Leading with Curiosity, Commitment, and Connection

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Welcome to a special episode of Experience Action.
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Now, customer experience is built by leaders who are bringing curiosity, courage, and a commitment to making things better for customers and for people delivering those experiences every day.
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And today I'm so happy we're highlighting several women who are doing exactly that.
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In this episode, you'll hear powerful insights from Amy Climer, Ovetta Sampson, Camille Kremer, Neen James, and Brooke Sellas.
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Their ideas span creativity, leadership focus, and the human side of experience, reminding us that great customer experience starts with how we lead, collaborate, and think differently.
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I'm excited to share these moments with you, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
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I know so many amazing creative women who are leading not only in customer experience, but in all the work that they do.
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I hope you enjoy these conversations and look forward to more.
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I am delighted to invite my friend Dr.
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Amy Climer to the stage here.
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Hi, Amy.
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I had some fun picking topics for us because I thought about like what is innovation really?
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It's trying things, it's getting out there, it's exploring what could be next or what should be next, even.
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And so I found a few headlines that I thought would be fun to explore.
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This headline says turning screen time into seamless personalized shopping, the future of in-car commerce.
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And that stuck out to me for a couple of reasons.
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One is when was the last time you were driving and were involved with commerce, like in the moment, right?
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Like, are we doing that?
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Maybe we are and we shouldn't be.
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But this really is thinking about the screens that a lot of cars have now, the way AI is introduced.
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And so the concept here wasn't really about what we might be familiar with, with like if you're using a Google Maps, sometimes it says, hey, here's a gas station nearby.
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But this is more about integrating that with the actual car um electronics and uh wayfinding and all that, where it says, Oh, you're a little low on gas right now.
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So it knows the information about you in your car.
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And it says, if you want to, there's this, you know, you're in this traffic jam, why don't you just pull off, have a cup of coffee while you gas up your car or charge up your car, as the case may be.
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Yeah, I can see where, you know, maybe if you're traveling and you're in a new place that you've never been and you might turn on, like, hey, give me recommendations for cool cafes or something, and it was able to learn your type of preferences, then that could be really helpful.
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I I think the interesting thing about this, and I know with your background, Jeannie, and consumer experience and marketing, like this is a constant tug, is this feels like something that's very good for the company that's advertising, but not necessarily very good for the consumer.
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It makes me think of like those gas station pumps where TV talking.
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Yeah, and then we're just like, oh my gosh, seriously, we do not need to constantly be bombarded.
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And if there's a mute button on it, I will push it or just try to walk away.
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Um but I I wonder how can if people the companies who are using this, how can they do it in a way that's actually helpful for the driver?
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And to me, it almost gets into like a little bit of an ethical issue of you know, how much are you going to be bombarding people?
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And is it just about getting them to buy, or is it about really nurturing a relationship with them?
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But I also was thinking, you know, going back to like what is valuable for the driver, the consumer.
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I wonder, you know, instead of saying like, hey, pull over to this gas station and get your, you know, the new Snickers flavor or whatever, like what if it's hey, there's a there's a traffic jam coming up that you know might be a little bit stressful.
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Would you like me to play some calming music?
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I love that.
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Or hey, you're in the midst of a traffic jam, it's gonna be a while.
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Would you like me to to lead you through a breathing exercise?
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Or even better, you're like, hey, we noticed your heart rate's going up.
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I guess eventually it could do that.
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Yeah, connect it to your to your health watch.
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And yeah, exactly.
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I love that idea.
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I think there's some ways to use this technology that's like truly beneficial.
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Yes.
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Not just like, oh cool, I got a new type of coffee or new Snickers bar, you know, whatever it is.
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Um yeah, so that would be really interesting to see is who's gonna get really creative.
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I love that.
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Can I add one more thing?
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Yeah.
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In so in my book, I talk about the definition of creativity because we use this word a lot.
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And that's so the definition that I use is that creativity is novelty that is valuable.
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And I would definitely say this counts for novel, right?
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Like this is something that we really maybe that's happening a little bit, but not much.
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It's very different, it's new, it's unique.
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That's really cool.
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And then my question is, is it valuable?
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Right.
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And that's of course, that's also in the eye of the beholder, right?
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Like it might be really valuable to the company, but not so much to the consumer.
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And so I would just encourage companies to think about that is how can they make it truly valuable?
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We are diving in with my very special co-host, Ovetta Sampson.
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Ovetta, it's so good to see you.
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I've known Ovetta for a million years, and you are one of the first people who really tapped into the power of AI and also the warnings about it, what we can do, some of the things that we need to be aware of.
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I know that's that a lot of your um listeners and people who are turning tuning in have heard about generative AI, I'm assuming.
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And that's when um AI models generate or even create new text content, anything that people can engage with nowadays.
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And chatbots once the purview of Alexa, Alexa, Alexa, have now turned into.
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You just turned on a bunch of speakers.
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I don't know if you know.
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Like now I know I turned on a bunch of speakers where you had to repeat yourself, you had to like frustratingly talk to them because of generative AI, they can have conversations and seem as if they understand us and can engage with us on an almost imperceptible human level, right?
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And for those of you who are not tech savvy, uh the blade runner test, right?
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Like so these chatbots seem as if they're human, but the problem is they're not.
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And the problem is they're not even close to understanding us.
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What they are are probabilistic systems who base their responses on the probability of what they say is correct.
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So when you ask a chatbot a question, what that chatbot is doing is going through all the training data that it has been in that has been inputted into the model system by a human, labeled by a human, and described by a human to the chatbot what it is, and then doing a statistical probability model to say what you're asking will is once a response in this outcome.
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And because it's a probable probabilistic system, it will be wrong.
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And so chatbots will give you what they're calling the industry hallucinations and what my mother would call lies.
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It's not because it's intentionally trying to deceive you, but it is because of how it's built and how it works.
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So companies who decide to use these chatbots, if they decide to set it and forget it, they will get problems like this.
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And what's going to happen, a la Google, and its first release of Gemini giving you Indian and Black popes, right?
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Yeah.
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Um, what's gonna happen is you're gonna have to go back through your system and figure out why your chatbot made that mistake.
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The problem is your customers may not give you that grace period.
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So you need to install rigorous testing.
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And even to the point of what I it's called adversarial testing in the industry, but I'm calling it Mike Tyson proof, right?
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Like it needs to be aggressive, you need to beat up your AI chat bot to ensure that it doesn't give you these wayward outcomes.
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Yep.
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And I think with this story in particular, one of the things that struck me was like it's one thing if you hear from one customer, right?
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It's one thing if you hear from like that's a red flag.
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That's a that's something you can say, oh, what's going on?
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It's another when you hear from a bunch.
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And so that tells them
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I also think your example is an example of AI exacerbating and underlying customer experience issue.
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So if you read some of the comments of the people on that Reddit thread who said that they were leaving and stuff, it wasn't just what the chatbot was saying.
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It was this overall view that the company was trying to corner the market on them.
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And then the chatbot's new policy was just an example along another list and examples of that customer not treating or of that company not treating them well.
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You are absolutely right.
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You are absolutely right.
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So I think if you are if you if you add AI to bad customer service, you will get outside customer service issues, right?
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Well, it it all goes with
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give you an outcome, but adding AI will give you an outside scaled customer service problem.
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And you know, what we talk about a lot is that every step of the customer journey is either building or eroding trust.
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Correct.
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And so if they've already eroded all that trust through other experiences, and then this happens, that is absolutely something.
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But I think one of the things that I wish more customer experience leaders would kind of embrace is this idea that to your point, you can't set it and forget it.
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You need to keep oversight on it, you need to keep testing it, you need to because it evolves.
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That's the whole idea, is that it learns and generates and evolves.
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And so if it's evolving in the wrong direction, you need to be aware of that pretty quickly because then you can put a pause on it and figure it out.
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If it goes completely rogue, like that's hard, you can't put that genie back in the bottle, right?
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So yeah, and I think I when I speak about AI and especially generative AI, because it seems magical.
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It does seem as if you have just hired uh a new employee who you do not have to train and you do not have to educate, and you do not have to do all the investment that you had to do in another employee who's already ready to take your company, your company policies, your business, and and deliver that to customers um scot-free.
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The problem is that new employee you hired has the human engagement quotient or the emotional intelligence of a toddler, right?
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And no offense to toddlers, right?
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Well, they're little tyrants, let's be honest.
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They are, right?
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They have no conscience, right?
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Their moral code has not been set.
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We know from research that that comes around age seven, right?
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So if you're talking about somebody two to five, two to six, they're all about themselves, right?
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And all about what you give them, right?
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And and generative AI model systems are a lot like that.
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It's not that they don't perceive their environment, that they don't understand, that they can't learn, all those good things, but they also aren't wielding a lot of emotional intelligence at all.
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And I won't say a lot at all, and they have no moral code.
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So right and wrong means nothing to them, right?
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And so you can't just unleash that sociopathic machine like toddler onto their customers without a handler, right?
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Somebody is writing a Hollywood script based on that right now.
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I'm thrilled to have a special co-host with us as always, and that is Camille Kramer, who is from Holiday Inn Club Vacation, the director of CX, senior director of CX.
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Expectation setting is my favorite CX topic.
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Oh my gosh.
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Like it is
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We are just we are just geeking out on all the cool stuff right now.
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Why do I do this?
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Come on, like I love my job.
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So there is no like secret sauce or magic spell to get CX right, but there is definitely like a rotten tomato you could put in the soup to make it go bad.
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And that is mismatching expectations.
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And for me, I think about it as kind of like a quick equation.
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So we said you were we were gonna give you a thing.
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You, this is actually the most important part of this whole equation, is you, as the customer, did something to invest in that.
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Like you booked at our restaurant, you booked your flight, you came to our store, you bought our product, you decided to come on vacation with us.
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The customers invested.
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Then we do or don't deliver.
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Let's say we don't deliver.
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So now they have this expectation that was that they were personally invested, we've underdelivered, they've now got this like cognitive dissonance, right?
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There's they're holding two different thoughts simultaneously.
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They had their expectation, wasn't met.
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People hate dissonance.
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It it's upset, it's upsetting, it's frustrating.
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It breaks basically in the long run of it, it breaks trust.
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That's it.
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That's what it equals.
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So on the the equal side of that plus those three things, equals, you've not only dissatisfied someone, they're not going to be loyal to you.
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They don't trust you.
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Right?
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You've broken trust.
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And not only have you broken trust, but you made them think they make bad decisions.
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So likely
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Oh, I love that.
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Wait, say that again.
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So you've made you've made them think that they've made a bad decision.
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That's why I said that second one is so important because they did something to invest in the expectation you set up.
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That's right.
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Right?
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So now they that's part of that dissonance piece, is they're like, but wait a minute, now can I trust myself in my decisions?
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You made me make a bad decision.
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Nobody likes to feel like that.
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So you've broken the trust, you don't have loyalty, you probably lost someone as a customer, and you've probably earned yourself a detractor, to be honest.
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They're probably telling people about not doing business with you.
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Absolutely.
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So mismanaged expectations, 100% to me, like I said, that's the secret sauce of getting it wrong.
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Yep.
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I'm so thrilled to bring with me none other than Neen James.
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I did a research study into what I believe is luxury as a mindset.
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And I've always believed luxury as a mindset, but I have there was no research study to prove it.
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Despite what mindset people had in the research study, regardless of which of the four they were, they agreed on two things.
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Jeannie, they said that luxury is a reward for hard work.
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And I think that's really cool.
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Second thing they said is luxury is about experiences, not things.
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And I know that people listening to this would agree with that wholeheartedly because it's not about the fancy handbag or the fancy car, it's about the experience you create.
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And so I believe my whole body of work is about getting people to feel seen, heard, and valued.
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And so that's really the stealth message in this book.
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You mentioned my work in attention for sure.
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Attention's about connection, but I think luxury is about human connection.
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And luxury brands know more than so many how to make people feel seen and heard.
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And it doesn't always have to be expensive to make people feel valued.
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I am thrilled to welcome Brooke Sellas today.
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Hi, Brooke.
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Hello, thank you so much for having me.
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Content is the vehicle, emotion is the destination.
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And I think what I see happening with a lot of brands, especially on social media where I spend a lot of my time, is content has become the currency.
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Not because it is the currency, but that's what brands want it to be and that's what they've made it, but that's not the currency.
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The currency is connection.
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And to get to that connection, your content has to create that joy that's not only joy within yourself, but also, as the article points out, joy that is shareable.
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Something that is so powerful that you want to share it.
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Or you, in my opinion, sharing could also mean sharing your opinions and feelings on that theme of content or whatever it is.
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Working in social is like everything is expected to be a huge win.
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Yeah.
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And we're like, no, no.
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Yeah.
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This is a this is this is a total playground.
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This is a total experiment.
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This is an A-B test.
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This is a beta test, whatever it is.
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I think we put so much pressure on creators and teams, especially content teams, to like see these giant wins.
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Like, think about the way you build relationships and you connect with people in real life.
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It's never just like a giant win.
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I don't meet you and I'm like, you're my new best friend.
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Come over, you know.
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You know, I like to think so, but yeah.
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Well, maybe you have that natural ability, but I think most of us, it's it comes in little like fits and starts, right?
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It's it's not we have to look at the whole board.
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I think we've we need to pull back a little bit and look at the whole board versus focusing in on like this one piece of content has got to make it for whatever the KPI is, you know.
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Right.
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Whatever the KPI is.
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Yeah, because who knows?
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It's definitely the quote of the episode.
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Thanks for joining me for this special episode of Experience Action in honor of Women's History Month.
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I hope you continue to lead with curiosity, with commitment, and with a desire to better the world.
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See you next time.
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Thanks for listening to Experience Action brought to you by Experience Investigators.
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If you're ready to turn insights into action, join our CXI Membership.
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That's our community for customer experience investigators just like you.
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It's where CX leaders get the tools, support, and inspiration to move from ideas to true impact.
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And don't miss my new book, Experience Is Everything: Making Every Moment Count in the Age of Customer Expectations.
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It's available now for pre-order.
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Learn more and reserve your copy at experienceinvestigators.com.
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Until next time, keep asking questions, keep improving, and keep leading with experience.