Overcome incrementality by reimagining customer and agent experience - Interview with NiCE's CEO and Staysure's COO

32:41And that's not where we still need all of those strengths, but in a CX AI world, we are creating incredible human experiences, both consumers and agents or employees, we are reimagining customer experiences. And ultimately, what's it going to do? It's going to create a nice world. People are going to feel good when they interact with their brands. And it's also for our employees, something to really rally behind, hey, we're here for a bigger purpose. And it sounds a bit cheesy, and I know that, but we really mean it. We're wanting to create, what does a nice world mean to us as individuals, as a team, as an organization?

33:20and are we doing things that will generate that? And so it's already had an impact in our organization around our employee, our community engagement, our diversity and inclusion, our policies around how we treat and look after each other, how we work with partners, how we behave ourselves and be great in doing business. So it has a very specific intent, but it also has a lot of follow-through And yeah, I love our company name. So I figured, hey, why wouldn't we use it? So hopefully you like it too. And if nothing else, it's memorable. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, so I remember writing a book back in, was it came out in 2016?

34:04And right at the very end of the book, I wrote this kind of like slightly tongue in cheek thing where I can like said, you know, bad customer service sort of just spoils people's day, whether you're a customer or you're an agent or whatever. And if we could do more about actually reducing the number of bad days that people have, there'd be less conflict, less fighting, less this, less that. It'd be like world peace. Amen. Hallelujah. Yes. And that's kind of why I like that. I'm just like idealist. Creating a smile. But just creating more smiles. And so that's kind of cool. I like it. You would have seen that we've sort of updated the smile.

34:39But it really is. It is about that. if you're an agent and you've just delivered a great experience for a consumer it makes you feel good it it creates a smile if you're the consumer on the other end of it and it's whether it be an ai agent or a human or whatever the way of creating the smile and doing someone to really automate an efficient smile i think it can that's the opportunity we have it's a win-win the brands don't need to compromise customer experiences and satisfaction anymore in fact they can empower it But ultimately, we need a few more smiles in the world. I think you and I would agree with that.

35:12Yeah, absolutely. 100%. And so, Scott, just want to ask you one final thing before we finish. Is there anything else you'd like to add or highlight that we've missed out before we wrap up? You've been very thorough, and it's been wonderful to join you today, Adrian. I really do appreciate the opportunity to share not only a little bit about what we're doing at NICE and the passion that we have around really reinventing in this space, but also having the opportunity to talk more about the purpose of who we are as well. And I look forward to reading more of your insightful reports because they'll then become other things that we need to implement on in future years.

35:52So keep doing it. Thank you very much. Well, listen, Scott, it's been amazing talking to you. Thanks again for your time. Appreciate it. Thanks, Adrian. so we just have an interview i just i just had a chat with scott russell from um see the ceo of nice and following on from that conversation i am now joined on the podcast by alistair hadfield who is the ceo of stay sure who are also a customer of nices and also and i're going to have a chat about their digital transformation journey with nice just to give us the inside scoop as it were so alistair welcome to the punk cx podcast how you doing i'm very well thank you uh thanks for having me i appreciate it you're very welcome now for the folks that are listening in that might not be aware of stay sure and also yourself can you give us a bit of a thumbnail sketch on yourself and also the stay sure and what you're all about absolutely um so my name else, Hadfield.

36:52I'm the group COO here at Stay Shore Group. We are the UK's number one travel insurer with ambitions to grow. So we're looking to expand internationally over the coming months. We have a high customer base, lots of different customer brands servicing our target demographic. So our specialism in the travel insurance market, a market that we made 20 years ago in the UK, is about pre-existing and medical travel insurance. Okay. So trying to enable customers of all ages and most medical conditions to get away on holiday with peace of mind. And my role in that as COO is to enable our agents in our call centers to provide the best possible service.

37:46We'll focus on enhancing our technology offering and supporting them better in those conversations. So we'll get into all of that and transforming the company as a whole. So it's a company that's grown organically over the years. It's got to a scale where there are some things that we need to fix and some things that we are seeking to improve. And we've got a high level of ambition as well. Awesome. Now, as a sudden, you know, the intro, and you alluded to it in your little intro, your little background kind of bit there, is that you are going through this transformation, digital transformation in terms of how you serve your customers.

38:24And NICE is playing a big role in that, as I understand. It will do. It will do. Right. Okay. um but before i ask you about kind of what your plans are i mean i'm always interested to understand where people have come from because it almost like sets the context and the picture so i wonder if you can take a picture of where you have come from and what are the main challenges you were facing before we get into what the plans are going forward absolutely so um a number of different challenges um for me when i joined so i joined um stay sure group not so long ago um beginning of last year and i joined a company that had um grown considerably over a period of the previous three years coming out of covid stay sure was one of the only insurance brands that stayed on throughout covid and therefore uh as we emerged out of covid um was the only operator that could really cope with the massive spike in customer testing travel.

39:27And therefore, I joined a company that had gone through those growth surges and that had left a set of things that needed to be fixed, partly the technology. So the incumbent tech for our agents to use with customers and for customers to contact us. We're all outdated and not really supporting the types of conversations that we wanted to have and the types of operating models we wanted to put in place. From an organizational perspective, there's been, again, an organic approach, let's call it, to what people had to say to customers, what journeys we took them on online offline the ways that we performance managed people the way that we QA'd quality assurance the conversations that we had there was a real opportunity for improvement in all of those domains and last but not least you know we put a lot of burden on our agents talking to customers to remember things that weren't given to them so they had these things to remember and given our customer base is typically more on the aging side of them demographic with potentially medical conditions as well they can be quite challenging conversations because you get into detail of that to offer travel insurance so so also our agents have to understand and be able to converse on some quite complex and sensitive topics with customers.

41:10So not a straightforward proposition? No, indeed. Therefore, my job to make it better. Yeah, well, perfect. I mean, so you're in the process of transforming that whole customer service kind of offering and the whole and the broader sort of experience and by understanding you're going to do that with kind of nice kind of ai driven platform the cx1 and power um tell me more about that and tell me more about why nice because it's quite crowded marketplace right and there's a lot of people going to talk about doing all these different sort of things and so i'm interested in terms of that decision kind of criteria that kind of that process that you kind of went through yeah and we did do a full market evaluation as you say there's there's a lot of platforms out there and and many of them offer similar capabilities on the face of it so so it was an interesting process to go through we are an ambitious fast-moving company we've got um a very ambitious founder and ceo ryan house and who wants to drive this company to be the best it possibly can be so we did want to get a platform that could meet that brief right so it had to be one that was market leading um global um and it had to have ai inside so that's his brief right that's our brief as a company and that's that that's that's taken as read when my team did the evaluation the thing that they really really liked and keep coming back to is the co-pilot capability because we have these complex conversations with customers because we have long conversations with customers because we have hundreds of agents worldwide servicing these customers having the capability to surface a knowledge base we've already got a knowledge base but to put it inside nice and have an ai capability sitting alongside agents surfacing knowledge at relevant times contextual to the conversation having with customers and then allowing our team leaders and supervisors to be able to view that in real time and intervene if there are problems, that is some really cool tech that we felt was going to transform that dynamic for our agents and give them the help that they need.

43:38And how do you envisage the whole, I feel like, both the customer experience and the employee experience kind of changing over time? Because you're going from, as you say, a platform or a set of processes, people, processes, and technology that's been organically grown to something which is you're now trying to future-proof and be a bit more sort of digital sort of first and AI sort of enabled. So how do you envisage things sort of changing from both the customer and also the employee side? so i'll start with the employee if i may and then we'll move to the customer of course so from an employee perspective we're in a predominantly remote working environment for our internal employees and then we have outsource providers who predominantly are office location based so a blend of different operating models we have a number of platforms that they have to use all of which we're trying to evolve so they are going to go through learning journeys and they often spend between 20 minutes or maybe up to an hour on sales conversations wow they can be quite protracted conversations because when you when you sell travel insurance there can be more than one person on the policy right those people have their own characteristics etc and you need to go through all of that um in order to give them the peace of mind that they're covered and i guess i guess when you're dealing for it with a specific market with with pre-existing conditions then you have to risk adjust to based on the information you find out and so on and so forth and that'll be a kind of dynamic pricing kind of model i'm guessing as per most insurance companies i'd say yes absolutely um but the number of medical conditions you know very broad ranging topic and the number of places you can go on holiday uh and full iteration and so there's all of these different things that we have to get into and as i said we have inherited a set of platforms which make it a difficult for um us to traverse between different channels so you end up with a lot of repetition for interactions that a customer might feel they've already had customers hate that customers hate that agents don't particularly like it to be honest yeah wasting their time yeah um so that that's part of our challenge um the way that the information in the system is surface for agents i mentioned before they have to remember too much yes over time too many exceptions have been arrived at and you end up with you know longer learning journeys for agents and they should have to go through in order to become productive yeah and tenure makes a big impact on on their capabilities as agents so the quicker they become productive and the more enjoyable that work environment could be the better so come back to that as well and also over time as i mentioned earlier as well there's a load of sort of clumsy wording a lot of regulatory wording a lot of repetition again for the agent that's time consuming and they are have historically been very much managed on a compliance basis so regulatory compliance obviously important but if you're qaing one of your agents that's a lot of investment of time to get no development or feedback or softer uh feedback around their performance so that should be an opportunity for a development conversation not just a pass or fail on the compliance scorecard and if i may is that the um has consumer duty played a role in that in terms of adding a level of complexity because you're dealing with people existing um medical conditions and then also insurance and it's regulated but then there's the fca's consumer duty and that and there's vulnerability is a big is a big topic a a big topic and a big category according to the FCA.

47:52Yeah, and especially a big category in our market. Yeah, indeed. And that's one of the capabilities that I'm excited about exploring. But then the response to that is around making the scripts more friendly, making the systems more friendly, remember less, so that we can focus on training agents to be empathetic, active listening. I mean, we're selling, so objection handling as well. And also then making the systems more helping in terms of prompting, oh, we've forgotten to do this. Remember to say that that medical condition is X, Y, and Z. So you're then getting contextual advice for agents about how to do their job better.

48:40meanwhile in the background listening to those conversations automated QA across every call rather than manual QA across a very small proportion you start to get a much richer picture of the performance of your operation as a whole where the risk heat spots are and focusing in and addressing those through coaching through through other actions as of course as well but all of that is going to improve on the relationship that team leaders have with their agents the performance conversations that we can have the development conversation that we can have you know even to the point where I was at the NICE conference a couple of weeks ago and they're demonstrating some of the co-pilot capabilities for supervisors where they auto-generate development needs for in particular agents and then spin up ai based training to specifically address those needs right that they can then have interactively with ai come off the back of that and that's a new skill learned so you know those sorts of things are really exciting so that's that's why i started with agents first you may be surprised no it's perfect and i guess in when you because you talked about the kind of qa and it's like automatically doing the qa on all of the interactions i guess that's also going to bring you i imagine it's also going to bring you closer to the product team uh teams as well in terms of kind of all the insights that's going to drive from that that might be the next stage as it were but it's undoubtedly there's a richness in there um and insights that you can feed through to back through to the product team it is like night and day so our old platforms i'm gonna ask you to explain that so our old platforms hosted all of these customer touch points and generated no insights across them right whereas we've been live with nice for two months now so we're still in a process of rolling out to all of the different parts of our business operation model across all of our different group entities but we started with our flagship our stay shore and avanti and expat brands and real time you can see these insights emerging right um not just in terms of call by call but then trends hot spots um you can run different proofs of concepts and monitor their performance real time on different subsets of your operation you know it's all very dynamic all very intuitive and i've really enjoyed learning how to dashboard all of that so i can get into that and see myself how how things are evolving so as you mentioned you know one of the capabilities that nice has is a really rich data insight back end where it's constantly analyzing through AI interactions.

51:39And you're getting real-time customer sentiment, real-time agent sentiment. And then that allows you, as I mentioned earlier, to build out heat maps of who's performing, who's not performing, what do we do about that? And then as you said, off the back of that, that wealth of customer insight then should be feeding the rest of our enterprise now we're early days yes that will come into come on to lessons later but you know the amount of insight that that will generate as you say for our product teams for our consumer duty reporting measuring vulnerability qa compliance and our pricing teams as well i mean they're going to get a load of insight from customer behavior and and interactions and ultimately, of course, myself in terms of what opportunities does that present for automation or digitization?

52:30Why are we bringing digital native customers into our call center? What madness made us do that? We've got all of these different opportunities ahead of us. So we're early in the journey, but we have a vision to leverage all of these things. And the organization is getting very excited about that. our challenge now is prioritizing from the sweet shop of capabilities that are in front of us. Yeah. And before I ask you to reflect on maybe how that might change the whole customer experience, I mean, I wanted just to ask about the one thing about, because this is probably slightly off script, but it's another, the nature, with the AI empowered sort of enterprise software, the nature of the game has changed yes right and it's no longer you buy the software you get some training you get some onboarding and then you're into a series of qbrs and access to the help team and the success team yeah and then left to your own devices now it's a case of the burden of management so development monitoring testing all these different things is also squarely on the enterprise and they have to that has to be resourced how have you dealt with that have you had to throw more resources at it have we had to redeploy people or you or both or how have you done that well how are we doing how are you doing that how are you learning as we go yeah so we are a we are leaning into ai yeah we want to leverage ai capabilities i think the reality of the ai capability right now is in augmented processes where whether it's for the customer online or for our agents offline or combination of the two in both channels you know ai can really help those interactions become better informed more simple and ultimately more productive and efficient yeah so that's effective and efficient as well so that is where we want to focus on ai but it is also moving very quickly so we are building up teams who are dedicated and focused on ai with our enterprise with a c-suite leader with that accountability to drive at an enterprise level how we consume ai and we've got to be responsible you know we're an fca regulated company and uh and we do need to keep our customer promises in terms of how we treat them how we treat them fairly how we treat vulnerable customers and give them consistent outcomes so we we need to build all of that into a model and that's what we're doing and that's why we're focusing on qa right up and up front because that will give us a really large level of insight that we've never seen okay that's why i'm engaging with the data platform and as you can imagine there's various different parts of functional groups within our business who are all independently interested yeah how do i leverage that data how do we consume it that that's going to live and breathe for a few months yet in terms of how to do that um but yes i think it's around setting things up from the outset to be as intelligent as automated as possible so you can automate the things that are genuinely automatable right from the outset with a view to giving you a lot more consumable insight but then make it very clear to your organization whose role it is to do particular things because everyone could do all of that in theory sure but i want it to be really clear where the roles and responsibilities lie and where are the opportunities for some more unharnessed innovation let's say to go and experiment with some things yeah and so um finally the um how do you envision the um the the the sort of the customers experience kind of changing kind of with that it's just is it that you think it's going to be increasingly self-service or is it actually a little bit of that because given the length of your calls from 20 minutes to an hour i mean it feels like that's still quite heavily human touch focused but then augmented with the technology yeah i think we need to improve our customer journeys so let's start there i think the we drive a lot of people into the offline channel at the moment okay by design or by accident and that's something that we're looking at in terms of why are we making digitally native people go into the offline channel equally a lot of people choose to interact with us that way and that's natural you know as a demographic demographic person who prefer to be on a telephone call and using their smart device or or um or laptop desktop so we do need to provide a consistent consumer experience across all those different channels and as similar degree of flexibility so we've got to change our online journey so if we cater for that and we've got to change our offline journey to cater that and we've got to build seamless integration between those journeys so that if someone is a digital native and they've come into our offline channel for whatever reason do they need to speak to us for an hour or do they need a three-minute sense check and then we send them back into the digital journey nice and the other side of the equation, our internal platforms, once we've fulfilled our ambition, will support those traversing journeys to allow us to avoid repetition, pick up where you left off seamlessly and get help in the context of the channel you're in, whether that be through AI or human intervention, all of those things are then possible.

58:25And maybe go into some asynchronous channels as well, depending on the choice of channel of the consumer. So all of those things are in the bag it's working through the amendments you need to make in each area of your tech stack so that you can get them to integrate seamlessly and i know that you said that you're only starting your journey with nice and you're like so two months kind of in so is it is it a little bit uh ambitious for me to say to ask like how is the business benefiting kind of currently or is it the are there early signs on the doors well um okay so it's stable that's a start basic hygiene it's already generating insights that we can respond to we've already run various proof of concepts where we're generating real-time mi to say is that a success or failure you know this sort of stuff could take months we're recording our own ivrs now by typing them in rather than sending them off to recording studios right okay um implemented a callback process we suffered a little bit on call answer rates the other week so initiated callbacks built that process in a week went live now it's up and running can leverage it whenever we want you know with a 99.7 connection rate where we did you know that that flexibility and agility that we have been nowhere near before awesome awesome so we are seeing real benefits straight away um the thing that i think is is most important in this phase is that agility yeah because we're going to try a load of stuff yeah and some of it's going to fail but i'm not scared of failing if i can if i can correct it quickly if i can monitor that that outcome and we can course correct very rapidly you know that's that's a a brave new world for us because we've been nowhere near that in the past yeah you don't want to be kind of putting a request into development and stuff and then it joins a queue and then you're like going i wonder where you're at like are you calling up the code the next day like are we any further forward are we any further forward you're like no you want to be able to toggle things back and forward and sort of like actually kind of learn very quickly and and just because you manage your own your own learning your own risk and your own performance yes so we've also had to look at our operating models around that so how do we manage that agility in the production environment because we also don't want to lose control of that environment so it's about how do we build pace into some of those processes and visibility and get the communication right so everyone's aware of what's going on and modern the modern back back end office platforms really lend themselves to that type of collaboration to be sure so so that's also helping so and also no i mean one kind of couple final questions before we um to wrap up because i know that um i saw some rather frightening statistics the other day which said that um it's from a goldman sachs cio survey which that was published summer last year that said only about 30 to 35 percent of all enterprise workflows are currently in the cloud and that number was only expected to go up by about 15 percent in the coming three years so around about 45 maybe 50 percent by summer of 2027 and then they then they can also kind of another piece of data was that um they reckon that about 70 percent of enterprises still rely on um cobalt applications for many kind of um mission critical um apps and i was thinking wow there is still a lot to do in this transformation yes now fortunately I'm working for a company where neither of those things are a challenge because it's fast paced because we have our own workforce in Sri Lanka focused on tech and tech innovation we have some real advantages that set us in good stead in terms of the use of cloud and use some modern technology in order to build and manage our systems.

1:02:44That said, that's an area which is in itself developing rapidly. Sure. So keeping on top of that is in itself going to be an enterprise challenge for everyone, I'm sure, but also an exciting time. So, yeah, I have worked in companies with those challenges. I'm delighted to say this isn't one on. Well, that's great to hear because there's some definitely companies, a lot of companies around that have some heavy lifting to do i think it's fair to fair to say but also if i was actually to sort of this is the all this is a journey it's it always is i mean i sometimes think that we should stop talking about transformation and just talk about continuous evolution or if that's an oxymoron probably is actually but it's a journey that we kind of all go through to trying to keep up to stay competitive to stay relevant to try to be differentiated in the marketplace um the very sort of actually to wind the clock back and think about kind of what lessons you've learned along the way or is if you if you had a chance is there anything else that you would do differently if you could do it all over again is there anything that you would highlight so yeah that i would have engaged on the whole data topic earlier okay because there's there's a because there's so many parties interested parties because there's such a volume of it um getting the the teams together and thinking about how to leverage that and the enterprise level from the outset is a is an opportunity missed in a way it's not an opportunity we're gonna let die on the vine we're we're focusing on it now and also having people who really understand this particular platform and are plugged in to how it's evolving because it is a fast-paced evolution yeah um you know even a new development so presented uh just a couple of weeks ago uh are really exciting and you get you thinking wow that that's that's genuinely transformational even on top of the platform which is transformational for our business so we've got to keep abreast of that so we need to build an internal capability to be able to plug into those and think about how we leverage them you know nice a nice example i used um at the conference was one of the execs there from nice had bought a travel insurance policy from us to go on a cruise the following day right it's great she's a customer that's great and we were talking about the capabilities that agentic can offer in terms of transforming when you engage with customers so wouldn't it be nice to phone that customer before they're going on holiday and check in with them have you got everything you need is there anything else you can do now at the moment we don't have the operational capacity or cost appetite to run that type of service sure but with ai we could yeah no indeed i mean i think it's like um i always going to say that i was talking to somebody earlier uh today and i said you know what's fascinating is a lot of the talk in terms of the about harnessing the potential of ai and we talk about efficiency and productivity and things and a lot of people then go straight to oh that's going to be loss of headcount or redeployment or whatever and i said well actually that's the thing that's the not the trap but it's a quick thing to go to an actual fact if you stop and think about well it creates capacity and you have then a choice about what you do with that capacity kind of in relation to your business or the service or the experience that you offer and i think that's a really rich opportunity and i think it's one that that many companies skip by without actually thinking about well can i do something that's different to your point that's going to mark me out in a in in a marketplace which is very competitive and very noisy but it can be sometimes just these little small things that just make a difference and make you kind of memorable and can be the thing that kind of makes a difference between keeping a customer or losing one.

1:06:51Absolutely. So reinvesting that into an enhanced service and an enhanced customer experience, that's an opportunity waiting to be grabbed. Absolutely. So thank you for that and good luck on the rest of your journey. But before we go, is there anything else that you'd like to add or highlight that we've missed out? No, I think we've been thorough about our current opportunities. We're looking to expand globally, as I mentioned earlier, which is going to present some new challenges like multilingual and how to find an operating model that works like that across the globe. But I think these are also areas that are moving quickly and I'm sure that we are seeing capabilities come through in a nice platform that's going to help us on that journey too.

1:07:39Fantastic. Well, thank you, Alistair, for sharing your time and your insight and your experience with me today. That's been awesome. Pleasure to meet you.

1:07:51Wow, what a great interview. I hope you enjoyed it. I know I did. Find out more about me and the work that I do at adrienswinsko.com. Do leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. And if you have any comments, feedback or questions about the podcast, then feel free to send me a message to podcast at adrienswinsko.com. and do tune in again. Thanks very much.