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“I’m excited to introduce our next step in this journey, the Webex AI agent. This is currently in testing, and will be available to our customers in the first calendar quarter of 2025. This AI agent brings together conversational intelligence and generative AI to deliver natural conversations with hyper-personalization.”
Those words come from Cisco, a digital communications and technology company; especially from Anurag Dhingra, SVP and GM of Cisco Collaboration. The words sounded strangely familiar. That same month of October, we had heard of similar plans from Oracle, which also serves primarily business, and Zendesk, which serves mid-sized business customers and has a smaller offering focused more on customer experience.
Something was in the air. On the other hand, the goal of automating the customer experience (including automating the work of service representatives) proved too ambitious. At the same time, if everyone starts doing it, it will soon be table stakes.
But is it a realistic goal? And does the customer experience really boil down to service (or support or success)? We spoke to an expert, Isabelle Zdatny, head of thought leadership at the Qualtrics XM Institute.
Defining experience management
First, it helps to clarify the relationship between Qualtrics, a knowledge management software vendor, and the Institute. The first thing you should know is that the Institute is product-agnostic. “Our role is like a think tank within Qualtrics,” Zdatny said. “We focus on CX and EX [employee experience] professionals and providing them with the information, processes and principles they need to be successful in their role – enhancing their personal skills and helping to build an effective and sustainable knowledge management system. Unlike other experts within Qualtrics, we are less customer-focused and more focused on building the category – what is experience management and what do people need to know to do it well?”
The XM Institute was founded in 2018 when Qualtrics acquired the Temkin Group, a retail consulting firm founded by Bruce Temkin, whom Zdatny calls “the god of customer experience.” He has been with Temkin Group since 2013.
Zendesk’s goal of providing AI agents across all channels, working independently or in collaboration with humans to answer customer questions, is an approach it calls “customer experience management.” Sure, Zendesk believes that customer experience “refers to every interaction between a business and its customers,” but the definition of its new capabilities always seems to circle back to the call center or digital customer service channels; the same can be said about announcements from Oracle and Cisco. Isn’t that a small idea?
“That’s right,” said Zdatny, “because that’s just putting out the fire.” Information management is more than responding to customer complaints. You have limited resources as an organization. There are probably thousands of problems that you can go and fix. Information management will help you figure out where to focus, where to give attention and resources. And it’s not just fixing what’s broken,” he emphasized. “It’s about how we deliver emotional, innovative experiences that will help us stand out in a crowded marketplace.”
What does Zdatny think about the customer (and the job)? He had two definitions, the first “according to the student” which was used within the Institute; the second, one used in conversation with the C-suite. First: “Drive discipline using a continuous flow of information about how customers and employees think, feel and behave. It is a systematic business practice, not a collection of isolated activities.”
Second, and simpler: “Understanding and optimizing the customer and employee experience.”
How should experience management develop within organizations? “What we’re seeing in first-tier organizations is a different approach,” Zdatny said. “Product, sales. “What makes a good program is a central team that is able to integrate and coordinate experiences across the organization; you call a contact center or walk into a store, you have the same experience.” For very small companies, he said, assigning responsibility for finding information to one person can work well.
The key to improving the customer experience, as Qualtrics has long emphasized, is to collect feedback. That doesn’t mean it’s straightforward. “Early stage CX programs are very responsive. Unfortunately, they don’t take much action based on that response. They collect a lot of information but they don’t use that information to make changes,” explained Zdatny. “A functional CX team has that data and analytics but also other support functions like experience design and change management. The answer is basic but you can’t have an effective experience program if the information is just passed over the wall for other teams to deal with.”
Dive deeper: Zendesk complements CX with AI and voice
Road to fully automated experience
Perhaps a simple solution of centralizing and continuously improving CX, whether in a broad sense or in a narrow sense of support and service, solves many of these challenges. That’s an idea passionately promoted by Jeff Wartgow, VP product manager, Oracle CX services. But he admits it’s a matter of moving forward.
First comes improving service by switching from traditional chatbots to conversational AI. Second, improving the performance of human service workers by providing them with AI support (or, indeed, assistants). Third and fourth: improving performance by automating service processes and transforming service through automated application programs. I asked Wartgow to distinguish between the latter two.
The third paragraph says: “I know how to fix this, I’ll automatically figure out how to fix it.” Fourth: “What if I don’t know how to fix it, can I automatically program how to fix it?” In other words, it’s the difference between using AI to make an informed answer to a service issue and using AI to get an answer to a service issue.”
One challenge businesses will face in pursuing this approach is that it will need to have a knowledge base for AI agents to be trained effectively. Over the past two years, Wartgow said, Oracle has completely rebuilt the knowledge base in Oracle Fusion Cloud. “Say that there are 15 service requests and we prepared them all in the same way. Are we just going to turn that into an informational article? Just press a button and genAI will write the article and put it in the database.”
Wartgow acknowledges that the knowledge base will need to be updated regularly and says Oracle has a way of “putting clean water in the fish tank.” Oracle’s knowledge base can also import large amounts of legacy information, even hidden in large manuals, and create knowledge articles tailored to specific tasks. “We had to do all this first before we started talking about these agents,” he said. Oracle will encourage clients to use Oracle’s knowledge base instead of using internal alternatives as the primary source of truth for Oracle service agents.
Dig deeper: Oracle aims to automate the entire customer service lifecycle
A perfect experience
When asked, Oracle, like Zendesk, will admit that the customer experience is not reduced to the service experience. “I’m a service guy at Oracle,” says Wartgow, “so I talk a lot about service. But 70% of the interactions a customer will have, whether it’s B2C or B2B, will be with a service department. But I don’t feel like I’m talking to a brand agency, I feel like I’m talking to a brand. I have to be able to switch from sales, to action, to marketing conversation as quickly as possible.”
So, Oracle and Zendesk have a blueprint for an almost completely automated future, at least in the customer service part of the experience. How will that sit in a world where the customer experience is so much more than that? “Consumers’ concern about having someone to connect to is the only concern that increased last year and it was more than 50% who were concerned,” said Zdatny, referring to a study by the XM Institute (registration required).
Indeed, he points out that there are regulations in Europe that say you have to facilitate access to the person. “I understand from the company’s point of view that it works best if you divert calls away from the more expensive call centers. Right now, consumers are clearly saying it’s not what they want. “
But Zdatny admits it’s hard to say what consumers (or B2B clients) will want three years from now, when AI agents become better at their jobs. “In the long run, that’s the way we’re going. “In the short term, I think a lot of companies have gone out because of their skiing,” he said.
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