Balancing AI and Human Touch in Customer Experience

Nicole Saunders: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the CX Nexus podcast, where we explore all facets of customer experience. I'm one of your co hosts, Nicole Saunders, and I'm here with my co host,

Chris Detzel: Chris Detzel. How's it going?

Nicole Saunders: I'm good. How are you doing, Chris?

Chris Detzel: Thanks for asking.

Nicole Saunders: Yeah, so we're both about six weeks in at new jobs. We were catching up a little on what that learning curve has been like, what we're looking at. It's an exciting time. It's been a busy period of time, and it sounds like one of the things that you've been thinking about A lot in your new role is A.
I. And new technologies and how we're looking at bringing these into the ecosystem. Tell me a little bit about that.

Chris Detzel: Yeah, I think that look, we have to think about A. I. First in our community journey or our customer experience. I think and that doesn't mean we need to think big bang. Hey, all things A.
I. No, no, I don't think that. But because I don't [00:01:00] think the technology is there yet. So when you think of, some of these platforms, they're trying to figure it out. We're trying to figure out. But there are technologies out there and thinking around how to think about AI first.
So I'll give you an example. A lot of companies are building chatbots and what they're doing is, and we were doing this at a previous company, and we've done this at my, my current company is it's building a a model that will that you can feed that w whether it's documentation, whether it's community posts, whether it's, specific to your company and to your product.
And, and then, for those and then integrating some of that into your self help tools, like the help center, like docs, like community, etc. And that then from an easy question standpoint, they can start answering those questions easily. And then, from there, you can start looking at the data around.
Hey, these are the top questions [00:02:00] being asked constantly. Maybe you can start writing specific things around those areas that you know your customers are users are having problems with. So let's just think that, you start integrating slowly but surely. Some of these A. I kind of things. I know, like one company, and I'll just name him.
Grazidi is doing some things around sentiment, customer sentiment. So think, and again, this is a product company, self help. I'm pretty sure almost. Any customer support company could think about this is, you have the same customers that are, on support and creating the support ticket or, looking at documentation, looking at your self help, engaging in the community, those are all the same customers doing very similar things and just think about that sentiment.
So when you think of okay, this customer is doing these things in community support, whatever they in getting data, like. Hey, this customer might turn or this customer is ready for upsell, cross sell and thinking [00:03:00] about, those true business outcomes that give us, good insights to what the customer might be doing next.
Does that make sense?

Nicole Saunders: Yeah, and I'm glad that you raised that example of sentiment because I think So much of the hype around community around AI, especially in the support space, the customer experience space has been around. How can we empower bots to answer support questions, maybe intercept some tickets that we don't have to then get agents involved on increased self service.
And those are great uses, but I think where the more significant. Bang for the buck is going to be in the long run is how we use those tools internally to do things just like you said, identify at risk accounts, identify maybe hot topics of conversation in our community that we need to engage with or create some content around.
Understand the sentiment. So chris, let me ask you what has been driving you thinking about this Is it something that you are working on in your new role? Is it just an area of [00:04:00] interest? Is it just because you're seeing it out there in the ether? Why has this been top of mind for you lately?

Chris Detzel: I think yes.
Yes. Yes So all right When you think of the company i'm at today zoom info, they're embedding Ai technologies into their tools You how sales people engage and interact into with contacts and how they're prospecting, with even support.
We have chatbots that are, that we're continuing to work on. And then when you look at our leaders, they're talking about these kinds of things. When you look at technologies, We all know that chat gpt cloud 3 whatever like all the we're all using them We're all engaging in these kinds of tools.
We know it's all out there We know that new companies are starting up some will fail some will be successful. Some will be bought, And we know that the ai piece is going to change the world That's just the reality one way or another and I think so much. So when you think [00:05:00] of You know, social back in the day, right now, we don't even think of social.
We just use social. It's not like

Nicole Saunders: part of the water.
Chris Detzel: And right now, we're evangelizing. We're talking about how where, product companies are using these AI things. Tomorrow, it's gonna be like, yeah, so what you should be if you're not, you're going to be left behind. I don't get that.
It's like. When you look at on prem versus sass, you have on prem. Oh, my God. Like, why wouldn't use sass? Some of that's changing again. But so I think that yes, to all of those questions, because, it will and has already changed our lives. And we've got to figure out how to incorporate that into our daily jobs.
And whether it's community management, whether it's customer marketing, whether it's support, whether it's. Inside the product you're a product leader, right? Like you're building the products and your pms They're doing stuff our customers want to do their jobs easier. How do we do that? How do we make their jobs easier, whether it's saving time whether it's you know Getting this quick hit kind of thing out, we're learning we're doing a bunch of stuff [00:06:00] So I don't think we You know all of a sudden just stop everything we're doing and hey implement ai I think we now incorporate ai But we think of that first.
Hey, can I add ai to this community or to this customer experience? You know through those things. I mean I just think it's you know, going to help us do our jobs faster get us better insights over time and then you know even think of moderation, like there's lots of different ways. I think you know, you get these huge communities And you might not have to hire all these moderators to moderate it You might be able to just do some ai things, have some examples.
Anyway, does that make sense?

Nicole Saunders: It does at the same time I don't know that there's a ton of value in people throwing ai On top of stuff for the sake of throwing a on top of it So much as keeping it in mind as a tool, right? When you have a challenge that you're trying to solve in your community, like, how do I scale moderation?
Is there an AI capability out there that could help you with that? Any of those challenges, you [00:07:00] mentioned Chris looking at Grazidi's sentiment tool. What are some other examples that you've seen of really great uses of AI? Either in the community space or more broadly in customer experience and support.

Chris Detzel: I think that you know it's the basic things that you already know and everybody else already knows but tools like, cloud three or anthropic Or open ai's kind of tools, you know allow us to do already our jobs easier, right? I was talking to one platform company that says hey look, you know The first iteration of our ai is we're going to do it from a blog standpoint, right?
So we'll allow your customers from a platform standpoint to create blogs or you can create blogs Using our ai tool that's going to be embedded You Into the product, it's the first step is how they're doing that. The other pieces are you know, beautiful thing about I'll give you an [00:08:00] example.
Like I was using cloud 3 the other day and I had all this Data around, you know why customers want Community. Why are customers want a community? I just use the copy and paste didn't have their emails, just but just had their reasons why they wanted to use it. They had a 1 to 5 on certain things.
There's probably like 150.
Question or answers to specific questions and things like that. And I thought, man, that's a lot of questions. What's the output here? What's the value here, and so what I did was throw it into cloud and I said, Hey, look give me a an analysis and understanding.
Quick hit of why these customers want an online community and boom I said x percent wants this x percent wants that and then you know, it was like this whole entire kind of View of What my customers want and how they want it, right? and so I copied that pushed it into A doc and save that for later and say hey our customers [00:09:00] want this Revops community because of a b c and d that's what they said You know, and so I think that you can get analysis from there.
I think you can you know start blogs from that like transcripts that we Let's say i'm just doing a webinar for example And we went deep into the product or whatever and it's very technical just take that transcript Push it into cloud three five or chat gbt and then it gives me this blog or write up or summary of exactly what we talked about in detail, right?
It doesn't have, it does have some of the, you can get picks from it, but I wouldn't use that for yet for the for the blog, but. You have powerpoints and things that people created or titles or you can get titles of Webinars you can get you know, what we want to talk about on the webinar, things that we had to think about Intensely writing a blog or hey, what do I call this webinar or what are some descriptions of this webinar?
You don't need that anymore. I'm, sorry, like I don't [00:10:00] like Does it stop us from thinking maybe but we everybody's using it and we need to be smart about using it But I think you know, you've got to use these tools because it makes it easier,

Nicole Saunders: Absolutely, like I think about where some of the places I've found that it's been really helpful is with the stuff that we do over and over in community like when you're hosting whenever user groups program and you're hosting dozens of user groups every quarter It gets tricky to rewrite those descriptions and make it sound interesting each time, right?
And a lot of people don't want to take the time to do it. But if you can throw that into a GPT transformer and have it quick adjust, pull that information in, reward it in a different way. That can be a really easy way to do things. I also think about how much time I used to spend. Taking notes in meetings and then writing summaries and then sending them out.
And it's just so amazing that AI can just do that now and just take care of it for you. Now I always go back and [00:11:00] tweak it and polish it up and make sure it's all correct and all those things. But it saves a ton of time, and I think that it can be just these little shortcuts. And often, when I've talked in the industry about implementing AI in the past, it's been these big enterprise level implementations of predictive analysis and chatbots.
But I think every employee could be using it. Just to make a couple tasks a little bit more efficient, a little bit easier. Getting over that initial hump of oh, I gotta write this thing and I don't even know where to start. That's where these tools can be so handy. There's no more writer's

Chris Detzel: block.
What is writer's block anyways anymore?

Nicole Saunders: Writer's block is really it's I think it's partially imposter syndrome. It's when you're sitting there staring at the page, you're like, I can't come up with anything amazing enough to accomplish this thing. And you totally can. You just got to get started.
I I had that experience the other day. I was trying to write a song and I just didn't know where I wanted to start. And I just grabbed a line from a poem a friend had written. And just that little trigger helped me write a whole song out of it. And I think that the GPTs [00:12:00] and everything like that can really help just get those initial ideas out there and come up with something a little bit new, a little bit fresh.
Like I said, especially when you've got recurring programs and you need to put a new spin on it, it can brush it up for you really quickly and easily.

Chris Detzel: How are you thinking about and not to put you on the spot, but to put you on the spot one is you have employees. How do you, there's a couple questions here.
How do you encourage your employees to use it or not use it? Or and then how are you thinking kind of the overall strategy? And, the things that you're doing, because you own community, you own customer marketing and some other stuff. So how are you thinking about that?

Nicole Saunders: I think it's some of the ways that I've talked about.
And of course, everybody's got to navigate within their own organizations roles. And I'm still sorting out what that is at my new company. My previous one actually had spun up a center of excellence around AI, where there's a team that was keeping up with industry trends looking at the tools that were out there, experimenting [00:13:00] with them Rolling them out in limited access to employees and then asking employees every month.
Okay. What have you figured out? How are you using it? Taking those turning them into best practices and then teaching them out to other people. So as we would say, Hey, I've used chat GPT to do this thing. Maybe that's great. Let's get more people using it that way. And I think that's a very smart way to do it is experiment.
Figure out where it works for your organization, where it works for your program, and then try to get more people on board with using it in that way. Those are the things that I'm thinking about the most, and I know that's not super detailed, but at the moment, it really is that experimental phase of understanding, where is this tool useful and where can I use it?
Is it cool, but maybe doesn't actually save you that much time or it's just a different approach to it. I'm also really interested over time to see how this changes things for people that maybe have different ways of thinking or processing information. And if it may be. Remove some [00:14:00] hurdles for people that have struggled with the traditional structures and work life in the past.
I'm interested to hear about those kinds of things. If anybody has come across them now, Chris, you're speaking about this at an upcoming virtual community conference. The refocus. Coming up on August or October. Gosh, what month is it? It's gone by so fast. October. It is

Chris Detzel: still September, but it's next week, actually, October 1st.
So I don't know if this podcast will be, I'm sure it will be out right at the same time, actually, probably
Nicole Saunders: around the same time. So you're speaking about AI in support communities or just more
Chris Detzel: communities over, broadly, and it'd be somewhat similar to this, I'm, I have a guy named Ed, who's That is very well known within the community space.
I feel a little like imposter syndrome a little bit, but yeah

Nicole Saunders: We love ed

Chris Detzel: Yeah, he's great. But but yeah, and you are as well talking about something. What are you talking?

Nicole Saunders: I'm going to be talking a little bit of back to basics talking about communities for support and really how they can impact that because Even as the community space has evolved so much.
I think [00:15:00] that support is one of the critical foundation blocks You For communities, right? You have to build the trust and the usefulness of the community before you can do any other stuff that communities can do. And it's interesting coming in to a space where there's an existing community and seeing what's there.
And it's a good reminder of how critical. Those foundation blocks are so really, I can,

Chris Detzel: I'm sure I'm going to learn a lot. I'm going to try to go. I don't know what time it starts, but I don't have anything that day. I'm going to that time. I'm going to make sure to because that's what I'm doing today.
I can certainly learn from you. You built a support community at a support company, , so true. A thing or two about support communities?
Nicole Saunders: I've learned a lot over the years about what works and what doesn't. And you know what's so interesting about it's, it keeps evolving too, right?
Yeah. There's the things that were true 10 years ago, some of them are still true, some of them have changed. And I think AI's actually been one of the biggest factors in that, I think it was first bringing in chat kinds of support and then now starting to have a [00:16:00] lot of that automated. We've talked about it before, but I think that communities for support both remain very important, but also communities have to be able to do more than support because as you've got AI and chatbots and accelerated knowledge management via AI taking over a lot of the self service support.
The questions you're going to see in the community are going to start to be the harder ones where people are really

Chris Detzel: it's going to be a shift. That's interesting that you said. Yeah,

Nicole Saunders: It's going to be like a shift where people aren't going to be coming in and asking the basic hey, where's this setting?
Or like, how do I build this thing? They're going to be coming in and saying, okay, I read the article. And so I know how to use the setting, but has anybody ever used the tool to do XYZ? And so the questions you're going to get in the community are actually going to be the ones where people really need.
Okay. The help from somebody else who has done this or done something similar to it before, and that's going to be questions that a bot can't answer. An article doesn't answer. Maybe even your agents can't answer because they haven't actually done the thing and [00:17:00] can't tell you from experience. And so I think that communities are going to increasingly pivot to being about that hands on experience and people really sharing about and connecting with that.
So one of the places we're really interested to see AI go is finding ways to identify people Other users that have similar use cases that you should follow and connect with because ultimately that is the deep value of community and today I don't know of too many technologies that are really great at Taking 10, 000 users and saying, Hey, here's a little cluster of people that have similar things, and here's a little cluster.
We let them self organize with groups. I feel like AI has a

Chris Detzel: huge potential for that.

Nicole Saunders: Yeah, but there's this huge matchmaking potential out there, and I think it's just going to become ever more critical as those questions do get more complex and do get more focused on. Actual experience.

Chris Detzel: Yeah, I think that when you think about the matchmaking piece and I love that you said that because I think it's something I'll be talking about a little bit at the conferences, when you think of there's a small [00:18:00] business company, there's medium sized business and then enterprise wide kind of big companies, a small business customer.
You know that uses your product is probably using a little bit differently than to some degree, you know Than a bigger company or whatever, but this person in a small business does a million different things, right? They might be the president. They might be the sales guy maybe they have five people or seven people versus, there's enterprises that have teams of 50 or something like that.
So there's probably opportunity to say, when you think of the matchmaking pieces, Hey, this person's a small business, they have this many people, this is their role. This is what they're trying to do. Match them with this kind of person. That's similar, but boom. And then voila, there's technologies that we've seen.
I forgot. I got an email not too long ago about, Hey, we've matched you to so and but you start using AI. You still need the data. So when somebody creates a profile, you've still got to get, where's this person from? What company, what, what do they look like? And that kind of stuff.
The beauty is my company Zoom Info does that for, [00:19:00] Already Get all that stuff. So there's some great stuff there so you can imagine what ai can do on that matchmaking piece and the one thing I would say though is and I and maybe i'm wrong Is I said this to an executive yesterday?
I said look because the key at the end of the day is user generated content getting users to create content And the other piece is google is putting that as a priority rather than your other content Has been Like blogs and things like that, that's not as much of a priority than user generated content you know the forums of the world and things like that will get way more authority in the future because it is user generated So I think that's one thing to note that ai probably is going to dilute a lot of this content search engines are getting a lot smarter, or will get a lot smarter.
It's only

Nicole Saunders: going to make communities that much more valuable. Absolutely. This is such a critical time for businesses to be investing in their communities because of that. And making sure that they are also being very thoughtful about [00:20:00] how they do and don't allow AI use. In a community because you do want that authentic authoritative content that is going to rank really well.
There's also a big call for like companies, if you've got a gated community, now is the time to open that up and make it searchable. You're missing out if you're not using that as a part of your SEO strategy.
Chris Detzel: I think that there's reasons to have gated communities, but in my mind,

Nicole Saunders: portions of your community that are when
Chris Detzel: I think of support communities, most of that should be open to the public, right?
And if it's not, you're missing out a lot of, nice gooey SEO, organic traffic. And, and there's a lot of, when you think of support deflection, when you think of getting the name out there even more, when some, I always tell people and I tell people with the zoom info, I was like, one of the number one goals, which there's many, but one of the big things I want to be on the first page of Google.
If anybody says anything about my product and has a problem with it, I want to be on the first page right there. You know [00:21:00] why? Because it's expected. We. We do it all the time and if it's not on there i'm frustrated now to go Find it on support or I gotta go find it somewhere else You know i'm gonna call my account manager or something else that it's gonna take time and effort I want it like that and I want to be I want to make sure that i'm there now It takes time and effort when you start from ground up, Anyways, I know I got off a little bit, but I do think Having the whole conversation we

Nicole Saunders: have there, too

Chris Detzel: Exactly but I do think ai is going to play a huge role, you know in our online community space and we should watch out for it.
But I think there's a huge opportunity for And i'll say this again I've said this a lot because I think innovation within the plat community platform space is Zero, it has been zero for a long time and it's very frustrating And so this is the time to do it because somebody's going to disrupt you if you don't, I think.

Nicole Saunders: And

Chris Detzel: so I think they know this, hopefully. I think it's

Nicole Saunders: only [00:22:00] a matter of time. I think we're going to start seeing some things from some of the companies. I sure hope so. In the next several months, I would hope. Because. I know that there's organizations that are investing in their platform development and so it'll just be interesting to see when some of that starts to come to market and get implemented for people

Chris Detzel: because, we can't do everything, but if they don't, they will be left out because we'll be using other technologies to embed it into our communities and things like that.
They should be thinking. That if they don't we obviously do think of that whole entire customer experience, you know connecting directly to support systems Whether it's zendesk or salesforce or connecting to lms's, whether it's I don't know Whatever lms's are out there and other sites, to have an open api kind of area, That is just table stakes now, and those are still hard problems to solve, but how does AI now embed into that?
You know help your community managers out a little bit, Like we're having to come up with this stuff ourselves all the time or we have to be the experts in freaking everything You know help [00:23:00] us Help you, and and to sell that value, Hey, I need this platform because it does a B and C and it's AI first and thinking, that would be an easy sell. Anyways, I digress a little bit. But I do think that it is on us to think of AI first. But I also think it's on other technology companies that deal with community leaders on a consistent basis.

Nicole Saunders: Yeah, you got to make it feasible for us to do that to your right.

Chris Detzel: I

Nicole Saunders: think that's, I think that's good for this conversation.
We got to save a little for your presentation refocus next week. So I hope everybody joins us for those couple of sessions. It's going to be a, it's always a good virtual conference. It brings together a lot of the industry leaders. They always record it too. So if you're hearing this after October 1st, I'm sure you can go out and find those.
On demand recordings as well, but I'm looking forward to it. We've got some more episodes coming. I think we've been. Networking with a lot of our industry friends and we've got some great guests lined up for everybody So make sure you subscribe share this with a friend or colleague somewhere in [00:24:00] the cx space And until next time i'm nicole saunders,

Chris Detzel: and i'm chris detzel.
Take care everyone.

Nicole Saunders: Have a great day