Why you need the I4JM in your life - Interview with Mark Smith and Ray Gerber

0:00So welcome to the next edition of the Punk CX podcast. With me today it's a bit of an unusual. and it's a twofer. You have two people that are interviewing at the same time, and those two people are Mark Smith and Ray Gerber. So if you've been around the customer sort of space for a while, you've probably heard their names, but right now they are founders at the Institute for Journey Management. Welcome, Mark. Welcome, Ray. How are you doing? Doing great. Thanks for having us, Adrian. You're very welcome. Thanks, Adrian. Thank you for having us. You're welcome. Now, for the benefit of our listeners and readers and people that read the highlights and things, I mean, I wonder if I can ask you just to give us a bit of a thumbnail sketch of you and your journey so far, pardon the pun, obviously.

0:40I'll start with kind of you, Mark. Can you fill in the blanks, give us a bit of an idea of who Mark Smith is and how did you get to this kind of point? So I guess I've been in the customer technology space for about 30 years, maybe a little over 30 years. Originally very analytics focused, understanding the behavior of customers in an analytic sense. that business then was acquired by an interaction management company portrait software back about 15 years ago one of the very early players in sort of aligning experiences for customers on different channels that space then kind of became the journey space this mix of analytics and interaction management i founded a company called kite wheel back in 2013 essentially doing those same those same things, but now on the cloud as a SaaS solution.

1:35That kind of coincided with the emergence of this new technology marketplace, the journey orchestration space. And it's kind of then that I became aware of Ray, let's just say. You were competitors at one point, right? Yeah, maybe. Maybe we were. Fierce competitors. Yeah. Yeah. We'll revisit that one, shall we? Yes. Yes. And so, you know, Kitewheel, the last dozen years or so, went through an acquisition in 2021, became part of CSG, but essentially was always one of the top rated journey orchestration players. So I've been in that journey space for a dozen years or so, from the technology side, primarily.

2:19Perfect. Ray? Yeah, so I, you know, hopefully try and reduce a little bit of humor, but, you know, it doesn't always work. The first time I ever spoke on expert systems in South Africa, there was 2 ,000 people in the audience, and I started with a joke, and nobody laughed. so so so so i'll try again so you know people ask me where i'm from and i always say i'm from the deep south and obviously the america that means the southern part and they're like oh where i said south africa and then they then they laugh and they were like how are you gonna remember your name i said well everybody loves raymond the show and then you have gerber baby foods so everybody loves Raymond Gurr or baby food.

3:02So that's kind of, that's me in a package. But, you know, I came from South Africa, moved to America in 96, was a software engineer, transitioned into the ERP space. From the ERP space, transitioned into CRM. From CRM, then transitioned into CXLest Journey Management, where I was, I wouldn't say I was a co-founder. Glenn Manchester was the founder of Thunderhead, which was a CCM company which was sold in 2016. And then we transitioned to build a journey management solution which competed with the kite wheels of the world. We were sold to Medallia in 2022. I then joined Coltrics as a distinguished XM scientist or as my wife calls me an extinguished XM scientist.

3:54And in February this year, Mark and I got together with Joanna introducing us, like, let's do this. And it's been a very exciting time. We're still in the early stages of the Institute, but it was great to keep going to mark, you know, as a person and as a friend versus as a competitor. And I think we work very well together. We know our place within the Institute, and I think we've found a way to invigorate the founders that joined. So excited to be joining today, Adrian. Excellent. Now, before we get into the Institute for Journey Management, I thought it might be interesting or useful just before we get started, just talk about customer journeys.

4:35I mean, I'll come back to you, Ray, on this one first. It's like, can you explain to me what you mean by customer journeys, just so we're clear? You know, it's interesting when I was at Thunderhead and we built the first version of the solution, it was focused on, you know, next phase action decision, because that was my background at Pegasystems. And we realized we needed the visualization part of it. And it was like, how do I do this? And I spoke to somebody and I was talking about the app called Waze. I'm sure you use Waze. and there's this interesting story where a guy in London took 500 cell phones and put it into a container in London and they were all on Google Maps actually very similar and the way they track because all the phones were opening in Google Maps it showed that there was a tremendous traffic jam because as this guy was moving there was 500 phones that was moving very very very slowly.

5:34And so when I thought about how do I create journeylytics and insights, I was thinking about ways how it attracts people, how it looks for friction, but also how it suggests off ramps to avoid friction in the future and traffic jams in the future. So I kind of think that's going to where when I think about journey management technologies and specifically journeylytics and journey orchestration, how we can equate customer journeys to the journey we take in vehicles and the tools we use through a navigation system to be able to help us avoid friction, you know, go on detours if needed, find shorter paths, find things that are valuable on the road as you go.

6:17So that's kind of the way I talk about journey management, I think it's a way to visually explain the value and concept of journey management. I mean, it's fascinating to me I wanted to also ask because the other thing that feels like is a popular and possibly misconception within this space is that people come to the point where they go, oh, we can control the customer journey. And you're like, have you never met a human being? And Mark, I know that you and I have talked about this in the past before. So this is almost like to try to lift the lid on that as well. This is not like a prescriptive thing.

6:55This is more of a, an organic thing that responds to behavior. That's right. Yeah. I mean, the key thing about customer journeys is they're the customer's journey, right? And the customers do what they want to do. They've got their goals in mind. They've got their destination and there's lots of different ways they can get there. All right. And I think journeys can be misunderstood when the business thinks they own it and the business is trying to define it and they're just, and they're really driving and they're trying to drive this customer where they want to go. And if that doesn't line up with where the customer wants to go, you're going to have a problem, right?

7:34And so the key thing for me about customer journeys is it's the customer's journey. That's the nature of the modern world. We all have all of these auctions available to us. We can buy things 10 different ways, 20 different ways from lots of different providers. And we all go through a process of thinking what we might want to buy or what kind of service we're looking for and what kind of help we need. And you go your own way to get there. And the businesses that are really successful are the ones that get that and organize themselves around those customers as best as they can to kind of be more thinking about helping the customer along that journey, rather than, as you say, prescriptively defining and saying, no, this is what this is the way it works and pushing things are the custom is and do you think that's the thing that can people get most wrong with approaching this because it feels like going some people can't get beyond the process way of viewing the world i kind of this is how we're going to do things like business is a process and this is kind of we have this is how we exact control over it but then they almost like have to impose that on an external kind of world and that And do you think that's what that?

8:49Well, that's one of the things that makes it difficult because businesses do need control and they need to set themselves up and to operate certain ways and to have rules about how they operate. And customer journeys are difficult because it becomes this connection point between those two sites. How do you still have an efficiently operating business whilst aligning properly with the customer and what they're looking for? that's a complex that's a complex thing which is why you need kind of complex solutions to get there the value is huge yeah when you when you get that alignment almost like cogs in a in a gearbox you get that alignment between you operating efficiently but also meeting those that that customer interest the value can be massive and ray and i have both seen that's one of the reasons we we're working together on this institute actually is we've seen so many great examples of incredible value being delivered when you get this customer journey stuff to work right just because it's difficult not not enough companies are doing it sure and getting getting that value so maybe can I ask because you talked about the the opportunity and and Ray you talked about complex kind of like systems and you know getting it right I mean and then Mark you also then talked about examples I I mean, Ray, do you have an example of like, just to illustrate what the opportunity is for some firms?

10:16Yeah, I mean, I think a very practical, you know, just to add on to what Mark said is we had a play on words at Thunderhead slash Medallia. It is not a managed customer journey. It's the customer managed journey. Okay. Right. Well, so when you take it the latter, you take marketing, traditional marketing automation system with campaign management, it's the managed customer journey. We are predicting as marketing specialists what we think this sequence of steps are that the customer wants to go through. We base it on an audience of 10 ,000 people, but we don't have the ability to personalize it.

10:54When we actually became OEM partners with Salesforce, they embedded the journey management solution inside the marketing automation solution to be able to, at each step in the campaign, to be able to determine for this specific person, based on interaction context, based on behavioral context, based on feedback, is this still the right thing to do for the customer? So I think always for me, that's kind of a very, very good example in terms of taking the traditional controlled environment where companies are forcing customers through a process or a journey or a campaign, but being able to use the concepts of journey context, journey insights, and journey orchestration to be able to say, let's have flexibility.

11:42We still have to have some level of control, like Mark said. You can't just have an open-ended system where you have 10 ,000 people and every one of those people will have a different journey. It just doesn't happen. And companies can't comprehend that. So it's kind of this combination of taking traditional concepts and modern concepts and embedding them and fusing them together to find more details, engagement with customers that are more relevant, what I would call in language they need, once an intent. and you guys have been working on this for for a number of years and now in recent years we've seen the explosion of generative ai and now agentic commanding but does some of those new kind of things fundamentally change what you were talking about or how does it does it make it easier does it make it you know how does it impact it i mean ray what do you think I mean, I think when we talk about personalization, you know, I always talk about descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and perspective as analytics.

12:50Those are the four phases of it. And generative AI is really, really good at describing what's happened. We know that. Diagnosing what's happened. And possibly prescribing what things you could do. but nothing replaces the traditional predictive elements of machine learning where you can ensure that the same next-base offer or next-base orchestration is given to the same group of people in the same way because there's bias, there is regulations that require you to be able to show how decisions were made. So I think that yes, generative AI is becoming mainstream, it's changing the interfaces of how employees expect to engage with systems.

13:37When I look at some of the new VOC systems that are coming out, a company called Interpret, you know, their whole interface is a prompt. There's no UIs, stuff like that. And I think very much like our lives are changing, you know, as consumers. I think employees' lives are changing. You say we need simpler interfaces, but also the ability to just be able to take individual customer context plus the orchestration context and then use to generate very, very personalized conversations that are at the individual level without somebody having to craft that and think, okay, here are seven different types of messages.

14:12Now we can have thousands and those are very, very relevant based on individual customers. So I think the one-to-one marketing context is becoming a potential. It's not there yet. Yes. potential. Mark, anything to add to that? Yeah, I would. And kind of building on what Ray just said about we're not there yet, right? You know, there's huge opportunity to automate coming out of AI systems, all the different kinds and building on one of the things Ray said, you know, just predictive AI, as it would be called today, just, you know, on being able to identify what is the right thing for a customer.

14:58That's actually been around for a long time. Again, too few companies are really using it, certainly in the journey context, really empowering your journeys with that prediction of what the customer's really interested in. Huge value there. Not many companies set themselves up to do it. And that's kind of repeats itself all over. There's a great match between AI and customer journeys. in that the customer journey approach sets you a framework for how to interact with customers. If you then feed intelligence into that framework and you feed automation into that framework, things go very well. You try and feed automation into something that isn't actually set up right.

15:42I mean, you haven't got a framework of a journey to interact with the customer in the right way. You risk automating the wrong thing. You risk automating all those bad things you currently do that really annoy the customer. Well, let's do more of those and let's do them faster. No, right? You got to do the right thing more often. Now, the other thing I'd add is the agentic AI is an interesting area as well. And there's clearly a future there where we all use more agents to interact with businesses. Again, it's really key to have this right framework in place, a journey management framework to work with that agentic technology that will speed up and automate all of those interactions between a business from both sides, potentially, right?

16:31When you've got agents working with each other, you better set up a framework for how they're going to operate if you want to get the right results out of it. And so there's great alignment between all these new AI technology and journey management. One isn't just going to replace the other. I think it's a real sort of synergy that's going to be delivering business value. Correct me if I'm wrong as well, is it feels like, you know, Ray, you talked about predictive analytics and kind of machine learning. And that's kind of what the sort of foundations that that's best decisioning was kind of founded on.

17:06And then you add in kind of generative AI and then now the agentic AI dimensions to that. and it feels like correct me if i'm wrong that the journey management field was more around a sort of that almost like the digital only sort of like space but with the advent of these new sort of technologies when you can do things in real time you could potentially add in live channels into that kind of too and then it just gets richer it's like across the piece, but also kind of pre-sale, post-sale, and all the bits in between. And as Mark said, if you get it right, then this is incredibly rich intelligence that can be infused across that whole conversation that you're having with customers.

17:54Does that make sense? I did a podcast about four years ago on the concept of autonomous orchestration. Yeah. I created that to concept of testers with autonomous vehicles in terms of how we can use the signals. To continue proactively to understand, you know, how's the guy driving next to you? Is he going slower? Is he going faster? Is he weaving off? You know, and integrating that with the GPS in terms of proactively saying, well, you're going to have to turn right a mile from here, start getting to the right lane. And so it's just exciting to see how all of these things coming together. I think coming back to the AI thing, I still think for the next two to three years, most value of AI will be internal to organizations from an employee perspective.

18:37I think if we just look at the work I did at Qualtrics around building journey atlas, we'll be making journey atlas available by an institute. Journey topic models where I took a website of a bank and it went through a whole website and it built a hierarchical topic model for me that was just amazing. So when you think of the productivity improvements that provides within organizations, and widening the knowledge and skills of the people that work, I think it's amazing. I think we still have to get there, but maybe 20 % of the value, if that much lands at the end consumer, I think that that will mature, that percentage will gradually increase over time.

19:21Yeah, no, perfect. I mean, I think there's a long way to go. And let's put it this way. There's a lot of chairs that need to be moved around in many organizations to get ready for this. and that will take kind of like um some time but now that we've kind of like talked a little bit about journey management i mean let's talk about the this the institute thing that you're that you're founding i mean so how did it start i mean what was the concur what was the thing like oh there's the thing we need to solve for that what is the what was the the spark that that that started with that as that and i'm going to ask mark kind of to have first go at that one and and see if Ray kind of corrects you.

20:03Well, it's good that you asked me because then it gives me an opportunity to say that it was kind of Ray's idea. But it all came out of, we got together, and Ray kind of mentioned this earlier, for 10 plus years, we both worked with this Joanna De Quintanilla, the forest analyst, who's really sort of created the journey orchestration and journey management space with her work. and we both know her very well and she rated our companies very very closely together for years always competing for kind of top top spot and she got us together she said you two guys you you know you've got to get to know each other because i think you'll get on well and so we we got together six eight months ago and had a first call and found out we kind of agreed on so much stuff around customer journeys, but most importantly, we had a shared kind of frustration that this market wasn't taking off more.

21:05We've both seen the value that can get delivered by doing journey management, right? But, you know, one, 2 % of companies are actually going there. And we were sort of bouncing ideas around. I said, why would that be? Why is it that despite Why all of the evidence for the value that can be delivered, so few are doing it. And Ray said, you know, maybe we should create an institute, a body that sort of helps the whole industry by sharing these stories of value so everyone knows it, by providing education of how to get there. And if you think of the journey space, there's nothing in the journey space that's dedicated it to the industry.

21:53Unlike lots of other industries, whether there are institutes and professional associations and so on, no one had ever done it in the journey space. I'll say that. Ray will now say, what was the little spark in there that gave him the idea of the institute? I think, to latch on to what Mark said, I think even a stronger word, it's disappointment. We worked our butts off. When you look at how successful we were compared to the VOC vendors that had much simpler solutions. It's like, what's going on? I think, and then when you start thinking about why that is, I think there's the combination of complexity of the problem we're trying to solve.

22:35You know, it's not doing a survey and getting a response to one survey and one touch point. It's really truly omni-channel journey behaviors, trying to understand that across all channels. But then, you know, I think with the Institute role, an issue was thought about is these silos created by vendors. You have journey mapping vendors. Then you have the Mark and I, they were journeylytics and journey orchestration vendors. And there was some like, okay, but, you know, journey orchestration is really next-based action, you know. And then you had the marketer generation companies like Adobe that's saying we have journeys.

23:10And, you know, you have Salesforce said that we are journeys, but they're really campaigns. and then you have VOC vendors that were talking about vendor and you talk about PECA systems that said their case management system was a journey system. So it was just a lot of confusion and I think we were very fortunate to be able to get an audience in the founders of the institute. They do the Semanticas, the Incubas, the Alterians and all of those that came together and saying, we agree. And it's interesting, the first meeting we had in Amsterdam in March, was it March, something like that? I thought it's going to be a technical meeting because I said we need to find ways to create a mechanism where these solutions can more technically, we're easily integrated with each other.

24:00Export a journey map into a journey solution, you know, an activation system, et cetera, et cetera. Very quickly, within the first two hours, no, we need to find a way to promote the industry to create confusion out of the terms that are being used. And I think that's where we are today. So, and so does that mean it's then, so it's about claiming or owning the narrative in many ways. Is that, is that right? Is that right? Cause it feels like that the technology capability is there, but actually you need to educate people and equip people with the right knowledge. It's almost going back to kind of like where we started is like, this is what journey management is.

24:44This is the possibility. This is like, it's not a process. You can go and control it, but there's a different way of thinking about it. And you have some semblance of control, but it's actually about the customer. And does it feel like that's the sort of thing that you're aiming at leaders and practitioners to try and expand their mind, as it were? it's certainly some of some of it is that trying to set um standards and definitions for these commonly used terms because you know the space is somewhat fragmented as Ray said with all lots of different players there's a whole set of core journey solution providers um even in there there's different types from mapping all the way through to you know optimization but then there's set of players in the broader ecosystem around there that either connect to journeys or talk about journeys.

25:34And every one of them has a sort of slightly different definition of what a customer journey is or what customer analytics might be. And let alone the technical standards of how they would work together and integrate, just even the words they use causes confusion. Causes confusion One of my favorite sayings, a confused customer never buys anything, right? And that definitely happens at senior levels in organizations. When they hear three different definitions of what a customer journey is, they're not going to buy a customer journey solution because they're not quite so sure. So definitely level one for us is setting some standards and definitions of what these things are that are industry-wide and independent of the vendors.

26:23Okay. But I would say that's just level one. And maybe, Andrew, to add what you asked earlier around, and I talked about the customer managed journey versus the managed customer journey. We even talked about it, is journey management the right term? Right. You know, like customer experience management, you know, and I would like to say an alternate term, it will not stick. if it's a journey enablement of an ecosystem. Because firstly, it's not a single solution. It is a set of solutions that all work together to enable journeys for customers. I think that's, for me, something interesting for us to drive over time.

27:05I think the other thing that we're struggling with is value. And one of the big things that Mark is driving is There's not enough proof that journey management as a philosophy and as a practice has tangible value. Very similar to what the CX space is struggling with. There's some really good books out recently on proving the value of CX. And I think that a big role for us in the Institute will be to be able to prove and have tangible proof of the value to customers and to brands by adopting the philosophies, practices, and concepts of journey management. yeah i mean i was just going to say the the um it feels like also that there's i mean to what you were saying kind of like ray is like i have this thing where you know every now and again somebody goes if i'm speaking to somebody they go like they choose me they go like adrian swinsko he's a customer experience expert i'm like no i'm not i think because you know and people might go oh you're being so that's all semantics or being pedantic or i'm like yeah but here's the fundamental philosophical point.

28:18It's like, how can you be an expert in somebody else's experience? I mean, you can facilitate, create the conditions that allow somebody to have the experience that they can, but you can go, you have two people that come at something and have had very, very different days or very, very, very different experiences and go through the same process and how they view it is going to be very different. And that's why I like to talk about experience enablement. No, no, I think that's fine because you're this, and that's why when I get to the point where I sometimes say slightly heretically going like, I wish the whole customer experience space would go away.

28:56Because actually, if you think about it, you can't do somebody else's experience if you agree with my kind of point. But what you can do is you can work really hard to serve or be in service to them to facilitate or enable that they have a positive experience with you. But there's no guarantee in any of that. Right. Right. Right. Yeah, it's like, it's the classic deliver an experience. Yeah. You can deliver an experience. You deliver a lot of things and maybe they create a good experience. Indeed. And I think that's, you've got to work hard and use kind of insights and kind of different, you know, all the tools that are at your behest to try and create the conditions that is going to, that was going to create the greatest likelihood that somebody is going to have a positive experience.

29:44And that's about it. And one of the things that makes it so hard, Adrian, is it's a long-term game. It's a long-term game to get it really right. And there's lots of evidence that an investment in customer centricity delivers huge returns for businesses, but it delivers those returns over a fairly long time period. and that's a hard thing for so many businesses so many businesses are driven by and everybody's incented by very short-term wins and short-term goals and that's one of the key things which is why our sort of first sort of outreach is to business leaders right to educate them on the things that they can do that invest in the long term.

30:38Now, immediately, it's a certain kind of business leader you're looking for there, who really is trying to shape their business to be different in five years time. And all the evidence is if you do these things right, you're going to double the growth rate of your competition. If you can take that long term view and start putting in place, the processes that build around the customer exactly as you've been describing. And then maybe just add to that, obviously, because I was at Medallia where they acquired ThunRed and we don't see any progress. I was at Qualtrics and they acquired UserMind and we don't see any progress.

31:19And I think that I come back to the concept of journey management is hard. And when you try and sell journey management as a philosophy that's a cross-organizational practice into a CX team that are generally underfunded and has one or two people in the team, it is deemed for failure. I think that's one of the things where Mark and I, with working with the founders, will make sure if we can prove the value and show the brands truly got value from adopting the practices, but it needed investment more than just technology, It's people, it's processes. I think that's something that I think our pursuit is over the next two years to show organizations you have to invest to get value.