And you can tie the two data sets together. You can say, is this customer a promoter and are they going to stay? And you can see differences in factors emerging over time. So we’re in an absolute playground of data and analysis. And we’re capable now of answering questions inconceivable four or five years ago. But it’s this transition to AI that’s making it possible.

Mauricio Duarte
Great, Richard. Thanks a lot. Regarding, let’s backtrack a little bit within time. It was almost five years ago that we were in the middle of a pandemic. And I think there’s a lot of lessons from that episode in humanity. From your observations in CX, what are the key takeaways in such a massive transformation of what was the status quo of CX and how did it evolve and what did we learn from it?

Richard Owen
That’s a great question. I think we now have the benefit of enough time passed to be able to look back and sort of synthesize what happened during the pandemic. And I would pinpoint it this way, and I think very simply, digital transformation finally mattered. And not in a way that it was not an advantage before the pandemic and companies weren’t embracing it, but it went from being for a lot of companies, something they aspired to, to being something that was absolutely essential almost overnight. Let me give you an example from the banking and finance sector.

So going into the pandemic, if you asked any significantly at scale financial institution about their customers and use of digital product, websites, mobile, digital banking, they would say, yeah, it’s great for the kids. If you talk to someone under 30, and they would say, yes, it’s very good. They think that a bank is a wristwatch or an iPhone, or they think that PayPal in the US is a bank, or if you’re in Africa maybe, or in emerging countries, it’s mobile phone-based banking. But that’s for kids, that’s for the under 30s. If you go into the people who hold deposits for retail banking, over 50, the people with the money, they wanna go into a bank branch.

They still use cash maybe, maybe they write checks, but they go into branches and they do things in branches. Well, the pandemic arrives and branches are closed. You cannot walk into a branch and do something. And so, banks very, very quickly, and I would argue rolled out more technology within six months than they’d rolled out in the prior five years. And many banking executives told me this. They felt like the shackles were removed.

All the reasons they couldn’t implement digital products, all the excuses evaporated. And they had to go and suddenly deliver online and also contact center experiences in lieu of bank branches overnight. And that generation that loved bank branches, remember the generation with all the money, suddenly decided that digital banking wasn’t horrible after all. Actually, it was quite useful.

They learned to use the apps, they learned to use the websites. And banking, for as an example, as an industry, will never go back to the way it was operating. People got trained on using digital product, they got trained on using mobile product. Every generation moved in that direction. There was a seismic shift away from physical presence, point of presence to digital. That’s not going to change. I’d say the other area which affected almost every industry was the sudden dependence on the contact center.

So if you don’t have any way to service people physically, you have to deliver it through remote contact center. And now your employees can’t even show up in the same building. So now you have to figure out how you’re going to enable work from home. And that’s going to change the whole nature of how you service your customers and your employees and employee engagement and employee sat. And I think we saw a shift which has kind of come back a little bit as people come back to the office.

But we’ve seen a huge investment in contact center technology. And a lot of that was directed to delivering better and better experiences through the contact center. Some of it was just designed to help employees work remotely. But I think that’s had a profound impact on how we think of customer experience, because we were much more dependent on contact centers than we ever were. And then I think one more observation, which perhaps is a little less obvious, or I’d hope is a bit less obvious for the people listening.

I think as a result of the pandemic, we all put a much higher value on experiences. So post pandemic, and I don’t know if true in Latin America, but in America, North America, there was always this conversation around revenge travel, it was called. It was this concept. And the idea of revenge travel was I’ve been cooped up because of the pandemic for two years. When this is over, I’m going to see the world.

Richard Owen
I am going to travel to Japan, the way, number one destination, a country I love. But people just woke up and said, I’m going to travel. I’m going to have experiences. I’ve realized how precious experiences are because I was denied them for two years. I realized how important my connection with my family is because I couldn’t see them. I changed my entire calibration around my life because denied the opportunity to meet with friends physically, denied travel, denied physical experiences in restaurants.

I suddenly realized how important these things were to me. And I changed the way I think about experience. And I want experiences. I don’t care as much about products as I used to, because I had products. I could sit in my home and could have my TVs there, my sofa’s here. But products didn’t make me happy. All I missed was experiences. And so I think post-pandemic we all recalibrated, and put a huge value on experiences, an opportunity to connect with other human beings physically in the real world, travel, see friends, see family. And I think that is having a profound effect on the quality of experiences we now deliver to people and what customers want. And maybe that’ll fade over time. Maybe 10 years from now, we’ll all get back to just wanting a better high definition television. I don’t know. Cynically, that’s the case.

But I think that at least for now, we prize experiences much higher than we probably did going into the pandemic.

Mauricio Duarte
Okay great. Richard, let’s change the area to the B2B world and CX. What is your key advice in 2025 and moving forward on how to capture or how to create experiences from corporation to corporations? What makes sense? What is working?

Richard Owen
Right, so B2B has always been the sort of stepchild in CX analysis, right? A lot of the work always came out of consumer markets and research work was always consumer centric and anyone in B2B was sort of frustrated because none of this seemed to really work. And that was somewhat true of NPS as well. In Net Promoter Score, because we tended to use surveys to collect information from individuals, we would say, well, is that the right individual?

I mean, is the person responding actually going to have any impact? Because unlike consumers, the buyer, the decision maker, and the respondent aren’t necessarily the same person. And in B2B, that’s a huge problem. So now we have the opportunity to rethink that and say, the account is the atomic element in CX. We want to understand, the account, buy more, buy less, grow, shrink, all of those questions. And as we move into this era of predictive CX metrics, we can predict the behavior of the account and sort of tune out these problems we’ve had with individuals. Are we talking to the right people? Now we’re sort of asking, the account going to behave this way? And sort of solve that problem of the wrong person that was highly tied to the survey universe.

The second problem we’ve had in B2B over the years is that unlike consumer markets, unless you’re in a very, very micro B2B environment. In other words, your average customer has maybe one employee or two employees. And so they look more like consumers, frankly, than they do with businesses. If you’re in larger enterprise, you have no homogeneity. Your accounts are all different. They have different economic profiles to you. They have different behaviors. And so, extrapolation just doesn’t work.

I mean, it’s simple thought process. If you had three accounts, and that was all you had in your business. And one of them was generating a million dollars, and one was $500,000, one was $250,000, all in different industries, different geographies. And one of them responded to a survey that had a 33 % response rate. That’s great. Would you extrapolate from that one result to the other two accounts? That’s nonsense. I mean, that doesn’t tell you anything about the other two accounts. Maybe it tells you something about similar accounts, but they’re not similar. They’re different economic profiles, different geographies, maybe different product mix.

So extrapolation fails horribly in B2B. Prediction works very, very well. So we’re now moving into an era where B2B can finally get its due. We can finally get to the atomic level of behavior in accounts. Now, there’s another interesting problem with B2B, which is that loyalty in B2B has a different relationship with financials than it in B2C. Why? Well, for a number of reasons. First of all, because of contracting.

I mean, it seems fairly obvious, but if you go to a customer and you sign a five-year contract with them, you know they’re not going to leave you for five years, barring some huge disaster. So the probability of them leaving might be zero for the next three years or close to zero, and they could be a detractor. They could hate you, but they’re locked into a contract. So we now need to think differently about the relationship between CX and customer churn.

And maybe for what we want to be thinking about is that five-year contract event and what leads up to that and how we ensure that that creates a great result and how we lay the groundwork for that in the first few years. Even though we’re going to have zero churn risk, we want to create a promoter because we believe that in three or four years when that contract comes up for renewal, we want that customer to be going, this has been a great contract, great relationship. I’m not going to put you out to bid.

I’m not going to force you to reduce your price. I’m going to reward you with a renewal or expansion of business. So we need to think about contracts. We need to think about timing differently. We need to think about customer lifetime somewhat differently. So the nature of how we use CX data is changing when it comes to business to business accounts. And we want to get this issue of lifecycle really under control. And then the other aspect of B2B is in most companies, the relationship with the customer is managed by a combination of humans and technology. And that combination is very interesting. When you get very large accounts, people often assign whole teams. They may have three people or four people, and they want those teams to have great data.

Now the problem is, and anyone who’s run a business to business company will tell you, if you go and ask your people how things are going with customers, they’ll give you an answer. Is that answer even vaguely accurate?

Probably not. It’s based on a lot of human bias. Well, I had lunch with the customer the other day and they told me everything’s fine. Well, lunch with who? Is that even representative of the customer? And when they told you it was fine, were they being polite? Did you buy an expensive lunch? Had they had a bottle of wine? I mean, and what does fine mean? Does fine mean they’re gonna renew? Do you even believe that? So humans tend to form these biased impressions of their relationships.

And what we want to do with all of these humans in the mix is we want to introduce data, not to replace them. Far from it. We want to introduce data to account managers, data to customer facing team members to help them make better decisions. So if I’m an account manager and I’m running a large account and I think everything’s going great, but the algorithms are telling me that something’s wrong. That can help me make a better judgment. That can help me go and ask different questions of different people. Investigate what’s going on. Unearth the truth that’s not obvious to me from the conversations I’m having, but if I dig into the data becomes obvious.

And so we’re now creating more productive human beings. We’re also creating more efficient human beings. I’ll give you a simple example. If I have a thousand customers and I have a team of people to support them, the temptation is just to kind of spread their activity across all of these accounts. I’ll give you 100 or I’ll give you 10 or I’ll give you five. Just go do something. Whereas if I have a view of the health of all these accounts that’s very precise, I can start to allocate teams and actions very specifically. I want you to go after this account and do these three things. Because the data’s telling me this is where my problem is or this is where my opportunity is. And this is probably what’s going to work best.

And that makes those people much more efficient. I can run with perhaps smaller teams or I can get more done with the same size teams. So the opportunity for productivity in B2B is really high. And then finally, how do we blend digital versus human experiences for our B2B customers? We can answer those questions. We can start to look at whether or not we’re creating the right mix of digital support versus actual human beings getting engaged. Are we creating that right balance? Because we start to see that in the data, we can test that now. So I think B2B is arguably the most exciting area now for innovation. B2B2C, by the way, is even more complex and even more interesting because now we’re talking about how does the distributor or the channel partner behave in relationship to the company? How does the customer at the end of that relationship behave in relationship to distributor?

And we’re able to tie all that data together in fascinating and insightful views of how we can grow our channels, how we can grow our business, how we can delight end customers. And that’s a subject for a whole other day because that’s a fascinating and really exciting area now, B2B2C.

Mauricio Duarte
Okay, thanks Richard. We’re approaching our deadline, so just a couple more questions. Regarding, there’s lot of emphasis always regarding the detractors. You mentioned previously that we should be careful when we have passives or non-respondents because probably it’s an indication that they’re not very happy. But let’s turn the headlights to promoters.

What is the best advice regarding promoters? What should we do with them? How do we mobilize them? What makes sense from your experience?

Richard Owen
So I think where people have had the best results with promoters are really in two distinct areas. First of all, when we look at promoters, we should be asking two questions. One is why are they promoters? What are we doing right? Is it the nature of who they are? We just sold to the right people. We have what people call best product market fit with this particular segmentation of customers. And so we should find more customers that look like that.

If it turns out that every time we sell to people who are part of this particular firmographic, we get great results. Let’s go find more people that look like that, because that’s a great way of building a company. We want to understand why, or is it the result of just high performing operations, right? Turns out that every time, you know, we’re capable of delivering outstanding spare parts performance or, you know, great support that results in promoters. Well, okay, that’s our formula for success. Let’s replicate that.

So we learn from promoters what it is that’s working in our business. And then we want to replicate that across similar segments of customers or across the whole company. And promoters can tell us a lot about what’s working as opposed to detractors telling us what’s not. The other area, obviously, is if you have promoters who are promoters delighted but underperforming economically, how do we sell more to them? If they’re not pulling their weight financially, something’s wrong. They love the company, but they’re not buying all our products or they’re not buying enough of our products or they’re not buying our high margin products. So we’re failing to market to them adequately.

And, you know, I spoke to one of the greats in B2B marketing, Das Naryandas from Harvard Business School. And I remember Das told me, customers don’t know what you’ve done for them. You have to constantly market to them to remind them all the things you’ve done for them. And so sometimes marketing to promote us to say, you know, here’s all the things we’re doing and reminding them of how good it is is a mech and saying, look, if you love us, you might want to consider these products or you might consider, you know, expanding your relationship. And so we need to market to promoters much more aggressively than we typically do in terms of understanding why they’re happy. You love our support. Now you’re going to really love us if you buy this or that or the other.

So I think there’s opportunity to really market with promoters. And then the third area, which everybody I think is still a bit underdeveloped is using promoters to drive advocacy. You know, how do I mobilize word of mouth amongst these promoters? I mean, real promoters, and you can argue a subset of them potentially not only want to advocate for you, but they actually get utility from advocating for you. If they advocate for you, it makes them feel happy. They want to do this.

They feel that is enriching for their lives or their careers. And so, creating opportunities for promoters to advocate for you is extremely important. Now that could be digital opportunities. How do you get them into social media to advocate? It could be, how do you get them on the stage at conferences? It could be, how do you get them to create case studies? But whatever it is, actively tapping into promoters to create advocacy, is a huge marketing asset that I think is often underused by companies. We’re so focused in marketing often on how do we get new customers and how do we spend money on advertising, how do we spend huge amounts of money on television advertising, whatever, Google search.

We miss something that is a real oversight, which is the most effective marketing is customer testimonial. That’s not hyperbolic. That is based on a lot of good research and data. So we’ve got all these customers saying, hey, I love your brand. And by the way, now we can predict instead of asking, we have far more numerical promoters to go after because we, not just the ones who respond to surveys, we found all these hidden promoters who we didn’t even know existed. How do we get them mobilized to tell others and recruit their friends, their colleagues into our product or service?

And that is a massive opportunity that I think companies often overlook.

Mauricio Duarte
Okay, finally Richard I know that you’re OCX Cognition What do we foresee in the near future from your company and from your leadership in the field of customer experience?

Richard Owen
Thank you for the question. So I think I divide the experience with OCX Cognition really up into two phases.

I think to date, we’ve been really focused on how do we build these highly accurate predictive models of customers and how do we make sure that we can understand every customer continuously and connect that to operational data, the way I so described it earlier. I think now we’re pushing into much more prescriptive analytics. How do we turn that data into the next best action using sort of AI terminology. What’s the thing we should do next? And how do we get organizations to adopt that and do that best thing? So I think we’re now moving from what you might think of as advanced analytics and an understanding of our customers and better insights to better action. And I think this is really the holy grail in some ways for CX programs. We always struggled with what we knew about customers because of limitations of surveys.

But even when we had data, we didn’t really know what to do. And I think the opportunity to use artificial intelligence to be prescriptive as well as predictive is the next big thing. And so that’s where we’re focused on now. And we’ve got some absolutely terrific customers working with us on this in sort of co-development mode, for which we’re always incredibly grateful because it only makes sense if you do it with customers. And that’s a very exciting phase for the company.

Mauricio Duarte
Okay, well Richard it has been a pleasure as usual Thanks so much for your time and for your knowledge and for sharing with our audience There’s so interesting topics about CX. I hope to see you very soon here with us again Okay, thank you.

Richard Owen
Thank you very much.