls before, no. So Steve, maybe just start off, you know, who you are, what you do and where you come from.

 

Yeah, thanks. Yeah. So I’m Steve Blood. I’m VP for market intelligence at Five9. So that draws on a lot of my previous experiences in the industry. I’ve been here now since March 2024. So that’s about 20 months, I think, something like that. I did have a very, very long career with Gartner prior to joining Five9. was

 

I think about 23 years. And in that time, I used to write Magic Quadrants. focused very much on Five9 and its major competitors. And I spent most of my time advising end user organizations on tech decisions in and around the customer service, customer experience space. But I did have a proper job before that. So I came across my first call center 35 years ago. I was a sales engineer working for Mercury Communications, which was the alternative to the British Telecom when the

 

UK telecom market deregulated. And the company is called Dixons. It was a, sold basically white and brown goods. And they had this novel idea of sending out catalogs of their products and they had a call center for people to call in to order stuff. And then they sent it out in the mail. So Dixons Direct, it was called and that was my first exposure to call centers and it kind of took off from there. I’ve been involved in

 

Steve Blood (02:35.734)

customer service, customer experience space for 35 years. some of it as an advisory, some of it as a in sales and then more more recently in in sales and marketing.

 

So I’m glad that you brought up the word call center because I, before this podcast started, I jumped on Google trends and I was just curious. So I did a comparison of search trends. So anyone that doesn’t know Google trends will track the volume of search terms. So you can type in a keyword and it’ll tell you over a given period of time, how frequently that term was searched. So I looked up and compared, the term CX customer experience, contact center.

 

and call center. And I was a little bit surprised by the results to be honest with you. A couple of things that jumped out at me was number one, call center remains pretty high and it’s been pretty steady over time where that’s fallen out of favor on this side of the industry on kind of the supplier and the advisor side. But it seems like end users are still calling it a call center. Contact center had kind of a late bump as did customer experience.

 

but CX, you saw a steady rise going back about, 15 years. So there’s been a window of about 15 years where the term CX has steadily grown, but you didn’t see a commensurate increase in the term customer experience until about 2025. And then you see a big jump, which I thought was interesting. So I wanted to get your perspective on that. And before I ask you what you think might be at play there, and if any of this even matters, but, you know, I, I,

 

I feel like it could be that practitioners have been searching for the term CX because that’s the industry term, right? That the vendors are using. But maybe it’s that the boardroom is starting to look a little bit closer about customer experience, maybe as a strategic component of the business. What do you think? Does this data tell us anything?

 

Steve Blood (04:37.868)

Yeah. And I think, obviously, you know, organizations run call contact centers for operational effectiveness. you know, some, some businesses, they’re, they, they’re problems. They want to fix them as quickly as possible. and they want to get onto the next customer in, some respects. They’re not in, know, I shouldn’t be saying this, but they’re not too concerned about whether you remain a customer with them. I mean, we talk about loyalty and things, but actually in and out and done.

 

you know, if you don’t want our product and then someone else will, will, will come along and, and, and, and take it from us. Other organizations that look at that as, you know, lifetime value, they want to continuously increase loyalty and things. And yet they have a more of a, a greater focus on customer experience. It is about the lifetime of the car of the customer with them. And so I think from that perspective, you know, the, cost of getting customers, you know, I forget the metric it’s.

 

Is it four or five times more than keeping one? Those sorts of things become more relevant if as a company you’re trying to grow. And you know, we’ve seen, we saw data, you know, moving through from Gartner last year leading into this year that, customer service leaders were targeted with growth. Companies want a growth trajectory. And when you’re in that sort of situation, then how you do, how you provide the experience to your customers matters a huge amount. So I think

 

I think the term CX, it’s been used and abused in some cases. You’re right, we’re all CX vendors. We’re a little bit cagey sometimes about what bit of CX we provide because it’s a massive function. It covers sales, marketing, digital commerce, as well as service and some of the other areas as well. I have to be very specific in some cases. I think we’re still on that growth.

 

trajectory. Despite some of the challenges, companies are still looking to especially take advantage of artificial intelligence to grow even more. So think customer experience is a very, very relevant term. I love the term myself. I think it’s very relevant. As consumers, I just had another poor customer experience this morning, which caused me to cancel the product. And I can guarantee you that company doesn’t care. And we move on.

 

Shawn Cordner (06:54.03)

It’s interesting that you say that because I listened to a podcast recently. There’s this podcast called 99 % invisible. And it’s, it’s about the kind of hidden design of the things around us that you don’t really, you take for granted, you don’t pay attention to these things. And the topic was contact centers, call centers, and they introduced a term that I had not heard and I’ve been in this industry for quite a long time, but I, I don’t come from the CX side. I come from the telecom side. So, yeah, and it was sold call center.

 

solutions, but I never really got that deep into the call center space. So, anyway, the term is sludge and the S have you heard this term? No, that’s a new one. Okay. So it’s not just me, right? Maybe they just made it up. You know, supposedly they had an insider, an industry insider that was giving them information about how, contact centers intentionally create friction and bad customer experiences for a variety of different incentives. not the least of which is to.

 

get you to not get that credit that you’re looking for or return that product that you want to return. They want to put up barriers to get in your way. My immediate thought was I’ve never met anyone in this industry, having been with Amplix now for a year and a half, maybe almost two years, we’re pretty deep in the CX space. I’m starting to make my, this is my coming out era for CX.

 

And so I’ve never met a professional in this space at all that has ever alluded to the idea that they want to put barriers. All I’ve ever heard about was how can we leverage technology to knock down these barriers? And ultimately it’s because they want to preserve revenue, which you’re saying may not always be top of mind, but as a marketer, and maybe you can relate, I always relate this back to brand, right?

 

In today’s social media driven world, you can do a lot of damage to your brand by giving a customer a bad experience. And so I can’t understand why someone would intentionally architect a bad experience. you know, it’s, it’s, it’s stepping over dollars to pick up pennies, right? It’s, it’s not a good practice in my mind to destroy your brand and create a reputation that would prevent people from wanting to purchase your product in the first place.

 

Shawn Cordner (09:10.978)

just in order to save a couple of dollars in breakage or returns or things like that. What do think?

 

Yeah, I think, I don’t think, mean, certainly in the customer service domain, it is incredibly stressful for staff to be listening to a customer or prospect shouting at them because what they’re talking about is completely obscure. It’s ridiculous. And they know it’s ridiculous. The customer knows it’s ridiculous, but there’s nothing they can do about it. because they’re not empowered to, and there are a lot of companies that run like that because operationally they’re looking to.

 

to your point, limit the cost of fixing a problem. So I don’t think the people necessarily, they would love to be in a better position to support them. And of course we find companies that allow staff and empower them to fix these problems. They enjoy their job more and they stay longer and so on. so it’s a vicious cycle in some respects. But yeah, I think the brand thing is interesting, especially in…

 

There’s an interesting company called Ryanair. don’t know, is it a European? The CEO is quite a character. You would almost think they pride themselves in having this awful brand, if you like, because so many times he comes out with statements that seem to be anti the experience, but it’s an incredibly successful AI. One of the largest in Europe.

 

and, and, so it’s working, but I think you’ve got to, you know, it does come down to brand, know, the brand for, for Ryanair is we fly you cheaply, no frills and don’t expect anything and step out of line and we’re hammer you. you know, and if you re if you know that and you realize that and you accept that, then for you, the brand is fine.

 

Steve Blood (11:00.558)

But others, you know, they will just, that’s not my experience with, with the American airlines or we’re United or whatever. can expect to get that experience with Ryanair. So getting that bit right, I think is very important, but I agree with you in general. I mean, as a, you know, marketeer and the idea that you would actively go out to destroy the brand does seem weird, but then at the same time, haven’t we just seen that with a failed chat box over the last couple of years?

 

They have literally destroyed some companies brands. It’s been very, very difficult to recover from them. So I don’t think it’s intentional, but it is an outcome of not doing things properly or carefully, should we say from that perspective, not enough planning.

 

Yeah. I, when I think about the bad interactions that I’ve had with the customer service team, it’s mostly about the process being broken. Right. I, I, I get to, you know, some sort of attendant or IVR or whatever, and then I have to jump through hoops to get validated. It doesn’t quite understand me or there’s, you know, it’s not taking the entry or whatever. makes it inconvenient to authenticate who I am.

 

takes a while to get to somebody I get to someone it’s the wrong person they transfer me to another place I have to give my information all over again. To your point they’re not empowered to fix my problem right that’s that’s a huge problem. What was your experience today that you had you don’t have to say the brand but what.

 

You

 

Steve Blood (12:29.816)

Well, unfortunately it was airline. tried to out. So the scenario was I booked a rental car through the airline. But of course it is a separate process. It doesn’t sit within the airline process, it sits outside. But I paid them my money and they said I was going to get a car that would be sufficiently large enough to take four people and three suitcases, which is what I wanted.

 

We’re traveling next month. when I went to the rental car, because the airline doesn’t have rental cars, it’s a partnership. When I went to the website of the rental company, they said that the car I’ve been allocated can only support one, can only support one suitcase. So I emailed them and they were very quick to get back to me and they said, well, according to what you’ve booked,

 

You’ve got one suitcase. Yeah, but that’s not, I sent you the doc. It says three suitcases. we need to get onto the airline because you booked it through them. When I then started chatting with Victor, the chat bot, they said, you’ve got to communicate with the rental car company. So neither wants to take responsibility. As a result, I canceled the order and I actually managed to book one. So within a month to go, I managed to book.

 

another vehicle for 70 % of the cost of the ones that I canceled. Fortunately, I was to cancel free of charge. That doesn’t always happen. Obviously, that just infuriates people further when they’re looking at adding more cost. But I don’t think anyone cares. In their situation, it’s okay. Well, if you don’t want that, we’ll find somebody else to take that vehicle. And that’s why when you look across Trustpilot, and airlines, and rental car companies,

 

Does anyone have a good score? Does anyone have a good rating? Everyone feels they’re being, you know, they’re being, they’re just, just taken for, you know, taken to the cleaners in, in, those situations. So, but they, don’t do a lot about it, necessarily. Now other premium brands and things, I mean, I will call out Apple as a premium brand. you know, they make good products, and they do listen to their customers and, in the very, very odd occasions I’ve had a problem.

 

Steve Blood (14:50.072)

they’ve fixed it. I think that drives that loyalty and so on. And you could argue that phones are commodities, right? I mean, everyone buys a phone every few years. So yeah, it’s where the industries are, I think, in its reflection of that.

 

Yeah, you’re right. It is a reflection of where the industries and the individual companies are because Apple is a great example where Apple’s not actually selling you a phone, right? Or whatever you call this thing these days, right? What they’re selling you is an experience. Yeah They’re they’re an experience They’re the king of creating great experiences, right? It’s the experience of the the software ecosystem and how the devices are interconnected It’s the experience of the design of the advice device the user

 

interface of the device. mean, just everything with Apple is about experience. Whereas you could argue that travel should be about the experience, but really it’s not. It’s about logistics and just moving bodies from one place to the next or giving you the logistical support so that you can take your family to wherever you’re taking them. And Ryanair is a great example of a brand that has intentionally taken the low price leader position, which every industry needs that.

 

Yep.

 

Steve Blood (15:57.708)

Exactly, yeah.

 

Shawn Cordner (16:07.18)

that player, right? So they’re being true to their brand by not caring about how you feel about their service. What they gave you was a cheap price and that’s all you really want.

 

That’s what you get.

 

I do want to go back to, you kind of brought, we were talking about the terms, right? Whether it’s contact center or call set or CX or customer experience. I’m jumping ahead. This is something I wanted to circle to later, but since you brought it up, I’m seeing some shifts in how, some of the key platforms, the, the CCAS platforms in this space are going to market how they’re talking about their services and that

 

The big shift that I’m seeing is a lot of them are starting to pull back on the term CCAS and starting to use the term AI enabled CX. And I’m wondering, you do you think that this is just capitalizing on kind of the marketing momentum of the term AI or is there an actual shift in philosophy there?

 

I think it’s a mix. think I’m going to go back now about 20 years to when the term customer relationship management started to become very popular and Tom Siebel was on stages and professing the brilliance of this personalized level of service for customers. And I was tracking Avara at the time and they said, we’re a CRM company. What exactly does that mean? you make you do call centers, contact centers.

 

Steve Blood (17:40.13)

And I think we have to balance this very carefully. You’re right that when you think about how CCAS platforms have developed, they are broader than just this narrow focus of customer service. Many of the seats are sold into sales environments. There’s analytics being used, predictive analytics to understand more about where customers would be potentially propensity to buy and so on.

 

There’s there is absolutely, it’s not just a case of it’s a contact center platform anymore. but I do think that sometimes, we do confuse our potential audiences, especially given that the, the number of people involved in a purchase these days is getting more sort of 11 or 12 is typical. Everyone has to understand what it is you offer so that they can play their part in, in, either selecting or rejecting.

 

I think we could do a little bit better. mean, yeah, it is all about AI, obviously. AI drives absolutely everything. There will be a time when we don’t use the term AI because it’s obvious. Remember computers used to be Intel inside. Who cares what the processor is anymore? So I think, yeah, it’s…

 

We have to be careful about, think, using some of those terms, but certainly CX is the phrase and AI enabled is, or AI powered. Yeah, we’re all doing it. And I think there’s a concern perhaps, my goodness, if we’re not doing that, we’re seen as laggards or as technology. A company doesn’t want to invest in. yeah, I think, but ultimately it’s interesting.

 

Again, when I back at Gartner, Gartner still has the contact central service magic quadrant, right? And they still have the customer engagement center CRM magic quadrant, because there are buyers specifically for those sets of capabilities. When those buyers stop, Gartner changes and they produce new material and things. And without a doubt, there are still, as we know, lots and lots of buyers who primarily are buying

 

Steve Blood (19:52.526)

a contact-lender platform. yeah, know, it’s a CCAS is still a very, very relevant term. And I think using it in disposably is probably, you know, the correct way to use it.

 

Yeah. I always thought of it as a hierarchy, right? Customer experience refers to more than just the technology platform that enables the interaction. There’s a large ecosystem of technology and not just technology, but principles, right? Processes and operations that go into it and humans. So I guess that’s a good definition of what CX is, right? It’s kind of the,

 

The aggregate of all of those things. It’s the technology, it’s the processes, it’s the design of how you engage. Um, and then, you know, AI, uh, contact center, uh, CCAS is a piece of that. It’s an enabling technology. AI is a piece of that. Do you see a time in the near future? Um, meaning one to three years, let’s say where AI becomes inextricable to the term CCAS or CX. Or are we there?

 

I think we’re almost there already, I think. mean, know, pretty much every package that would be offered to a buyer has got an element of artificial intelligence built into it. And so I think we are to some extent there. I think what changes, the level of investment, there are bundles, there are packages out there, but when you think specifically about

 

some of the generative models and the direction for self-service towards agentic AI. I think that will extract itself to some extent as a separate set of capabilities. Maybe we believe that the employee is not going away. I think I’m tired of hearing this still that AI is going to basically take jobs on mass.

 

Steve Blood (22:00.686)

It’s not true. It’s never going to happen. It’s kind of boring to keep hearing it. But I do think that what changes is how you operate the artificial intelligence. So if we imagine that a very large percentage of engagements would be served or supported autonomously, then what you’ve got is people that are basically supervising

 

the AI model. When you get to that point, the platform that we deliver takes the principle that there are more customers wanting to be served than there are employees to serve them. When you shift that into artificial intelligence automation, arguably you’ve got more processing capabilities available to support customers than there are customers needing to be supported. So those models do change. It’s still the whole routing piece.

 

connecting a customer to a resource or to an employee. It’s still very, very important today. That doesn’t go away overnight, but moving forward, you get to this point where actually, you know, the principle of automatic call distribution that we started with probably does start to go away. And at that point, I think there may be CCAS is not so relevant, but you know, companies are different phases of adoption here. And, know, we still, we still get, we still see reviews from customers saying,

 

You know, I moved to cloud and all of a sudden I was able to manage all of my phone calls far more effectively. For them that was, you know, that was Eureka moment, but for a company that’s been doing it for 10 years already, it’s so what? you know, companies themselves are at different phases of adoption.

 

I never thought of the AI adoption trend that’s happening right now and how quickly it’s being adopted as a numbers game, just a ratio thing, right? It’s, it’s, you’ve got X number of calls. You can only have so many people to staff those calls. If you can deflect some of those calls and those interactions into AI, then you have a better ratio of actual people to solve bigger, more complex problems than you do people calling in. And, and really AI also kind of enables.

 

Shawn Cordner (24:13.442)

the growth of those employees to be able to handle more complex problems, right? By giving them, you know, things like agent assist and access to more data, which to some extent, I think helps. You know, it makes them happier, right? It makes employees, employee satisfaction go up. Google famously did a study a while back about what makes their highest performing teams perform so well.

 

And one of the key things that they came up with was impact. They need to be able to feel like they can make decisions that they are able to impact the business and impact their stakeholders. so I can’t imagine that the contact center employees don’t feel the same thing, right? They want to be able to resolve those issues. They want that fulfillment to have an impact and AI provided they’re given kind of the ability to make decisions, AI can be the tool to help them make those better decisions.

 

absolutely agree. Yeah. I think everyone, everyone comes to work wanting to a good job, right? They don’t want to be shouted at and, you know, and be presented with a situation which they themselves think is completely bizarre, but there really is nothing they can do about it. You know, it is, but it’s, it’s, I think it’s a right to some extent is why, you know, newer startup companies do so much better because they just throw the rule book away. They don’t have any, they, they build the new rules, and they use new technology to do that. And so they are in a way better position.

 

to sort of address some of those challenges. And that’s often why newer companies starting up will get ahead of those established players. It’s business, isn’t it? I think it happens in many, many cycles. I think I agree that we do see that the staff are going to be playing more important roles. I suggest that maybe

 

They will be elevated to AI supervisors and they will then be scoring the quality of the engagement of the AI agent. you know, almost a role reversal to where we are today.

 

Shawn Cordner (26:18.702)

Sure. so right now there’s, mentioned it, there’s a rich ecosystem of these kind of bolt on AI solutions that you can add to your ecosystem. know, the CCAS players, they are also building that same functionality, natively into their platforms. So we’ve, we’ve got this, this big ecosystem right now, historically, what we’ve seen, at least on the telecom side of the industry is we go through these periods of a new technology comes out like VoIP, right? And it just.

 

It starts to adopt and you see the ecosystem grow and grow and grow. And there’s all sorts of new players that enter the scene. Then you go through a period of contraction and consolidation where the better platform, the bigger platform start to pick up the better or smaller players that are independent bolt on solutions to bring that functionality into their platform. then they start to dominate the gap gets wider and then the smaller players start to fall off.

 

So I wonder if you could just look into your crystal ball for a second. What do you think is going to happen with the big AI ecosystem that we’re seeing today in one to three, five years? Is it still going to be thriving or are we going to start to see some consolidation?

 

I think we will start to see some, I mean, you we think about where the hyperscalers are at. These are the companies that are likely to, you know, to benefit most. You know, they’re set up for it, right? And it’s all about processing. have data centers, you know. So I think they’re well placed, but then you then got to think about, well, are they going to be able to provide all of the use cases for all of the market segments?

 

themselves or actually would they find that working with vendors that focus in those specific areas is a better approach? I think that’s where we are right now today. Pretty much all the Seacast vendors partner up with hyperscalers in some form or another. We recognize that those hyperscalers are also to some extent competitors. That’s just the nature of the game. You have to ensure that your proposition

 

Steve Blood (28:21.728)

stands up to your target audience better than what theirs does. that’s just a standard business. I think that for me, one of the developments that we will see over the next few years is probably going to be more around the convergence of, we’ve got the infrastructure management, the interaction management, which is CCAS platforms.

 

the relationship management, which is the CRM players. We’ve got the employee engagement, which is the workforce engagement players. Again, that’s, that’s consolidating quite a bit. And then we’ve got the customer experience, you know, the players in that space and all these things are starting to consolidate. So I think we will get to a point where there will be more of a, you know, a smaller number of, bigger players. I we’re already starting to see that. Let’s just take CCAS, right? It’s been around for 25 years or so.

 

You look at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, it’s a diagonal line, right? Not much in the way of vision, not much in the way of challenges. Leaders and niche players. That defines a mature market. That means there’s not much more that could take place. think companies that are investing in that space then have to look at, well, I’m making a big investment. This is not just about the money I’m spending. It’s about my brand. It’s about…

 

the amount of money we’re going to spend orienting around these new capabilities with this particular vendor, whom I’m going to invest with, a company that’s upward of a billion dollars, or I’m to invest with a company that’s 50 million. So those are going to be difficult questions. It’s the nature of the business. As new opportunities emerge, companies start to invest in smaller startups and take the innovation. As you say, those startups get bought.

 

Um, and they, and they end up with, you know, with those larger players. So I do think that looking out over the next few years, um, then, uh, yeah, by 2030, I think the, landscape will, start to, um, become a little more condensed than it is today. I, I track the, the, traditional contact center infrastructure market, uh, when, uh, Gartner was running the magic quadrants and things. And, know, what you had was there were three players that had like,

 

Steve Blood (30:43.982)

60 to 65 % of the market that was Cisco Genesis and Avaya. And there was a very, very long tail of smaller players who were doing okay. They targeted certain geographies, certain verticals, and they did okay. were profitable and so on. But then it gets to the point where with the cloud players coming in, new competition, that doesn’t happen anymore. they get consolidated and Ench House is the company that’s buying up most of those companies.

 

That will happen in the CCAS market. We have already seen some, Serenova, they run out of money and ended up in end chances. These things are natural, but think companies, given how important this is front office, there is a need to look very closely at, am I dealing with a company that’s going to be around in five years time as it got the financial muscle to still be a major player to make those investments in continued innovation?

 

Yeah. Capital will define the market, to a large extent, right? Do you, do you think that we, I’m asking you to probably get outside your comfort zone making predictions, but, do you think that we’re seeing a broader AI bubble, not just, you know, confined with, the CX space, but just in general, there’s a lot of capital going into AI right now and not a lot of return and a lot of people are speculating.

 

I agree. a worry. I’ve been through 35 years in this industry, the peaks and troughs that we’ve gone through, the valuation of some of these companies is really difficult to understand. then when we hear that Gartner is putting generative AI into the trough of disillusionment because the ROI and

 

the value on return isn’t being recognized. Yeah, it worries me. It scares me as to what could happen next year from that perspective, because there’s a knock on effect, right? Any vendor that then is an AI player, does this mean we’ll go back to in C-Cash providers? Anyone that says AI is potentially going to the cold wind of that sort of fallout. So it does worry me. think

 

Steve Blood (33:07.278)

I look generally, just you’ve probably seen my old firm took a massive hit. know, their stock is down more than half from where it was at the start of the year. And this is idea that, well, I can just go and ask Chatch GPT for a list of vendors that I should be looking at. And we’ve got to that point now where we seem to believe it. And you think, well, if all the intellectual property is

 

locked behind a paywall because that’s the intellectual property. How can you make those sorts of decisions? We all know that the material that the models are using is the stuff that we’ve created. So it’s not unbiased at all. So that does kind of surprise me to some extent that we’re getting to that point, this viewpoint that, I don’t need those specialized services. I can just ask ChatGPT. And that has had a lock-on effect.

 

you know, in all of our space, especially in the contact center space, if I can ask ChatGPT and get a good answer, why do I need to use, you know, a contact center platform or a chatbot with a CCaF provider? I think this time next year, the light will have emerged and we’ll see where some of the errors are, but I just don’t know where we’re going to be in terms of valuations.

 

and what those knock-on effects could be for the industry. So yeah, I don’t want to be the voice of doom and gloom, but it scares me as to what might happen, certainly the first half of next year.

 

Yeah. You brought up something that we contributed to an article for Channel Futures Magazine or Channel Futures Online, is a, for anyone that doesn’t know, it’s an industry rag that everyone in our space, meaning the trusted advisor and technology provider space, we all follow Channel Futures. And they asked us to contribute to an article, the premise being

 

Shawn Cordner (35:12.13)

Will we see AI take over the trusted advisor space? Companies like Amplix someday go out of business because. Buyers will start to just ask chat chat, you BT, who’s the best provider for me to to. And, that was basically one of our key responses. There was, all that intellectual capital is, is locked up in the humans and locked up in our systems that chat. You BT doesn’t have access to, right? So.

 

All you’re really getting, and you alluded to this, but I’m going to hit the nail right on the head. All chat GPT is really picking up or largely what it’s picking up is marketing speak, right? It’s, what we as marketers want you to think about our products and services and solutions. And it’s not necessarily the institutional knowledge that’s built up by doing thousands of transactions with these providers every year and, and going through the process of, you know, benchmarking their pricing and.

 

going through the procurement processes and understanding who’s doing well with what and who’s not doing well, who’s playing nice, who’s not playing nice. There’s a lot of intellectual capital that’s locked up in there that that chat GPT doesn’t have access to. as well as I still think that when you’re making complex decisions, it’s very human to want to interact with another human. You know, we’re, not saying what’s the right price point for me to buy this car or.

 

You know, what’s, what’s the best stereo for me to buy? What you’re asking is who do I entrust with the entirety of my company’s infrastructure or our security, right? That’s a big question with a lot of repercussions and a lot of potential downside. If you get it wrong, you really kind of want to talk to a human being for a decision like that. do you think that’s true? And, and for how long or do you think we’ll get conditioned to, trust AI?

 

Um, a thousand percent. agree with you. I think, um, you know, I’m still looking for the first it buyer that puts a $3 million contract down based on a conversation they have with, uh, with a love language model. Um, you know, I’m thinking of what was that phrase? No, know. No one got fired for buying from IBM. And I think that, I think that trusted advice is, is absolutely critical, but I do think that it may surface in new ways. um, you know,

 

Steve Blood (37:33.95)

If my, if my, if my, and by the way, you know, not wishing to be too much, too much doom and gloom on, on, you know, the large language model, I use them daily. They are exceedingly helpful. They’re not always right, but they’re right enough. They’re, they, they create content and that’s 80 % useful. And that means a massive time saving over doing research yourself. so, so I think that, you know, they have a role to play. and, it really is, if I’ve got this content that I trust, then go and

 

analyze that for me and that’s the real beauty of this. I think, imagine that one of your customers could subscribe to a service Amplix provides that’s another bolt on to chat GPT or one of the Gemini or one of those models. The customer just turn that into Amplix mode and now they’re getting a perspective that is based on

 

real data, shall we say. I would argue the same thing with Gartner. Gartner’s biggest challenge is if the best value is in speaking to an analyst, the more customers you get, need more analysts. That doesn’t scale. But if you have a model that says, can get access to that information, I can then train my large language model on that to provide the outputs for me, I could go a long way to making decisions without actually having to speak to that expert.

 

But the source of the data that’s behind there is validated and it is expert data. I think, you know, this is, this is really, really key, I think, to the understanding. and it does, it does frustrate me that there’s still a lot of, there’s more to this. I don’t want be, know, to this come to Jesus moment. And I’m not wishing to offend anyone who’s religious, but it does seem to me to be a bit like that. And, you know,

 

Many, many, many, many, many years ago, people, they didn’t recognize something, they created a god for it, right? They got a god for fire, for water and time. And I think people don’t understand, so they created a god for it. And it can do absolutely anything. So I don’t know, I’m going off on a soapbox there, but it’s incredibly useful technology. It’s brilliant. It’s only going to get better. The idea of full autonomy does actually scare me. I don’t think we should ever get to that sort of position.

 

Steve Blood (40:03.246)

But the source of the data has to be accurate and you have to be 100 % certain that that source is accurate to really feel confident about using it. That’s the point at which someone places a $3 million order using a chat GPT outlook.

 

Yeah, this is maybe a far off tangent, but you do need the source, the source data to be accurate and you need to be able to confident, be confident in that. But you can make data, you can interpret data a lot of different ways. Two people can look at the same set of data and see it two different ways. Data is not always a source of truth. What is truth, right? We could get philosophical. What is truth? It really, it could be what is truth from your perspective. So.

 

How would a large language model ever, how could you ever trust that it’s the right interpretation of the raw data? Is it dependent on the company that built the model and what their biases are?

 

these, it depends on what you ask it. It’s the same thing. so, you know, I was going to say welcome to my world in market intelligence. You know, I, somebody says to me, how brings the compact center market? Well, I’ve got 25 sources and they all say something different from their perspective. So it’s bringing that together now. Yeah, I would, I would love to be in a position where I could pump that into, put those sources into a model that would, help create the output. I think I need to have a very, very strong prompt.

 

So I have to be very specific about the question that I’m asking. that’s something that gets, know, as these newer iterations of the models come out, that’s something that becomes more more important. It’s the quality of the question that you ask, which I suppose is not dissimilar if you got a very clever professor and you ask them a question, you know, ask it a different way and you’ll get a different answer. So I think it’s really, really key that, you know, we do…

 

Steve Blood (42:04.642)

We will ourselves learn new methodologies of how to ask questions, which increasingly will be of machines, but equally could be applied to companies, partners, and people generally.

 

I do think someday there will be a tool and an Amplix version of chat GBT that accelerates the procurement process. A tool that we use, a tool that our clients use, that will happen in this industry. I’m, quite sure Gardner, you know, someday maybe they can democratize their service by having that large language model that they could sell as a subscription for mid market or, instead of having to pay for, you know, 12 junior analysts for every account, they just have one analyst and.

 

This large language model that they built. it will revolutionize things. Earlier you were alluding to the maturity of this X market. And I think you were actually talking about this, the CCAS market specifically, I’m sure that market is. But I wonder how mature is the CX market, the broader market? In other words, I know that

 

Largely enterprises are adopting the CCAS technology, implementing it very effectively. It’s, pretty sophisticated. What even, you know, smaller mid-market companies are out there doing with this technology, but how sophisticated are companies in general in terms of the broader customer experience in terms of processes and operations and integrating that into their brand and their value proposition.

 

Yeah, it’s, it is definitely varied. I think one of the big challenges here is that there is, still a lot of, fragmentation, across those different, you know, the, the sales marketing ops, digital commerce service. There’s still lots of fragments, or it’s rather still is very fragmented. And so bringing that together therefore does become, exceedingly difficult, you know, and we know that just from our own customer service space, there’s different technologies, different

 

Steve Blood (44:10.636)

teams of people supporting different sets of capabilities and capabilities and therefore you get the challenge there. I think that takes a lot to consolidate, that takes a lot to focus on to improve on that experience. So companies generally tend to sort of work in different, work at it in bite-sized chunks. think customer journey planning, for example, is

 

a huge initiative, but it’s probably one of the most valuable that a company can do. think just listening. I mean, we’ve seen surveys recently that nobody wants to complete surveys anymore. The email, the after the call and so on. And because they’re getting very tired of this survey fatigue. Well, every day your customers are talking to you or messaging with you.

 

And there’s nuggets of information in there, which are relevant to your products, your service, your processes, everything. and all they’re doing is looking at, well, did the, did the employee engage with the customer correctly? you know, did they fulfill the problem? and, know, what, what’s the NPS that comes out the back of that? it is just not enough focus on using that data to really.

 

make changes to where to where business runs. And I think that’s one of the huge biggest opportunities that we have. I was talking to call center helper earlier on today and the they were saying in the server they ran earlier this year, the focus on using speech and text analytics as part of the experience has doubled. Now that means gone from 12 % to 25%. There’s nowhere near enough. Right. I said, I want to see that double again to 50 % by next year. But the

 

insights are there and they’re so easy to extract now with transcription, with large language models to surface topics and summarization things. So again, the technologies are helping to be able to do that. I think that focusing on those areas, what you’ll get is lots of outputs, lots of departments will have initiatives or

 

Steve Blood (46:29.56)

tasks to complete as a result of that. And then collectively, if there’s a CX leader, a chief experience officer in the company, if someone’s running this from the top down, then maybe they’ll get somewhere in terms of improving those services overall. But again, it does come down to who’s running the project. If it’s a regional or departmental project, then they’re just going to focus on what works best for them, not necessarily what’s…

 

works best for the company overall. So I do think, you know, this is more about structure of companies and the people involved in necessary technology.

 

Yes, surveys are misleading. think it’s not good data sometimes. There’s selection bias in surveys. So it’s the happiest people and the most angry people. And I think people tend to be theatrical with surveys as well, But if you can mine the actual interactions, that’s lot more objective.

 

Yes.

 

Steve Blood (47:27.47)

It’s amazing.

 

But you have to, you have to act on those insights as well. You talked about a chief experience officer. wonder, you know, who, currently owns. Contact center, not operations per se, but just the whole CX, right? Does that, does that live with it? Does it live with the contact center department? Does it, does it live with marketing yet? I would make the case for marketing someday.

 

What?

 

And maybe more broadly, are you starting to see an increase in the trend of people looking more holistically about experience in terms of customer experience, employee experience, and digital experience as all being one thing?

 

who owns it? I mean, that is, that is the million dollar question. If I knew what the answer that was, it is tough. And you’re right. There are some very senior CX leaders sometimes reporting into finance or even, you know, a seat at the table, the executive table, that have this overarching responsibility, but it’s very much a virtual, you know, so they’re, they’re interfacing into multiple groups of stakeholders that are actually executing on, on that experience.

 

Steve Blood (48:42.83)

I think a lot of it does fit in marketing. A lot of the CX tools that we see out there are paid for by marketing because they’re looking to understand best they can about their customers and their experiences through voice of the customer and things. So I don’t think, yeah, that does sit there quite a bit. And then, yeah, sometimes it reports up into finance because it’s an operational cost. And so you’ve got to get that cost down as low as possible. I haven’t done any

 

analysis, I, know, specifically, but I, I can say that over the many, many years I spoke with clients when I was an analyst, they came from all over the place. Interestingly, the most, the challenging, most challenging conversations were when someone like a CXO brought all these functions together on an inquiry, or you could cut that virtual space with a knife. Very, very political, very tense.

 

Because it’s, know, it’s, it’s change, right? And that can be quite, you know, quite a challenge. So I think, yeah, that is certainly, certainly a big issue. And I’ve now forgotten what the second question was.

 

So the second question was, yeah, I ask questions like this is a presidential debate. know.

 

the

 

Shawn Cordner (50:00.504)

So the second question was, are you starting to see a trend of companies looking at experience more holistic? Customer experience, employee experience, digital experience.

 

I think overall, yes. so, you know, this is recognition that employee experience, a better employee experience leads to lower turnover. It leads to better satisfaction, which impacts the experience that they offer the customer. So, you know, good CX equals great CX. sorry, good EX equals great CX. We’ve known about that for some time. interestingly, again, from the, the call center helper, survey,

 

In terms of the customer experience, they’re starting to ask employees more, which I think is great. That’s like double though in the last year. They’re now saying, what do our employees think? They’re involving the employees in what that overall experience is going to look like.

 

You know, these things are starting to, starting to come together. I think the digital experience piece, you know, there’s the digital experience of the employees. There’s the experience of the customer. I think that’s still a bit fragmented because I think companies go off and build a web-based or mobile-based capabilities very much independently. And that’s something that, you know, does need, does need time to evolve. But I think, again, if you do your customer journey analysis,

 

And then you listen to what customers are saying or writing, then it all starts to come together. You say, okay, well, we’re doing well here, but in this area here, we’ve got to disconnect with which we’ve got to fix. So I think over time it will get, it’s going to get better. and of course, you know, we, we have a duty as, as ecosystem partners to ensure that we can create those interfaces to make it easier for companies to surface those insights and that.

 

Shawn Cordner (51:56.014)

Sure. I’m very interested in the customer journey mapping aspect of CX is coming from the marketing side of this. spent a lot of time on user experience design for our digital footprint website. And I do think that the principles are very much the same, right? There’s, a book called the, the design of everyday things. Can’t remember the guy’s name right now. something Norman Norman something anyway.

 

But you know, what he talks about with the general principles of user experience design is making sure that there are affordances for people that they can understand how to accomplish what it is they’re trying to accomplish and to leave a path for people, right? That indicates how to get from point A to point B and accomplish what they’re trying to achieve. And so we do that in a digital format. We do that by understanding how people interact with the current landscape of our digital footprint and

 

What pages pull the most traffic? Where do people go when they come from the homepage? they go to this page. Where do they go from that page? What are they trying to do there? Where are they clicking? How much time do they spend on this part of the page versus that part of the page? So that’s that in current state is pretty manual. You hire user experience designer that takes in all these inputs. But I do believe that in the contact center space, a lot of this can be accomplished probably with the use of AI or their tools out there that

 

Simplify that mapping.

 

I don’t know actually. I’ve not looked at customer journey analytics. There’s obviously more artificial intelligence being embedded into those. And I think, you know, the proactively surface where there are issues, because you’re right, a lot of it has been quite, quite, quite manual. But I think the bigger problem is that, you know, and we see this with customer journey mapping generally, a department does their bit.

 

Steve Blood (53:52.058)

that doesn’t necessarily give you the overall perspective because you know, in CX customers bounce around different, different functional areas. It’s how do you link those together? so, I suspect there are tools emerging to do that. it’s, it’s not something that I’ve, I’ve looked at in, in, in great detail. So, I’m not entirely sure, but I know within, within the space, you know, the, the, operate, yes, certainly there’s.

 

a greater focus on trying to analyze and surface data in that perspective.

 

And then on one hand, you’ve got the complexity of doing the customer journey mapping, but on the other hand, you have to do the operational integration on the backend to help them accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish. So I’ll go back to the example that you gave from this morning of your airline experience with the car rental, right? So there’s two different divisions within this organization. They clearly don’t have integration of the process. They clearly don’t have integration of the operations, right? So.

 

that became a roadblock for you. So it might not be too hard to assume that someone that books a flight and books a rental car at the same time might have a question that impacts both of those things at the same time. Right. That’s not a crazy thought. Maybe they could even map that the right way, but what about the technical debt of integrating those two sides of the business to create that seamless experience for you?

 

probably were the biggest challenges to user experience, would you agree?

 

Steve Blood (55:23.31)

I would agree. often, you know, when they start to look at that, the cost is so large, they hadn’t factored that into their business case. And so it does get left. And what it means is that, you know, maybe for 80 % of the customers that book a rental car through the airline, it works. Which, why change anything? But for 20 % or maybe I’m just the 1%, I don’t know.

 

If they were to analyze all their emails, they’d find out. I think it’s that the cost of doing nothing, I suppose. Does it cost more to create the integration, a better experience, or is the cost so much that you just have to accept that 20 % are going to get upset? By the way, I will be booking again with the airline.

 

I just won’t be renting a car through that. So, you you’ve got to balance this, right? It’s business. So sometimes you can look at things as being perfect and then say, well, perfection costs a ton of money. We have to find a balance. But you’re absolutely right. You know, it is the fact that maybe, I mean, maybe as we see more use of multi-agent systems. So, you know, with A2A as a protocol emerging.

 

you know, bots will be able to inner work better and therefore surface and deal with the necessary executions rather than doing sort of, you know, API integration and screen scrape and all those sorts of things that are probably necessary today. don’t know, but, you know, I think we could see some improvements. Technology could help with that. But again, we’re on the cusp. We’re just sort of starting to dip our toe into single agent systems a lot, especially for agentic, which are coming out now, but

 

The real value is in multi-agent and those will emerge. We just need to get some single agent systems out there working first.

 

Shawn Cordner (57:22.318)

Sure. And then you also have to be able to trust those agents to be able to work with each other and not do something you don’t want them to do, which I think is a whole other barrier to adoption for things like that. just to start wrapping up the conversation a little bit, it’s easy for us to sit here and kind of critique what people are doing wrong in their customer experience. But let’s just talk briefly about what people are doing right. just.

 

In terms of speaking in generalities, what do you think the industry is doing right in terms of CX and leveraging AI to?

 

I think those companies that are being a bit more realistic about their expectations, think certainly starting from the perspective of how does this improve the experience for the customer rather than how much money can we save? Because I think what we found with certainly the first or previous versions of Chatbox was the focus entirely

 

let’s not allow the customer to get out of jail. We’ll just think of all the questions they’re to ask. And we did the project, we left it up there and it created frustration because customers were stuck. I’ll give you an example of a company that are doing this well. was in London last week presenting on this topic and it was more of a discussion sort of thing. And this particular company said they created a

 

a generative voice agent. So digital agents is a lot of, but voice agents are a little bit more complicated. Create, they created one and they started out a hundred percent of the phone calls went into this AI agent and a hundred percent came out. So they were using this platform as triage to get down to the employee. That’s where they started. And over time as they analyze and they understood more and more about the type of questions that were being asked.

 

Steve Blood (59:25.326)

They got that down so that they were able to deflect, I think they were at 35%. So 65 still went through to people, 35 % got contained within the AI agent. you know, A, that’s a real realistic number, right? It’s not the, oh, we can automate 95%. No, you can’t. It’s realistic. And also they’ve done it without making customers angry.

 

Because when they started out, there were going to be mistakes. So they rooted through to the employee. think that’s a great example of focusing on how are we going to build this for the customer, not for us. And guess what? You build it for the customer, you make it work. They will self serve. Now you’ve got your ROI. So it’s kind of self fulfilling from that perspective. So I think that’s a good example where they’re doing things really well. And I think we’re likely to see

 

We’ll see more of that, think, moving through. Companies like Ampliq talking to you guys recently, they’re the workshops, getting all the right people in the room to sit down and say, what is the problem? Not, here’s a nice new shiny thing, let’s go and put it in there somewhere. What’s the issue? What are we trying to solve? What problems do you have? And which of them are going to have the biggest impact? And then let’s go and target some of those, get some success.

 

And on the back of that success, show ROI to get more budget to go and do another one. So I think that’s the key. So it is very much a case of doing things more slowly, I think, maybe what some of the vendors would like. We’d love customers to adopt tomorrow. Of course we would. But that’s just not going to be… They need time to evolve these things. So think that’s where we’re seeing…

 

there is success out there. so the more of that we see, think the light will shine and companies will see that as the right way to do it.

 

Shawn Cordner (01:01:27.79)

That’s great advice to use that as a framework and think about the outcomes and the problem that you’re trying to solve as opposed to the technology that you’re trying to implement. Um, and maybe that’ll be your answer to this question, but if you’re advising a CIO or a CXO or CX leader at this moment to, um, you know, what’s one thing in their three to five year roadmap that they should focus on, maybe answer it.

 

you strategically and tactically. Is there a big picture thing that you think they should be working towards in terms of a philosophy change or a change in their approach? And then is there a tactical thing that should be on their roadmap in terms of a technology or, you know, something that they should implement?

 

Yeah, mean, longer term, think everyone has to, and depending on the vertical, this will vary, but let we take retail. mean,

 

Who was it that just published? it McKinsey just published their survey on AI agents for commerce? And Gartner’s been, I love talking about machine customers. Gartner’s been talking about it for a long time. So we’re going to accept to some point that there will be increasingly levels of automation, not just humans connecting with machines to get answers, but also machines asking for services. And so when you think about that and some of that’s longer term looking out, I think companies have to prepare.

 

but moving in that direction. I think this idea that their staff elevate into a new role of being AI supervisors so that they can get that right. first they may start off advising the machine agent that’s supporting their customers, and then all the same principles are accurate. When the machine customer says, I’ve got a problem, they will know then how to deal with that. So I think there is that analogy that fits together from that perspective.

 

Steve Blood (01:03:19.246)

So that’s big thing. The people are going to be very important. think also longer term, we haven’t talked a huge amount about it, but you know, the whole governance, trust and governance is going to be absolutely critical. We all know that these models don’t necessarily tell the truth. They hallucinate, they give wrong information. So we need a structure in place that we can manage that, especially before we scale. Right now, a lot of these new agents that are going in, they’re doing lots of testing beforehand, which is a good thing.

 

And then they’re monitoring through customer journey to see how it’s performing. That could destroy your brand. You need to know now, you need to know at that moment as to how those agents are performing. you need, you know, observability. That’s the new, that’s the new word that’s emerging. You need observability of how these agents are performing. So I think there needs to be a big focus on that and linked to the governance bit. Obviously I’m based in Europe. We have the Europeans AI Act coming into force next year.

 

massive penalties for companies that don’t align themselves with the legal requirement and things. so getting that bit right as well, as much as how it can destroy your brand if you get it wrong. So I think those are sort of the longer term perspectives. Yes, more automation will come. Not tomorrow, maybe not next year. But as we look towards the end of this decade, we’ll see a lot more automation out than we have today.

 

More tactically, think, just, you know, start small. You know, it does come back to that. What’s your problem? You know, to have a solution, you’ve to the problem is. What’s the problem or problems you’re trying to deal with? Let’s identify those and then let’s come up with a solution. it involves automation, some description.

 

It may not be self-service, it may actually be assisted service, but an improved assisted service using agent assist tools or summarization and so on. I have this, if I may, have this vision, this idea that one day customer service leader gets the team together, they start off on a Monday morning and they say, by the way, you don’t have to do wrap up anymore. We’ve automated wrap up. I don’t know how close we are to when I do that.

 

Steve Blood (01:05:40.974)

But you think about it, can transcribe all the conversations, we can summarize them, we’ve got workflow to say this bit goes there, that bit goes there. How close are we to it? So when we’re like 99 % certain that the quality of the outputs are good, we can just say, you know, we’re automating wrap up, you’re gonna get 15 seconds between your next engagement because anything more seems like a lifetime.

 

but you can now have an extra hour for lunch and everyone’s gonna get two extra days holiday a year because you’re sharing the productivity improvements. I don’t know, am I just sort of, in my head in the clouds, I think that’s how we could potentially see some of these technologies benefit the people as well as customers moving forward.

 

I like your vision and I do hope that AI can be used for good in these kind of scenarios and context. And not just for adding, you know, pennies and dollars to the bottom line, but improving the lives of the stakeholders, the employees and the customers for sure. Wrapping up in just a second here, but what’s one bold prediction that you’re willing to make about the future of CX technology? Maybe that’s it.

 

Preparations will grow a heart.

 

Ah, yeah. Yeah. I said a lot of predictions in my last job. Some of them, some of them came true as well. Um, said bold prediction for, mean, for the next two years. Well, my, my bold prediction for the next year is that by this time next year, um, there will be a little bit of a sea change in how we approach, especially generative models. I think there’s going to be a bit of a

 

Steve Blood (01:07:30.594)

hit on the industry. My fear of course is that there’s a knock on effect, means companies move from looking at growth into, you know, recessions and things could potentially impact. I mean, they would focus back on operational savings potentially. So there is that risk in there. But I do, I think that this time next year we will, we’ll have got over this. It’ll be in the trough of disillusionment. We’ll start to get over this fanatical, my goodness, you know,

 

We can solve everything. can cure cancer with generative AI. Actually, they’re getting close to doing that. Not a good example, but I do think that that’s my bold prediction that we will be in a very different place a year from now than we are today. And I think positively, positively for the customer experience industry, positively for all our stock prices and so on. yeah, that’s, think, you I just feel that I just sense this, that I’ve seen these

 

Peeps and troughs, several of them through my career in this industry. I just feel that we’re at that point now where we need a little wake up call and a bit of a re-grinding.

 

That’s a great prediction. final question. just spent some time in Ireland and the UK last week. How do you drive on the left side? Because I rented a car and it was the scariest moments of my life trying to get around.

 

I’ve been living in Spain for 20 years, so I drive on the right now and actually I have the same challenge. I was in London last week and I almost got run over by a taxi because I was looking the wrong way. I can tell you, for me, it’s easier, it’s more difficult if I’m driving a left-hand vehicle on the other side of the road. That makes it very, very difficult. But if I have the steering wheel on the correct side,

 

Steve Blood (01:09:20.341)

I just reverse things in my head. talk about turning right when I mean left. It is a challenge. right. Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

 

It was tough, but it was worth it. was a great trip. Steve, thank you so much. Appreciate your time next.

 

Yeah, good to speak with you. All the best. Thank you.