Abhii Parakh
Appearances
Experts of Experience
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The brand is the promise, but the experience is the reality. We define customer experience as a sum of all interactions that a customer may have. So it's not just the call center. It's not just the digital experience. It's any experience.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Absolutely. I mean, storytelling is such a great way to convince people. Human beings have passed on information in the form of stories from prehistoric times. So storytelling is hugely important, actually a skill that we constantly strive to better within my team. through trainings and such, so important to communicating.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
I'll give you an example of storytelling, a really kind of interesting one. When we were first starting our transformation and we had that sort of forum of the top 40 leaders that I mentioned, we wanted to make it real. We wanted them to hear from real customers on what their level of emotion and relationship with Prudential was. Well, when we first started, we actually didn't know how to do that.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
We had no access to communicate with customers directly. We've obviously come a far way since then, but we went around asking our colleagues if they had friends or family that were Prudential customers that would be willing to talk to us. And this was 2021. So this was post-pandemic. Everybody was remote. We set up Zoom meetings for everybody. We recorded them in the comfort of their home.
Experts of Experience
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Stays together that video. And that was the first sort of customer video that we made where customers from all different areas of our businesses were able to talk about their relationship, what their pain points were, what they liked, what they didn't like. So really scrappy beginnings. Fast forward to today where we have access to customers on a daily basis.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
We are co-creating with them, testing with them. So we've come a far way, but from the beginning, storytelling has been a pretty important piece of the puzzle. Every quarter when we have our voice of customer meeting, we arm the employees who join with a QR code that they can scan and access all the different ways that they can hear customer stories, whether it's calls,
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
with customers, whether it's the voice of customer feedback that the customers, advisors and clients are sharing with us. And each one of those nuggets tells a story. So I think all of bringing the customer into the room, bringing that, making it real has always been really important.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Yeah. So some of that is also from prior experience. I've worked at other big companies and banks, for example, Citibank. We had a community like this. that was alive and thriving. And I knew the benefits that something like this could bring.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So we did invest, the company has invested in customer experience because it is such a strategic priority for us to deliver industry leading customer experiences. We invested in those capabilities and tools. We asked our customers with emails, whether they would like to participate in such a community.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
And so we recruited our customers into those communities and panels, and we refresh that every six months or yearly. We've actually seen so much engagement from our customers, because it's just a matter of asking, right? They're more than happy to be part of this story with such a strong brand. and help us help them.
Experts of Experience
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So now we have hundreds of customers from our life insurance business, from an annuities business. And not only that, we also have other forums with our advisors, for example, where we meet with them monthly in our businesses and we ask them and we share and communicate what's coming, what they can expect on the roadmap and things like that.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So there are multiple modes where we are listening to our customers today. So that's just one example.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
There actually have been a few. I'll share maybe one or two. One was from a customer in San Francisco who had received so much paper in the mail from us. Yeah. And it was such a disjointed experience between phone calls and paper that they actually had this email message.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
written to one of our presidents about how they're going to thank Prudential when the polar bears are dying and the ice caps are melting because of the amount of paper that was being sent to them. And they would much rather be communicated in digital ways. So that was a sort of call to action. And a really great story that made the rounds and really as a wake up call to say, what can we do?
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
And led to a multi-year investment and roadmap to digitize some of those and stop the paper. Because we want to be able to communicate to our customers in the mode of their preference. And the fact that our customers are actually asking for that just makes the case for us to invest in some of our digital capabilities.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Yeah. And these are long term relationships. This is not a apparel merchandise that you buy and you can switch to a different provider tomorrow. Right. This is a lifelong commitment because imagine a life insurance policy. A lot of our policies have been bought 30 years ago. Wow. Right. Because you buy life insurance for the long term.
Experts of Experience
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annuities are your life savings and, you know, people are living longer and longer. And we are at peak 65 where we have had, we've never had as many people turning 65 than we have today.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Yeah. Right.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
More people are living longer. They're retiring and they will live longer retired lives than any generation before them. So, um, We have to make sure we are there for them, not just for tomorrow or the day after, but for decades. So I think customers are more invested in that relationship because it is such a long term relationship.
Experts of Experience
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Yeah. And we do see our churn rates are actually very low single digits because of that sticky relationship. And we want to make sure that they're not with us just because it's a high switching cost, but because they actually enjoy being with Prudential. And just one point about feedback. You know, and I'm sure we'll talk about this more, but we ask and we're so happy that they give us.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So we ask and we receive. But we also want to understand what their needs are without having to ask or without having them telling us, because that's an extra step. We have so much information that we should be able to predict or in real time be able to say, this is what's going on. And can we take action on that quickly versus waiting for all the survey results to come out?
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So that's an important step we're taking in the future of customer experience that we're building.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Yeah. So as I said, surveys have been great. And I don't think surveys are bad. I don't think surveys are going to go away. I think you need to ask your customers. But that can't be the only way you understand what their needs are. Right. So that's the future that we're going is a not a post survey future, but a survey plus real time and predictive future.
Experts of Experience
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When I talk about real time, I talk about signals that you can get from how folks are experiencing your experience. experiences and channels in real time. So somebody is coming to our website, they get frustrated.
Experts of Experience
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Well, we should know that they're getting frustrated because there are various different indicators in that website that when their mouse is shifting places or they're, you know, rage clicking, all of those things are, it's actually a thing. It's a metric of rage clicking.
Experts of Experience
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So the data is there, right? It's up to us to listen to those signals in real time. And also, if someone has come to us once, come to us the two times, called us, there's definitely something going on that we can predict what their next need or step is going to be. Perfect example is tax season, right? It's so cyclical in nature. We don't need to wait for the customer to come to us.
Experts of Experience
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We can be proactive. We can be predictive. We know these people are going to come to us at a certain time. So we can expect... some interactions and plan ahead so we can deliver seamlessly. And actually speaking about tax season, that's exactly what we have done. We have proactively reached out to customers.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
We've integrated all the forms and all the documents that they will need during tax season. And we've been so ready that actually the incoming calls have gone down by 20%.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
In some cases. So we've seen a lot of benefits already of that predictive and proactive experience.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
That's actually just this year. Year over year, we've seen a 20% reduction.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Oh, my gosh. Yes, this is a classic. How much data is good data? And I think you can be drowning in metrics and not being able to take action. So that's a very important question. So the way I think about metrics is about business metrics. So all of your metrics should be put in context of the funnel because you could boost traffic, but then none of that traffic converts. right?
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So it doesn't matter in isolation, I should say, what your traffic growth is in isolation, what your engagement rate is in isolation, what your conversion rate from visits to leads looks like, just as an example on the website that my team manages, right? What really matters is have you ultimately increased the contribution to the bottom line, right? Have you taken out steps and
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
within the servicing process, great, but has that increased calls, in which case, bad. So it really matters what the ultimate business metric is that you're trying to influence. And all of those early indicators should be put into context in the funnel, whether you're trying to save costs or you're trying to boost revenue or you're trying to increase experience.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
All of those things have to be looked in tandem with each other and in the context of the end-to-end funnel. So that would be my advice.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Yeah, actually, our customer experience transformation has been really successful, if I can say so. And we have the sort of proof points, right, on that. So I would say in terms of just hard metrics, and I know that customer experience, you know, there's this whole debate of... Which metrics to use? Is NPS still the right metric? Is NPS outdated?
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
There's so much customer experience, social media debate. A lot of that fueled by influencers who want to be controversial.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
But look, from a practitioner perspective, my advice is the following. Just when it comes to the debate on NPS or any other metric, just pick a metric, right? Make sure that it's consistent. Make sure that you have benchmarks. If that metric is NPS and it works for you, great. And you can get buy-in on that better. Pick a different metric.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
If you can have consistency, it makes sense for your business and you can benchmark, then do that. But you need some kind of measurement to be able to quantify. The nuance in that is that with any metric, don't just run after the metric, right? Because that can lead to some adverse behaviors as well. Make sure that you ultimately are taking action. Are you making the experience better?
Experts of Experience
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The metrics are secondary and actually a guiding force to be able to do that. But it's all that under the hood drivers and the verbatims and what are people talking about that really matters. So that's sort of just my overall disclaimer. As I say, our metrics have seen a lot of improvement. So those are the indicators that I can talk about. But over two years,
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
year ending 2024, which is the most recent information we have, our core CX metrics have jumped 138%. So huge improvement. In that space, our digital experiences have never been easier to use. We have hit record highs in that area, about a double digit growth in two years. And what's even more exciting, as I spoke about that cultural change that we were after, our employees, right?
Experts of Experience
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We do a pulse survey on customer experience with our employees every year. I was honestly shocked to see this metric, but of the employees that we surveyed, 94% know what they can do to meet our customer and their goals. So they know what their needs are and what they can do to improve and deliver on those needs.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So that's really encouraging and a really leading indicator that says, okay, folks know what they can do. So we're gonna keep doing the right things. Our culture is on the right track. So we feel really excited about that. And aside from that, we're also really proud, as you mentioned in the beginning of the call, of the external validation.
Experts of Experience
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It never hurts to win awards for all of this improvement. Forrester recognized us last year as the most customer-obsessed enterprise in America. So again, you think about insurance, you're thinking about 150 years, but how we've embraced cultural change, how we've embraced technology and the excitement and momentum around that from the top down and bottoms up is really encouraging.
Experts of Experience
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And those things are important because they fuel the fire to keep going.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Yeah, absolutely. We have seen that. I mean, we've seen folks... In the verbatim comments that we get, right, in our surveys, for example, in the call center as well, we are getting that feedback around our improvements because we have made changes where people had trouble understanding the person on the other line, for example, because of a difference in culture or a difference in sort of accent.
Experts of Experience
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We've made some changes there. So now people are able to actually understand directly based on the feedback, have a better conversation, a more meaningful interaction. And we're seeing that coming through in the feedback as well.
Experts of Experience
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Yeah, I mean, I would say I'm going to talk on behalf of a lot of my peers and colleagues. All of us are working together to drive this sort of AI assisted future. I would say really in 2023 was the year of exploration. So a lot of fact finding. It was also the year I think everybody woke up to the reality of how far the technology had come.
Experts of Experience
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So 2023, we were exploring a lot of different solutions to improve productivity, to assist our employees. 2024 was the year where we really piloted and very, very rapidly scaled that up to a lot of our employees. And we saw a lot of engagement, a lot of adoption, and really focused on the employee side of the equation. So that's really where we began and started to see a lot of improvement.
Experts of Experience
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I should caveat that with the types of AI that I'm talking about. So the timeline I just discussed is about Gen AI. Yeah. There's obviously been traditional AI sort of in the machine learning space that Prudential has used, right?
Experts of Experience
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We've been using that for a very, very long time, such as in our underwriting function, to be able to use models and big data and be able to make sense of that in real time so we can improve the experience, improve the speed to market, and improve the accuracy of decisioning. of the life insurance application process.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
And then this is the year that we are obviously looking at agentic AI and a lot of heavy exploration going on in that space.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
I mean, of course, you know, you have the human factor when you introduce any new technology. It is very natural for people to feel all sorts of emotion with any new technology that's introduced. There's always this cycle that I have seen personally of, you know, first folks are going to be, and myself included, right?
Experts of Experience
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You're going to be apathetic because you don't really understand the technology. You're going to have anxiety and fear. around using this technology and what it means for me and my job. And then there's curiosity. It's like, oh, this seems interesting. I want to learn more. Then you start engaging, the light bulbs go off, and then you get that adoption.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
The trick is how quickly you can move folks from apathy and anxiety into adoption.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
We provide life insurance and retirement security and advice to 50 million customers across 50 countries globally. They actually had this email written to one of our presidents about how they're going to thank Prudential when the polar bears are dying and the ice caps are melting.
Experts of Experience
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Right. And that's what I'm really proud about. Within Prudential, we've been able to do that. So a couple of things on that. So those were some of the challenges, but... Kudos to our company, kudos to sort of my colleagues and the team for embracing all of this so quickly. I would say, number one, From the top down, early on, there was a lot of curiosity, right?
Experts of Experience
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And a lot of embrace of what this technology could do. So I think the faster you can move the higher ranks of the company from that apathy into curiosity, and our leadership was there. So kudos to the Prudential leadership for that curiosity, for that engagement. Second, I would say the way that we've done this is not through some, oh, this is the AI team.
Experts of Experience
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This is going to be centrally managed, another governance, bureaucracy, none of that, right? This has been a very democratized process. Of course, you need some central controls. We are a regulated company. We care deeply about our customers' finances. So you have to be able to have all the right controls in place, the risk assessments and all of those things. But-
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
to be able to say to every function and team, go ahead, experiment, right? Try new things. Let's see what we find out. That has been, I think, such an unlock for Prudential and a good playbook for new technologies as they come out, because marketing to HR, to all different sort of functions have been able to experiment very quickly.
Experts of Experience
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Third, I would say we are very fortunate that we already have set up a ventures team. So we have a team in Palo Alto that is very tech forward, always on the bleeding edge. And they have a whole ecosystem and partnerships with startups who are always on the, you know, sort of the next best thing.
Experts of Experience
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So they've been able to bring into Prudential that external point of view and introduce us to a lot of startups as well. So there's been a lot of different things that have, I think, worked in that. And then I just from the human element, More of show and less of tell, right? In the show versus tell spectrum.
Experts of Experience
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Once you put the tool in the hands of the people, you'll be amazed at all the different uses that folks will start coming up with. So when I talk to my people, I'm always asking, like, are you using AI? And they said, yes. And I said, what kind of tools are you using? And
Experts of Experience
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I was amazed at what tools that we thought people would use AI for and actually the use cases have proliferated across the board.
Experts of Experience
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I think that's a really good way to drive innovation through experimentation. However, we are running a business. I think use cases... forecasting what the sort of business case is for these technologies is really important. But what happens is you actually surpass that over time, right? Because now all these people are using it for all kinds of different things.
Experts of Experience
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But when you start, you do need to be very clear on what primary use case you're trying to assess here and then see if that's working or not. But of course, we've been rewarded multifold by having this open and empowered approach.
Experts of Experience
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Yeah, I mean, I would say in general, if we just take the broad view of experience, employee experience, customer experience, I don't think there's one area of the company that is untouched, right? From a use case perspective. Of course, some areas like marketing have been super early adopters. I think Gen AI lends itself really well to marketing, right?
Experts of Experience
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Because it's about content, content generation, right? So we're all familiar. We've used chat to create new content or even in our personal lives or create some imagery. So, of course, from a marketing perspective, that's been really good to assist with first drafts of content for our marketing assets. And we've seen a lot of productivity gains there.
Experts of Experience
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Our insights can be generated 50 percent faster, for example. So half the time productivity has gone through the roof. in customer experience. We're using it for user research. So we have these communities of customers now that we were talking about earlier in the call. We do focus groups with them, right?
Experts of Experience
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So video interviews, we see how they are reacting to certain new experiences that we're building. And it used to take weeks in some cases to synthesize all of those video interviews and drive those insights and then say, what actions would we recommend? Now we can do that in hours.
Experts of Experience
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AI can actually very accurately synthesize all of that information, actually even recommend what actions might be helpful based on what customers are telling us. We are doing the same thing on the voice of customer for all the hundreds of thousands of customer feedback that we get. And then I spoke about HR. We have been using AI for coaching.
Experts of Experience
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And again, that's not my area of expertise, but in the company, such an interesting use case to have an AI be able to have conversations with employees, difficult conversations with employees and coach them to perform better. So lots of, lots of different use cases have come up.
Experts of Experience
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For those living under a rock, Gen AI is about generation of new content, right? So whether it's research content, whether it's marketing ideas, whether it's imagery or even video, which the technology is moving so fast that it's pretty incredible. The voice and video elements change. that you can now generate is just mind blowing, but that's, it's all about generating it.
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It's based on, you know, patterns in existing data that can be used to create new and unleash creativity. Um, so Gen AI is actually pretty creative. Um, so, so that's the sort of Gen AI space. Agent tech is autonomous task execution.
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To do so, you need context, you need memory, you need decision-making capabilities. So that's where agent tech comes in. It can autonomously deliver on outcomes for certain tasks. So this is not predetermined tasks and sequences, but it can actually decide what it needs to do. And it can talk to other agents who are specialized in tasks. And you can have all these virtual tasks
Experts of Experience
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employees that are working behind the scenes to drive outcomes for you but I think it is important at least in this stage of the game that you don't give them too much autonomy and then there is a human in the loop who can still monitor
Experts of Experience
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Yeah, you know, my ideal state for agentic AI is this thing I call the one conversation solution. So you don't have to go to different places. You don't have to call and meet an IVR. You know where to go. You can have one conversation about it and it's handled and it's done. And you can go back to the things that are most important to you.
Experts of Experience
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So on the customer's experience perspective, I think that we've always been on the quest to make it as easy as possible and as enjoyable as possible. But we've had all these different channels that, you know, and when I say we, I just mean in general in the universe, not just Prudential. Different channels are owned by different people and run differently.
Experts of Experience
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And so there's this sort of omni-channel dream that has always eluded even the best companies.
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And I think with agentic AI, we have that opportunity where the service agents and the digital agents in whatever modality we choose, whether it's voice or text, but you can have one conversation and then the army of agents can coordinate, have the context on all the previous conversations with this customer, have that memory and also have the autonomy to be able to then deliver on the outcomes that they're after.
Experts of Experience
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I mean, I think the technology is a little bit over promissory, if I'm being honest at this moment. Every company last year overnight became a Gen AI company. And every company this year has overnight become an agentic AI company. So while I appreciate that everybody's embracing technology really quickly, I just have not seen... the agentic side of things delivering on the promise so far.
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A lot of that also has to do with how perfect the data has to be for that to happen, right? With Gen AI, I think it could happen much faster because it can be a point solution. You can point it at a PDF or a huge library of research or scripts that you have within your company, and then it can generate based on those patterns. But with
Experts of Experience
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agentic AI, there are so many different systems and data points that have to connect with each other that I think That is the biggest challenge that I'm seeing for these agents to autonomously be able to go and get the task done. So I think we are looking at maybe another one to two years before this really becomes commonplace. I think there will be point solutions.
Experts of Experience
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which you can point for specific things that live in a one-dimensional space. If all your data, all your stack is in one system of record, then I think it's going to be much more effective. But for truly autonomous systems where the customer can ask anything and they can go through different places, that orchestration, I think it's going to take some time for the kinks to be hashed out.
Experts of Experience
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I would say that some of the Gen AI stuff, especially when it comes to being employee facing, but also customer facing is ready, right? We're doing that. It's ready. We're already in the middle of that phase.
Experts of Experience
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I think with agentic AI, if you want to, this is the year that you should be trying and experimenting with low risk use cases, which mostly might be in the form of internal employee assistive use cases. But if you have low risk use cases, which are heavily content oriented, for example, you have a lot of content about your products and your products are complicated.
Experts of Experience
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Thanks for having me.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
You might have an agentic AI system that may be able to go through that, answer questions, but also then connect you with the right people autonomously and maybe even ask you questions and give you some answers around financial calculations, all of that being in the realm of guidance and not advice, that could be an interesting one where you can do it with low risk.
Experts of Experience
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But I think anything that has to do with real money moving and transactions happening can be really risky for where we are right now, if there is no human in the loop.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So I'm not sure if this answer is going to make it in your podcast or not. But because it might be a little controversial, but look, I think AI is not the answer to every problem. I think when it comes to data, there's two things I would say. One, to understand your customers better, to segment them and to house all that data. That technology has been available to us for a very long time, right?
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
But the problem with, especially with companies who've been around for a very long time is that the kind of systems we have and the number of systems we have and the number of places where that data exists has been the issue. But there are existing solutions for defragmenting that data and housing it in domains to make it more useful.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So I think even it's as a precursor to AI for AI to be more meaningful instead of AI solving that problem, getting your data problem sorted out is really important. I don't think you need AI to do that. You have existing tools to be able to do that. So you're ready for AI because then the AI will be much more powerful on top of that data. Now, I do think that being said, that problem is so big.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
And when I talk to peers outside of Prudential, everybody struggles with that. And nobody has cracked it, right? Because the data is so much and it's in so many different places. So if there is a company that can actually make sense of that data without huge multi-year projects for data to be sorted out and that layer to be all perfect, because perfect data is... maybe just a pipe dream, right?
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So if you could use AI to actually be that layer so that you don't have to go through those multi-year, huge millions of dollars spent to make that data better, I think that could be really cool and a really good use case for AI to help with data.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Great question. And actually, colleges should be teaching customer experience because it's not a formal discipline in colleges, but it's definitely a formal discipline in the business world. So I think we need to bridge that gap. We define customer experience as a sum of all interactions that a customer may have with a company. So it's not just the call center.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Look, I mean, world is such a complicated place today and everything that happens outside of the business world impacts the business world. So I think AI, just like any other technology, can be a force for good or a force for bad.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Cybersecurity, fraud, all of those things that we have had in the past and just gotten more complex and harder to deal with are probably going to get harder and more complex to deal with with the advent of AI, and they probably are, right? You're seeing that in your personal life with all the scams, and you're already seeing that In the business world.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So my skepticism lies not maybe specific to AI, but with any technology, what controls, what regulations, how is it going to be, what laws and policing mechanisms are going to come up? and maybe standards internationally that will help AI be a force for good.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So skepticism, but also hope, as we've done in the past with all technologies, we've standardized, we've put laws in practice so that, and that there are mechanisms and agencies in place to be able to enforce the goodness of the technology. So my hope is the same for AI.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Exactly.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Exactly. And I was around for the Y2K paranoia in the year 2000 because everything was, I think, in COBOL. And they said, like, there's some issue where the number of digits can't, like, go beyond that. But anyway, it was all this mass hysteria that everything is going to go bad and the nukes are going to get fired and the world's going to come to an end. But of course, that was not the case.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
The human race is more resilient than we give it credit for sometimes.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Wow. Okay. So I love the Marriott brand personally. We are all in on the Marriott brand. I think they have really expanded their footprint, acquired a lot of different properties, and we've been able to stay at some really, really good ones. And I think some of their brands, especially if you have the opportunity to stay at a Ritz Carlton or a St.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Regis, I mean, I think those brands really understand the customer experience, they remember who you are and you feel really wanted. And they're always happy that you're there. So I think that experience has been a really good one. But I would say in the day-to-day life as well, I think Costco is another one that is not that high-end. And it's very, very loved. And they're not luxe.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
They are not high-end. But they know who they are. And they know what their customers want, right? So the Costco customer is very different than like the... whatever higher end grocery store, like a Whole Foods customer. And you know what to expect and you're getting what you need. So I think those are the secrets.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
It's not just the digital experience. It's any experience. It could be a marketing email, a brand experience. All of those things together are experiences. Combined and together, the customer experience. And the way I always describe it is the brand is the promise, but the experience is the reality.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Well, I mean, it's real. Employee experience and customer experience go hand in hand, which comes down a lot of times to, well, obviously having the right talent, but empowering your talent, right? So having not a tight leash, but a very loose string with your employees and their experience is a very good thing.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So you hire the right people, trust them to do the right thing, democratize the tools like we talked about with AI, and let them uncover and unlock the potential.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Thank you so much for having me. This has been such a great conversation.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So I've always been passionate about design, about experience. Before leading this team, which I started in this role four years ago, I had various opportunities to interact with the customer experience team, with the design side of things. I was just fascinated about how they use empathy as their superpower, how they get to make things easier for customers.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
And there's such an art and science to make these experiences consistently enjoyable. And there's so much power that can be unlocked if you do it right, but also so much emotion and frustration that can be unlocked if you don't pay attention to it. It is such an important aspect in our personal lives when we have a good experience and then we recommend that company.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Because of the amount of paper that was being sent to them. So we created a network of clients. champions, hundreds of customer advocates within the company. Forrester recognized us last year as the most customer obsessed enterprise in America. You can't survive for 150 years. You can't thrive as a company for 150 years without that culture of customer obsession.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
When I go to a really nice hotel and you discover a really nice restaurant and you were wowed by the service, those experiences matter and it builds word of mouth, it builds recommendation. So I've always been passionate about this space. But then four years ago, when the opportunity was knocking on my door, I jumped at it because I had so much passion for the area.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
And it's been really amazing to be able to lead such a talented group of people so that we can make an impact on Prudential's customer experience.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
Yeah, exactly. It was almost exactly four years ago, actually. So where were we, right? What was the state of CX? I would say we had the right aspirations at the company. We actually had a documented cultural aspiration, which we have today as well, just to be customer obsessed, right? You can't survive for 150 years. You can't thrive as a company for 150 years, which is what Prudential has done.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
We turned 150 years old this year. without that aspiration, right? Without that culture of customer obsession. So we had that aspiration, but I think it was hard to quantify that. It was hard. It wasn't tangible. What that really meant or how we were doing. So when we looked towards measurement,
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
We found that we were measuring our experience with customers in many different ways, pretty inconsistent across the board. So again, apples and oranges and how things were and very hard to get a full consistent picture across the board. We had some basic capabilities, right?
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
But we didn't have direct access to our customers to co-create with them and see what they wanted from us, but also predict what they might need. So there were pockets of goodness. There were areas where it was working, but it wasn't homogenous. It wasn't consistent, especially globally. So our measurement was inconsistent, right? But part of that was also because our incentive model
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
was unclear, right? It was unclear why you would focus on customer experience. And then all of that together, I think, was a little bit of shaky confidence because we weren't sure where we stood on customer experience.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So Prudential is a 150-year-old company, like you said. We provide life insurance and retirement security and advice to 50 million customers across 50 countries globally. So we're huge. We're also a top 10 asset manager, which is not a very popularly known fact. So we manage wealth for huge organizations, governments, We have a lot of clients across the world that invest with Prudential.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So leading customer experience in Prudential, we create experiences that meet customer needs and business objectives. Our customers are defined as not just our end customers, but also our advisors, intermediaries, and brokers that help us distribute our products. to our customers, and then ultimately the clients from an institutional perspective that we work with as well.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So for example, group insurance would have employers that we consider our customers, our clients, but we also look at the employees of those employers as being our customers. So pretty nuanced and complicated, multi-layered stakeholders. Mm-hmm. So that's the first part of your question is how big Prudential is. A pretty big, global and complex organization.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
In such a large organization, you can't do it centrally, right? Of course, you can spark the fire. Because our transformation has always been about embedding customer centricity into the DNA of the company, how we work, how we make decisions and so forth. Culture is made up of beliefs, of rituals and artifacts. Right.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So if you have those three things running, you'll have the engine to keep the momentum going. When we think about beliefs, right? At Prudential, we do believe that a focus on our customers and their needs and their experience will drive growth. That is the cornerstone. So you have to have the belief and it starts at the very top of the company. But you have to engage the entire company, right?
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
all sorts of emotion with any new technology that's introduced. The trick is how quickly you can move folks from apathy and anxiety into adoption.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
A big global company. So from the top of the house perspective, when we started this, we brought the top 40 leaders of the company together every six to eight weeks, right? to talk about this belief system, to talk about what our strategy would be and align everybody on a set of common goals, common initiatives that would spark this movement. The second thing we did was launch a champions program.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So this is about engaging the rest of the company. We have that top level sponsorship. How do we engage the rest of the company? Of course, a small central team is not gonna be able to do that. So we created a network of champions.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
They're called the customer experience champions, hundreds of customer advocates within the company who are driving advocacy for the customer, what the customer needs are, and different ways that employees within the company can get engaged. with this movement for customer centricity. So those were the two big cultural ways that we embedded the belief around customer centricity within the company.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
But then we designed rituals and artifacts too, right? So rituals like every quarter, we not only have an earnings call for external shareholders and investors, we also host an internal all employee VOC call. A voice of customer call that is attended by thousands of employees where cross-functional leaders, digital, business, service, tech, ops, sales, right? You name it.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
They share what they're hearing from our customers. And what are we doing? What are we planning on how we're going to deliver on those needs? So we have a really good forum every quarter to do that. We also have an annual conference internally where we bring external speakers in, internal leaders. We celebrate our progress and we reinvigorate our momentum for the following year.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
And regular monthly tactical meetings to look at feedback from customers and create strategic action plans with owners and timelines that then feeds into prioritization. So a lot of different rituals, artifacts have been put into place and a network of champions that keeps that belief alive.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
And I would say some of the language is internal, right? As we think about these things, what our philosophy is, how we're gonna approach it. We didn't get it all right in the first go. This has been an iterative process and we've learned a lot throughout the transformation. But if you look at what makes culture, it is those three things. You need to have a strong belief in any culture, really.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
I mean, even if you're in your religious community and you have a culture or your national identity, there are certain beliefs that you hold sacrosanct, right? There are certain rituals that you go to church every Sunday or wherever your place of worship is. And you have artifacts, like you have a textbook that has the rules and the, you know, everything is documented and you follow that.
Experts of Experience
Make Your Business Immortal: Create Customer Advocates & Unlock Predictive Metrics!
So I think it's drawn from real life and it works really well in the real life business setting as well.