Twilio's secret sauce and CarFinance247's road to success - Interviews from Twilio SIGNAL London 2025

0:00Welcome to the next edition of the Punk CX podcast. This episode is a two-parter that I recorded while attending the Twilio Signal event in London recently, which actually took place on November the 19th. My first guest is Peter Bell, who is the VP of Email Marketing at Twilio. Peter and I talk about his highlights from the event, what he has seen companies do well and are right to help them harness the obvious potential of all the new technology that is emerging around us, as well as some examples of brands that they're working with, what they're doing, what challenges they are overcoming, and what outcomes they are driving.

0:32Following my chat with Peter, I spoke to Michael Binks and his colleague Paul Mousen, who are Director of Technology and Head of Product, respectively, at Car Finance 24-7, the UK's leading digital car finance platform. We talk about their motivations for attending the event, what they spoke about in their breakout session, their journey with Twilio, and some advice and lessons learned along the way. So that's what we have in front of us. Well, let's get into the interview with Peter. I'm here at Twilio Signal in London. I am with Peter Bell, who is the VP of EMEA Marketing at Twilio. We're going to have a chat about all sorts of things, different things that we've seen here today.

1:13But first of all, Peter, hello. Welcome to the Hongseye's podcast. How are you doing? And tell me a little bit about yourself. okay so there's a sense of relief at this point because we're we're probably eight tenths of the way through the event and uh touch wood it's all gone very well so if he says touching a marble but no look i've greatly enjoyed the day um people came in the right numbers good and we've not had any you know honey big issues with the practical things which you know a big event like this may have but um and actually i was downstairs earlier and the noise of customers talking to customers yeah that's the magic they have a great part yeah he was wonderful and so i mean i know that we've had all sorts of people on stage we've had like from zayman ship chandler to chris curly to your good self and to a whole bunch of your other kind of colleagues as well as a whole bunch of customers including ing nestle and then a beautiful some beautiful stories from the unhcr which was they made me cry yeah i wondered if you could give me a i don't know if you know of yours some of the highlights kind of what stood out for you all right so but i'll let you into a secret first okay the unhcr video there's an it's sort of we have a an internal objective of will we make the audience blob at this point um so because not just them actually but other i mean uh age uk who big uk customers here today they have an onto similar video which is you know it pulls at the the heartstrings and makes you realize actually we also do some genuinely important work socially yes but to back to your question highlights of the day i think the first is the i always watch the audience and have people got their heads up are they out the phones because that tells me much more than the poise or the skill of the presenter and heads were up yeah uh people were listening people were present yeah which tells me where we've got an interest was telling an interesting story and i think the the maturation of our story over the past two years i've been with two or three years but i think particularly last two years you've always had the potential to take the three communication channels plus the contextual data that the segment platform is the foundation of and create something much more important and much more useful and of higher value.

3:45And I think we're there. We've not only built quite a bit of it out at the engineering level. You heard from Catherine and Chris. You saw the demos, which are real. But we also heard from customers who are doing it and delivering solutions to into the market i think that's my real highlight yeah it's the progress we've made yes the progress we still have to make because we're not you know it's we're not in denial there but it's much more tangible and we're i think we're more able to articulate the value of the sum of the parts now which is look we've got the three communication channels of messaging of all flavors voice and email and then we're able through first party data to enable our customers to understand who you are how that communication is working in those channels also connect to your other line of business systems and use ai to make really smart influenced choices yeah and that that i think for us that is that contextual part and it wraps up this context is kind of our secret sauce right because i think the thing is there was it was a couple of the speakers that were talking about i mean the contextual trust was a big theme but that's also about kind of how you kind of interact with somebody kind of like in the end and how you protect her kind of like you know come on get data you gather how you kind of protect her and so on and so forth but then there was also the contextual bit was the contextual data which was a big a big theme but then that comes back to kind of also how you're using that to create these ids and then go back to the un unacr sort of thing and they said something it's fantastic that's it like you must can't remember the name of the gentleman right now but he talked about his colleagues on the ground when you're dealing with people that are refugees that are fleeing hostile environments who do not have any, they're maybe the same phone number or kind of a phone number that's long running over kind of like time because they're having to relocate across geographies.

5:52They don't have the sort of PACO or official IDs, all these different, the bad guys. So they're having to be forensic ID investigators sort of thing. And I just thought that was a really fantastic insight because we take for granted our able to verify ID. But the thing, the ID of what we do and how we do it becomes very much part of that contextual data thing and you mentioned it's like you're the secret sauce yeah where i wanted to understand a bit more about that because it's it's i think it's a really important thing because it's a really important thing that when you inject it into that whole personalization dynamic it just adds so much more to the mix and i the the secret source piece is look having first first party data on your customers isn't a new thing you know certainly uh with a cookie deprecation more companies have made strategic investments to hold that first party data and treat it as a strategic asset that it is they're also using the various communication channels my observation would be email well, it is in good health.

6:59It continues to be used broadly. I see a lot of use of SMS for short-term promotions. That's changing with RCS as well. Yeah, and I think RCS will see a much broader set of use cases. It's a bit like WhatsApp has been dropped into... Yeah, exactly that. And I think the two compete. I think they have different strengths. But voice has been a little out of fashion because, of course, for a certain generation, they were dealing with IVRs, which were awful. But actually, you know, we're humans. The first thing we're born with is language. And I think we'll see the older generation, we'll see a sandwich.

7:33Older generation and younger, they will just race towards voice. Well, it's just physically easier to talk. Absolutely. And we're human. Yes. So we've got people using the channels. We've got, to a greater degree, access to first-party data. But to operationalize bringing the two together is too hard. Right. Which is why there are multiple companies we all interact with as consumers who have good information on us, which plays no part in their marketing communication towards us. And we feel it and we see it every day as consumers. It's true in B2B. It's true in B2C. And it's just been operationally too hard.

8:19And I'll take segmentation, which is a classic marketer's dilemma. there'll come a point where each segment will take let's say let's say building a customer segment in my martech stack is going to take half a day just for the sake of illustration okay i've only got five days in the week and i've got to finish this by friday so i'm going to be able to build two customer segments a day and have them go live in a campaign and get the communication out so by process of deduction i can do 10 segments a week yeah well what does that mean it means i take shortcuts well okay i can't really personalize this to the degree i would aspire to because i only do 10.

9:04and if i do more marketing operations are going to get annoyed with me and there'll be more jira tickets and it it all compounds so as a consequence you end up with this suboptimal really not that personal or pretending to be personal marketing communications going out and it look as consumers it's just a poor experience it's rubbish which is why i don't i think there's inability to operationalize things is why despite all the aspiration and all the noise and the hype yeah nothing's changed right the opportunity for twilio is to do two things uh-huh bring the pieces together on our platform to make it much easier and with the advent of ai and llms and our own use of ai in you know within the platform but also your ability to plug in your own llm on top of it is that secret sauce it's our ability to bring it together and make it operationally efficient to deliver genuinely personal customer experience And that's kind of what you're doing through the segment.

10:10Yeah, and segment is the underpinnings of where we begin. Okay. But its role in allowing us to keep context in customer interactions as they move between channels or stay within channel at a much more specific level is that's the unlock. and you know our ability to understand you got cut off while trying to make a return and when he called in you're not greeted with a very cheery hey you're having a good day and actually you're really frustrated you just got cut off you're like hey peter so you were trying to do this exactly and it's those moments that like turn the experience on time yes i mean i I think it's also important to point out is that that can also kind of work because it can work across whether you're an opted-in customer or not opted-in customer because actually it's always like conceptual sessions.

11:13Yes. As it were. And, of course, all of this, you know, with all of this, you've got to embed your interpretation of data regulation and things across your, you know, systems and practices and who has access to what. but I think even there I have a really really good example of, so you're familiar with Octopus because you live in the UK, utilities so their technology arm Kraken everything they've built is built on top of Twilio and Kraken now sell that technology to their competitors and utilities and that's what they work so when you buy the platform, you don't just buy the platform you buy into a business operating model.

11:59Yes. Which fundamentally puts the customer at the center. So when you call, that person you're speaking to has access to everything. You will never hear the words, just a moment, I need to transfer you. Yep. That, for me, is how you like transformative. And that has nothing to do with GDPR or any of the usual things that people say. So let me roll back on that a little bit because you've got Optimus and Kraken what they're doing right. But we've seen all sorts of different reports. Particularly, you know, we're in the midst of, there's all sorts of developments in technology across the face. Most of it's dominated by artificial intelligence and noise, the news of artificial intelligence is noise.

12:46That's a 40-year slip, isn't it? Yeah. and lots of data saying that people are struggling to scale the pilots and also generate significant value and ROI across their enterprises or just whatever size of their business what are you seeing because I think you speak to customers a lot what are you seeing companies do right to be able to generate scale and generate their returns because undoubtedly the potential is there Right. So I can, I'm actually going to use us as the example. Okay. Your own law, why don't you? So my personal view is that the reason for the failures is people either have not defined the use case well, or they've made it too broad.

13:33Right. And it's just overambitious place to start. Or actually maybe the technology isn't there. Right. I think in some quarters, you've seen agentic AI interpreted as almost artificial general intelligence. And, you know, let's just change the homepage of our website to an LLM chat interface. I mean, one, you're not being customer focused. And two, you're not solving an actual customer problem. So Twilio, a couple of years ago, had the challenge that on our website, we've got multiple forms, which are fundamentally contact me forms. Fill it in. It might be a talk to sales. It might be a talk to customer support.

14:13There's variations. You fill in a form. We get more of those submissions than we can get back to. Right. And it was a real business challenge, you know, because it was causing problems with NPS scores. It was potentially left unchecked. It could cause reputational challenges. and we could not afford to hire enough people to service that either outsourced or in-source that was not going to work so a actually relatively early in career marketer um proposed a solution and it was a real you know it wasn't quite because you don't do it these days it wasn't quite a server under a desk but it wasn't far off yeah and we if when you fill in that form now 95 of the cases it would be an ai agent which has read your email read to that and emailed you back yeah that is operational in 80 countries and it speaks 12 languages it has an nps score of 9 out of 10 and we routinely even though we declare it's an ai agent it's actually it has a human name uh isa okay bell i didn't name it after myself i do you know joke it's the most productive member of the family but and isa works 25 hours a day seven days a week you know spring written 65 days of the year and we routinely get people writing you know like isa i must congratulate you're the most useful you're the best customer agent like i've spoken to and things and you know at first we were just trying to answer the questions then we realized there's about eight categories of questions so we could fine-tune okay this is one of those put it in this bucket so then we could be more specific so quite often we get coding questions right so actually quite a lot of the coding questions lend themselves perfectly to ai conversation some of them are billing queries some people actually want to buy things and we transfer those to a human because we're not at the stage we want to risk a commercial transaction though but i think we had a well-defined business problem yeah which wasn't so broad it were it was too complex for our first big foray and we iterated through but the end results are fantastic I mean last year we took about four, as a consequence of this we serviced around four million dollars of additional revenue and I think it's a good example it's one I can be authentic in terms of not talking about what this may or may not be doing but I think it's a really good case study And so you think actually that it's about just being focused on what is the problem you're actually trying to solve?

17:13Yeah. Because it feels like what you're saying is that actually there's too many people that are a bit like throwing spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks when it comes to kind of some of the deployment or the phyletic or experimenting with some of these SAI technology. That and they then don't have the necessary data available to the LLM that is informing the conversation. Okay. So they don't have a call to enough data, so you end up with garbage in, garbage out type of thing. So for the coding queries, it actually just references our public docs, which are out there anyway, but the person probably couldn't find.

17:54but by giving a very specific answer on how do I do this, you know, how do I register 10 DLC in the US or whatever? It's quite a specific thing. Versus the person, you know, who just wants to, has a billing query. Well, that needs access to our billing information. So, yeah, the data is another big part. Okay. So tell me, which companies do you work with that you just go, they just get it? In fact, they're pushing us because they just got it, they clicked in and they've got like right they they understand what they want to do and they're off to the races and they're like you're just keeping up you know like and so tell me about them give me an example one of those and sort of like what sort of challenges they were facing what they're doing and what some of the outcomes that are driving just to kind of help us understand what what good looks like yeah so you saw some of those this morning on stage um you know your biggest advocates are often your biggest critics and that holds true yeah so you know ing um nestle for that matter you and hc i'll have less knowledge of them uh as a customer they they actually typify the types of customers where they're using what we've got but know what they need next yeah i'd say one of the things and this is actually true of all marketing teams A lot of, we can have the data lake, as you heard from Nestle, you can do the data lake to calculate the traits and the coefficients and everything.

19:27That then comes down today into their segment instance. And from that, we build audiences, and that's all built out. It's actually the downstream part of then getting a campaign live is for most marketing scenes today, you know, a series of Jira tickets and marketing operations. and the time to market lead time can often be too slow yeah and i think that's the next that is one of the next horizons but what we're talking about there is automation yes which is one of the things that ai is very very good at and i i think we'll see that resolved in the martex there yeah in the not too distant feature and is that kind of course i mean it's something i spoke i spoke to chris caller about earlier on i was asking him about we saw some of the demos on stage and i was looking at going and talking to marketers by signing campaigns and everything else and it was looking kind of quite technical but traditional marketers might be kind of slightly kind of horrified when they saw a little black box with some code in it kind of in in terms of the the management so yes does that mean that the marketing team has just got to either build developers into to their teams and or get more technical themselves or both to improve the speed of execution.

20:44I see some of that almost as I see those two as one the same. Oh, OK. The at least in B2B marketing, the kind of the title for that role is a growth marketer. Right. OK. And the growth market is increasingly a technical role. You'd probably be good at scripting. Uh-huh. You know, I want to I hesitate to use the word prompt engineering because it's annoying. but you're certainly going to be able to write script. You're not going to be a coder. And I do draw quite a delineation between those two. But yeah, we are seeing emergence of those outside of marketing operations. Right, okay. I think for marketing operations, which is a classic bottleneck in marketing, despite really great people, it is a bottleneck.

21:28And I think this is one of those great scenarios where AI will be fundamental to their success and the reduction and the frustration you hear from teams about mafia operations because they'll be able to scale and ought through automation. So, yeah, I see more technical roles in marketing and, as I say, growth marketers. A couple of final questions just to wrap up. Unless there's anything else you want to add? No. So, boiling it all down, completely standing in the frog. if you want to improve your customer experience Peter says do this

22:11take some responsible risks drops the mic thank you very much and the final one this is the Punxiex podcast after all who's smashing it who's moving the needle who do you love who's going oh my god they're just and it doesn't it doesn't need to be fancier or super tech or whatever are useful they're nailing it honestly i there i have two answers on this okay one is i'm a customer of octopus by sheer coincidence okay and you know they have my loyalty and trust at this point yeah you know trust at the end of the day represents my contact with them and initially it's that i don't know you but i'm going to give it a go and now it's embedded the broader one i'd say is i love the work that isvs are doing in the healthcare sector okay you've got doc planner here today and we have other isvs who do not dissimilar things and it's one of those things one it has a certain amount of social purpose yeah but secondly like who loves dealing with a receptionist in their doctor practice because they're like the archetypal uh gatekeepers yeah you know permission will not be granted yeah why are you calling us and yeah look no the computer is not saying no i'm saying no yeah let's just go away yeah and then you you know you you heard from the uh the the ai startup that are trying you know one thing he said in passing was you know trying to drive the utilization rates up of uh mri scan suites and things it's like so on one hand we've got people can't get access.

23:56On the other hand, we've got resources, expensive resources underutilized and I love the work that DocPlanner and their brethren are doing in that sector because it's important and it's making our lives just that little bit better. Perfect. And Peter, that is all I have. I just want to say thank you for sharing your time and your insight and your expertise with me today. It's been awesome. Great. Thank you. My pleasure. Well, I hope that you enjoyed my chat with Peter. Let's get started with my chat with Michael and Paul from Car Finance 24-7. So we're here at 20.0 signal. This is the second part of the podcast I'm going to do.

24:37It's covering, kind of talking to different people around the event. I'm here with a couple of guys from Car Finance who look slightly scared. So hopefully I'll ask them to introduce themselves and they'll kind of break the ice a little bit. But Michael, welcome to the Punk CX podcast. Can I ask you to introduce yourself? Tell me a little bit about yourself. Yeah, sure. Good morning. So, as you said, I'm Michael Binks. I'm Director of Technology at Carfinals 24-7. I've been with the business just over 10 years now. A software developer by trade, okay? And now I look after everything from engineering, infrastructure and the data teams.

25:10Perfect. And who's your pal? This is my mate, Paul. He's our Head of Product. Good morning, Adrian. How are you? How are you doing? As Michael said, yes, I'm the Head of Product at Carfinals 24-7. I've been with the business just over six years now. worked in almost every role you can imagine across the business started from sales moving up through coaching development into management through customer experience and now into the product role and head of product where i look after three of our core engineering teams okay being our crm team so it's an internally developed crm our dealers and vehicles team so working with all of our dealers across the uk and our data science team as well who's going into the ai world fantastic basis oh the ai world absolutely so as i say we're at twilio signal in london i just wanted to kind of quickly ask you about what's your motivations for attending the event i mean it'll come well certainly you kind of michael can i what's your motivations for the event because i know you're speaking we'll get to that a little bit later because then you get dragged into it actually yeah this year we're forced into it but um but no normally we're a heavy user of lots of twilio products okay we always try to stay at the forefront of technology within car finance um especially within the the twilio space and so for us coming here today is kind of learning more about those new features and all these new products they've got coming okay obviously paul mentioned ai that's going to be a big growth driver for us next year okay so yeah ultimately it's a big day of learning ultimately fantastic and uh paul what's your um motivation yeah i think it's quite similar to what michael said really in terms of where we can grow and develop with twilio for me it's around how we can simplify what our developers do okay you know we as a business aren't experts in the communication side of it or anything like that we want to all your to continue to handle that we'll be the experts in car finance that's what we'll do fantastic so how do we use the twilio approach to develop and enhance that customer experience okay use their expertise alongside ours okay hold on to the mic because i know you're speaking kind of later oh yeah i'm back straight back to you kind of like first you're speaking because we're meeting kind of first thing and so i haven't had a preview of your session so i just thought give me a quick kind of like overview what is he going to be talking about in the session yeah absolutely it's almost exactly that to be honest so we're looking at the sort of build versus buy journey okay and how Twilio supported us over the last 10 years that we've been with them how we've moved from a world where we built everything everything's from scratch well you talked about building your own entire house in a CRM yeah they're like yeah into more of a world of what we can buy you know what do Twilio offer okay how they support us all the different platforms as michael said we we're a heavy heavy user of pretty much everything twilio offer uh so just yeah really talking about our journey and how we've brought the customer experience into that and and use the twilio products to get us there talk to me a little bit about the kind of the buy versus build sort of like tipping point because sometimes like you're michael you're a developer at heart so i guess your first kind of instinct is probably to to let's build some stuff i've put some things together yeah but then what at what point does it tip that you go uh maybe we should build and then develop on the top of that yeah well like you say we've we've had basically developers in our business very little sort of products and um infrastructure level over the years so it's always been about by developers trying to build things and make things work yeah really quickly a family-owned business which means that decisions have to be made pretty rapidly and so there isn't time often to to analyze the products out there and write down it's just let's get score let's get going and let's get moving but kind of as we grow up a little bit more and we begin to mature yeah level of build versus buy right narrows a little the market also changes as well of course because you've got like how much choice have we got out there right now yeah exactly yeah but ultimately that's that's kind of that that build versus buy was so we built our twilio phone platform or i did at least years ago ourselves but then flex came along right so we spent so much time building and maintaining the platform right and things would fall over when we made a deploy phones would stop working so actually push all that back onto Twilio now with Twilio Flex calls tasks messaging okay handle all of that for us and like Paul said that allows us now to just concentrate on the finance and is that kind of change when now you've got you mentioned the dreaded AI kind of word and things get a little bit kind of technical and then there's you know access to more systems and more capability more possibility does that really then push you start feel like you're leaning on your vendors more as partners rather than as vendors kind of more and more yeah very much so so we've we spent the last 12 months trying to rebuild all our lender integrations okay so again they've got new features and new ways of moving applications through a process instead of us relying on the old ones and we're trying to really build more and more automation to that right so a it makes our agents lives and our account managers lives a bit more simpler and a bit more efficient for them but also actually can i then go and put an ai chatbot or an ai voice bot in front of that yeah which then ultimately digitizes the process completely excellent so how long do you say that you've been working with twilio for now just about so it is we started on the very first day i started at car finance 24 7 so a little over 10 years nearly it'll be 11 years in february okay blimey and so that's some journey

30:13um was it was it was let me go back to the beginning an origin story i think when you started the decision already being made or did you choose kind of twilio yeah sadly it wasn't my decision i can't take the claim for it my old my old cto sent me an email on the day i joined car final 24 7. we had spoke about it before he sent me three links one was angler js uh-huh one was signal r in order for us to share updates back and forth and one was twilio okay and it was the third one that i was like what on earth is this this can't be real completely impossible Right. A few lines of JavaScript, some one API call, and ta-da, the phone just started ringing.

30:52And basically, we sort of never looked back after that. Fantastic. And I guess this is the thing, the technology is moving so fast. And people are talking about either the buy versus build things, and they got the AI that's layered into it. And if you go back far enough, then cloud was a thing, and then so on and so forth. and so it's just like the evolution is just is is well it's kind of mind-boggling sometimes right and it feels like it's hard to kind of keep up i mean thinking about people that might be listening to this i mean and think about the yourselves i mean what lessons have you learned along the way i come to you kind of pull first given that you're the kind of the fresher of the two in the business yeah absolutely i think the biggest lesson for me is around trying to keep things simple right you know i think certainly in a product world and development world it's so easy to go and try and solve everything you know you get presented with three problems and you go and try and solve them all immediately whereas actually you can do a lot of just take things back to basic which is what we i think we've done really in the last sort of 12 months with twilio okay which is around moving away from all the old world that was built where we built the calling we built call transfers we built sms's to driving out of the world where twilio build back because that's just simplification for us right and it sort of really allows us now to step back and look at the business rather than sort of just working all day to fix issues.

32:12Yeah, I think that for me, it's probably the biggest thing. What do you mean? Yeah, I'd probably answer that. It's really ask yourself, what are you good at? Right. If you're good at voice and SMS and telecommunications, then by all means, go ahead and do that. But if not, let somebody else power that bit for you. There's so many different nuances to it and so many different complications to it. Yeah. Do what you're good at ultimately, which for us is finance, and let other people take care of aspects of your flow. I love that. So just focusing on your core capability sort of thing, and then lean on the people that are good at the things that you're not good at.

32:44And then, you know, because it comes back to, what are the outcomes you want to drive, right? You talk about that sort of whole kind of customer experience sort of thing, because ultimately it's about outcomes. It's about driving those outcomes. So if somebody was coming back to you going where we were a number of years ago what advice would you give them kind of if they're starting off they were you're like going hmm before you go down that track here's what you need to get sorted before you get going like what do you think are we talking Twilio based or just generally just generally I mean you are a business that are that is looking to grow mature compete differentiate themselves you're thinking about kind of making maybe some technology kind of choices it could be kind of twilight it could be somebody kind of else from blitz built on the top of that but they're setting out on their journey what advice would you get would you give the gift to them you know as they're going forward i probably still lean on the kind of build versus buy mode okay um and ultimately just go and have a play with things right every every single platform these days has got a free account go and dip your toes in see what it's like understand how it works what it's got maybe not just go and pick one to begin with pick two or three from the same area or technology but yeah just just have a play and technology these days is is amazing ai can help guide you through it along the way go to go and ask co-pilot a question or gpt um and yeah within days or hours you'll you'll have something up on working and at least you'll know where you're starting from i think i would kind of i would counter that with the idea of like don't be surprised if you get lost and get a bit of a fuzzy head through the process.

34:27But stick with it, because you'll come through the other side, actually see it a bit more clearly, because they're almost scared of getting lost in order to find yourself is part of the process, is part of the learning sort of thing. Sorry, I completely get that. Just kind of dive in. Embrace the feeling lost bit. That's the exciting bit, though, yeah? Yeah, I mean, you're like, I have no idea what's going on. I need some help. and then kind of finally come out the other side. But, Paul, anything to add to that? Yeah, I think my view steps almost a little bit away from the technology aspect and more into sort of like the customer experience world and what that looks like.

35:03So I think for me, it's about really understanding your journey. You know, what are you trying to achieve? You're A to B. How do you get there? And ultimately the difficult bit is being brutally honest with yourselves about where is difficult, where are your pain points and where do you need to improve it? We've just done something recently where we've mapped out a full journey and picking out all the pain points. And we sit there going, wow, look at all these from a customer perspective. All these things, all these challenges that a customer has to go through, whether that customer be someone buying a car or our sales agents downstairs.

35:32You know, to us, they are all customers. They all have their own pain points. And then us now sitting back and looking into 2026 next year, where do we use simplification? Where do we use Twilio? Where do we use AI to support those pain points and ultimately make them as smooth as possible? and when you're doing that kind of just if i may when you're doing that are you um and you're mapping all that out are is this like a massive collaborative kind of process so you're getting everybody involved you're singing voices from all over the business kind of involved in in in that how are you doing that it's exactly right so it's sort of either mini operational meetings with myself and various teams across the business and then myself my technology teams the directors sitting there looking at it and and really analyzing each point of what we're doing why do we do that yeah you know there's a lot of still a lot of manual processes within what we do today okay and we've had to sit back and go why are we doing that you know there's some elements this not even ai it's just automation we should be able to automate this yeah to make everyone else's easier to help customers in buying the car to help sales agents in processing the deal sure so yeah it's a it's a big undertaking but definitely worthwhile and it's definitely taught me a lot even though i've been through the business and i've been for every role in the business okay still learning a lot from doing it awesome so a couple of quick fire questions which are probably not on your list so you're going to be a bit of a surprise

36:51so paul if somebody's listening into this and uh i'd like you to complete this sentence if you'd like to if you want to improve your customer experience the paul says do this firstly understand your customer experience from a customer's perspective not from you as a sales person actually understand your customer experience once you understand it once you've been through it then i think you can look to improve it yeah and like what like i was talking about before the pain points yeah you understand it then from a customer's perspective not from within the business perspective perfect michael back to you somebody's listening to this has said if you'd like to improve your customer experience michael says do this couple of that sentence so i mentioned it in my talk later on today actually especially in the world of car finance there isn't a one size fits all process yeah so you have the cater for every single kind of customer that may be one that communicates on many different channels from our point of view they're buying different cars at different rates from different lenders so we almost we can't just build long journey or one experience we've got to build many of them and i suppose you just need to make sure that you focus on all of those experiences perfect to make sure that they all cover it just as well as each other so hold on to the mic another kind of question i know it's putting you on the spot but this is a punk cx podcast and i always ask people what is the what are brands do you think it's like smashing it right now you like that punk they're just out there they're just making the noise doing their thing who do you love right now we we spoke about this the other day they were this yesterday morning the one that we came up with was poly AI okay we're using voice communication yeah I know another nickel over there we had a really cool demo I think last time came to signal where they spoke in various different language and then chucked on a little bit of a pirate accent at the end okay it's kind of things so we can talk to kinds of customers now um but they're really doing it well in the fact that they're really pushing the barringes we we within car finance we are we're watching this from afar but almost potentially a little too scared to dip our toes into right it looks amazing but does it really work yeah how might customers feel our experience sure and that phone connects yeah um so to kind of have the bravery in the the foresight to go ahead and do that is it's quite an amazing step awesome Awesome.

39:00Michael, anything? Paul, sorry, rather, anything to add to that? Any other brand? Again, Poly AI is the one that stood out for us. I think, for me, where it's different is you look at a lot of the sort of AI companies and what they're doing now. It's all around message AI, SMS AI, text, web chat AI, whereas Poly AI are really putting the emphasis back on the telephone. Yes. You know, we are a telephone business. On our core, we are absolutely a telephone business. so for us to move everything over to sort of like a chat and text based ai oh what do we do here whereas poly ai are almost sat there going it's fine you can still do this people like talking to each other people still like being on the telephone at the minute so yeah yeah for me it's they're definitely our standout awesome well thank you so much gentlemen uh that's been great i mean i you don't need it but i'm going to wish you luck anyway in your kind of like session because it's before that but that's all i have today i just want to say thank you so much congratulations on your success today, your journey with Twilio and for sharing some time and sharing your insight and expertise with me today, that's been awesome thank you very much

40:07wow, 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 adrienswinsco.com do leave a review on your favourite 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 adrianswinsco.com and do tune in again. Thanks very much.