Describing yourself as ‘AI-first’ is a mistake - Interview with Chris Morrissey of Zoom

0:00So welcome to the next edition of the PunkCX podcast. With me today I have Chris Morrissey and now you've got to wait for it because he has quite a long title. He is Zoom's GM and Global Head of CX Sales and GoToMarket. So before we get into that, hi, Chris, how you doing? Doing great, Adrian. How are you doing? Very well. Yeah, bigger business cards for me when that title came out. I know, one of those kind of things you roll it all out because it's extended off the end of the business card. I mean, so I have to ask you just for the benefit of our listeners and the people that read the highlights, I was going to ask you to introduce yourself and tell me a little bit more about yourself and the work you do, and including explain to me what that title means.

0:42Yeah, so, yeah, it's a great question. What I do is a question. I ask myself that every day, actually. But I've been in the CX business for 30 years now. So it's a long time. And it's been through ebbs and flows at CX or Conduct Center or the number of iterations it's gone through in naming and titles. I always focus more on the good market strategy all the way from having my own business many, many years ago that I ended up selling to another vendor and then leading different go-to markets and strategy and initiatives. So for better or worse, this is the space I've been in for a long time. I don't think most of us in this industry went to university or college saying, I want to land in the contact center business or CX business.

1:24We kind of start paths and we all land here in different avenues. And if you like it, you stay here forever. And if you don't, you kind of bounce around. But what I found in this industry is most people I work with have been in the industry for a very long time. And it's usually because they have some sort of passion towards what it is we do in terms of like how customer experiences can get better, how brands can delight customers better. If you're passionate about those types of things, you tend to stay and approach it from different angles. So fast forward many years, I landed at Zoom two years ago, where the title general manager or GM, global head of go-to-market sales, it's really all encompassing of everything we do at Zoom in terms of bringing what should our products be doing, what should we do integrating with, how do we do our channel strategy, how do we go to market, who are we selling to, how do we deploy, everything you do with building the customer experience practice at Zoom.

2:21I'd say two things. One is the person that had the role before me was Eric Ewan, our CEO. So it's not lost on me. I'm feeling some very, very big shoes. And he had to move on. He's running a much bigger business at Zoom overall, so he couldn't be a GM as well as running a business. So I was lucky enough to be here at the time and take that over. But it is also very cross-functional. We work with GMs across the business, whether we are a phone business or a meetings business or a revenue. We don't view our products in silos. In fact, we view the collection of our portfolio better than the sum of its parts.

2:56Awesome. Now, the reason why I wanted to have you on the podcast, because one, I've seen some of the things that you've interviewed, you've done in the past and some of the things you've said, and there were some number of things you shared with me in the run up to this that I wanted to explore because I just thought what you said was interesting and slightly contrary. We like a bit of contrary. So first up, everyone is talking about being AI first these days. And I sometimes just go, my head drops a little bit. And this is a great word. You eschew that term and talk about being connection first.

3:37And I wanted you to explain to me, tell me, Chris, what do you mean by that? So I love actually that you picked up on it. And it's something I feel I'm actually passionate about for a number of reasons. One is you actually alluded to AI first is, well, like I think most people roll their eyes or shrug or look away when they hear it because it doesn't describe anything other than the company or a vendor is so excited to let you know they use AI. That's all that does, right? But it does nothing with like as a consumer, well, what does that mean to me? Right? It's like a very inward looking statement.

4:14And it also focuses, and to see the same, by the way, it doesn't differentiate. And it doesn't kind of give purpose to, I think, a vendor or company. Like, what is it you're rallying around? Why are you using AI? I'll give you, say, we're AI first, this, AI first, that. Like, what gets lost is kind of the why the company exists. Why are we actually in business? Are we in business to develop AI tools? Are we in business to do something for our customers? Outcomes, right? Outcomes, right? So that's why I say we're a connections first business at Zoom. Now, I'm not going to overarch into our chief marketing officer world or anything in marketing.

4:52This is more of the perspective of our CX business. But if you think about the connection first, everything we are doing is about building connections, whether that be a brand building a connection where their own employee base, which Zoom has been doing forever with the collaboration tools and meeting. or now it's like, isn't establishing a connection between brands and customers, a natural extension of that. So we really are about building connections. Now I qualify, the other piece I would say that is if you look at some of the vendors and some very big vendors, brand names, market leaders, if you want to out there, they're AI first this week.

5:31Last week, they were analytics driven, right? Four years ago, they were cloud native, right? Right. They're focusing on the technology, but - Before that, they were mobile first, I think. Mobile first, right? It's all these buzz phrases that focuses on which changes, but if you're really passionate about what you're doing, connection first will not change with Zoom. How deliberate might change, I guess AI for the next several years, I can see it, but it doesn't mean if there's new technology, we're going to go, now what is Zoom going to do? No, we're already going to be focused on delivering connections and outcomes, right?

6:06So I think That's one part of it. But I have to be very clear, that does not mean Zoom is not investing in AI, right? We're probably investing more in AI than most of your AI-first companies, right? There's the irony in that statement, right? We invest very heavily in AI. It is by far the single largest tech transformation revolution we've seen certainly in my lifetime. To minimize that, I think, would be a little tone deaf. So yes, we are leveraging AI and analytics and Agentic and all these other things that you hear. But we're doing all that predominantly to deliver connections for our customers, whether that be to the employees or the customers.

6:47And I think what I find refreshing about that is that it's like vision-led, right? It's almost like outcome-led. It's almost like saying, oh, here's what we want to deliver, and we're going to use all of the best tools that are available to us in order to deliver them. And that's just part of our strategy. And the strategy and the tools and the technology that we choose or we put in our toolbox will change as things and the environment and things that become available to us change. The connection piece becomes a timeless thing, and it's a timeless story. It is. And it goes back to the origin story of Zoom, right?

7:26When Eric started the company, his objective was to connect people, right? And that's something he did for the way of meetings. and focusing on his connection with his customers. That's his origin story. So it's kind of a natural progression, I'd say, of Zoom's journey, focusing on outcomes and not technology. No one, you know, what happens if AI changed tomorrow? Let's say, like, it won't happen, but let's just be extreme forsaken controversy. Someone, there's a mandate from somewhere saying, you can never longer use AI in contact centers for whatever reason. or somebody invents kind of a new technique which doesn't require kind of like gazillion but bits of kind of data and x amount of compute and everything else but just kind of works on simple simple super use and it's like wow it's brilliant does everything you want it to do we'll call now super ai does that be like are we now a super ai company or like like the the what do you do when you're you tie your your value to a technology versus an outcome Yeah, perfect.

8:28I love that because I'd imagine that's actually probably quite a, it's a message that probably resonates with people because there's a lot of noise. And actually, maybe that's a signal, a clear signal amongst the noise. It is. In fact, sometimes I'll be extreme and say, I'm going to say something very controversial is Zoom is not, or Zoom CS is not AI first platform. I'll start that way. Okay. Just to get out of the way. All right. And then it leads into these other conversations about why, like, and as enough you do, like, I'll tell you, I pay massive homage to our AI team, our innovators, our research team.

9:04They are doing phenomenal things in the world of AI. I don't want to minimize it, but it's just as a brand, we're really about connection. Excellent. So the other thing that I wanted to pick up on that you said was that you said that reducing effort often outweighs everything else in customer experience. And I wanted to, because again, that's almost been an illusion towards the whole frictionless experience sort of thing and reducing effort. And I wanted to help me understand and help me ask you to sort of unpack that. So ask you to say, well, what do you mean by that? Yeah. And we've seen this come up from, I wish I could say I invented the concept and trademarking it, but it's been out there for a while.

9:48We've seen a lot of different analysts leaning on it different ways over time. And the way I relate to this, the great thing about what I get to do is about customer experiences and we're all customers. So I relate everything that we do for customers and how we try to help brands at Zoom about the experiences that I have and what I feel is a good experience and what I feel is a bad experience. in my daily life. So it's analogous to if I was in an engagement with a human agent and I'm asking them a few questions and at the end of it, they answer my question very quickly and they say, at the end of it, they're like, how well did that agent handle your call?

10:25I'm like, great, they did great. I see that score. And that's a micro measure of an engagement. But if you take back, let's say I was in an IVR for 20 minutes, ones, twos, threes, fours, trying to figure out what I was getting done. Then I went to a voice bot, AI driven, and it was very friendly and empathetic. And it was asking me the right questions, but it couldn't solve my problem. So then it went to a chat bot and that didn't solve my problem. Then finally get to a human agent and it solved my problem. Now the human did a great job. They have a high CSAT score. As a consumer, that was an awful experience because what you don't know is I spent 20 minutes navigating different phone numbers, different chats, got lost, chat ended, no context between switching those channels.

11:14They should know that if they got their analytics in the game in place. I know if you're experiencing that, by the way, give us a call. We can help you. But no, if that's the experience, it's awful. So, and those are the things that you remember most as a consumer. I remember less that when I finally got the right path, it was solved. What I remember is the entire path and it was a very painful path. And that's if I have an other problem or an issue or a compliment of that company, I just don't want to go through that again, right? I'd rather have very low friction and maybe it's impersonalized and it solved my problem.

11:56like then you're not worried about the next event because you know if you have another event or issue or concern it's going to be seamless it's going to be flow it through even if it takes multiple attempts but it's like those temps are very quick like 30 second engagements 20 second engagements right uh through the child by choice do you think also there's something that's driving it it's almost a bit like like a meme that we all need to make reduce the friction and things and that becomes almost like everybody's going down that kind of path, everybody's following. But then it ignores that sort of fundamental misunderstanding of the experience that customers go through.

12:35Because sometimes a little bit of friction, a little bit of effort can be important and can be the thing that kind of adds value. And it feels to me that sometimes people are just almost taking the easy route to think, oh, we have to reduce this because that's what gets done or that's what people are doing. Yeah, it's an interesting observation. I think friction exists anyway. I would say if you're a customer and you have to proactively reach out to the brand, there's implied friction all right. That is friction because why I'm reaching out if something didn't happen or I have a question or something's not.

13:14So there's almost in that very nature, that very event having to reach out to the brand, there's implied friction from, well, right? So that I would say exists anyway. And then, but then like, but the flip side, if you solve it, like, and there's a friction you can solve very quickly, you become like a troublesome customer to a very happy customer because it was resolved. And I think that's powerful for brands to do. And I think they should continue focusing on it. I also say friction is not, it's certainly about the consumer and the brand, but it's also the employing the brand. And sometimes agents have, they have some of the hardest jobs out there because they're like, hey, here's your number one job is we want you to help these customers and engage with them and make them feel appreciated and valued.

14:00And here's the six applications we're going to ask you to use. And here's the four different places you get your answers and knowledge bases. And when you're done, do these 17 tasks to update what happened on the customer engagement and then do it. And they might be angry and then do it again with a smile five minutes later. It's a tough job, right? So we have to reduce friction for the agents too. And if you can do it, reduce friction from the agents and reduce it from the customers, then magic will happen, I think. Yeah, no, I think so. But I think my point was that it was around this idea that I think we have to be more considered about some of the sort of things where we think about kind reducing kind of friction because I remember and I understand kind of where friction plays a good role and where it plays a bad role because actually in you know physical terms friction can create wear and tear in the physical world and it can it can break things but also friction creates fire and heat and that's you know sometimes that's a bad thing sometimes it's a good thing because it also reminds me of a story that I was told by somebody who was working with a brand it There's a CEO of a tech vendor who's working with a brand and who got carried away with this whole idea.

15:16It's like, we have to make our digital experience friction-free, seamless, so friction-free. And they did all that. And they got straight through. So it was like a straight through processing thing. And they found that people went through the process much quicker and it was all good, but their attrition rate, their churn rate fell off a cliff. Wow. And they were a bit like, what? It was catastrophic. And they actually then looked into it kind of really closely. And what they realized was there was a part within that process where customers had to make choices about what they wanted. Right. And what they didn't realize was that whole part of the process, while it was friction full, as it were, was the bit that created all the value.

16:04Making customers make the choices that was very personal to them. And that's the thing that created the value and drove up the loyalty and the retention. And so when they understood this, they were like, oh, my God. And then they unpicked it all back to the point where they made it all friction-free apart from that one bit. And that's what I mean by the whole sort of thing. It's like be a little bit circumspect when people can say you do this, but then you have to understand why you're doing it. What's the benefit? What's the trade-off? What's the risk? All those different sort of things. It's very insightful.

16:36I have heard similar stories where sometimes if you focus on just effort, people can leave your business, but you haven't had the opportunity to explain, we have a new service, we have a new offering, we have a new price package, right? So you need some, yeah. I don't disagree with that. I think it's a good point. I would say focusing on both, like reduce effort where you should reduce effort, right? Make that easy. Make the easy stuff easy. Maybe the hard stuff a little bit harder, right? but know very well what it is as a company or as a brand you're trying to get done and know your customers, and you'll find a happy ground in there.

17:13Yeah. And so we're going to go back to the kind of, so the point I was making was all about trying to help people personalize their own sort of experience, as it were, and how the value of that. And that brings me on to the next point, is that because one of the next things you said is you called out this difference between lip service personalization and true personalization. Yeah. I go and bring on my little extra value. Tell me the difference, why it matters. Yeah, sometimes I make up terms. So I'll start with that. Yeah, so the way I would, I describe it is the lip services, you know, if you, let's say I was a brand and you called me, I'm like, welcome back, Adrian.

17:55I value you as a diamond customer. Welcome back, Adrian. I welcome you as a diamond customer. Sure. And you think of, when you say personalization, the best way to define personalization is what are your relationships like with your friends, right? There's nothing more personal and family. Now, if I had a very good friend and every time I saw that friend, the only thing I ever said is, you know, welcome, John. Thanks for being a good friend. Welcome, John. Friends are being a good friend. That was the exact conversation. It wouldn't go very deep, right? And then it starts feeling like rote and not sincere and scripted and all those other things.

18:30So I think that we need to move from that. And as consumers, we give a lot of information to the brands we work with. Like they know a lot about us, right? They, you know, we spend money with them. Netflix, as an example, knows like all the shows I watch, the movies I like, and, you know, my airlines I work with know what I like. And I'm okay giving that up, but use it in a way that's personalized to me. and I paint a picture of like, and the other thing I say, the second a brand starts adding value beyond the walls of just what that product or service, that brand offers, I think will be a phenomenal experience.

19:08And I think it's a very simple one. So think of the example I would give is I'm calling to travel and I'm going to go to Edinburgh. Like I have a flight out there and they know I've been there before and as they're, hey, welcome back, Chris. So I'm booking this trip. Now I would probably do it online, but let's say I haven't talked to the airline for this. And they said, oh, I see you there for a month ago. We actually just seen here, the weather's going to be rainy there. So don't forget to pack an umbrella for this trip. Right. The airline, like that's a very simple, simple thing they could change, right?

19:43It's pretty nice to me. Don't forget to pack an umbrella and we hope you enjoy your trip again. Nothing more like a friend would say because they know me. I think the more brands can use that and make it feel like you're talking to someone that legitimately knows you and cares about you and personalizes it, those are conversations you're okay engaging with. But the scripted welcome back your value, welcome back your value, I think it's going to get a little rote and it's actually going to become probably it's not genuine unless there's a little something that's going to feel genuine. I mean, it's a bit of a turn off.

20:17I've got a couple of examples that when I think about companies that I've been a customer of for decades, probably. I mean, one is, say, a bank that I bank with. I've been with them for decades. And then you talk about the kind of products or anything. So then we want to do a review of this. And then you're like, oh, we see that you have a mortgage and we'd like to pitch for your mortgage business. I'm like, go and find, knock yourself out. They're like, great. Now we're going to send you a form, which is like 20 pages long that you're going to fill in. I'm like going, no. I'm out. You're like going back to the effort point.

20:54You're like going, you've got all the financial history that you need. Yeah. Why don't you just kind of ask for my permission to kind of do some calculations and then send me an offer with some disclaimers and all these sort of things that's in there, and you go like, that's fine. I mean, like going, why are you stuck over here when you've got that information? You know probably more about me than anybody else in terms of my financial history. And then a bit like going to my mobile phone provider when the contract's up and they go, oh, such and such, blah, blah, blah. And then they go, I'll say, oh, that's rubbish.

21:29I'm going to go shop around. And then they realize that then they have to look up. They're like, oh, we can see that you've been a subscriber to our network for the last 10 plus kind of like years. And you're like, and why is that not front and center? Yeah. Well, it goes, I see you bring up a good part because it's, it's a lot of it is the personalized and, you know, making it feel more sincere. But, and then we talk about effort. These things kind of intersect where it needs to be more outbound, proactive outreaches to personalized. Like there's things that consumers do that you'll see a certain trend and don't wait for them to call you.

22:08examples, internet outages, just everybody that's internet outages, give them regular updates, traffic issues, flight delays. A lot of companies do very well, you know, car services, you know, whether it be a Grab, Uber or Lyft, right? They, you know, we're so used to as people, humans now, like getting alerted on everything, your gate changed, your Uber's five minutes away, your Lyft will be there in two minutes in this type of car, tripping is on the way. So in our lives we're very used to this proactive keeping me updated of what's happening but as consumers we hold every brand we work with at that level of expertise now right so experience so it's not resolved just for call it tech companies it's resolved for every brand i work with so i think everybody's talking about how you make this more proactive and personalized you know and i actually i'm i'm pretty impressed for so far and i don't think i've used ai once but We'll change that soon, but we're talking about the experiences.

23:05There's got to be a record in there at this day and age, a 30-minute conversation without AI coming up yet. Well, I think that's good because we're focusing actually on the outcomes and the vision and everything else. These are just tools, but you introduced the future, and I guess the future is here in terms of customer interactions. And one of the last things that you said was you talked about moving beyond chatbots and what the future of customer interaction kind of looks like. I mean, from your perspective, can you talk me through what you mean by that? What do you think it's going to look like?

23:39What's where are we heading towards in this AI first world? Yeah. So I think like chatbots or voicebots or something bot, right? It's out there. And you can tell us popular if you believe any of the stats right now in the past. Well, one early days, everyone thought voice was going to die, right? Voice as a channel is going to die. And now it's kind of the fastest growth self-service channel. So experts get it wrong every once in a while is what I'd say to that comment. So I think voice is growing faster than chat in terms of a self-service channel. but with that it's focused on really resolving a customer issue and personalize and all those other things we talked about it's the very tip of the iceberg in terms of what happens to really support that customer because there's workflows in the background there's insights across the business there's other things that typically agents have to get done so it's not just it's yes of course delivering a good customer experience answering the questions letting them like express in a human conversation flow, multi-intent turns, and are you remembering me, and all these other things.

24:48You'll hear LLMs and memories, which are important. I'm not dismissive of them, but it's beyond that. There's also complex workflows. Now I have to go to a ticketing system and update something. I have to go make sure some paperwork or system is filled out so I can get the shipping done. Then I want to make sure I send a text or WhatsApp to the customer to confirm that it's happened and give them up regular updates. It's all the workflows in the backend, internal and customer facing that you want to automate there. So it's beyond just the engagement. It's kind of the orchestration of what happens throughout the organization, which is one of the things I mean by that.

25:25And then the other one that actually I'm a little bit more excited about is historically contact centers have been looked at as a vertical practice within a brand, right? We have a product center and it's its own department. And that's where all the magic happens with our customers. And we have all these funny acronyms we use in the product center world, but no one else in the business really knows what they mean because we use the word AHT and FCRs. But it didn't really elevate to the point of where it became, I might call it, executive level insightful. It was just kind of a cop center. There is so much.

26:05The way you can get so many, well, first of all, you have to differentiate a customer experience this way because the cost of switching as consumers is getting easier and easier and easier. As consumers, we're very impatient. We won't take too many bad experiences before we move on. It's easy. But the insights coming from those engagements is so valuable across your product team or your services team that delivers products and services about your marketing team, your sales team, your executive suite. So I view customer experience more of a horizontal practice these days than call it a vertical department.

26:40The insights going from them to your product team. So real time, is there anything you need to change in the product or service to make it more competitive? Are we messaging it the right way and how are consumers responding to it? What are our competitors saying? You get so many insights that those insights absolutely should be shared in real time or close to real time in every department, not just your contact center. And then you need a CX leader that understands what the system engagements was happening and can be a cross-functional stakeholder on how important that customer experience is to every department in that organization, just not the contact center.

27:19So I think that's the other beyond bot commentary I'd have. I think I completely agree with that. I always believe that the customer service, customer support, contact center has always been the biggest and the fastest growing real-time data set or data set of data insights. If you want to know anything that's going on with your company, then speak to somebody in service and support. Absolutely. Now, technologically, the analytical capability to be able to refine that for those interactions, whichever channel it's coming across, to refine them for intents and emotion and satisfaction, all these things, it's all kind of happening.