Shawn Cordner (00:13.294)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Amplitude of Tech Podcast. I’m Shawn Cordner, Chief Marketing Officer of Amplix. Today I have a guest Ricki Lang. We nerded out on customer experience, user experience, digital experience, employee experience, and how all of that turns into total experience. This is a podcast episode that you have to listen to, especially if you are in charge of anything that touches any of those experiences in your enterprise. I really enjoyed this one. You’re gonna be able to tell when you hear it. I hope you do too.

Shawn Cordner (00:48.898)
Right, Ricki Lang, welcome to the podcast.

Ricki Lang (00:51.746)
Lovely to be here. Thanks for having me.

Shawn Cordner (00:53.74)
Lovely to have you. appreciate your time today. So maybe start off with a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Ricki Lang (00:59.544)
Sure. So I run the Telecom Media and Entertainment Vertical at Quantum Metric. It’s a digital behavioral analytics company. We’re doing a ton with AI, GenTIC, MCP, and more, helping our customers, mostly Fortune 100 companies, understand what their customers and employees are doing in their digital experiences online in real time. I was a VP at Comcast for both the residential and commercial areas.

Product development and engineering is my space, so relatively technical space, did some really exciting work there, which gave me the opportunity to do what I’m doing now at quantum. And yeah, so it’s great to be here and I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Shawn Cordner (01:41.624)
So talk to me a little bit about just kind of the the day to day about what you’re getting involved in.

Ricki Lang (01:46.862)
Sure. So you know, with our company Quantum, our customers are trying to make sure that their customers are having the best experiences with them and really looking at the total experience, the omnichannel experience. No matter which channel they’re in, they actually are able to get their tasks done. They’re able to buy services and buy products with without friction.

And also connecting those experiences so it really works across the board because the way that you build loyalty for customers and satisfaction is making sure that it’s easy to do business together. So we help our customers do that. And it’s really interesting some of the amazing use cases, especially in the telco space, which is quite complicated coming from it, as well as an organ as well as a leading industry in using agentic software and implementations, but how complicated.

And quite frankly, legacy stack most of these telco companies are. So we’re helping them really understand where the opportunities are in their technical stacks, fix them, and also then add behavioral context to those experiences to provide the most optimal path and the fastest path to get their tasks done.

Shawn Cordner (03:01.514)
My audience would be forgiven if they thought that I was trying to turn this into a marketing podcast because I’m always sneaking some marketing talk and brand talk into these, but I’m not, I swear. I just think there happens to be a lot of crossover. Maybe you could just convince anyone listening before they stop, that’s a a technology leader of why this is actually an IT conversation as well as a marketing conversation.

Ricki Lang (03:25.41)
actually don’t need I don’t want to necessarily talk about quantum. I like to talk about tech. I worked working at Comcast, which is where I came from. I was in the engineering space and I’ve been in the engineering space my whole life. So my dad was a software engineer. I grew up around computers and really understand the way that the architecture, the infrastructure impacts the the entire experience for customers. And I’m focused on how you create the best customer experience.

And that’s previous before all these great tools were out there. And then now, because everybody is looking at how to automate and how to use agents and how to use loops and how to create more of a program level success plan for their organizations as a whole. So that’s really what I like to talk about and and how you go about doing that in all of the different channels, which I’m a data person and I don’t know about you, Shawn, but a lot of us techies are, is like how to use data.

to get the best results for everything that you’re trying to do. And then how do you prove that you did it so that you can continue to rise in your career?

Shawn Cordner (04:29.526)
Yeah, I think that that’s the answer, right? So we don’t have to talk about quantum, but just in a more theoretical or philosophical you know, tangent, I I think the answer is that data, it comes from marketing and it also can be used by marketing. And I think also the answer is it lies in C X and DX, right? So we’re gonna talk about CX obviously this audience very much knows maybe a little bit less about DX, but

Customer experience is very much a brand asset if if you ask me, as well as digital experience. And I think IT is really an enablement function to both of those things and like a driver, right? So to briefly touch on I mean, we know what CX is, but let’s talk about DX for just a second and like define it.

Ricki Lang (05:18.136)
Sure. I mean when I think about DX, it’s that interactive experience that people get to have with the screen. It’s a screen, digital screen, whether that be on your your, you know, laptop, your mobile device, your iPad, whatever that might be, it’s what does that interaction look like? And for the companies that are running them, it’s what

infrastructure architecture and logic and data that they’re using on the back end to actually make that work for somebody that’s interacting there. And that’s really the digital, which is one piece of the whole experience, but it’s an opportunistic place to work from.

Shawn Cordner (05:53.134)
Do you think that I I love how you broke it down into the two perspectives, right? So there’s the perspective of the user looking in into the digital experience, but then there’s also the digital experience and the infrastructure that created that digital experience. And that’s more from the enterprise perspective, right? So why is it that we have two sides to that coin? And do you think that maybe sometimes the people that are building the infrastructure and the architecture are not thinking so much about

The inward view from the customers.

Ricki Lang (06:25.344)
You heard of shipping your org, right? So and coming from enterprise companies, and I you know, I was in consulting before I worked at Comcast, so I’ve had a lot of opportunity to work with lots of different types of organizations, and people are are only more recently getting to not ship their org. Like if you think about a company that you’re interacting with where you’re trying to buy something and then when you’re trying to service something, they should look the same, they may be the same colors, maybe the same experience.

maybe even coming from the same data sources. And that was not always the case. It’s something that c companies are working towards now because the digital experience in one space versus another and then the overarching experience is something that you can optimize for. And you think about, you know, you weren’t able to do something in that digital experience. And then you made a phone call and you called an agent, which may be a live agent or a digital agent that you’re working with. Do they know what you did?

Do they understand why you’re calling and they do they know how to fix your problem or do they have to pass you off to other folks? And making sure that that’s there’s a consistent through line so that that data lives with that customer all through those opportunities. And that’s something that I know that there’s a lot of organizations working towards, but it’s a newer path, especially with the tools and how fast we can process and provide data to different areas. So

Shawn Cordner (07:53.048)
Yeah, I think you know, the from the CX perspective, the customer experience perspective, it can be jarring if they had a really good digital experience to sign up, but then all of a sudden if they need support, they have to jump through hoops and there’s a lot of friction involved, right? And so, that kind of abrupt feeling I think erodes trust. It’s kinda like, it’s really easy for to get in, but it was real hard for me to cancel. And actually there had been re regulation, which I think got pulled back with the recent administration, but

Ricki Lang (08:23.576)
With click to cancel you’re talking about?

Shawn Cordner (08:25.494)
Say to click the cancel. And I I know they’re trying to do that again in New York now, but maybe talk about that for just a second and the importance of that to customer experience and digital experience.

Ricki Lang (08:34.542)
Sure. I mean, one of the things that I did when I was at Comcast is we actually up ended and recreated the activation experience. How do you make it really easy to sign up, sign in, activate your devices? And they want that. They don’t get paid until your v device works, right? So that is something that every company should be looking to make sure it works. And to your point, it’s very jarring for a customer, but it’s a really great space to focus on because you want those customers there.

The canceling piece is actually interesting because there’s a lot of people that are implementing AI alongside those cancel and cancel flows, which is the most emotional part for a customer, right? They don’t necessarily want to cancel service with you. And if they’re doing it, they’re probably really angry or just couldn’t get whatever they needed. So if you want to interject automation in those experiences, you need to be really careful with that, because that’s the most emotional time for customers.

It’s been interesting because all the companies, when they saw the click to cancel, they said, I don’t want to do this. Right. and then there’s like the New York Times as an example. I was signed up and I said, you know what? I’m not reading it. I don’t have time. I’m looking at everything else. You go to cancel, they offer you better offers, better offers, better offers as you’re going through that cancel flow. And finally you just say, For four dollars, fine. No problem. You can keep me. So that automation kind of worked, but it does not work in all

all cases and it probably also is around the value to the customer and how much they value that service and what they see it’s worth to themselves.

Shawn Cordner (10:07.438)
I think that I have no data to back this up, so feel free to clap me on the hands if I’m wrong here. But I I feel like the emotion actually really comes from the the bad interaction that they’re having trying to cancel the product or we’re trying to get support for the product, right? So it’s a it’s actually the friction that raises the emotion as opposed to the emotion, you know, that that I guess the friction makes it worse, right?

Ricki Lang (10:33.376)
It it does. I mean, I was having I needed to fix something with my home internet and I made some tried to do it online myself and I tried calling. I was passed off to four different agents, some of which were digital non live agents and some were live that passed me off to others. Really, really frustrating. And that’s not the experience with everyone. But I’ve also had very great only digital lo digital live agents, right?

interactions recently where they fixed my problem. They got me to it fast. And there was literally no waiting because it was all automated. So there’s a wide variation of what companies are doing now. And s the younger generation actually doesn’t mind the bots as much as some of the older generation does that just says, agent, agent, agent, get me out of here. So, you know, it’s a, it’s a, it’s going to be an interesting time seeing how things evolve over the next even six months because they move so quickly.

Shawn Cordner (11:30.638)
I guess the best proof point is really how Amazon has become so ubiquitous and how it’s become this, you know, monster in the retail industry because that’s what they did, right? They removed the friction of having to leave your house, first of all, to go shop for something. they made it possible for you to have more options. So they removed that friction of going to multiple stores and having to price things out and compare things and and and look for

you know, any kind of consumer reports on that product, right? They remove the friction from the purchasing process, even with the one click purchase option, right? They remove the friction from the return process or the can’t order cancellation process. And to me that personally that’s a a huge value because I I absolutely hate the process of returning things. And they made it easier. So now when I even shop on Amazon, I make sure that I’m buying from, you know, Prime because I know that

I’m dealing with Amazon as opposed to the seller. And when you deal with the seller, it’s often a lot more friction and that gets frustrating.

Ricki Lang (12:31.318)
It’s true. My daughter, who’s about to go off to college, when she wants to order a whole bunch of stuff online, I’m like, what is their return policy? Let’s talk about that. And some of these folks I’m like, We’re not we’re just not buying from there. I’m sorry. Just choose something else because of that friction and that bad experience that you have with companies that maybe don’t have the money to invest in a better digital experience.

Shawn Cordner (12:56.46)
Yeah. I think you see it to a lesser extent that it goes the other way where a company has a bad digital experience but a good customer experience. But I I guess that’s out there probably to to a much lesser extent. Why do you think that is though? Why do you think people are investing in the digital I know the answer, but w it it was. But go ahead. What’s the what’s the reason that they’re making that investment in the CX I’m sorry, in the DX and maybe not as much the C X?

Ricki Lang (13:23.938)
I mean, digital containment’s a real thing. So for anybody that doesn’t know that word, keeping people online is the mo it’s the least and it’s the least expensive channel, right, for people to be dealing with. So you want to keep people in your digital channel. It’s automated, it’s consistent. And if you can keep that working for your customers, no friction, then number one, they’re not gonna call. It’s an expensive call. Like no matter how you do it, it’s expensive. And so they can do everything with you in that way. It’s fast.

And it’s easy, and they’re probably gonna do it again because it was that case. And they become loyal to your company. This was easy, it was a great experience. You can see it all over Reddit, see it all over the blogs. So it was so easy to buy and the product was wonderful. Spend money so that people can have that consistent experience and then also provide an opportunity to obtain feedback when that’s not the case. But all the folks that I’m working with are trying to use their digital channel as their primary.

And it’s a it’s a move that a lot of organizations had struggled to make, but they’re doing some really great stuff now. It’s exciting.

Shawn Cordner (14:31.774)
I would say the same logic probably applies to why we’re seeing so much investment in AI agents and maybe not so much in fixing bad processes or, you know, we’re I guess we’re starting to see workflows, agentic workflows in the the contact center stack now. But it really started with the AI agents, you know, both chatbots and and voice, right? And it’s it’s because it

it reduces the cost of those interactions and it allows you to to handle at scale what you wouldn’t be able to handle with, you know, the same amount of agents now.

Ricki Lang (15:08.014)
And then you can grow your business because if you’re handling every call one by one, there’s no way you can grow the business. But you’re also learning because you’re using those agents, you’re understanding the data associated with it and fixing the faulty processes so that customers that did have a bad experience don’t actually even have that again. So I mean, and I’m also seeing folks doing some really good chatbots with personalizing

what the interaction is with those customers. So I know that you were in the billing portal and you were trying to set up auto pay and it didn’t work, which in telco that’s one of the one of the big challenges is billing, which you know, they want to get paid, let them pay you. and basically meeting your customer where they are instead of making them start over, make the first term count every time.

Shawn Cordner (15:52.332)
Yeah, absolutely. So we talked about CX and DX and we should now talk about EX. So what is EX?

Ricki Lang (16:00.65)
EX is the employee experience. So one of the lines that one of the leaders had in my past was happy cows make great milk, right? And that’s true because if your employees are happy, they believe in what they’re doing, and they’re able to create a good experience for the people they’re interacting with, they’re going to make a great experience for everyone. So that employee experience is just as important. And I think that, you know, if you think about technicians out in the field trying to help.

Implement internet for people. The systems that they’re using should work. They should be able to find the information they need and quite frankly check the box when they’re done. It shouldn’t take them two hours to do that. And we’re seeing automation in that space, but again, it’s an investment. And the other thing that’s important when you’re making those type of employee investments is talk to the people on the ground. What are the hardest pieces that you actually can automate to make their life easier and they can do a better job for your customers?

And that’s how you create a great employee experience. You learn more about what the on the ground interactions look like because you can’t replace those most of the time, right? We’re not all talking about robots yet. So so it like how do you really make that a great experience for employees so that they show up with a smile on their face every day?

Shawn Cordner (17:16.694)
And it’s not just about the smile you alluded to it, but just to put a fine point on it, it’s also removing the friction so they can actually do their job better. And if they can do their job better and faster then then the customer gets to outcome faster, and that means they have a better customer experience, right?

Ricki Lang (17:33.28)
It well well, that’s why it’s this total experience, right? So but the employees that can just do their job and not frustrated with the systems, that maybe there’s certain processes that you’re looking to fix fine, but they’re not frustrated with the systems themselves. It’s just a it’s a great opportunity that not everybody’s looking at at first. They’re looking well, what are the customers doing? What are they doing in digital? What are they doing when they call? Well, what are they doing when they interact with your team?

Can they do what they need can your team help them? Or are they stuck also and they’re looking for workarounds?

Shawn Cordner (18:04.812)
Yeah. talk maybe a little bit about the cost to this, the hard cost, but also what are the soft costs to how it impacts customer experience, brand equity, things like that.

Ricki Lang (18:15.736)
So hard costs, I mean, if you have processes that are inconsistent, there’s workarounds, you’re constantly outside of what’s standard and like all kinds of workarounds, which is time and money across the board every single time. And if you spend time understanding what those are to fix them, because you need to know what they are and where to put the resources, then you won’t have those workarounds. You won’t have bad data in your system, you won’t have people like

trying to slam in orders because they can’t get them done. so the employees that are helping customers do that or that are on the receiving end of bad data from something that was slammed in the system, if you’ve invested to fix those things that it’s smooth across the board, right? and then from a from a softer cost, it’s again that frustration that someone like, I can’t do this again, right? How many times?

Yeah, I’ve been on the phone, I’ve been at the bank with people and they said, I’m not allowed to do this, I’m sorry. And I I’ve tried to do this and I’ve told my managers, that’s the worst. It’s you feel bad as a customer too, for this employee. It’s just it’s just a bad experience and actually takes away from NPS, loyalty, it takes away from, you know, why that customer’s there and happy to be a customer.

Shawn Cordner (19:32.974)
Sure. I am not a runner, but I do run occasionally. So last year I did a half marathon midnight trail run. Shortly after that I did a twenty mile hike that has little bit of trail running in it and a lot of elevation gain. And between the two things, I couldn’t walk for like two months. I had knee pain and heel pain and foot pain and I just

I was broken down. And I spent six to eight months trying to rehab my knee and my heel and my ankle. And it just wasn’t getting better. So I went to a really good sports physiotherapist and what they actually diagnosed was the problem was in my hips. It w my hip flexors. I didn’t have enough mobility in my hips. And that has you know, there’s a kinetic chain that hatches these things, right? So what was happening, the problem in my hip.

was causing me to strain a certain way on my knee and the way that I was compensating with my knee caused problems in my feet. Why am I telling everyone this? It’s because I think sometimes the problems that you have in your customer experience actually originate further down the kinetic chain and it’s actually coming from the systems and the processes that you have. And and so one of the topics that we talk about a lot right now is don’t introduce AI into a bad process. You don’t want to be bad faster or be better at being bad, right?

But it’s it’s also not just the process, it’s the underlying systems that I think people have to look at. So d in your opinion, do you think that people are making edge investments that are, you know, improving things on the margins but not necessarily addressing the core problems that they’re having? Or people are doing it outward?

Ricki Lang (21:20.982)
Yes. I mean, especially in enterprise organizations. So one of the telco customers that we work with has done a lot of orchestration with MCP. So really because their entire code base is in one place now. So they are able to look at what the friction is on the front end with these customers and dig down to be like, this is the real problem and there’s a lot of legacy architecture and to allow them to do that. Most companies actually haven’t necessarily

created the ecosystem to allow that. So somebody that’s on the business side is like, well, this is just what we should do. And the engineering side is, this is what I was told to do and this is what the policies are. And they don’t talk to each other. Right. So they just have bad process and they basically continue to build on top of bad process, which just is a it’s a wheel of failure, to be quite frank. And

So understanding the why, and I’m a very curious person when I ask people about like, well, why is it set up that way? Or why are you doing it that way? You can actually dig down into the root of those problems. And for organizations to get leaders, cross functional leaders in a room, like, that’s why that’s the case. We don’t have to build it that way. We can do this differently. And look at what that can do for the organization. So to your point, and what you asked is are they automating things that they shouldn’t be? Yes.

If you’re not being curious and you’re not asking the right questions, you could end up with like the total wrong answer. And then you build something that’s quite frankly making everything even worse.

Shawn Cordner (22:52.686)
Yeah, maybe just as a heuristic, if people can just keep in the back of their mind that there’s a difference between ultimate cause and proximate cause. Don’t treat proc proximate cause. It’s the it’s the same thing as you know, in in healthcare, treating symptoms versus treating underlying cause, right? So don’t be so quick to treat a symptom. Actually look at the system. These are complex systems, right? And what you’re trying to do is is

simplify a complex system down to the point where a layman that doesn’t know anything about your world is able to interact with your business and interact with your products, interact with your systems and processes. And so you really have to, for a better, you lack of a better word, dumb things down in a way that they’re able to kind of navigate, right?

Ricki Lang (23:38.986)
Yes. And as a leader, your job is to be curious enough to connect the right people so that you can get down to the root problem instead of just assuming and just working within your own little silo. I mean, and that’s that’s something that I’m seeing the best organizations work towards a better holistic implementation. I’ve seen some of my customers actually pulling together their digital teams, their product teams.

And their care teams in under one umbrella, and they’re actually learning from each other and fixing things across the board. So to create that better experience it holistically. And some of the challenges that they’ve found and some of the policies that they’ve dug out and thrown away have moved the business forward significantly. They’ve seen tons of growth because they were able to move these things out of the way. But that doesn’t happen unless you really take time to understand the root cause.

Shawn Cordner (24:34.926)
One of closest friends is a military guy, Coast Guard guy, and he always loves to use the phrase addition by subtraction. Is there something to be said for taking things out of the process as opposed to improving or adding processes or technology?

Ricki Lang (24:50.712)
For sure. I mean, it just depends on what you’re trying to do and what the goals are. And I think these companies also are their goals are changing. What are they trying to automate and what’s what’s actually going to make an impact? Don’t assume that something’s going to make an impact. And quite frankly, there’s some analysis and automation that’s being implemented without that human in the loop. You need a judgment call too, sometimes. Like understand which is the one that’s actually going to make a difference for my for a human.

And for the way that someone’s enjoying or really hating their their work together. So yes, there’s definitely something for addition by subtraction. I’ve heard that in many different ways actually. And I also think that, you know, that human judgment of where to focus and why to focus based on the overarching company goals is part of that entire process.

Shawn Cordner (25:42.102)
All right. And I’m gonna just take a pause break for a second and say, Johnny, I’m gonna tell you to listen to this podcast episode because I mentioned you better tell me that you heard this. Okay. moving on. so we talked about CX, we talked about DX and EX and how these all kind of work together, but I wanna dive into that a little bit more because you you you gave a little bit of a spoiler. There’s actually an extra X.

Here, right? There’s another experience that people don’t talk about and it’s it’s the T X and it’s not Texas, but it’s total experience, like you said before. So what does that mean?

Ricki Lang (26:19.246)
So total experience is across the board. You have your employee experience, you have your customer experience, you’ve your digital experience, and there’s a entire experience of, you know, as a persona and as a person interacting in all of these different realms, that’s the total experience. So as someone that is, you know, a digital only user, maybe you’re looking at it one way, as a marketer working inside the company, your persona is different. As a product

person that’s interacting with with the company with all these systems, you’re different. So there’s all of these different people interacting with your company. They’re all having experiences. What kind of experiences are they having? You know, as someone that’s been in consulting also, was it fun or not fun to work with X, Y, or Z? How are their how are their processes? How did they work together? What was the culture? And that’s the whole experience. And what are the permissions that are given around those experiences?

So you can actually move the ball forward. So that’s what that’s what it looks like. And it’s it’s useful to look at the total experience from these different lenses for design. Like you’re looking at, you know, there’s all different ways that you’re looking at the interactions with these companies and how you optimize across the board is how successful your company can actually be.

Shawn Cordner (27:41.64)
is it useful or necessary to make a distinction between the different experiences, or does that maybe set up a bad framing that these are actually compartmentalized?

Ricki Lang (27:56.63)
If you’re running a company and you want your company to be successful, you need to look at the total experience. Because you want to have people within your company enjoy doing business with your company, inside your company, alongside your company. And that’s how you become successful because we’re in a relationship business, right? And it’s not all data. If it was all data all working together, then none of this would matter anyway because they’re all just gonna work through it, right?

So that does matter. It matters to the growth of your company to look at it across the board and to remind yourself that every experience matters and that’s how you create that loyalty and the trust that lets your company really soar. So yes, it matters.

Shawn Cordner (28:44.204)
Now I this is a question I don’t know the answer to, so I’m I’m being a bad lawyer here, but is this what a CXO does, a company that has the CXO position, are they orchestrating or coordinating across these different experiences to make sure that they aren’t siloed?

Ricki Lang (29:00.376)
So what I’ve seen from a customer experience perspective is just the customer side. So it’s not necessarily the employee side from what from from the experience that I’ve had, that might not be the same everywhere. So CX usually includes DX, it includes

Shawn Cordner (29:19.256)
Want you at the beginning to turn your Zoom ringer off and mine just came through.

Ricki Lang (29:23.662)
So you y CX will be engaged and involved with the digital teams. They don’t always run the digital teams, but they’re and they’re looking at from a care and operations perspective those interactions, but they may not be looking at the employee experience as well. That’s a newer lever that people are starting to pull. And you know, how you create the total experience is not always the CX leader’s job.

It depends how large these companies are and how curious and invested those leaders are so that they can have the tool sets to dig into each of these personas.

Shawn Cordner (30:03.724)
I wonder too, like

Do you do you have does someone have ownership though of like the the whole total experience? Like who should be coordinating that? Who should have accountability for that? The CEO.

Ricki Lang (30:17.95)
Yeah.

That’s my perspective, right? That’s the culture you set forward. So at our company, the culture we set forward is we work with customers that are maniacally focused on creating the best experience for their customers. And that means that they’re looking at all these different pieces and we work with those CEOs on their customers, their employees, not just digital, their care and like adding the behavioral side of what they’re

experiences are creating in their ecosystem so that they can make it the best. And we do focus a lot on OpEx and where you invest with CapEx. We we talk about these things, but that’s a CEO opportunity because guess what? The CFO needs to also be in it to win it to invest in some of these places. The COO needs to understand the operation side of what’s being done. And then that CX leader, the digital leader, the engineering leader is

I always look at like tech as an enabler for great things. And you use tech as a business opportunity. And that’s how I function. Like the the engineers should understand why the goals and what they’re trying to achieve alongside their business partners.

Shawn Cordner (31:33.39)
How do you go about orchestrating all of the data in a way that it becomes usable for the total experience as opposed to siloing again data or car compartmentalizing it for each of these separate experiences?

Ricki Lang (31:51.01)
That’s such an interesting question. And I was actually in a conversation the other day because not everybody’s going to have the same data perspective and understand what does conversion mean to you versus what conversion means over here in marketing versus in product, right? As an example. And so, you know, i it’s how you create cross-team knowledge and looking at similar KPIs to achieve those goals.

And understanding that in the marketing realm, this means one thing. And in the care realm, this means something else. And understanding how to join those types of KPIs together to understand overall. I had not seen someone s unless maybe there’s probably smaller companies that can look across the board of all the data that they have and really synchronize it. I’m sure it’s coming any moment with quantum. But

I have not seen that synchronization. It’s really a common understanding of the language that you’re using so that you can achieve those goals together and how you look at the consolidated metrics to understand if you’re actually moving the lever or not.

Shawn Cordner (32:58.796)
Yeah, that makes sense. I think that’s probably the ideal state, right? But we’re probably very far away from that, especially since the amount of data and the sources of data keep increasing, right?

Ricki Lang (33:09.556)
shadow IT and I mean how many people do you know it’s like well I created my own instance over here so I could play with it. And as a leader, you say, Okay, well where’s the source? And how are you making sure that what you’re coming up with from an analytics perspective matches anything else that we have going on in our organization, right? And understanding how things are used. Because there’s certain especially in in telco where there’s a lot of legacy back office

You can see one thing if you logged into this portal and see something else you logged in over here and they should be the same. But that doesn’t always occur.

Shawn Cordner (33:47.5)
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Spoken like someone that has been there before for sure. so we’ve talked about the total experience, but there’s actually one more X involved here that I think is often forgotten, maybe not so much in the marketing department, but maybe in the IT department, and that’s user experience, which also is part of the total experience, obviously. And I would argue it’s it

can be closely related to, although it is a subset of the digital experience. So do you want to maybe define user experience for the audience real quick?

Ricki Lang (34:24.952)
So I mean the UI itself is just the surface, but the user experience is all the architecture that goes around that and understanding what the interaction is going to be, the feedback, how you recover from errors, how you apply these with agents looking at and talking to customers at the same time. So it’s it’s you know the data that tells you what’s happening with those user interactions.

And you know, sometimes the engineering team’s focused on latency, but do you understand what the UX what does the UX do when there’s latency in that in that opportunity to make it so the customer is okay to wait for a second, right? We’ve all seen the spinners. Spinners didn’t used to exist. It used to just show a blank screen and you waited and you said this didn’t work. So that’s part of how, you know, the UX has been modified and you use data to understand if it’s working or not.

Shawn Cordner (35:16.684)
Yeah. so just to make it simple, the if you think about this digital experience as a car, like a website, let’s say as a car, the user interface is the design of the car, the color of the car, the type of seats that you have, are they leather or are they plastic or whatever, the dashboard? and then the user experiences, what does it feel like to drive that car? How does it corner? What’s the acceleration like?

is it easy for me to find the different functions that I need to operate the car? Or is it hard for me to find those things, right? You wanna make sure that there’s a a clear path and and what’s called discoverability. People need to be able to figure out how these things function. And user experience design principles are very tied to human psychology and how we think. And that’s something that I think is super interesting to me. And I think user experience is very

should be very closely tied to all of the other types of experiences, right? So they should be designed with intention. what do you think?

Ricki Lang (36:22.636)
I I agree. I also like a recent stat is that everybody’s investing a lot of money into, you know, all like the automation and things of that nature and and what customers want is can you just give me a search that works? Like, can I just use a search and find the thing that I’m trying to do and make it easy for me to interact with you? So it’s where you choose also to spend your time so that the car feels good and also works at the same time.

And so I mean, that’s what we’ve seen. I think there’s something like forty percent in a recent benchmark study that we we did was that companies are not investing necessarily in the right place in the user experience to make it easy for customers to work with you.

Shawn Cordner (37:08.044)
Yeah. So the user ex the the user experience principles, it actually brief history lesson, if you’ll forgive the tangent, right? But the the start of user experience really comes from material design and from manufacturing. So they designed workflows in manufacturing, they designed systems to be able to have more efficient manufacturing. And this goes back to like the the twenties, really just kind of an evolution of

what Ford built. And then in the fifties, interestingly, there was another evolution of these design principles that happened in the telecom space. Bell Labs innovated the user experience design it when they built phones that people had to dial, you know, button instead of rotary dial, and when they eliminated the operators and started making it kind of a self-serve thing, right? So you don’t think about that, but they actually had to think about the placement of the numbers.

what order do the numbers go in? What shape are the numbers in? what you know, the asterisks and the pound that is functionality that people needed to be able to have, right? So they they develop these principles. And I’m gonna read these principles real quick because I think it’s so important that these principles be used in customer experience and in employee experience as well. We have it in user experience, we have it to some ex extent in digital experience because of UX. So it’s user centricity.

You have to put the user first. It has to be human centered design. You need to think about the way that humans behave, not engineers. Not that I’m saying that engineers aren’t human, but I think everyone gets what I mean, right? It’s it can’t be that you you have to make the human bend around the equipment. You have to make the equipment bend around the human. So

Ricki Lang (38:48.834)
Different, it’s different.

Ricki Lang (38:59.262)
Different humans also. I’m just gonna say, like I watched my fiance interact on a website and I’m like, Why one that I built and I said why did you do that? I don’t understand why that’s what you looked at instead of this. Right. And guess what? You never know what a user’s gonna do. That’s why some of this understanding is so important. Keep going, sorry.

Shawn Cordner (39:16.702)
Hundred percent, yes. so to your point about different humans, there are humans that are differently abled. So actually accessibility is one of the core tenants of user experience design. consistency. People I say this all the time on here, but your brain is nothing but a a modeling engine, right? So it has a map of what the world looks like and how things work in the world and how human how

This particular human interacts with the world. And if you break that expectation, they’re going to have a bad experience. So once you have introduced some sort of design and functionality into a website, you need to keep that across the entire experience because you’ve built a mental model for them and then you break the mental model for them. That’s going to be a very bad time for everybody. visual hierarchy. So we talked about discoverability.

People need to be able to figure out how things work. And if they can’t, you know, they can’t figure out how things work unless you have what are called affordances, little signals that this thing does this thing. And we I think you kind of alluded to this earlier, but like with the the spinning thing, like we have as an industry kind of set up these standards that have been adopted across, you know, all user experiences. So

You really don’t want to break the mental model that someone has that has been built from their entire experience over the internet. I mean, prior to that. Usability, obviously, just needs to be peop people are there for a reason. They need to be able to find what they’re doing and do what they want to do. and they need to do it fast and efficiently. And then the last thing, which I think is probably the one that I see broken in the customer experiences that I as a consumer have all the time is user control.

People need to be able to do what they want to do without you making it hard for them to do it. We talked about you know, the the click to cancel. there’s dark patterns where, you know, we we design, you know, a functionality that we want them to do and we make them proactively change that functionality. That’s not a good pattern for people. And the one that I see all the time is you get into an IBR or you get into a an AI agent and you wanna talk to a human being.

Shawn Cordner (41:38.402)
And they make it impossible for you to get out and talk to a human being. That is probably the source of the most frustration, at least for me. So I’m gonna pause there. What do you think about all that and how it fits into this conversation?

Ricki Lang (41:51.074)
This is why behavior is such a an important part of understanding what your customers are doing. How are they interacting with you? How are they finding and getting to achieve their goals? Or are they calling to talk to you all the time because they just can’t figure it out? And yes, sometimes it’s user error. I understand that. But you can look and you can figure out where the problems are by the data that’s showing you how big those problems are. Why are people calling? What is their intent? What did they do before they called you?

Right. And how do you fix it so that they have an intuitive experience? We have great designers out there. And you know, yes, there’s accessibility, but there’s also, you know, there’s those little eye icons like, how do I do this or what does this mean? And how do you create that simplicity and use data to understand where the friction is and stop people within the experience too? You know, I’ve seen kind of injecting

Clarifications. If you see someone rage clicking and scrolling out on a page, like, hey, it looks like you’re trying to do this. Can I help you? yes, please help me. Right? That’s an opportunity. And some people do it really, really well. So, you know, you want people to have an intuitive ins experience. I’m very interested to see how things continue to evolve when it’s the agents interacting with agents on these experiences and what that looks like. because there won’t be a human in the loop.

And you may or may not be able to figure out what these things did. So, but I I do agree with most of those principles. I think that the change of the experience and change management for your customers is a huge deal. But I’ve also read studies that the younger generation doesn’t have as much of a problem when you start moving things around as the older generation does. Like, where did that go? And the younger generation just finds it and they figure it out. And that’s a weird

Dichotomy because you’re trying to show for everybody.

Shawn Cordner (43:48.802)
Yeah. It’s interesting though. I I wonder how much of that is the use the the younger generation’s experience and basically their mental mapping growing up in an internet connected, application driven world and how much of it is just kind of the age because I can tell you that I’m I’m turning into an old man and I get cranky about change now when I didn’t used to when I was younger. So you know, time will tell in a couple of decades whether or not it’s actually a a different

behavior or whether it’s just they were they were young and life was easy back then.

Ricki Lang (44:23.566)
Are you somebody that when you click onto a new website and I’m sure you’ve seen this where, hey, things have changed. Here’s what we’ve changed and they kind of show it to you. Do you close it or do you look it look through it?

Shawn Cordner (44:35.022)
I look through it because I’m interested from a a design perspective and from a marketing perspective. As a consumer, I I I don’t think I could care less, and I think probably it would annoy me if they changed stuff. But like wait, when I I owned a branding agency for about six years and at the time, like early in that process, ***** was the gold standard from a brand perspective for me. Like we would look at their website constantly and they changed it very, very frequently. Yeah.

and then I I I think they they moved it from an agency in house, and that’s when you start to see a lot of drift from the original intention and they started just kind of piling things on. And so fast forward to now, and I think they have one of the worst user experiences and and website designs out there in the space. and that’s a personal opinion, not an Amplix opinion. And

I just feel like the change management aspect of it is exactly what they were missing. So you’re you’re so right to point that out. And I I don’t know how often a context center leader would introduce a new process just kind of haphazardly without a change management approach to it, but they they certainly shouldn’t, especially if it’s a situation where maybe in healthcare where that patient is gonna be constantly interacting with them.

as opposed to rarely interacting with them.

Ricki Lang (46:03.894)
Right. Yeah. I mean, change management as an art is something I love actually. And I think that there is great ways to do that and to make sure that when you t when you’re talking about EX and then DX and then TX, right, you’re basically bringing it along for the ride, like to the employees, this is what we’re changing, this is why we’re changing it, this is what it looks like, then moving it along and saying, Okay, it’s being implemented, let’s interact with it, let’s see how it’s going, and then looking at the data associated with those changes and bringing everybody along for the ride.

What did that look like? Speaking with your care team. Hey, we changed something. Did that work or are you getting complaints? Because the care team is you the last ones to understand that something even changed. So really creating that opportunity across the board. I haven’t looked at the website that you mentioned earlier. but I’m sure that there’s ways to kind of look holistically, and that’s also important. And what we talked about before is like what are the goals and what do you what do you want people to achieve there?

And which how does your entire organization interact to make sure that that goal is achievable for the person that’s interacting with your company?

Shawn Cordner (47:07.544)
Well, you know, we didn’t talk about it, but I you just basically said it right there is you you have to consider the different user personas of the people that are coming into your experience, whether that’s a customer experience or a digital experience or a user experience or an employee experience. There are different people that have a different profile that are trying to accomplish different things and different things matter to them in that process. And it and and so really I guess what we’re what we’ve probably spent all this time saying is that

There is one experience with just different personas.

Ricki Lang (47:38.306)
Yes. And that’s part of, you know, UFs too. And thinking about it from all these person personas so people can be successful in their pursuit of getting things done. That’s it. ‘Cause they’re there for a reason. They’re doing research, they’re trying to pay their bill, whatever that might be, how can you make them successful in that and how can you help the people that work at your organization enable that success?

Shawn Cordner (48:01.218)
Absolutely, a hundred percent. If you’re doing anything other than that, with like maybe some slight nudges towards what you want them to do as well, right? But but you really need to put their experience first. so I I want to talk a little more about behavioral context and and kind of the data driven engineering that you keep talking about here, because I I think when when you talk about human psychology, one of the key concepts in this kind of aspect of psychology is stated preference versus revealed preference.

So people have an idea in their head of what they want and they’ll tell you what they want, but actually their behavior can show you something different. And that’s why the kind of data that you’re talking about here is so important because you’re not gonna actually get to the truth with a focus group or with a conversation with somebody. You’re gonna get to the truth by seeing what those people actually did as opposed to what they say they’re going to do, right?

Ricki Lang (48:54.764)
Right. And I mean that’s that’s what we’re doing is we focus on what was that behavior. Don’t make assumptions, right? How many times have you gotten a survey? I’m sure you didn’t fill it out ’cause like one percent maybe fill out surveys, but if I went and look back at what you did while you were online and how many people that were like Shawn that did it that way, I can understand the challenges or the great experience that people are having. So I’m using data to drive those results. So a lot of systems out there will tell you the what.

But they won’t tell you the why. They’ll say, this was where they clicked. Okay. Like, why did they do that? What were they trying to figure out? So if you start to add in that behavioral context as an example, I know that you were doing X, Y, and Z, and that’s why you’re calling me and you couldn’t get it done. Or that’s why you started chatting. And here, here’s the FAQ as well as a link to the page that you’re trying to get to, because I see you’re, I think you’re looking for this. Is that true?

And that’s that’s using data to drive those results and also quite frankly, digital containment in these spaces. So understanding the quantification of those experiences and what did people say they wanted versus what did they actually do?

Shawn Cordner (50:07.47)
That’s why it’s so important for this data to to flow together, right? Because if you understand that someone was on your website, apparently trying to do a thing, couldn’t do it, and then contacted your customer service and then didn’t like the AI bot and tried to get out to a human being. If you can see all that as one journey, then you can actually understand what’s broken here and how to get to the ultimate cause as a pro as opposed to the proximate cause.

But you mentioned survey. This is a good example of of I think bad data because it’s not proving anything. It’s what I it’s the perception of the interaction. And there are so many reasons why you’re not actually getting good data on that. One of them is bad engineering of the survey itself. Like I actually fill out surveys. I’m I’m the one percent. I’m the one percent. But I’ll tell you why I do it is because today I know that so many of the the

Ricki Lang (50:54.36)
You’re the one percent.

Shawn Cordner (51:01.666)
You know, the frontline people that I’m dealing with, their compensation or their employee performance you know, reports or whatever. I give I will give positive if if I had a positive experience with somebody, I will be sure that I go and fill out that survey because I know it’s gonna impact their job.

Ricki Lang (51:21.526)
But if you didn’t let’s talk about do you fill out the surveys where you had a negative experience and do you explain it?

Shawn Cordner (51:26.998)
No, because I feel bad. And I I don’t want that person to get in trouble, right? The the other part of the problem though. But the other part of the problem is like the the way that they write these, it’s hard to separate the interaction that I had with the person versus the the experience that I had with the business. Right. So like

What am I telling you about my experience here? Or am I giving experience, you know, my feedback on the experience that I had when I finally got to that person? And they usually don’t make it easy to differentiate those two things.

Ricki Lang (52:14.988)
But that but that’s why it’s important like most people don’t fill out surveys. And the one percent, one to two percent that do fill out those surveys, a lot of them are ranting and raving about what a challenge they had. And a lot of team there’s teams, full teams out there that are focused on looking at that survey and saying, Well, what happened? Okay. And so, you know, we provide you can go and watch what they did. Like, this is what happened. Well, how many other people had that problem? There’s also intent.

When you call and they say what do you what do you why are you calling? And you give an you give something, you might have four different things that you’re trying to do that you might have tried to do or didn’t try to do. Right? And then you’re gonna get a survey. What are you focused on? And are you filling that out? Most of the time, no. And if you’re if even you as somebody that likes to fill out surveys, which is interesting, if you don’t know what you’re focused on, you’re certainly not filling it out because it’s just confusing to start with.

But the behavioral data is key to getting better results because you can kind of understand how many people are having those types of experiences and where people are just escalating to escalate or escalating as a fallback ’cause they couldn’t get done what they wanted.

Shawn Cordner (53:22.764)
Yes, absolutely. That is a a key distinction. And so whatever you’re setting up to capture that, if you’re if it’s not empirical data, but rather subjective feedback, you need to be very mindful of how you’re architecting those those questions, right? there’s also something, you know, there there’s cognitive biases that get in the way here too. Like there there’s the recency bias, and then there’s something called peak end rule.

And and basically that that is we tend to judge an experience that we had off of the last part of it. Yeah. So you can have and this there’s data behind this. This is not me just making this up, but you could go on a vacation and have an absolutely terrible vacation, but have a great ending experience on the last night and you’ll look back on that vacation and it will be colored in a positive way. The inverse is true as well. If you had a really terrible experience at that resort,

But the l but the or I’m sorry, really great experience at that resort, but the last experience was really bad, it’s going to color that experience in a negative light for you as well. So I think you have the same, you know, thing in the the customer experience journey as well is like knowing that you should really focus on what that last you know interaction looks like because they’ll leave thinking that it’s it’s a good interaction.

Ricki Lang (54:44.256)
I how many times you get off the phone with someone and say, Is there anything else I can help you with today? Did I did I help you achieve what you were trying to accomplish?

Shawn Cordner (54:52.28)
Such a good point. I never even connected that, but that’s probably I don’t know if someone did it intentionally, but y that is exactly what’s happening there.

Ricki Lang (55:00.046)
I don’t know. You d you just came up with it. I just gave you my experience for it.

Shawn Cordner (55:05.038)
Well you connected two dots that I didn’t. So yeah, so I think that that’s pretty interesting. But the the other I guess challenge that you have here is the data that we’ve been talking about to this point is very much lagging indicators as opposed to leading indicators. So are there any lint leading indicators or KPI that you can help you be proactive as opposed to reacting to a bad problem?

Ricki Lang (55:28.792)
For sure. I mean, but that that’s what data’s for, right? I mean, that’s how we use all of these systems is where’s the opportunity is where are the most people having friction and looking across the board, not shipping your org, understanding the entire sales experience, the entire service experience, and where people are really struggling and not just in one channel. Right? It’s not just the digital channel, it’s the care channel. It’s

the chat channel, like there’s different ways of like looking at these experiences. So you’re you’re taking on the best growth levers you have to impact your co company in a positive way. But I I personally think that that’s a data opportunity and also a human judgment. Which is which is gonna what sometimes there’s some low level fruit you can kind of like pick off and like fix stuff. And then there’s some big things that might take a little bit longer. And

understanding the balance, but understanding what you implemented and if it helped fix some of those challenges that people are having. And it’s a holistic thing, right? So but I use data to drive those results. Data and then actually just interactions. Maybe you call your your care team and you say, Hey, what are the biggest problems you’re having? Like understanding that and then looking at the digital data and saying, Well, that doesn’t make sense. That’s not what we’re seeing, right? And having conversations so that there’s

you know, a common understanding of where you can drive the, you know, the lowering of all those friction points so that your business can be more successful. But I I do think that it’s it’s a data exercise with human judgment.

Shawn Cordner (57:13.038)
That’s such a a great example because in that example that you just gave, that’s the lived experience of that employee. That’s impacting their employee experience. So even if that’s not showing up in the data, that is an a real issue that needs to be considered

Ricki Lang (57:31.214)
I like how you tie this all together with total experience because it’s important and that’s how you create a great company.

Shawn Cordner (57:37.56)
Yeah, I I agree. let’s talk about automation for a second. You know, how do you know when the right where or when to automate versus where or when not to automate?

Ricki Lang (57:51.224)
So if you think about two employees that would follow the same process every time to get the same thing done, and there’s not like a high emotion and a high problem with that, and there’s a big volume of that type of task, that’s a good opportunity to talk about automation. It doesn’t mean that it’s the right place to do it. There’s human judgment that needs to be considered, but high volume, low variance, clear success criteria, those are areas that make sense to automate. Things that you’re doing over and over and over again.

That makes sense. Whereas when you have a customer that’s angry and they want to cancel their service, maybe that’s not the best place to automate because there’s an opportunity to save them, to calm them down, to actually create a more loyal customer that actually loves your company. So it’s kind of like if you also if you’re gonna be wrong. If there if automation is gonna is going to create like you something totally wrong, and I’ve seen that with some of these bots, customers have won, the companies have not.

that is a bad, bad, bad part. And you know, you want to think about what you want that relationship to end up up end up like. I’ve seen some really good automation that’s helped people move faster, but it really needs to be done in the right places and then the validation that that automation is achieving the result that you expected. Or better, right?

Shawn Cordner (59:12.396)
Yeah. You you mentioned high emotion, someone that’s in a vulnerable state. You know, we’ve in past podcasts talked about healthcare being a place where it might not be great to automate. but ambiguity and complexity are maybe another area as well. I that that’s the number one reason I’ve said this before, but if I’m contacting customer sort support, it’s because it’s something that is it requires explanation.

Like if I’m if I’m trying to zero out and talk to somebody that’s a human being, it’s because I feel like what I have to say is more complex than their AI is going to be able to to handle. It’s more nuanced, right? Now, I know that Claude, for example, when I’m working with Claude, understands my nuance, but I don’t expect that their, you know, their chat bot or whatever is gonna have the same level of interpretation as as Claude’s Frontier model, right? But

Maybe I’m wrong in that and maybe I

Ricki Lang (01:00:13.114)
I think there’s opportunity there. I do think that there’s there it is nuanced. And I I also think that if there’s an opportunity to help you get your task done and it is just factual information where it is not as nuanced, you might think that something’s more nuanced than it is. So like I see customers, specifically in the telco space, they look a lot at that a lot. International calling plans and international support.

People are looking for that all over the place. It’s a total big opportunity because people call every day about it. And there’s nothing really nuanced about it. And it feels like it’s nuanced ’cause like you’re going to WAM or something, but it’s not really that nuanced. It’s kind of like a formula. So if you can give a customer that information, maybe it’s not that hard. You give it a shot first.

And you can give it a shot. And if it didn’t work, you can say, let me get you to somebody that can help you. And I’ve had that type of experience as well, right? Where you’re like, I tried. Let me get you an agent.

Shawn Cordner (01:01:18.348)
Yeah. I just ordered a piece of furniture and the website that I ordered it from the they for whatever reason they didn’t print the number, like the street address on the the the shipping label. And so it got rejected like the day that it was supposed to be delivered, it was out for delivery and it got rejected and it was being held up and so I had to contact their customer support.

I happen to be living in a a in new construction that doesn’t have like it’s not in all the databases yet either, right? So when I was trying to to do it through this this AI agent, it just wasn’t understanding the address situation. It wasn’t understanding the nuance of me wanting to, you know, pick it up. And it was saying like, yeah, okay, you can pick it up. All you need to do is provide your, you know, ID with the address, the delivery address on it. Well

My ID hasn’t been changed yet. And also, even if it I did, it has the it it doesn’t have the same address. Exactly. So I’m like, give me a person. But actually to the credit of FedEx, it immediately gave me a person and that person was able to to help me. But it it also did give me conflicting information. The something that the AI bot or that yeah, the voice bot told me was not true. And the agent, the live agent told me that I couldn’t do what it said that I could do. So

Ricki Lang (01:02:21.182)
Too many nuances.

Shawn Cordner (01:02:44.486)
that’s the kind of complexity that I’m talking about, right? And I’m not there there’s no way you would want to, let alone could, design for an edge case like that. But as long as you make it easy for me to get out and talk to a human being, it’s a it’s actually a good experience for me.

Ricki Lang (01:03:01.484)
Yes, I agree. But it but there are certain cases that like and you wouldn’t even want to try to fix that. I mean, you’re like, I just want my package, man. Like I got my package. And you you knew that there was a problem. That’s never coming up.

Shawn Cordner (01:03:14.594)
Yeah. Exactly. we talked about automating bad processes, something that we don’t want to do. and I think we talked a little bit about the infinite loop, but maybe just a quick reminder to let people get out of the system, right?

Ricki Lang (01:03:29.346)
Yeah, if you’re impossible to do business with, people are gonna remember that and they’re not coming back. That’s how you lose loyalty.

Shawn Cordner (01:03:36.226)
Yeah. I’m I’m speeding up a little because I’m using up a lot of your time and we’re getting close to the end here, so I want to get through a couple of things. human in the loop. When we were having a planning call, you started talking about human in the loop as an operating model. What do you mean by that?

Ricki Lang (01:03:55.704)
So I mean, you can’t just automate everything and be like, okay, it works. You there’s a there’s a there’s a there’s a checkpoint and a validation that the things that you’re automating are working as expected. And we all know that these models, it’s a lot of matching words. And yes, they’re getting to be amazing, but that doesn’t always work. So you and you know that a human reviewing five hundred AI decisions also, have you heard of thought shitting? I don’t know if I should say that on here.

Shawn Cordner (01:04:23.753)
It’s okay.

Ricki Lang (01:04:25.016)
Yeah. But but but people are, you know, looking over what bots are doing. They’re looking at code and they’re like, my god, you rewrite the whole code base instead of this little chunk. That’s a problem. So you need to have human in the loop to make sure that what people are building, what people are putting out is actually moving in the direction that you want it to be. You know, what’s asked in a postmortem and who is accountable? Accountability is huge. Who’s accountable

for the decisions that have been automated and that they were right or wrong. Did they achieve the right result? And how are you reviewing to make sure that that’s a that’s that’s something that you have these checkpoints on. So if you don’t have an operating model with human in the loop and you just set everything off and you did never come back to it, you’re probably gonna end up having some problems because balls move down the line and you need to make sure that they’re moving in the right direction.

Shawn Cordner (01:05:18.094)
So really you’re you’re advocating for taking a different approach in that the the human in the loop is not the safety net to make sure that things are necessarily going wrong. It’s more the the proactive guardrails to make sure that things go right.

Ricki Lang (01:05:31.81)
Yeah, I mean, of course, things are gonna go wrong, but humans do things wrong, right? Humans do things wrong too. But who’s accountable when the automation went sideways? And, you know, how long did it go sideways for? Because there was no human ill, there was no validation, there was no checking. I do think that there’s new systems and there’s new agent processes being put in place. You have agents checking agents and junk judgment, but at some point there’s gotta be someone that looks at it and be like,

This is doing what it’s supposed to do. And I am making sure that that’s the case. I mean, you want to be confident in the things that you are implementing with your team as a leader and creating the right progress and validation of progress along the way.

Shawn Cordner (01:06:20.608)
You said it, humans are fallible too, right? So

Ricki Lang (01:06:24.248)
They’re biased, they’re tired, they’re inconsistent.

Shawn Cordner (01:06:27.79)
we’re very problematic. but what do you do to ensure that that human in the loop is actually paying attention? And just as an example, you know, if you’ve got an agentic workflow where at every step it makes you approve the process, but it’s just clicking an approve button, people get fatigued with process like that. So are they actually really looking to make sure that they should approve it?

Ricki Lang (01:06:56.11)
I mean, are you putting a human in the loop or human on an audit trail? Like where are you like and again, there’s an accountability piece. Who’s accountable for what you just implemented? And who’s who’s the checks and balances to make sure that, you know, Shawn did something on your team and Brendan did something on your team and Ricki did something on your team? And that that all s that all doesn’t clash because nobody was paying attention to each other. You have to have some type of checks and balances to make sure that your

metrics are moving in the way that you expect and those experience points are being received in the right way. And I mean, some people look at a total health score. We have customers doing that too. Like what are the most important things that they’re trying to do? And did they have a good experience or are there problems? Having the visibility and the metrics to understand what happened down the line is important. Because you to your point, you’re not going to have Hugh in the root in the loop for every piece, but you need some type of overall

validation and that context and knowledge of what it’s trying to do because computers don’t always know the right way.

Shawn Cordner (01:08:01.452)
Yeah. Does it change how you architect or deploy your technology?

Ricki Lang (01:08:09.714)
I guess it depends on how things are set up before you begin. But I I do think so. I you know, there’s I think we’re all feeling out the automation piece and how to put humans in the loop in the right spot. post mortems are important and checkpoints are important. But it degrades so fast to your point, if you have to checkpoint every piece. So putting

Putting metrics in place to be able to understand where something went sideways quickly is important. And maybe you’re adding automation so that that’s there too.

Shawn Cordner (01:08:45.602)
We haven’t talked about observability, but it feels like that fits in here. How important is observability to this process and the auditing that you were talking about?

Ricki Lang (01:08:54.274)
I mean, you should know what your tools are doing. So I think is really important. I that’s the thing is you could implement a bunch of systems and not know what anything’s doing, and then you have no observability. You could have implemented something that’s an infinite loop and your customer can never get out of it. And all you get is a bunch of escalations and you’ve no idea why because you’ve no observability. Or latency introduced into your system because you have an API that just fails and nobody put a checkpoint on it. How do you

make sure that you have the observability and the knowledge. That’s why I focus on metrics, because observability at the end of the day is metrics, right? So how do you understand what’s going on in the in in the back end with the things that you’ve done? How about you? What do you think about observability? I know you have thoughts on it.

Shawn Cordner (01:09:38.423)
I yeah, I have thoughts on everything. I I’m not qualified to comment on any of it, but I do anyway. It never stops me. yeah, I I think it’s important but I I don’t

think what’s more important is a single pane of glass view and probably nobody has that yet. Like that’s probably very hard to achieve. But you know, these systems are complex and interconnected and interdependent. And so you you’ve and really what the humans are doing as well, right? So all of th there’s all this data it we’ve been talking about all of this being one experience, right? So all of this data should be aggregated someplace and it should be connected someplace and it should it

You should be able to see the story that it’s all actually telling and how all that got there. but I don’t think that we have that yet, right? I think it’s it’s all these Yeah, right, in pieces. Exactly. There’s disparate systems and you have observability and you could look under the hood at each one of these systems, but that doesn’t mean that you’re seeing the whole picture.

Ricki Lang (01:10:27.308)
This probably.

Ricki Lang (01:10:38.382)
And I think that there’s also a piece of asking the right questions to understand the underlying things that are actually happening. And that’s where curiosity comes into play. And it’s also an art to ask the right questions to understand what’s happening.

Shawn Cordner (01:10:53.24)
You know, the these AI systems are, as everybody knows listening, they’re they’re they basically emulate neural networks, right? They are neural networks as just a different substrate. There’s a guy named Antonio Damasio, who was a neurosurgeon who became one of the the leading researchers on how the brain actually works and how we actually think physically. and what we believed up until the point that he did his work.

was that the brain had specific sections that were responsible for very specific things. Right. So if you were you were experiencing the color red, there’s a little color red part of your brain. That’s what people thought, right? If you’re getting angry, there’s a little I’m angry part of your brain. And what he observed was, there’s a I can’t believe you got me on this tangent. I’m so sorry. But say it anyway. So there there was this guy a long time ago. It was a case where he was a

He he was someone that was I think it was a miner, right? And back in the day, this is the eighteen hundreds, the way that they did it was they had a a s a steel pole that was hollow and there was a charge in there. And a human had to hit that pole with a hammer to trigger that charge. That charge would then be focused through the pole, and and or the pipe, and it would focus it to a specific part of the rock and it would break the rock. Well his shot back

because it wasn’t loaded properly, went right through his skull. And he survived it. And he was coherent and he could talk. And and he was able to live his life. They removed this pole, but it completely damaged one section of his brain. And the guy’s personality changed. He used to be a really sweet guy. Everyone loved him. And then all of a sudden he turned into the opposite of that. He he was a very difficult person. Nobody liked him. And so Damasio, you know, a hundred years later or whatever, he

He had a similar patient and he started thinking, can’t be that this guy is one part of his brain was impacted. Like he he found that there was actually more than one part of the brain because it went through a part that was responsible for speech, but he was still able to talk. So he he by process of elimination said, There has to be other places that speech is coming from, right? Or that his personality was coming from. So he

Shawn Cordner (01:13:18.862)
He dealt with a lot of other patients that were similar to that. And what he found was that the brain doesn’t have one particular section. It’s a series of sections working in concert to create these experiences that you have. And so that’s a long way of saying that AI actually works the same way. We don’t it there’s not one place in the the LLM that’s responsible for punctuation, right? It’s it’s like a whole vibe throughout the neural network. And so I think that’s an observability problem.

In specific AI systems, but also when you have a complex system made up of lots of different AI systems. Does that make sense?

Ricki Lang (01:13:56.842)
Yes. yes. Sorry. I’m trying to associate it with like the technical side of things, which is like MCP where you have all these different MCPs that can kind of work together to understand the overarching challenges, problems, fixes, interactions. I don’t know. So it’s interesting. I I mean, I’m not a neurologist or neuroscientist or anything like that.

Shawn Cordner (01:14:21.886)
Am I neither am I, obviously. But so let’s talk about the MCP thing because I know that that was something that you wanted to bring up.

Ricki Lang (01:14:28.558)
I mean, I just think it’s so interesting how quickly we’re moving with AI. And even one of my very senior architects at Quantum Metric said, like, Claude’s just like the smartest analyst that ever lived, but you can put these these systems together. It takes less than five minutes to set up and you can have all of these systems interacting in a very different way. And from an architecture perspective and the way that we used to build things, the way that we’re able to connect systems now.

It’s amazing and it’s super exciting. And from my perspective, now we’re adding this behavioral data into all these other systems so that you can really focus in the right spots and move so quickly. And one of the th one of the things that one of our customers did, you know, in these legacy systems, there’s business processes that why did this happen or why is this set up this way? And it takes a human days, weeks to figure this stuff out. It takes

an MCP alongside another MCP and maybe two more, like ten minutes. It’s just insane. So I j I think it’s a it’s a great thing and something we’re all trying to understand better. Th everything is moving so quickly in this space. You can’t you can’t even keep up with it. I’m sure by the time this podcast comes out, he’ll be like, MCP’s old hat, now we’re up to this, right? And that could happen in a matter of weeks.

Shawn Cordner (01:15:53.506)
What what do you think it brings to the table? Like the the industry standardizes on this? Do you think it makes interoperability easier?

Ricki Lang (01:16:01.25)
For sure. I mean, if you have the processing power, but it also matters how great or not great the systems that you have in these ecosystems are, in these in these enterprises. I also think it opens up for some really problematic things from a cyber perspective. So it can go in many different directions. And I don’t think we all have our hands around it yet.

Shawn Cordner (01:16:25.112)
I realize the rate of change makes this impossible, but if you could look six months a year from now, I mean, how how does MCP change the way that things are today?

Ricki Lang (01:16:38.968)
Pass?

Okay.

I d I I mean that’s I I just I mean MCP is so recent. I feel like MCP is, you know, only a few months old. I have no idea. I I yeah, I passed.

Shawn Cordner (01:17:00.822)
No, there there are industries like healthcare that famously have interoperability challenges, right? So maybe this is something that can make that possible.

Ricki Lang (01:17:13.912)
There’s so much bad data, I just I don’t know how quickly it’s going to be able to happen in some of these organizations that I work with. And I’m working with some pretty hefty organizations that have the money to invest. And some of them are really ahead because they’ve done a lot of rewriting and data normalization and data cleaning. And some are just not. So it’s it’s it’s widely varied and the tool set’s so easy, it’s only going to keep getting better.

I mean, I think in six months we’re gonna be light speeds ahead of where we are today.

Shawn Cordner (01:17:46.412)
Yeah. that is a certainty. last thing I wanted to finish on here is you’ve been so generous with your time, so I’ll I want to make sure I bring this up. we met at the at a Philly sim event because you’re in the Philly market and so am I, sort of. And you told me on our planning call about something called Philly builds, Philly builds AI. Is that yes. tell me about that.

Ricki Lang (01:18:12.768)
Sure. So there’s a group of us here in the Philadelphia area who believe and actually there was a study done in twenty twenty three that said that Philadelphia, the greater Philadelphia region, is prime for enterprise AI. So there is an opportunity for economic development and we are actually last from an economic development perspective, but there’s a lot of opportunity in this space for

our enterprise companies and quite frankly our startup community to build more in the enterprise AI space. We all know AI is going to be part of everything. It’s a part of the bones of these organizations. And Philadelphia is one of the most prime locations in the country. I don’t know about the world, but in the country for that economic growth and opportunity. And we have the people to make it happen. So that’s why I’ve gotten involved in Philly Builds AI and

And I’m really excited about the opportunity for the greater Philadelphia region and the studies that have proven that now is the time to do it.

Shawn Cordner (01:19:15.022)
So what’s the vision? Like what does it mean practically to be an enterprise AI hook?

Ricki Lang (01:19:20.158)
it means that our enterprise companies are building using AI and using the new modernized technologies and also investing in the startup community, I will say, as well as just training up the the the workforce here so that they understand how to use AI. We have a lot of very compliance heavy areas with financial services.

the bi the pharmaceuticals area, like these are primed for AI because it’s standard things that happen over and over and over again. And how do we train our workforce and our enterprises to lean into it, hire more people that are involved in doing those things and use it throughout the ecosystem.

Shawn Cordner (01:20:03.576)
to workforce readiness and building a pipeline of startups that you know can can contribute to the enterprise ecosystem. Yeah. so where are you at with that project and you know what’s what’s next?

Ricki Lang (01:20:19.928)
I mean we we are creating a nonprofit. So a five one right now we’re under we’re underway getting all the paperwork completed and we’re partnering with enterprise companies as well as founders and startups as a whole to help do some more matching and assisting for those enterprise organizations to understand what’s available in the region. And quite frankly, some of these enterprise organizations, they don’t have the resources to do it.

But it would be great if these startup companies can help solve those problems. So we are kind of still at the start of that journey, but there’s a lot of motion and a lot of folks involved in creating this ecosystem and, you know, the spider web of aligning aligning the companies with each other.

Shawn Cordner (01:21:06.584)
So anyone listening that’s in the Philadelphia market, what can they do to help and be part of this?

Ricki Lang (01:21:11.746)
Go to Philly Buildsai dot org, join, take interest in the startup community as an enterprise company or somebody that works in an enterprise company. Understand what’s being built in the Philadelphia region and also invest time in understanding how AI can benefit your business and how you can continue to train up your workforce because it is the future.

Shawn Cordner (01:21:34.178)
Sounds great. I will be joining Ricki Lang. Thank you so much for your time and expertise today.

Ricki Lang (01:21:39.362)
Thank you. It’s been a lot of fun.