The NiCE World London Takeover of the Punk CX Podcast Part One

0:00So welcome to the Nice World London takeover of the PunkCX podcast. This is part one of a two-part series of chats I had with Nice executives, one of the clients and an analyst while here at Nice World London. Right now, I'm very excited to say I'm speaking to Michelle Cooper, Chief Marksley Officer from Nice World. Hello and welcome. How are you doing? Good. Thank you so much for having me and for being here with us at Nice World. You're very welcome. Now, can I ask you to give me a bit of a thumbnail sketch, a bit of a background on Michelle and the work that you do? Yeah, absolutely. So as you mentioned, I lead global marketing and enablement for NICE.

0:37I've been here for just over a year, and my focus is really on helping organizations understand how AI is transforming customer experience. So working with our customers, our partners, our sales organizations to really help, you know, help educate the market on the opportunities that we have and how they should be rethinking, you know, the way that they think about customer experience today in their own organizations. Awesome. So as I say, we're at Nice World London. This is part of a tour, you know, like going around the world. But there's been a lot of talk about, you know, new products, new platform innovations, all these different sort of things.

1:18as in many of these events, there's a lot. It's like drinking from the host pipe, right? So what would be the big highlights for you, big standout things for you? Absolutely. Obviously, the leading conversation is AI, right? Of course. We're living it, all of us these days. But I think for me, it's really about the discussion is really shifted from it's less about experimentation and should I be doing and using AI to how do I really embrace it and scale it in enterprise scale, right? And we're so excited to have so many of our customers sharing their experiences and their learnings, you know, with our, you know, the guests that are here with us this week.

1:57So that for me stands out as a, it's real. Companies are using it, they're having success and doing it at the enterprise level. Orchestration is really a big conversation. You know, we talked about it the other day. It's, you know, as you add more technology, the complexity increases. So companies and organizations need to be thinking about how do they orchestrate the customer journey from the initial intent the whole way through resolution and really thinking that through what's their data strategy? How do they want their agents to interact? What's the combination of, you know, AI agents and human in the loop and putting that together.

2:37So I think that's a very big theme. And you heard us talk about that on the main stage this morning. But Scott talked about the future of CX is the ones who kind of orchestrate intelligence. It's not about more technology. It's about artificial intelligence, but it's just general intelligence, human intelligence, operational intelligence, et cetera, et cetera. All the intelligences. Exactly. Working together. And then the third kind of discussion is around the hybrid workforce. and how should companies really be rethinking when you have the combination of AI agents and human agents working together and how do you manage that?

3:13How do you enable it and really rethink how that will work in a future state for us as managers and leaders in any organization? I love that. That's really the last one. I don't want to come back to that if I may, but first of all, I wanted to just ask you more about it from a CMO's perspective because the CMO's role is changing. They've been in charge of lots of different sort of like kind of things. And I wanted to get your perspective around many CMOs talk about brands and the importance of brands. But some of us don't think that brand and customer experience kind of get kind of fused together when they kind of like should.

3:54I mean, I want to hear your perspective. What's the link between brand and customer experience? Some people talk about brand experience as separate to customer experience. I was like, clear this up for us, Michelle. From my perspective, I feel like I just said, you asked me a loaded question. No, no, no. It's not. But from my perspective, the reality is that customer experience is your brand, whether you like it or not. Okay. And it's in those moments that you either build trust or you erode it very quickly in how you interact, your understanding of the customer's needs, their personalization, and whether you can ultimately get to resolution for whatever they're trying to solve for.

4:35So I think today they are synonymous with one another. Okay. I mean, I think you're absolutely right because it's also, I think there was a great quote, I think it comes from Jeff Bezos back in his old kind of Amazon days, the early Amazon days, we said something like, your brand is about what people say about you when you're not in the room. That's right. And which is, it's the things you can't control of. It's almost like you have to take account of all the things that you're, how all the interactions that you have with your customers, and that makes up your reputation, your brand, as it were.

5:10So I love that. And actually, when people talk about it being distinct, brand experience to customer experience, I think they're actually, they need to understand that it's all part of the one thing. And you think about it too, and from a service perspective, now that really translates into marketing and sales. Yeah. That interaction is no longer, or it no longer needs to be confined, that those are different motions at the point of interaction and engagement with your customer. which brings us back to what kind of scott said on the main stage which is the future of cx is about those who belongs to those that orchestrate intelligence and so you what you're talking about is that actually we're not seeing things as separate whether it's been marketing or sales or service and actually it's all about the convergence of kind of things and so i think that's kind of fascinating and it just like raises the stakes kind of like for people but i want to come back to which i think is a really important kind of like topic if you touched on it we told the thing that's standing out is what this the future of of the work particularly in the advent of like how do we balance the human intelligence with kind of artificial intelligence where does it come and play and i wanted to get your perspective on how you're managing that and what are you seeing happening with your kind of clients because it feels like we've come from an era where we knew what work was for the last couple of decades and now we're into a new year where we don't know what the future is and we're sort of laying the road as we go.

6:39And I just wanted to get your perspective on like, what are you seeing? What are you learning? What do you see some of the biggest challenges are? Because I think it's a fascinating kind of space. I think from a standpoint of the first thing that all of us need to do is really kind of flip the switch about this is not about technology, but it really is an opportunity to completely rethink your business. And so if you're not thinking about it as a wholesale transformation from how do your business processes work? How do you use the data and the intelligence that you have in them? How do you think about the skills that you are going to need in your future organization?

7:18And then a lot of focus around change management. Enablement and change management. And we talked about that last night. I mean, it's, you cannot, You cannot underestimate the importance of really making sure that as you go through that transformation, you are thinking about how do you bring your employees or your partners or your customers with you on that journey and helping them to really understand how and where they fit. and that at the end of the day, it's not going to ever be an either or. It is how do you tap into the best of the capabilities that AI affords and that we do inherently well as humans from a creativity, from a strategic perspective, from an orchestration, and from a humanity perspective.

8:05And I think it seems to me that you as an organization, you're leaning into that. So there's the announcement around the AI labs, but also you're starting to push more sort of forward deployed engineers out into the customers because it recognizes that this is not easy, right? And people are figuring it out. And sometimes you need to put kind of expertise and specialism as close to kind of customers as you possibly can to help them figure it out because their success is your success. And so it becomes this kind of partnership. And I think that's a really interesting kind of thing, the way that things are evolving is moving less from a customer vendor relationship that it has to be partnership because it's like we don't know kind of what the future holds when it comes to the future of kind of like work and things.

8:55So I think that's really interesting. I love what Jack said this morning in the keynote from Fabletics where he talked about they started with some of their most challenging, you know, instead of starting with something simple, they said they really were going to lean in and use it as a way to help really demonstrate what's possible and then to build on that success to fuel the next, you know, next areas that they wanted to focus on. yeah no it's it was a really it was almost a counterintuitive thing to say everybody goes like oh start simple take a small use case and can like start this and then scale up from there and he's like going no i love their story just like go big go home and i just thought that's really smart because like he said he says like going well if you do a simple thing and it takes you two days to do it and then your board is going to come like going why is not taking you two days to do all these other kind of like things over here and it's like there's just a there's a reality he's supposed is basically a reality around organizational change and how people view kind of things and so that was i thought that was fabulous kind of advice um i wonder if we could actually just take a moment to say because you get exposed to all sorts of clients that are doing all sorts of fabulous kind of things and you're you're at the heart of an organization that's developing kind of market leading to the technology.

10:16There's also a number of people that are just disembarking on their journey as well. You know, and people sometimes get worried about, oh, the fear of missing out. Like, oh, I'm too slow. I need to catch the bus. And you're like, oh, no. The reality is there's a lot of people that are still starting, right? What would be your advice to people that are listening in that think about, I'd like to get on this trade. I'd like to think about how I can reimagine my business, how I can lean into that future of work, how I can embrace the potential that the technology offers, whether it's generative, agentic, orchestration, the whole shooting kind of matters.

10:54I want to start that journey. What would be your best advice? I think the first thing is just to get started. You know, just like taking that first step in recognizing that the quicker that you get there, the sooner you're going to learn, right? And that it is, it's a journey, right? And there are going to be learnings along that. And so giving yourself the grace to know that it is evolving very quickly. The other thing I will say is I think the data that we have in our organizations is critical, especially from a customer service or from a customer experience perspective. Instead of just kind of guessing where those customer friction points are or where you have an opportunity for greater efficiency, I would really encourage organizations to start with their data.

11:45What do they know about their customers? Where do they have those friction points in their journey? And then use that as a way to really prioritize where they start. Yeah. I mean I think that I would maybe add something because when you talk about data I use that as a proxy for intelligence right and I've always thought that in the midst of all of this people talk about data and they talk about databases and data lakes and data warehouses and things and it's almost like the human bit gets lost in that is not to forget the data that sits in people's heads the collective intelligence that is your kind of people who can synthesize a lot of this stuff and give you access to answers kind of very quickly but are also so important when you're doing that journey because you you know making people feel involved bringing them with them respecting kind of their their insight and their perspective is usually it's crucial and and so that's the the one thing i would i would say to that because i think you're absolutely right data but the data in all its thoughts.

12:51Stuff that sits in computers, but stuff that sits in our heads as well. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, to your point, from a human perspective, I think it's good to have open conversations, right? Because there is a lot of uncertainty and fear. So I think the more organizations can be transparent around what they're trying to accomplish, what are the outcomes that they're looking to achieve? The fact that it's not an either or, it's a combination, right of really tapping into the best that the technology has to offer and the best of what humans have to offer and i think just having more of a open conversation and dialogue about that it starts to kind of open up the aperture for the fact that collectively these organizations are going to build something for the future and everyone has a role in helping to accomplish that Absolutely.

13:44And one final question. What are you most looking forward to in the nice kind of journey? What's coming out of the year? I'm really excited about that. Oh, my gosh. I'm so excited to tell our customers stories. They are, you know, from any marketer's perspective, they are the best of what we have to share, right? both their successes and also their learnings and their best practices along the way. So I'm really excited about tapping into all of the great customers and brands that we have the opportunity to work with and sharing their journey and learnings with the broader community. But it's a great opportunity to be in this space and I'm so excited to be here.

14:25Fantastic. Well, I just want to say finally, Michelle, thank you for sharing your time, your insight, your perspective, your expertise with me today on the Punk CX podcast that Nice World has taken over. It's been great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Welcome back to the Nice World London takeover of the Punk CX podcast. In the second part of part one, keep up, I'm going to be speaking to Chris Herbert, who is Director of Customer Service at Opreach, and Giles Bryan, General Manager of CX at Nice. I think I got that right. Welcome. Yep. chris and giles how are you both doing very good thank you for the invite oh you're awesome you're welcome it's a tremendous day very pleased to be here brilliant so for the benefit of the folks that are watching or listening in um can i ask you to give me a quick thumbnail sketch about yourself and the work that you do so i'll start with kind of you chris yeah so um i uh look after service within overreach now overreach is uh is the is the the uk's backbone digital backbone we provide connectivity for you know events like this homes businesses millions across the the uk uh and effectively my role is looking at end-to-end service how do we how do we deliver the best service that our customers deserve how do we ensure that the customer experience keeps pace with the demands and the ever-growing needs of our customers.

15:53We are demanding, as people. Absolutely, absolutely. So in a nutshell, that's broadly what I do. There's a lot more there, but I won't bore you with the rest of the detail. I love the better detail, but we'll maybe get into that. Giles? So I'm a general manager in our CX line of business, particularly the agentic line of business, the AI line of business. My particular focus is in proactive AI. That's using AI capabilities proactively to deal with people's needs, desires, wishes, hopes and dreams before they have to do things like call in or log in. So we are part of what's making the world a nicer place.

16:31Brilliant. I love that. It's a great, well, create a nice world. We're here at a nice world in London. This is part of the nicest kind of world tour. We've seen, there's lots of people here. I don't know if people could pick up listening in. there's like a big buzz around a lot of noise a lot of people but i wanted to ask you there's been a lot of uh sort of talks and and things what have been some of the big highlights the standout sort of things that you've gone ah that's interesting i really like kind of that let's do that for you yeah i think that the first thing for me is uh and yeah there is a tremendous buzz uh in this room right now um i think it's clear that we're moving from experiment experimentation to delivering in real value now we're moving from not just being pilots or tests but large-scale deployments that not only save the business you know in terms of efficiency that's good but now really starting to turn the dial on on customer experience um you know i think two or three years ago it was around how much value could you deliver in terms of pounds shillings pence for me now it's about delivering the value in terms of pounds shillings pence but also that customer experience and i I think the second part for me, it's about how you can orchestrate the world of AI and for active AI end to end.

17:47So it's not just about little user cases here or there. It's about how do you plug it in connected to your colleagues working hand in glove to deliver an end to end experience that everyone should be proud of. Yeah. Perfect. Love it. Diles? So I've been a nice five years now since my company was acquired in 2021. And at the time, NICE was mostly focused on what you might call call center software enablement. That was really what it was. It was a call center business. And sort of AI was kind of a side project almost, if you know what I mean. And as the years have progressed, and particularly with Scott arriving and acquisition of Cognigy, we have transitioned now from a call center software provision business to an AI-first business.

18:38And the buzz you're getting here, this excitement, the number of people here, the event, the topics, it's totally changed since five years ago. This fundamentally is now an AI-first company, and I'm hugely pleased to be part of that. And everyone here, as Chris said, recognizing this isn't experimentation. This is actual delivery of real CX benefits, real financial benefits at scale. And that's what we're here to celebrate and disseminate also. Correct. Well, I also wanted to talk about celebrating. We want to celebrate some of the success that OpenReach has had. You're a nice customer and you've been on a bit of a journey as well.

19:16And I wanted to kind of dig into that a little bit. But first of all, before I dig into it, I was going to say, tell me a little bit more about how OpenReach operates. Because I think people will understand it in terms of some of the struggles that their customers face and some of the challenges that you had to overcome. and so if you paint that picture that we can get into what's actually happened and how you've transformed that. So a really good question at the most basic level OpaReach runs the UK's broadband network yeah we're a connectivity business we connect the nation quite literally we support our customers we support hundreds of communication providers I'll call them CPs from now on because it's a bit of a mouthful but you have to like the sky bt total vodafone people that you can buy your broadband for absolutely absolutely and and for us the challenge was scale each one of those communication providers had a slightly different sort of you know communication strategy with their customers in terms of whether that was a provision experience or whether that was a repair experience and i think that that sort of linear approach i'll describe as a linear approach so as a consumer if you wanted to change your engineering appointment because life happens yeah you'd have to contact your cp communication provider they would have to contact us we'd go yes sure which day would you like go back to the communication provider back to the customer now that could take up to 30 minutes at least in terms of that transaction and i'll talk a little bit later about how we've transformed that but that just paints a picture of what it was like i think before our partnership working with nice to be a much more proactive business to reduce the effort of working with us on quite literally millions and millions of transactions by them yeah i i know what that's like you're trying to like you're trying to arrange an engineer's appointment and then it's a bit like trying to get it all scheduled but as you say life happens and then how do you kind of you change that and it's like it's a it's a when particularly you're dealing with an appointment based sort of like uh kind of business is like when you have failed appointments that's a big cost to the business and those costs kind of like kind of man uh kind of man out i mean so how did you move from that to where you are can i what's kind of there's some of the bits that are in between because that's like about that's that's a big old journey we can i remember ryan saying that you had 700 different communication providers you're like i'm what it's not just like a handful this is like a whole network and that's worth pointing out the complexity of the open reach business yeah is actually much higher than you would get with any normal ai implementation because we're not just dealing with your customers we're dealing with all of their customers and those businesses are very cautious about how they engage as well and it's not just about cost the the uk telco industry like all telco industries is huge you can bet to you know you have to make sure you retain customers keep customers this is when they're cutting the cord costs are costs are high but the amount you can charge is constantly under pressure it's a very challenging business yeah i mean adrian uh just just to be really clear our pivot over the last sort of four four five years of working with yourselves has moved very much into how can we deliver real customer experience outcomes that matter most to the customer yes of course you know the financial benefits that they're there they're important they have to be there but for us in a super fiercely competitive environment that we now operate customers have choice yeah they don't have to choose opereach anymore or you know provider that is a with opereach right so we had to move from that reactive to proactive approach and that meant not hiring our way out of it and by that i mean not putting loads and loads of people in contact centers to do this but to move from reactive to proactive and that's where the partnership with nice really came in and we can talk about some of the sort of the the cx benefits shortly uh adrian if you like yeah well i think so what i wanted to go back to is just is because it relates to something that the gentleman from fabletics was talking about on the main stage today it's one of the key things you have you could have a great partner but you've also had to have a great sponsor you've got to be able to kind of be able to move the needle for the board and i wondered if you could take a moment just to explain how you move the needle for the board because oftentimes the distance between service operations and the boards feels like a country mile and that's you collapsing that distance and making it feel real and creating an opportunity for them is essential.

23:49Yeah and I think quite simply again it's starting with the customer experience. So describing to the board who are big supporters of what we are doing here hasn't always been straightforward hasn't always been easy but we started with you know looking at the highest volume cohort of customers that we could find so that was in this case how can i change my appointment without the need to go and call a communication provider to contact overreach to back to the communication provider back to the customer and we did a test pretty pretty small um scale test um on that cohort and and could quickly see that if you put the empowerment into to the hands of the customer to move their appointment to change to let you know and then to do that without the need for the communication provider to be involved you could see the benefit in terms of engineers were turning up to houses and customers were there right yeah engineers were able to get customers connected on the first visit and for me that's a financial benefit but the biggest thing is getting customers onto our network right customers want connectivity and they want it when they want it not you know maybe when you can get around it so that flexibility that we gave, I think changed the landscape significantly.

24:57And the board could see that. They could see that in terms of financial benefit. And more importantly, they could see that in terms of just excellent customer experience benefit. Fantastic. And how did you bring all the communication providers? You actually almost create a test case and then go, look, you can have some of this. Or how did that work? Because that's like 700. That's like a farming. That's a herd of people. I mean, look, I won't suggest it was easy because it wasn't. But again, it's the same principle. To get the board on board, I had to go, right, this is what we want to do. This is the outcomes we're trying to drive.

25:30This is what I believe the benefit can be. And look at the results we've got. So we found a few friendly, all of our communication providers are friendly, but we found a few friendly communication providers to test with. right and it was a you know it was excel based spreadsheet testing um to prove the value and then once we proved the value to them to say look why why get your customer to contact you when they can just do it seamlessly with us that takes our effort from you it connects your customer quicker and it drives value all proactively proactively yeah and the rest sort of snowballed then they could see the benefit they were then advocates at the you know various industry fora that we had to attend and then everyone else slowly and actually quickly became on board there's like a social phenomenon in there though it's a bit like a fear of missing out and it's worth being transparent you know you have had to go to the board um you know multiple times during our engagement um and ask for non-trivial amounts of money because these things cost money and you had to justify that based on sure the cx benefits but also the financial benefits that is a process that you I the board have had to go to we spent many uh many a sleepless night over that one there Charles but no in all seriousness um that's exactly right you know you can't go to the board of a multi billion pound business that we are without the here's your story here's what it is for the business here's what it is for our customers and yeah it wasn't always easy but guess what we went to those investment panels and we came out with the support and the backing of the business to go and deploy further and here we are we're doing 12 million conversations per annum 12 million 1 million per month direct to our our end customers as i call them to make it easier for our communication providers and ultimately deliver a better frictionless service and so give me an idea of like what so if you've talked about um it's all been you know agentic and kind of proactive and things what sort of what what's the solution combination that you've that you've chosen to be able to kind of to do this yeah and i think just to touch on that solution combination it may not be the specific question you're asking me but i'd like to touch on it if it's okay that's fine and I will come back to your question I promise.

27:40AI is not in my opinion now about replacing people right it's about how do you work alongside the AI so what we've we've built credibility on is we've taken a lot of the transactional yet proactive interactions away from our colleagues and now we're giving them the real complex work to deal with that perhaps the AI capability can't yet do or perhaps you know what a customer doesn't want to interact with ai we know we now want to give them more choice we've got people now that we're freeing up because we've taken the the volume away from them to go and here's the complex work that we are now you know want you to do to deliver a great customer experience but i think just to give you sort of one example i gave you the example of now you can change your appointment at the touch of a button in seconds used to take you probably 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes, yeah?

28:30We've recently gone live now with a lot of our Gen AI Proactive capability, which is called a proactive ask me anything. So what we were seeing is a significant proportion of customers, I guess, get nervous about the installation and they cancel before the engineers even arrived, right? That's not good for us. It's not good for our communication provider and it's not good for the end customer because they need that connectivity. So we're now giving them the opportunity, Proactive, to ask me anything, does exactly what it says on the tin and it's a proactive gen ai capability that um responds to customers saying you know what time is my engineer going to come um will they um you know what's the experience like on the day what am i going to expect can i have it here do i need to be next to a power socket which is particularly important if you're dealing with vulnerable customers correct or hard to reach kind of customers but it also gives them the ability don't get me wrong gives than the ability to talk to someone if they want to.

29:24But we're seeing great, great engagement with that. And it's handling now a lot of the sort of semi-complex questions that you can use Gen AI to handle proactively. And we're seeing early days, but we're seeing a really decent reduction on cancellations, which is good for us, good for our customers, and good for the end consumer or business in their home or office. Great for engineers who don't go roll up to an appointment and those guys cancelled. So Chris, we were having coffee earlier. You said this equates to how many thousands extra customers a year, potentially for uh into the open reach network well i think it's i won't put a precise figure on it right now because it is um we are still in relatively early days but it's it's tens of thousands right it could be tens of thousands now have the confidence to go ahead with the installation with us because they got the right information proactively and get connected to the network okay and to be clear the benefit of tens of thousands of customers that's that's tens of millions of pounds benefit you know as that rolls in which obviously pays for everything that's being done well also you're kind of saving costs on the back end because you kind of reduce the cancellation of appointments and stuff as well because you'll be able to kind of like make that sort of i feel like a bit more flexible and a bit more proactive because i know from my own kind of research is that there's a rule of thumb in appointment-based businesses particularly where they have field service engineers um is that 10 of all appointments will fail and largely because customers forget or something kind of comes up or something and so therefore that it but it's a cost to the business if you can minimize that even by a couple of percentage of points then that that would save you so many kind of like thousands thousands of truck rolls which is hundreds of hours of engineer time which is a direct direct cost saving agree we took a third we took a third of our missed appointments out where we where we did this this user case a third which is significant there's still work to be done right we're not saying we're we're a high fiver we're happy here what we're saying is that we took a third hour and i think with the with the technology and the partnership we've got now we're trying to work out how we become the best at delivering customer experience in a fiercely competitive environment awesome i mean so i mean it's really exciting and i know there's kind of like the paint is still kind of drying on on on some of this but like tell me about what's your plans what's some of the future kind of plans kind of like you know we're right we're here we're seeing some of the news that are like stuff the new developments and things.

31:45Tell me about kind of what's down the road for it. What can we expect? What are you excited about? Yeah. So I touched on some of that just there. Two weeks ago, we went live with our full proactive Gen AI capability and it's looking really positive. We're not going to stop there, right? We're going to keep tuning, refining, iterating that. So it gives our customers the CX that they deserve. So that's sort of in train, but future development as well. I think the second part that i'm really keen to start looking at is voice ai okay so we are working with uh nice and cockley g actually on voice ai there's nervousness of course okay but i think it unlocks a cohort of customers that again we don't want to hire our way out of being able to reach those customers right we want to give customers the flexibility choice to you know whereby we can't get them because we haven't got a mobile phone number for them or an email address for them but we do have a landline number for them so we're starting to look at how we might test that safely in the right way to deliver a differentiated service through voice ai not just you know two-way um sms or email capability but i'm really excited about that one tell me about the nervousness what why are you nervous about that what's the uh i'm just because it's new well i'm nervous because i'm i'm thinking of my own experience okay yeah we've all had the automated contacts and you know uh whether i should be saying this or not here i'm gonna say anyway no no i rarely i rarely go further forward on that because i'm like no so you've got to get the empathy and the genuine nature of it but being clear that it's a voice you know it's it's automation that's i think that's number one secondly i'm thinking my own mum for example how does that work for for cohorts of customers like my mum would she interact with that i think she would if she had the confidence of the capability and the outcome that he could give her e.g you don't need to now wait and speak to someone you could do it here so i think i don't know adrian maybe that's not making much sense but i think it's just real world thing right but what i've seen the capability it is it's incredible actually and i think there is a massive place for it that delivers value for our business our customers and ultimately the consumers across the UK.

33:53Yeah, absolutely perfect. I mean, look, when you react to something and it's based on your own experience and based on kind of your loved one's experience or what you're thinking about, that's real. And that speaks to not from a business or the corporate or the brand and perspective, that speaks to it from a customer perspective. And I think that's important because it's important that we carry these concerns, these insights, these perspectives into the work that we do because it matters. It connects us. to the people that we're trying to serve. And that's a really significant point with the company acquisition that NICE made.

34:28Essentially, we had a massive leap forward in the capabilities, the generative capabilities, the voice AI. So we're going from prescriptive, predefined engagement on voice to actually generative. And my favorite bit about this is the ability to incorporate knowledge specific to each of your CPs in that engagement. That has a massive change to the customer experience because it means you haven't got a hand off all the time you can just manage the whole journey with that generative engagement yeah absolutely and making it specific to you know one of our many many you know valuable customers and making it specific to them so that when you are talking to us there's there there's a same sort of almost feel to the communication that you get whether it's from you know one of one of our 700 communication i think that is i think that's game changing and i think that is that is our ambition right and again i'll go back to we want to be the lowest effort organization to do business with but also delivering that cx that we are all super proud of we know what that we can do we made great progress over the last few years there's much more that we are going to do okay perfect i mean so um one final question to both of you, you've been on this journey now for about four years now, which is over four years.

35:49There are still people that are still getting started. What advice would you give to somebody who's embarking on their journey, they're just starting and really step into an AI-enabled, AI-powered customer experience, trying to really leverage some of the tools? What would be your best advice to them? So I think, number one, be bold be brave uh think big but start relatively small yeah right um you know take a cohort of customer with maximum volume and value and prove the prove the benefit on there but to do that you've got to be really specific with the business problem you are trying to solve i think where companies perhaps get stuck is they try to solve the world and end up solving very little and then you've lost the confidence of your exec team to fund you you've lost confidence of your customers to to try new things so i think you know be clear on the problem that you are trying to solve be really clear on the measures of success it's it for me it's not just pounds shillings pence it's important of course it is but it's about the outcomes that you are trying to deliver and i think in today's competitive demanding environment whether it's telecommunications retail whatever customer experience outcomes are key so anchor to the customer experience outcomes and then i think the final point would be how do you then communicate this to your people within your organization and again it's not about it's going to come along and take your jobs in my opinion it's about how i can take away some of that low but high volume transactional work that then you can have the time, effort and energy to handle these complex situations and really deliver that outstanding customer experience.

37:42Fantastic. Thank you. Giles? I would like businesses to think not just about automation, but about transformation. So not just about taking a cow path around a hill, making it straighter, turning it into a road, but how do they fly over the hill instead? How do they use the power of AI for something more than just the straightforward saving of some money? How do they use it to redefine the customer experience? That's the first thing. The second thing is, don't think about point IT solutions. Think about engaging business, IT, transformation, and the executive to design, to consider what the future looks like and then start to pick those projects off with them with a north star and in that you know leveraging the power of the platform that you have leverage in the power of the great technology providers the third thing is something to remember always by the time a customer calls in emails or logs on the chance of a great customer experience or truly the best customer experience that's already been missed because you've missed the opportunity to engage proactively because you know what that customer needs so whatever else you're looking at make sure you look at programs that are proactive that are transformational and that leverage the power of your platform also um so gentlemen that's it i just want to say thank you well first of all congratulations on your success and your partnership uh thank you for sharing your time and your insights kind of me today at what is a in the background noise sense an oezy place but a very busy and buzzy sort of place here in nice world london um so yeah thank you so much pleasure absolute pleasure thank you very much