The CX Leader Podcast: "Cutting Through the Digital Noise": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

The CX Leader Podcast: "Cutting Through the Digital Noise": this wav audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Steve:
Personalization is one of the three key critical areas to an effective CX program, but how do you personalize a digital experience?

Michael:
There's so much noise in the digital ecosystem that personalizing those experiences based on the customer's needs at that point in time is really critical to solving for that speed and simplicity problem.

Steve:
The value of personalizing the digital experience on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone, I'm Steve Walker host of The CX Leader Podcast and thank you for listening. As we like to say each week, it's never been a better time to be a CX leader, and this podcast explores topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of your customer experience and help your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. It's something we've discussed on many occasions in the last year and a half. If your company is not providing a digital experience at some level, then you've already missed the boat. If you consider the possibilities of personalizing a digital experience, then you have potentially a powerful tool that can differentiate your company from your competitors in the marketplace. So how do you personalize that digital experience? My guest on this episode is Michael Scharff, the CEO at Evolv Technologies, a company specializing in AI driven optimization and personalization, and he's going to tell us a lot more about the value of personalized digital experiences. Michael, thanks for coming on The CX Leader Podcast.

Michael:
Yeah. Thanks, Steve. It's my pleasure. I'm really looking forward to the conversation today.

Steve:
Yeah, this is an area that I think is just become so, so relevant for our listeners. And, you know, a lot of it goes back to the… And I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about this, you know, the the whole pandemic and and you know, really any business that wasn't digital already had to become digital. But before we get into the kind of the topic at hand, maybe if you could just for context, give our listeners a little bit of your personal journey and your background and how you got to Evolv Technologies?

Michael:
Yeah, sure. So I've been in retail pretty much my whole life, actually starting in college. I was selling stereos out of my apartment and parlayed that into a career working in the consumer electronics industry to start as a merchant after doing sales for a couple of years. And then in nineteen ninety nine, I pivoted over to digital, where I helped build and launch the first e-commerce business at Best Buy and spent five years there in a number of roles. And then, you know, I spent some time at Staples running the technology B2B business and then ran US Global Digital for seven years, building out our global e-commerce business, including our own video and all of our cross-channel capabilities. And about seven years ago, I started doing advisory consulting work. And one of the firms I was working for was an AI research and development company, and we developed some amazing technology which we ultimately decided to use to create evolve AI as a new business to bring this amazing technology to market and solve some of the problems that I had experienced, you know, with experimentation and optimization in my own career. So it was a really great opportunity to kind of came along serendipitously through some of the work I was doing as an advisor.

Steve:
That's really cool story, you know, kind of a merging of kind of really a classic retail background with some really, you know, top notch retailers, Best Buy, Staples, and Toys R US. You know, they they were all dominant in their categories, but you were already kind of on the road with, you know, you're starting by selling things out of your out of your home early on. And then there's just this convergence of of things and factors.

Michael:
So yeah, I've always been fascinated by technology. I really got into the into retail because I love technology. So the opportunity to take my background had studied computer science, my love of technology and my love of building great retail experiences, whether it's online or offline really has led to this culmination, which has been really fun for me the last three years since we launched the company.

Steve:
Then you sell evolve technologies to online retailers or or big box retailers and help them with their online?

Michael:
Yeah, we work with a variety of industries we work with, you know, traditional retail brands. We work with large telecommunications companies, financial services, travel and hospitality companies and we, you know, do business around the world. We have divisions both here and in Europe, and then we have a partnership in Asia, in Japan, where we sell our technology as well. So we went through some of the largest companies in the world and also kind of small and mid-sized firm.

Steve:
And you said you guys started in seven years ago, so that would be like 2014, 2015?

Michael:
Yeah, the research and development company, I joined them in 2014, but we started Evolv AI in 2018. But the technology had been under development for about 10 years prior to that.

Steve:
So well, this is really a cool topic. You know, we did a study back in 2013 at Walker called Customers 2020 and you know, in 2013 you could call an Uber and you could order on Amazon. But none of that was starting to hit, you know, traditional bricks and mortar B2B space. And we really identified three factors in that study. It was, speed, ease of use, and personalization, because all the digital experiences were being informed and driven by Uber, Amazon, Netflix, you know, some of those really early movers. So from your perspective, why is personalization so, so important to customers?

Michael:
Yeah. Well, customers have been really frustrated with the lack of relevancy in their experiences online, whether it's getting emails that have nothing to do with your interests or getting frustrated when you're shopping, trying to find what you're looking for. You know, customers, as you mentioned, speed is really critical and simplicity is really critical. And there's so much noise in the digital ecosystem when customers are trying to complete a transaction, whether it's make purchase or watch a show or make a bank transaction, that personalizing those experiences based on the customer's needs at that point in time is really critical to solving for that speed and simplicity problem. If you don't, there's just too much for customers to try to wade through to get to what it is they're trying to accomplish. And the more effectively you can help understand what a customer's intent is and personalize that experience, based on that intent, the happier the customer is going to be, the greater the loyalty and the better of the business outcomes.

Steve:
So what's different about the way that you see personalization and particularly how does Evolv AI fit into that.

Michael:
Yeah, that's a great question. And it's one of the things that you know for me was most exciting about, you know, building this company. You know, historically, personalization has been very PII driven. It's been really about the information we have about a customer from a demographic standpoint, age, gender, education where they live, where they work, what their financial status is. But there's a real fundamental problem with that approach, and it makes a number of pretty big assumptions that don't really tell us much about the customer's buying behavior or intent at a point in time. And you know, the challenge of that is that if you think about a working mom age thirty five to forty five, it assumes they all have the same needs and are trying to do the same thing. And while there may be some similarities in what's important to them, it doesn't really help us understand what she's trying to do at that point in time. So we think demographics are too general in nature to be the primary factor in making meaningful contributions to a personalization experience, and it's much more important to understand a visitor's intent and their behavior in real time to personalize an experience based on what she's looking to do at that moment.

Steve:
So you use the term PII, just could you define that for us?

Michael:
Personal identifiable information.

Steve:
And that's kind of the classic demographic stuff.

Michael:
Yeah, exactly. It's all the data you've collected about a customer and who they are. And there are some data about customers purchases that certainly could be indicative of some of their interests or needs. But you know, you really have to go well beyond that personal information to be able to create really meaningful experiences for your users.

Steve:
And so how does Evolv AI do that?

Michael:
Yeah, well, so this is where the power of technology really comes in. It's impossible at the kind of scale that we're talking about with today's digital businesses for humans to be able to create individual experiences in real time. So technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning can be leveraged to help navigate the vast volumes of data and the complexities that are required to create digital personalization in real time. And you can do this without using the customer demographics. You could look at where visitors came from, what they're clicking on your website, how long they're staying on various pages, and what your trajectory is to really understand their browsing behavior and even look for areas of friction that are creating problems within that journey and try to avoid those. You know, it's possible to use the customer's individual account details and past purchase behavior to help inform some of those decisions. So, for example, if you're a mobile phone provider and the customer is due for an upgrade, you might know from past behavior. Do they usually buy the latest technology as soon as it comes out? Or are they looking for new add ons or accessories? So you can use some of that historical data about a person's behavior in the past, as well as their current intent and what they're looking at to try to create great personalized experiences.

Steve:
So can you just give us a couple of maybe simple examples that we could understand just sort of how pre Evolv AI, how that experience or that digital experience would go down versus post Evolv AI?

Michael:
Yeah. Well, you know, kind of in the past and still, a lot of the technologies today rely heavily on that customer demographic data. So what brands do is they tend to segment customers into large groups based on where they live, what their gender is, what their age group is. And rather than personalizing, they're really creating segment experiences based on assumptions about customers of a similar type, assuming that their needs are all the same and they're the same at the same point in time. And, you know, most personalization the way most customers see that is really around a product rather. Emotions, you know, customers like you bought this right, and that's not really personalization, because it really doesn't take into account the intent at that point in time or the behavior that the customer is looking for. So a great example, if you go to Amazon, they show you a lot of stuff based upon what you were browsing most recently. And they may show your recommendations based upon something you buy. But for me, I'm shopping for myself. I'm shopping for my wife, I'm shopping for my kids. I might be shopping for a gift and trying to understand that moment in time and what my intention is is more important than what I might have done last week or what I looked at yesterday. And that's where the magic of A.I. comes in is really looking at those clues and the customer behavior and trying to figure out what it is they want and then changing that experience in real time to improve that experience for them and help them find what they want faster and easier.

Steve:
Yeah. Ok, so let me I just give you a couple of my personal experiences as you're talking. And so this past summer, I got invited to an, you know, like this neighbor kids, you know, six year old birthday and the kid likes dinosaurs. So I bought him like this big blowup dinosaur that he could play with in the pool. Yeah. And now I still get emails like almost, you know, weekly from Amazon that, you know, you bought this and then there's a whole bunch of other.

Michael:
Yeah, that's not personalization.

Steve:
Yeah,

Michael:
Yeah. My my wife actually has a great trick for fooling the engines, you know? So she's shopping for something and she gets tired of seeing the ads. She'll start doing searches for things like vacations in Italy or, you know, southern France, and then she'll start getting in those in her feed. So at least she's seeing pretty pictures rather than, you know, ads for shoes or whatever it is that she might have been looking for.

Steve:
Yeah. And here's another example. So I kind of have a weakness for for golf apparel and, you know, exercise type stuff. So sure enough, I was playing around on my phone while I was waiting in line the other day. And, you know, I kind of saw this pullover kind of half zip kind of cool looking thing. And I looked at it and looked at it and I said, You know, it's right after Christmas. I don't need to be buying more clothes. So I clicked it off. And sure enough, a couple of hours later, I get another email from the retailer saying, Hey, you were almost there, man, you obviously you like this sweater. You know, it was, you know, it wasn't too creepy. It was actually a pretty good, you know, I still haven't bought it, but I didn't delete it either.

Michael:
Yeah, that's right. Retargeting. And that can be really useful. I think the key is finding the right balance because if it starts showing up everywhere you go on the internet, you're going to get pretty frustrated. Yeah. Occasional gentle reminders, I think, can be really helpful for sure.

Steve:
Yeah. Well, this brand, I mean, I like their stuff. I bought their clothes before, and so, you know, I feel like I got a relationship with them. And and so again, you're the expert. But that was a little more of a personalized because they were tracking off of how long I'd been on the page and stuff, right?

Michael:
Yeah. And that's a great example of why it's important to understand your customer and creating those relationships so that you feel comfortable when the brands reach out to you and when they send you information or they send you offers, you trust them because you've developed a relationship over time and it's based on them knowing who you are and what your needs are and what your behaviors and preferences are.

Announcer:
Are you looking for a little recognition for your hard work as a CX leader? Well, here's just the opportunity. Applications are now being accepted for the U.S. Customer Experience Awards. Finalists and winners will be named in 19 different CX categories, and you could submit an entry in multiple categories. This could be the chance for your team to finally get the recognition it deserves. To find out more and submit your entry, go to usacxa.com.

Steve:
My guest on the podcast this week is Michael Scharff. He's the CEO at Evolv AI Technologies, which is a company that helps other companies use AI driven optimization and personalization efforts in their digital. And we're having a great conversation. I'm learning a lot. You know, just for our listeners, I want to remind everybody that all of our digital experiences are informed by us being consumers. But Michael, a lot of our listeners are involved in more B2B space or, you know, more complex rather than sort of the retail space. Can you talk a little more about applications, maybe like in a financial services, B2B, health care or anything, you know, kind of where it applies there?

Michael:
Yeah, sure. Well, I think, you know, the same factors are really critical and I think maybe even more so with the business customer around trying to find things that are simple and fast and the, you know, ordering things online or creating digital transactions in a business environment is only a part of what that person is trying to accomplish. So the faster and easier you can simplify and standardize those experiences, the better. Financial services is a really interesting one because it's a really complex space due to all the regulatory challenges and the complexity of dealing with legal requirements for banks and what we've seen, traditional financial institutions have been very slow to adapt new technologies because of those requirements, but there's a lot of disruption happening now in financial services as well as in health care for consumers. And we're starting to see a much, much bigger focus on creating great applications, great user experiences and really trying to simplify as much as possible those journeys. And we think they're making really starting to make good progress. And a lot of that's happening due to the disruption with lots of startups in the space really challenging the incumbents. But the bigger institutions, both health care and financial, are all starting to understand the criticality of creating great experiences and really leveraging some of the same technologies that traditional consumer brands have focused on over the years. Another industry that has also had a pretty wholesale change due to the pandemic the last couple of years has been grocery and restaurants. Those are industries that really never had to focus on digital experiences as a primary customer touchpoint. And you know, when the pandemic hit back in the spring of 2020, every grocery store and restaurant in the world had to figure out immediately how to do delivery, how to do curbside pickup, and after they got through the challenges of starting to figure out their logistics changes what were pretty massive, they've now started to pivot towards how do we create better digital experiences knowing that these changes are not temporary, they're really permanent in customer behavior has changed, you know, probably five to 10 years faster than it might have absent the pandemic.

Steve:
Yeah, you know, in fact, I've noticed now a lot of the fast food restaurants now are drive thru only.

Michael:
Yeah, absolutely. I think some of them are now, over 50 percent of their orders are mobile orders, which is pretty staggering when you think about how fast that change happened.

Steve:
Yeah. And in a sense, you know, maybe they don't even need the same size physical plant going forward?

Michael:
I think I think I read Chipotle is actually converting a number of their locations to drive thru only and mobile order only. So I think, yeah, we're going to see big changes in how customers and brands start to embrace this. And we're seeing the same thing in retail. A lot of retailers that have large footprint stores are converting many of their stores to either mini warehouses or partial warehouses. Know you're seeing things like lockers for pickup and curbside, and the technologies are really giving customers significantly more flexibility in how they obtain products or services from brands, which I think is great. Customers love options, but it also creates a lot of complexity in the user experience. If you have four or five different ways, can check checking out to get your product understanding again. What that customer preferences are and what they're trying to accomplish can help you streamline that so you don't have to give the customer, you know, six options at checkout on how they want to get their product. It's just too overwhelming. So this is a great challenge for customer experience and personalization.

Steve:
Yeah, actually, you make a great comment and my regular listeners have heard me tell this story 100 times, but I'll never forget. I think it was the fall of 2019. So, you know, a little over two years ago, I got to visit one of the big cable companies contact center, and they took me to an area at the time where they had specialists that were just monitoring Twitter and they were actually doing customer service calls on Twitter. And that blew my mind as kind of an old person. And it, you know, it does increase the complexity. And I'll give you kind of my personal example, because now I work with a lot of young people, you know, and they text me, they slack me, they they, you know,

Michael:
Messenger, Snapchat.

Steve:
Yeah, and it's like, you know, I got a to do list and an email inbox. You know, that's how I keep track of that. So I'm constantly getting messed up with the media, but you know, again, it's very customer friendly, if you can have all these, you know, all these channels, so…

Michael:
It's really important to meet customers where they are and understand their individual needs. And you know, there are, you know, not infinite, but it feels like infinite number of channels customers want to engage and communicate. And one of the things that's really critical is that you have consistency across those channels. You know, there's nothing more jarring to a customer than having a completely different brand experience in, say, the store than you might get online. You know, whether it's look and feel or visuals or you know how the customers are treated or what the policies are. So consistency across channels from the user experience as well as you know, what you're offering is really important to customers.

Steve:
Yeah, I remember early on, you know, a lot of the pushback was the brick and mortar retailers went online and then they didn't really want to take the returns in the store. And they had a lot of channel conflict. And that was another brilliant thing that Amazon did is when they bought Whole Foods. You could return your Amazon stuff at the Whole Foods. It was again, they were so, so advanced in making it easy for the customer, right?

Michael:
Yeah, there's a whole different set of discussions, but you know, having been involved kind of since the dawn of Internet retail in the late 90s, I've had a lot of experiences with very big brands trying to sort through those questions. And, you know, omnichannel or cross-channel retail is. It's fascinating, but I think at the end of the day, from a customer standpoint, a brand is a brand and they're looking for consistency and it's taken, you know, really decades for brands to understand that and kind of build the capabilities, both the information technology, but also the store processes and processes and compensation alignment and all the things that go around. How do you manage different teams and different customer experiences across multiple channels? It's a complicated topic, but it's a really fun one.

Steve:
Maybe with kind of that last comment you made about how it gets complex and you know, the thing ought to be seamless and and how hard it is. What from your experience are some of the quick mistakes or the kind of the common pitfalls? So if one of our listeners is saying, yeah, we got to up our digital game? What are some of the things that they want to try to avoid or kind of some just quick lessons there?

Michael:
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things that are really important that I've seen in my career and that we try to get across as one is experimentation and optimization is not a project. It is a way of thinking in a way of living. So you have to constantly be trying new things with your customers, and you have to do that at speed and scale to really find things that work. So, you know, testing is not a project. It's a way to think about building great customer experiences all the time and responding to constantly changing market dynamics. And then the other one, which we've talked about at length here, is really thinking about context and intent. So understanding relevancy at a point in time to a customer is super important, and anything you can do to try to understand how a customer is behaving and what they're trying to accomplish in real time, just like you would in a store for customers in a physical store, you can kind of watch them, you can interact with them and you can understand what they're trying to accomplish and trying to leverage technology to do that online is super important.

Steve:
Michael, we've reached that point of the podcast where I ask every guest to give our listeners their take home value, and you've given us a ton of good information in terms of how we can personalize the digital experience and realizing that a lot of our listeners, you know, they might be only a couple of years into this journey, but you know, based on your experience, again, if I'm a person that's trying to help my company improve our overall customer experience, kind of what's your best take home value for these pros today? And that's something that they should be able to take back to the office tomorrow or next week and and really do something that could enhance their company's digital personalization. So. Michael Scharff, give us your take home value.

Michael:
I probably give you a list of a dozen of them, but I'm going to I'm going to pick one and I'm going to say consistency is really critical. And it's super important that within your company, you have alignment across all of your channels and all of your people that are engaging with customers, that there's a singular vision for customer experience. And you really know collectively what you're trying to accomplish with the customer at the center of that journey, and you're all working towards trying to build consistency in that user journey.

Steve:
And again, like if I'm a CX pro, how might I audit my organization on that? How would be a good way to go about that?

Michael:
Yeah. So I think, you know, there's some simple things, you know, looking across the creative environment, what you do in store, what you do online. Do you have similar or identical fonts and colors and things like that? Those are fairly simple ones. The next step down would be the policies and the processes that you use to engage customers. So like we talked about that kind of cross-channel returns, do you make things easy for the customer so that they can engage with you in any channel based on what they're looking to accomplish? And then, you know, ultimately it requires alignment among the people that are in charge. So, you know, does your management team have aligned objectives, and aligned goals around that customer experience and is everybody kind of marching towards the same beat in terms of being able to build great experiences with the customer again at the center of all of it.

Steve:
Well, thanks for those tips. And to my listeners, if you're relatively new into this digital part of your customer experience, I think this would be a great time here at the start of the year to kind of go take a look at that and look across all your various channels and make sure you've got consistency. And the move to digital is not going to go back the other way. It's only going to become more intense. So if you haven't really weighed into your digital experience, now would be a great time to do it and you'd add a lot of value to your organization. Michael, thank you for being a guest on The CX Leader Podcast. Really enjoyed having you on.

Michael:
Thanks, Stephen. Really enjoyed the conversation today.

Steve:
And just in case any of our listeners would would like to continue the conversation, you want to tout your website or maybe your LinkedIn profile or something. Just people want to learn a little more about Evolv AI.

Michael:
Yeah, absolutely. So you can certainly find me, Michael Scharff or our company Evolv AI on LinkedIn or on Facebook, and we saw the name Evolv.ai, so that would be our website address as well. And you can reach out via the website or link would be happy to connect.

Steve:
And if you want to talk about anything else you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your business's customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show and find all of our previous episodes. We organize them by series and topic, and we're now over 200 episodes into The CX Leader Podcast. You can also jot us a note, give us an idea for a future podcast, or just let us know how we're doing. The CX Leader podcast is a production of Walker. We are an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their experience management success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening, and remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader, and we'll see you again next time.

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