Intersection of CX and Service Design: Karan Thaker, Northwestern Mutual

The Gist

• Understanding customer experience evolution. Karan Thaker shares his journey from focusing solely on improving digital product user-friendliness to enhancing broader organizational functions and cross-channel interactions. This reflects a shift from a narrow focus on digital tools to a comprehensive approach encompassing both digital and physical customer interactions.
• Distinct approaches in experience design. Thaker differentiates between UX design, traditionally associated with digital interactions, and experience design, which encompasses a broader range of human-centered design aspects. This highlights a move toward integrating service design and journey management to create cohesive customer experiences across all touchpoints.
• Strategic implementation challenges: complex collaboration. The discussion reveals the complexity of aligning multiple organizational functions and stakeholders around a unified customer experience strategy. Thaker emphasizes the importance of establishing a common language and shared understanding to successfully implement experience design across different teams and departments.

Episode Highlights

1. Introduction to the Podcast and Karan Thaker's Role (0:06 - 1:08). The podcast introduces Karan Thaker, a customer experience and design strategy specialist at Northwestern Mutual. Thaker is described as a leading professional in the field, highlighting the podcast's commitment to featuring top experts.
2. Karan Thaker’s Background and Approach to Customer Experience (1:08 - 3:05). Thaker explains his career trajectory, emphasizing his experience in making products easier to use and broadening his focus to include cross-channel maturity beyond digital tools. This reflects the evolution of his career from digital product enhancement to broader organizational impact.
3. Distinction Between UX Design and Experience Design (3:09 - 5:00). Thaker clarifies the difference between user experience (UX) design, which is often digital-focused, and experience design, which includes a wider range of human-centered design aspects. This distinction underlines the broader scope of experience design in encompassing both digital and physical interactions.
4. The Importance of Journey Management and Service Design (5:00 - 8:34). The conversation shifts to the significance of journey management and service design in creating a comprehensive approach to customer experience. Thaker discusses how these strategies contribute to improving financial wellness for customers, illustrating the practical application of these concepts in financial services.
5. Data-Driven Decisions and Organizational Collaboration (8:34 - 10:00). Thaker shares insights on the integration of data and collaboration across different teams within an organization to enhance customer service and overall experience. This reflects the complex and collaborative nature of effective customer experience strategies in large organizations.
6. Challenges and Realities of Implementing Experience Design (10:00 - 12:21). The discussion highlights the challenges involved in aligning various organizational functions and stakeholders around a unified customer experience strategy. Thaker emphasizes the importance of language and shared understanding in overcoming these challenges.
7. The Role of Cross-Functional Collaboration (12:21 - 15:00). Thaker emphasizes the importance of cross-functional collaboration in effective customer experience management, highlighting how diverse perspectives and expertise contribute to comprehensive solutions and improved outcomes for customers.
8. Practical Examples of Journey Improvements (15:00 - 18:00). Thaker provides specific examples of how his team has used data to identify and address customer service issues, illustrating the practical application of journey management concepts in improving the consumer experience, particularly in digital access and internal operations.
9. The Challenge of Collecting Anecdotal Data from Physical Interactions (18:00 - 20:12). A discussion on the challenges of collecting and integrating anecdotal data from physical interactions, such as meetings with financial advisors, into digital experience strategies. This underscores the complexities of blending digital and physical customer data to create a seamless customer journey.
10. The Importance of Advisor Feedback in Experience Design (20:12 - 22:38). Thaker talks about the critical role of feedback from advisors, who are often the primary point of contact with customers, in shaping the company’s service design and customer experience strategies. This feedback is essential for tailoring services to meet specific customer needs and preferences.

Episode Transcript

Dom Nicastro 0:22: Hello everyone, Dom Nicastro, managing editor of CMSWire who brings you our monthly CX Decoded podcast. Good to be with everyone again. And today we are happy to have the latest awesome customer experience practitioner. We only get the best of the best here and we got Karan Thaker, he is the customer experience and design strategy specialist with Northwestern Mutual. What's going on, Karan?

Karan Thaker 0:50: Hey, Dom, how are you? Good to be here.

Dom 0:52: Good. Yeah, it's good to be with you. And you know, just for a little background. Let's ask a simple question to start. Tell our listeners who you are, like what's keeping you busy lately, kind of your career trajectory. And, you know, what makes you passionate about CX and customer experience design?

Karan 1:22: I've been in this space for about 12 years now, you can say in a variety of different capacities. I started off really helping organizations make their products, you know, better, faster, easier to use, specifically software products, digital products. And then over the years, I started to expand partnerships across the organization, as opposed to just digital partners.

So you know, marketing and sales and service and whatnot. And that led me to expand my career insights, so to speak, into making the business, you know, easier to use, as opposed to just the products. So as opposed to only look at digital maturity, I now start to start to look at broader cross channel maturity. And over the years, I've worked in a variety of different industries, from software to healthcare to even some nonprofits for a little bit.

In the last many years, I've spent time in the financial services space, or specifically insurance. And currently, I'm working as practice lead for our design strategy function at Northwestern Mutual. And basically, this practice is part of our broader design umbrella and NM (Northwestern Mutual). And the design umbrella is part of a broader CX umbrella.

So our customer experience office is where I reside. And, you know, my role really is to help be a force multiplier, so to speak, you know, to partner up with, stakeholders across the board from digital partners like digital product, product design, UX research and whatnot ... content, all the way out to extended partners, such as sales, marketing, customer service, and even legal functions or compliance functions. It's just been a journey doing more and more of the same work over the years.

Related Article: Improving Customer Experience With Human-Centric Design

UX Design vs. Experience Design

Dom 3:09: Yeah, 100%. Talk to our listeners about that distinction between UX design and experience design. Are you saying experience design is different from a general like UX person? 

Karan 3:32: Yeah, it's a good question. I wouldn't necessarily say it's different. User experience design; it's still experience, right? It's just that the term UX has a very strong connotation to digital. When you say that you're working on UX design, more often than not, the person on the receiving end is thinking, OK, so phone app, mobile app, web app, is it a digital platform? Is it a website, whatnot.

And the term experience design, in its origins, we can say, captured the general essence of human centered design, not just digital user experiences, I think the term UX just stuck for like 20 years now. Because when it started to get adopted, we were on a very high trajectory of these startups and companies, early 2000s, where UX was just everything. But then over the years experienced design has become more and more clearer, where concepts like service design have started to become clarified to say, well, we're not talking about digital channels, we're talking about physical channels, channels, where we have, for example, our physical stores and the staff and their interactions with customers, and how they use our digital tools; not just what the digital tools are that customers use. So it's the connectivity between all of those channels that I think is just considered as experienced design.

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Optimizing Customer Journeys in Finance

Dom 4:59: Yeah. Awesome, well, thanks for level setting, they're super helpful. I think now let's get into like the meat and potatoes of what's keeping you busy lately. And I know you're passionate about leading journey management and service design efforts. And, you know, can you share kind of an overview of that, and, you know, how journey management and service design efforts kind of contributes to kind of enhancing that financial wellness, right, and those journeys of your customers and prospects with insurance and investment products? 

Karan 5:32: So it's a pretty wide ranging topic. When we say journey management or any service design, even the very terms themselves service design, journey management, there's, there's a lot of overlap. In fact, the term service design hasn't been as widely adopted here in the US, you know, it's very largely adopted out in the European markets, or even the Canadian market. But this concept of journey management service design, in general, I'll just talk about all of it together.

And, you know, my particular role within NM or even in the industry in general is, how do we look at the different experiences or the interactions that consumers are having with us, throughout their entire lifecycle with us from when they are a prospect to if and when they become a customer? If and when they decide to promote us or buy more from us? What are all of those inflection points, you could say, or individual experiences, or journeys, and all those different points of your relationship between the customer and the company, identifying those in a way that is very data backed?

What are the priorities for the customer? And where do we focus most effectively? In recent years, where have we developed the most strength to respond in a very competitive and also a very capable manner in the market? By collaborating with a variety of different teams—like research content, data science, and specific subject matter experts from business functions—all these elements come together to actually define the primary journeys we should target. In my role, I begin to help create that language, putting some of that language on paper within the organization, either with specific business functions or on specific projects.

Then, I zoom out of that language to say, "Now that we've identified one, two, or three priority journeys, let's go through the ABC process, steps, methods, and whatnot, also in a very cross-functional way, to identify our strengths and then build a point of view in both a strategic and a tactical capacity." This enables us to say, "We are going to do A, B, and C things." But then here's the way in which we're going to measure those things, as opposed to just talking about it at a very high level. So, that's, you know, not in a nutshell, what journey management entails and where I spend most of my time.

Crafting a Unified Customer Language

Dom 7:57: Yeah, well, that's a lot of time there. I mean, if you're looking at the lifetime journey of the customer, that's a lot of data, a lot of interactions, a lot of sentiment, you know. How do you, as a professional, work with different teams to truly collect this data and make it actionable? Is it like one platform that you're using, or is it a bunch of disparate data that you have to make sense of together? How do you analyze all of those touchpoints?

Karan 8:34: Basically, you're getting at the meat of the problem, really. Because, ultimately, there are camps about this in the community. In that sense, should we be looking at boiling the ocean, at least to some degree? Or should we really only take bite-sized chunks out of it? Generally, when we look at the entire lifecycle of the consumer, as I mentioned, you know, we think of it in terms of what happens when somebody is just becoming a customer from being a prospect, what happens when they've already become a customer, and what happens when they are looking to just stay as a customer, and you're looking to retain them, and whatnot.

And across all three of those segments, you can say, or high-level chapters of that lifecycle, you have a lot of different touchpoints, a lot of different types of journeys. So how I've gone about it, and how, as a team, we're also doing it, and then as well as how we did it at my previous company, is that we're redefining that language for what those journeys and experiences are across the board. And again, there are some industry best practices about it as well, which we can unpack a little bit.

But once we define a language around it, it does two things. One, it brings all these cross-functional partners a little closer to the conversation because we might have CX talking about something as a customer journey, but then we might have UX design talking about something as a UX flow. They're both talking about the same thing but at different touchpoints. So having a language like that on paper demystifies this ocean that you're talking about, which is a lot of data, a lot of different touchpoints. And it allows a strategist like myself to then start the conversation around our trade-offs and our choices: What are we going to focus on, and what are we not going to focus on, because it's just not realistic to do all of it in one shot. And in really large companies, again, like NM, there's a lot of attention to a lot of things at the same time, as you would expect.

There are so many priorities, a lot of momentum behind our competitive response, behind our continuous day-to-day operation. So taking teams away from that day-to-day operation and executional focus and getting them to think about change in any capacity is a challenge in and of itself. So that's where this idea of breaking down the lifecycle of the whole consumer experience into smaller chunks helps serve as a very tangible output of CX, a very tangible output that you can really point to and say, "These are our athletes, or our catalog of all the different journeys, or our taxonomy of all the different journeys." And eventually, again, the dream being that we may use some platforms, or may use some sort of manual effort to layer in insights from data science, from finance, and legal, to user experience research, to broad market research, and several other sources.

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Data-Driven Customer Improvements

Dom 11:40: You know, that's awesome. To get that soup to nuts kind of data view, it's so hard, it's so challenging. And I think a lot of people would be like, "Yeah, I get that. It's not easy." Can you think of an example where you used a big data set to improve a certain part of the customer experience, like something you did recently you're proud of, or even one customer who got a better experience because you had data, you had the experience you wanted in mind, and you executed it? Is there something particular that you could point to in that regard?

Karan 12:21: Yeah, you know, fortunately, I've been able to be part of teams and projects where we've gone from strategic envisioning all the way to tactical measurement of that strategy. Some very recent examples I've been part of here at NM, where we started to look at direct impact to consumers, or even just direct impact to teams that are working on that area.

We were talking about this idea of consumer lifecycle earlier, a key component of that lifecycle is how consumers find customer service, how they engage the organization by calling, or by looking at a mobile app, or by sending an email, or in some cases, just sending a chat message on the website.

And NM has an increasingly strong presence across a variety of different channels. And over the last few years that I've been here, last year particularly, we spent a good amount of time really diving deeper into some very specific customer journeys within the servicing space. And again, we didn't solve everything, but we started to identify some priority areas where we can say, "What are the blockers for consumers to access our digital platform? Are there some very immediate low-hanging fruit where we can improve the accessibility for that? Or we can improve the way in which they register for our digital accounts, for example? Or what are the ways in which our home office teams or our customer service department essentially, how are they adopting different shortcuts in terms of change management processes in terms of just manual procedures? How can we, again, enable them with perhaps some additional tools, or by reducing some of the complexity on our internal digital platforms?"

We start to look at a lot of those areas of the broader customer service function, so to speak, and the journeys as part of that, and as a result of that diagnosis, we had identified some very specific actions that were then put into a roadmap later in the year, actually, that essentially help, again, increase the speed in which consumers can access and NM's website, or the ease in which our home office teams are able to identify data.

And some of those actions are active experiments that we're seeing through into this year now. And then some of those are just additional questions that we're going to start to explore further to say, "Well, in general, we haven't solved customer service, we're going to continuously improve on it. So how can we keep going?"

And by taking a very cross-functional approach throughout their engagement, if you will, it wasn't so much about this idea of handoff or recipient and find a strategy. And now we pass it on. And then someone on their team is figuring out the execution, rather it became a question of just transitioning, you know, the way in which we're measuring that strategy or the way in which we're defining some goals around it.

So that's just one very recent example. And then, prior to that, as well, in different capacities, even at a previous company, I was looking at, you know, along with the team, how do we improve not just the digital maturity of our experience, but also the physical experiences that we have, such as meeting with a financial advisor at their office? What is that experience like? What is that meeting in conversation like, you know, meeting with these advisors, often at community industry events, and whatnot? So again, there are a lot of different ways in which not just NM or like other players, but many, many other community members or strategists in a mechanic capacity actively seek out impact. Yeah.

Tracking the Physical Customer Experience

Dom 16:02: So now you're getting into the phygital world, right, like physical and digital. I'd love to ask you a follow-up on that. Because you know, that physical interaction is just as important as the digital for some people. In fact, I mean, there are people starting in digital, and then they go to physical, and they just want to get it accomplished. They want the same experience, they want to be in and out quick, with transparency.

Now, my question to you is, is there a way to track that anecdotal data of the physical experience? How do you collect that one-to-one informational session with a financial advisor or insurance adjuster and a customer? Like when they're sitting down at a desk? Like, do you have to, you know, interview the rep from your team? Or how does that work? In terms of collecting that information?

Karan 16:54: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, particularly, it reminds me of some very recent conversations over the last year, in fact. So there's this idea within our community that is increasingly talked about, it's called co-creation. The term co-creation, you know, by definition, is that you're problem-solving together.

And in the example you're specifically talking about the advisors, and like, the reps and whatnot, you know, we've at NM, at least, we very heavily lean into that by inviting the advisors and their staff, because often they're running independent practices of their own, you know, by inviting them into a joint dialogue with us in our human-centered problem-solving processes and, and methods and whatnot, and often with cross-functional leaders and tactical teams at NM as part of that conversation.

So the question doesn't necessarily always stop at, "But how are we going to capture the anecdotal data?" But often the question becomes more about for advisors, "What do you think, you know, we're not necessarily always going to have some sort of digital listening post and add into every single dialogue. It's just not practical, right?" But in lieu of that, how can we build these partnerships with these advisors who are actually in many ways, the face of the brand, right?

They are the, you know, they are the owners of the relationship, you could say, right, because they nurture these relationships with consumers, even outside of NM, it this is a pretty common practice within the insurance industry in general. So large matrix insurance companies particularly benefit from treating the advisors as that thought partner as that, that listening post, so to speak. And as part of that dialogue, again, it becomes a question of disseminating their feedback, which is often coming from, you know, strong focus on, say, certain types of customers, because you might have three or four really loud customers and a long tail of maybe not loud customers.

And some advisors are very, very specific and very prescriptive, and what they're seeing, while some advisors may be very focused on, again, what they're hearing from those, you know, those select few customers. So having that variety of, you know, feedback, as part of those conversations that we can have, as part of any journey really can help identify, you know, more nuanced feedback.

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The Golden Ticket of Customer Insights

Dom 19:23: Yeah, that to me is like, that's the golden ticket, right, right there to get insights of an actual customer experience. Like, I know, you know, we get all excited in our world of the digital customer experience. And that's so important, I mean, incredibly important. But to have that one to one, you know, adviser talking to a customer in a chair in front of them, and to take those insights and bring it back to the digital team.

Because I'm sure you I'm assuming you you collect this probably customers that come in and say the mobile app's not working I tried to Get this done on the website and I, and I couldn't, that's why I'm here. So you might get some digital feedback from those in person interactions, I'm assuming you do we do.

Karan 20:12: Our mobile or our, our digital footprint in general, for consumers, or mobile app or website, they do have increasingly, you know, increasingly sophisticated, you know, ways to capture like nuanced feedback, whether it's, you know, very specific tracking on what areas of the product are used most and which ones are not, or just tracking on, you know, overall session times, and, you know, and whatnot, from the advisors lens, there's also this other aspect to think about digital maturity. But for the advisors, you know, the whole world of digital customer experience, or digital CX, right?

Yes, it has the end customer in mind. But we can also think of it just as any consumer, which means our home office teams, our, our financial advisors, even me as an employee who's trying to use three of our internal platforms, that employee experience is an equal part of broad customer experience, umbrella. That's where the term experience management comes in, right, where we think of employee experience, customer experience, brand, experience everything all together.

So when we talk with all these advisors about the feedback, often that feedback is coupled with feedback about the digital platforms that advisors themselves use that, like, you know, what would be better if I were enabled with X, Y, and Z data points when I'm talking with this consumer in my office, and you guys should do better and provide a, b and c for that. Now, that's a pretty actionable piece of feedback for us to then dive deeper into.

Dom 21:47: The employee experience. You mentioned it jibes with everything we're hearing from CX leaders like you. And I think it's just like you said, I think it's gonna just meld into experience, there's not going to be any customer experience anymore. It's not going to be employee experience anymore enough, it's going to be one experience one umbrella.

And we're actually seeing titles that reflect this, we're seeing head of EX and CX, right. So if I asked you like in 1985, like, who owns employee experience, you'd probably say, What do you mean, the HR people? You know, they signed me up, they pay my checks, you know, that if I have a benefits question I go to completely do game now. So my question to you is in Northwestern, like, who would you say, you know, owns employee experience? It sounds like a complete group effort?

Cross-Functional Roles of CX

Karan 22:38: Yes, that's the short answer. Yeah, I don't think and this is actually just my personal belief, I don't think CX is something that is owned by an individual role or individual business function, I think what is owned, is, you know, the, the accountability or the responsibility to be that force multiplier to be that tailwind of the rest of the business, you know, so that you can unify and unite everyone toward a common goal.

And it's definitely a tough job. But when we say own your own goals is, you know, that you have the accountability to execute on it, or, you know, in other words, where you're controlling the, you know, the, the delivery of it, and it's just in business, you know, we have a variety of different functions that own the delivery.

And, of course, a lot of the problem solving for different pieces. We have, you know, individual business functions, again, like marketing, like distribution, like, you know, customer service, we have, in many companies, individual functions for product for engineering, for design, it's only in recent years, or I guess, over the last decade now, where we see the CX function start to absorb digital partners, like product management and design, it wasn't the case like 10 years ago, I don't think and as part of that this conversation of ownership is shifting, in the sense that teams are owning bits and pieces of the execution, but then certain teams are, you know, owning the, you know, the, the broader effort, which is more about influencing and more about, you know, guiding the conversation with a lot more of that cross functional dialogue.

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Dom 24:22: 100%. And we'll talk talking about that cross functional collaboration. Like, I'd love to know how that works. Because I myself, my team, I have, like, you have a good idea. And you're like, Well, this has to go through a few hoops, right? So like, who are the who's you know what, let me ask you this way. Who's your best friend in that company? Right, who's that person that in another department cross cross departmental friend, best friend BFF. That you feel that as it's so important for you to to connect, you know, day to day, week to week go and just kind of like hash it out and try to get these better experiences for customers. Yeah. My best friend.

Karan 25:09: So, in general, over the years, I've definitely leaned a lot more toward partners in research and analytics. And those partners could be having a variety of titles, you know, you could be in UX research, or you could be in data science, or you could be within consumer marketing and insights. But you know, any role or any team that has, you know, greater access than me, to what's happening with the consumer sentiment, what's happening with the business performance, and access to that kind of data and access to those perspectives, that I've found to be incredibly helpful, not necessarily only on projects, but even in general in how how I personally think about challenges, you know, it's improved my own critical thinking to be honest. So, within NM, particularly, as you can imagine, we have all these teams, they're all in different parts of the company, and they're all doing a lot of different things at the same time.

And I get to work with all of them, often in different capacities. So that's why it's a fun job, right. But when it comes to the involvement of them, that's where the challenge can can start to become very clear that sometimes you can bring everybody at the table all at the same time. Sometimes you have to bring one party at the table, knowing that here's the trade off, you know, we need to park a, b and c things so that eventually some other team will give us feedback.

So that's a muscle that I think any CX function just gets better and better at over time. Or even any individual like role like a strategist like myself, right. But this idea of having, you know, as you will put it, like best friends across the board, I think that idea is very true, if we really think about the brass tacks of you know, what makes a really strong CX like function, you need to have friends across the company, you need to have these, these levels of appreciation on how different partners can come together, as opposed to this idea that we're gonna do A, B and C, we'll hand it off, and then they'll worry about whatever the next thing is.

Doing the latter, it's inevitable in some cases, because of just the pace of things or because of, say, funding models. But when you can, when we have the right leadership support, and when we have the right organizational design, to actually have these cross functional partnerships. The result is striking, it's very effective, because you just get a lot more diversity in the perspectives that you present. Yeah,

Dom 27:48: Yeah, you're almost kind of like having to sell within your own company, like, you know, partner with me on this, I'm telling you, we all our data is telling us this is the way to go, you know, mobile app, we need to optimize that right now, we need to do more. So you almost got to sell yourself to these other leaders in these other departments.

Karan 28:08: Oh, definitely. And, you know, I, you know, it's well put, in fact, you know, because, and I even when I'm talking with, with folks within experience, design, whether it's product design service design, or I'm talking with folks in CX, you know, this idea of being able to pitch the value of our perspective or selling it, I think that idea tends to not get as much attention as it perhaps needs to, because, you know, by definition, I think we need to, you know, bring folks along, we need to, you know, demonstrate that, like strategy as an example, or customer experience strategy, it's not so much about an individual isolated effort, you know, we can co create it. And when we co created the outputs, we'll have a lot more fingerprints from the whole organization. And because it's going to have a lot more fingerprints from everybody, it's going to have a lot more buy in. And because it's gonna have a lot more buy in, it's going to have a lot of momentum when it comes to execution. Yeah.

Exploring the AI Landscape

Dom 29:04: Karan, we've been talking for like about 30 minutes. And guess what we haven't mentioned yet?

Karan29:12: Oh, I think I know; AI.

Dom 29:14: We haven't mentioned AI. I've talked to a lot of folks lately, especially if I went to the Adobe Summit recently, and there was a lot of on the ground marketers, you know, talking about where they are with AI. So for me, the vision and the aspirations on the keynote stages were very different from the ground. People on the ground, and that's usually the case, right? Because the keynotes are awesome. They've been planning it for six months. And they look awesome. And I don't deny that there's great technology behind this.

But my question to you, but what I've discovered was, they're not. They're still exploring. They're a little scared. There was another financial services leader there. and they were not diving in at all because of the compliance issue. So, question is to you, where have you made some gains with AI? Where are you overall? Since chat GPT, and generative AI came in the conversation? How much has it changed? If anything, for you kind of wish you had out there?

Karan 30:20: Yeah. Well, how many times this conversation comes up? All the time, right. So let me put it this way. AI is something that I'll talk about, like my perspective on it, and then I'll talk a little bit about, you know, how we're talking about it. And then, so when it comes to AI, I'd say we're studying it, you know, we're in process of interviewing it, you know, so to speak, you know, what I'm seeing is that when it comes to AI tech, because currently there are a lot of it is driven by, you know, new emerging capabilities that are not necessarily in a proven business models or anything yet.

So when I think of those capabilities, I think of it in context of just how we think of, you know, our capabilities as people, you know, think about hard skills, think about soft skills. And what I'm seeing is that AI tech, in general, it's, it leans very heavily on hard skills. And that's probably expected, right, because it's very driven by like, transactional, like technology first. And what I mean by hard skills, specifically is where again, the example of ChatGPT.

And since then, over the last year, year and a half, now, we've seen a lot more momentum, with tools, these value propositions that are cropping up across the board, as you know, startups, some of them very compelling as well. And they're tools that essentially help intake a lot of often very unstructured data, do a lot of clever things with that data, analyze it, and then spit out outputs that could be in the form of some text output. That could be in the form of some some audio video, you know, we're seeing some pretty compelling things there. Right. But it's essentially input and output. In other words, we can think of it as a tool to boost our productivity.

And when I say our productivity, I mean, again, think of ChatGPT. You know, it helps you think a little differently, it helps you question ideas a little bit, and clarify assumptions a little bit based on you know, our prompts. On the other hand, when I think of soft skills, the picture changes very heavily. It's not so much about tactical tools, it's more about, you know, negotiating between stakeholders, you know, aligning stakeholders that are very often having, you know, different priorities, or in some cases, competing priorities, with strong opinions in bringing teams along in this cross functional way, where you're talking about demonstrating to demonstrating outputs, that will get toward one goal, as opposed to individual outputs that teams typically produce, you know, that type of conversation, that type of navigating across the organization. It involves a much broader and much more nuanced understanding of what how business works, how communication works.

And I don't think AI tech is anywhere near that level of sophistication when it comes to just, you know, the soft skills. So the hard skills rolling great, you know, definitely piqued interest piqued everyone's interest. Well, you know, as I said, we're studying it. So we're actively exploring, how can this be used to enable our employees with maybe some more productivity tools? How can this be used to maybe enable our financial advisors or maybe some consumer efforts?

And that question is, it's an ongoing question, right, as opposed to rolling out some big bang value proposition in the market. It's more so about trying different things and testing them with smaller segments, and then increasingly with larger sample sizes. And the more we do it, I think, the more it will become clearer on if there is opportunity for AI to also jump into, you know, the broader discourse of communication within the business, or is it just one more tool in our toolkit?

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Dom 34:12: Yeah, so sounds like a little smattering, like a sprinkle of AI here they are test here test. So exploratory would be would that be accurate for where your teams are at right now?

Karan 34:24: Yeah, definitely. I think that's actually true. In general for for the whole financial services industry. Yeah.

Dom 34:31: Yeah. I mean, I was asking that practitioner I was talking to at that conference a few weeks ago, like, yeah, you're not just gonna throw in a bunch of financial data into ChatGPT you know, like, here's all our customers information now. Give us some trends. Like hello, can't do it. Compliance. We get it. This has been a super great conversation.

Bridging Audiences in Customer Experience

Karan 34:57: One big takeaway. Oh, It's always like this, like picking a favorite. Anything, right? There's so many things that come to mind, though, you, you're talking about two different audiences for the most part, you know, one is the broader customer experience audience. And the other is a little bit nuanced audience, which is experienced design and how it fits within customer experience.

I have, fortunately been in the middle of both of them over the whole course of my career, when I think of the next year or so, there are a couple of things in terms of just standout trends, that, you know, I would call out for both of these communities and, you know, ideally brush them in when it comes to customer experience, there is increasingly over the past many years a lot of dialogue around uniting action from the executive level, all the way down to tactical level, and, you know, introducing more and more customer advocacy within the org. So if you're working on broader CX efforts, you know, consider how you can make those efforts measurable, how you can make those efforts very bite sized.

So again, that's for some of the examples we talked about, such as defining, you know, a language around your journeys comes in, as opposed to trying to solve for, you know, the whole experience or the whole journey at the same time. I think that can be very effective as a very specific practice with a lot of cross functional participation. And it can also help CX teams in general, but a lot of credibility within the company. 

Dom 36:33: Karan, thank you for all these insights. today. We are going to close it down folks, thank you for tuning in to CX decoded by CMSWire. We're out once a month. We can't thank you enough for your your attention here. So we're gonna call it a day. I hope everyone has a great day; see you soon.

Connecting with Karan Thaker

Follow Karan on LinkedIn. 

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