INTERVIEW
AI, Leadership, and the Future of Customer Experience
With Moira Clark – Director of The Henley Centre for Customer Management
Despite the rise of AI, customer focus is declining due to cost-cutting, and surprisingly, high employee engagement can negatively impact customer outcomes, emphasizing the importance of organizational climate and customer-centricity.
Moira Clark, Director of the Henley Centre for Customer Management at Henley Business School provides a brief history of the prestigious business school, noting its long-standing reputation in the UK and even a surprising anecdote about Hitler’s intentions for the building during WWII. She then discusses the Henley Centre’s work in researching key trends in customer management based on the challenges faced by their consortium of member companies, highlighting the recent overwhelming interest in AI across various applications in CX.
Looking back at longitudinal studies of member interests, Clark notes a consistent focus on drivers of business performance from a people and culture perspective, alongside recurring themes like customer experience, self-service automation, and frictionless engagement. While member companies are actively engaged in these topics, Clark expresses a somewhat “depressing picture” of the broader industry, suggesting a decline in the prioritization of the customer in recent times, potentially driven by a focus on short-term cost reduction. She argues that while cost reduction isn’t inherently bad for customer experience (citing e-commerce as an example), many companies are implementing it clumsily, missing opportunities for strategic improvement, a point she hopes to explore further at the upcoming conference.
Richard Owen
For twenty years, we’ve been creating innovation in the CX industry. And now, we’re seeking out brilliant new perspectives on CX you just won’t find anywhere else. I’m Richard Owen. Welcome to the CX Iconoclasst.
Moira Clark is Director of the Henley Center for Customer Management at, perhaps to state the obvious, Henley Business School. For those of you, especially in the US, who may be less familiar with Henley beyond the town’s association with its iconic regatta, it’s one of the top business schools in Europe today, and it dates all the way back to the end of the second World War. Apparently, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe not to bomb this beautiful iconic building on the Bank of the Thames as he intended it to use it as a summer home once he conquered Britain. A little bit optimistic as it turned out.
Now Moira is Professor of Strategic Marketing there, and she brings sharp and unexpected insight from two decades of research into what drives customer loyalty, profitability, and organizational performance.
We also cover some really surprising results on employee engagement, essentially proving that the better the level of employee engagement is, the worse the business results. Moira makes a contrary argument that culture and the business climate are what truly drive customer outcomes.
Plus, we’ll discuss why UK business may have fallen behind on productivity and how COVID reshaped work expectations.
Also, and I should mention that OCX Cognition is delighted to be sponsoring this year’s executive conference at the business school on July fourth. Yes. A very famous day indeed as it’s the regatta. I’m sure you know what I mean. Just kidding. I do hope you enjoy our conversation.
All right, welcome, Moira. Thanks for joining us on the CX Iconoclast.
Moira Clark
Hi Richard, it’s great to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Richard Owen
So we know you’re a professor of strategic marketing at the Henley Business School and, especially in the United States, people don’t necessarily know a tremendous amount about Henley. And Henley has an illustrious past. And so perhaps before we talk about your research center, could you just give a quick thumbnail about the business school itself?
Moira Clark
Yeah, thanks, Richard. Well, it’s actually the oldest business school in the UK and it was formed after the Second World War to put Britain back on its feet again, because obviously so many industries had been decimated and middle managers had gone. So it became a kind of learning centre, a learning hub, if you like, for management education in the UK. And one of the funny stories that goes with it was that during the Second World War, apparently, Hitler had decided that he wanted to have it as his country home if he invaded the UK. And Henley’s always been a white building, so we had it camouflaged painted during the war. And of course, when we discovered this, we realised that nobody needed to have bothered camouflaging it at all because it was never ever going to be bombed by the Luftwaffe. So it’s got quite an interesting history. And the Queen used to come and play here as a child as well.
But of course, we’re really one of the top MBA providers in the UK and have a global MBA as well. And we’re probably quite well known for that internationally.
Richard Owen
Yeah. And it’s an absolutely beautiful facility. I can understand why Hitler thought it’d be make a great country home being there right on the Thames as well. So it’s a fantastic location to boot, as you say, and you’re running the Henley Centre for Customer Management. So talk to us a bit about what the mandate is there.
Moira Clark
Well, the Henley Center for Customer Management has been going now for almost 20 years, actually. It’s a consortium of companies who are interested in leading edge best practice in customer management. So the companies tell us the challenges they’re facing, what keeps them awake at night, and then we go and research those topics and actually do a series of workshops and conferences throughout the year. So over the years, we’ve researched many varied topics, everything from what makes a perfect customer experience, what makes a perfect online customer experience, how to drive business performance, the role of service automation. But of course, in the last two years, everyone has gone completely mad with AI. So almost all the members are constantly wanting AI. Everything from AI and hyper-personalization at scale, AI and CX automation, AI and the role of the individual AI in society. I mean, it’s just extraordinary the amount of interest that we have now with AI.
Richard Owen
So I was going to ask you what the biggest trends were and I think you probably nailed it right now in terms of what people are focused on. If you were to look back over a more extended period, have you seen anything based on your experience that’s interesting from the perspective of how people have thought about the customer. Has this been an ascending trend over the years or has it sort of fluctuated or has it been pretty consistent amongst the members?
Moira Clark
Well, actually, interestingly enough, we do keep a longitudinal study of the topics that the members come up with every year. And it is quite extraordinary how there is a consistency over time. And obviously, some get bigger and bigger, like AI, we’d expect that in the last few years. And that certainly didn’t feature at all going back more than a few years ago. But topics like what drives best business performance keeps coming up, especially from a people point of view, a culture and work climate point of view. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot around the whole retention and profitability piece, but also customer experience, that comes up time and time again.
And the other topic that’s come up quite a lot in recent times as well is the use of self-service automation. As everybody’s become increasingly cost sensitive, they’re all looking at how can we save money? How can we automate, especially contact centers and so forth? So there’s been a number of topics that are persistent. The other one is ease of doing business, actually frictionless engagement that keeps coming up again and again. So we try to not repeat any of these. So every year, I think we’re never going to find any new topics. But of course we do, we always do. And as I said, in the last couple of years with AI, it’s been really quite easy, if you like, to do that.
Richard Owen
Is there a sense in your mind then, because you now have this longitudinal perspective? Are companies advancing their actual practice here? Because there’s a tendency to believe, especially in the customer experience space, that there’s this interest, there’s this profound commitment at some level, we’re going to change things.
But the lack of motion can be quite disheartening sometimes. And I guess that’s a two part question. One is, do you feel like the membership is actually advancing? And secondly, if they are or if they’re not, what’s the underlying reason for that? Is customer just a topic that’s never going to go away, but people don’t quite know exactly how they can execute to improve it?
Moira Clark
I think it’s probably easy to talk about industry in general rather than the membership because the membership are there because they actually are passionate about customer experience and customer management and customer centricity. But generally speaking, I hate to say this, but I think it’s a pretty depressing picture actually. I think my perspective and I would say I share that with quite a number of people, is that generally speaking, the customer has slipped down the agenda. And whereas a few years ago, we were all passionate about being customer centric and putting customers at the heart of the business. I think that narrative has changed somewhat now and that people aren’t quite as obsessed with customer anymore. And if you think about it yourself, Richard, it’s really hard actually to differentiate, you know, is it because we’re more demanding that we think that service is not as good as it used to be? Or is service generally not as good as it used to be? My view is it’s certainly a mix of both, but I also think that service isn’t as good as it used to be. So I think there’s certainly an element of that in there. And you were asking what’s driving this? I think, again, it comes back to cost.
Everyone is so obsessed with short-term gains and the stock market and so forth. There’s just anything to win now. So what they’re doing is always looking at ways of driving costs down, where, because you’ve got often the finance people in charge, the easy things to cut are the customer experience executives and the service that we provide to customers. I mean, in the UK in that case. It’s just absolutely desperate in terms of the financial services sector where they’re constantly shutting down branches. You can’t get anybody to serve you anything. It’s awful. So I don’t think it’s getting any better. And I hate to have that as a bit of a negative note, but I really think that’s the case.
Richard Owen
Well, is it necessarily the case that cost reduction is intrinsically poor for customer experience? We are on productivity curves in theory, right? So at some level, if we’re improving productivity and we’re reducing costs, we’re beneficial. I mean, if you look at the growth, for example, of e-commerce and you go back over a 30 year period, not many people would argue that e-commerce has been a boon for customer experience in general.
Right. It’s, it’s transformed customer experience. If we remember the good old days before e-commerce where visibility to products and services, visibility to pricing was extremely poor. If you had to order something, you’d get a catalog and you’d flick through it and you’d place a phone call to an operator and then you’d go and collect it perhaps, or maybe if you were lucky, it would ship to you. And nobody would say, okay, that was a fantastic customer experience.
People would say Amazon has unquestionably improved customer experience. And yet it’s been a massive cost reduction and friction reduction. And so there’s no intrinsic link between cost reduction and customer experience. In fact, you could argue it could improve. However, to your point, it seems like we’re almost clumsily wielding an axe instead of a scalpel here when it comes to cost reduction. We’re not smart in thinking through productivity and cost. We’re simply looking at ways to just chop budget. Is that a fair characterization?
Moira Clark
I think that’s really fair. I really do. I think that’s exactly what’s happening here. And we’re not using it, we’re not using it in a smart way. And that’s why actually I’m really thrilled about the whole AI piece because I think that is one way for companies if they can be smarter about how they actually enact AI.
But of course, a lot of them still aren’t. Some of them are just they’re, we need AI, panic, and they throw AI at it. They’re not thinking about it strategically. In fact, one of my biggest frustrations in the last number of years, probably five or six years, actually, is that people stop thinking strategically about everything. You know, if you take marketers, particularly professional strategic marketing, you know, I feel that a lot of marketing is being dumbed down, it’s become tactical, you know, social media, it’s all sexy now and everyone wants to do social media. And it’s so much more than that. What we’ve got to do is strategically think about what business we’re in, what we want, what do the customers want, get good customer intelligence and good customer insight, and then think about our whole strategy, not just go straight away to the tactical piece. And I think that’s true of AI as well as it is of marketing strategy.
Richard Owen
And I think that’s something that’s really worth us bringing out in the upcoming conference. I mean, clearly that’s something that I think we can talk a lot about at the conference on July the 4th, everybody, which for is easy to remember for Americans for completely different reasons than the British will remember it. But I think that’s a really interesting observation that we’ve sort of moved, you’ve said two things. One, you’ve talked about the shift to some extent from strategic thinking. But you also talked about focus on perhaps too short term, which might be essentially the same thing, right? The pressing lack of strategic thinking is essentially a temporal problem. It’s a tendency to look at most immediate possible actions.
I, to some extent, share your optimism about AI, but I think there will be again, a division here, perhaps a bifurcation even where you have companies who look at artificial intelligence with a view towards how it can change their business for the better, how it can be transformative. And you’re to get another group that go, Oh, look, it’s going to provide cheap, better chat bots. Great. I can lay off another 10 % of the contact center team because I got a better chat bot. And in doing so, they not only fail to realize genuine competitive advantage, they potentially just chalk it up as another technology that, as you said, actually separates customers from the business to a higher degree, creates worse customer outcomes. And so we’re really at a fork in the road again with every new technology set. And perhaps now is the time for companies to be sitting back and saying, how are we going to choose the right path out of these?
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Moira Clark
Now, I couldn’t agree with you more, actually. And also, one of my pet arguments is that it’s time we got in the driving seat. You know, especially for a successful company, you kind of go on, you just keep doing, stick with the knitting, keep doing what you’ve always done. And it’s only when you get a burning platform, people panic and what are we going to do?
So they end up sitting in the passenger seat and just going along with it. Whereas I think really what we have to do is we’ve got to get in the driving seat and dictate the rules of engagement. We’ve got to shape the market the way we want the market shape and really get good insight and look at how we can get the behavior of the customer the way we want the behavior of the customer and how we can be smarter at what we do.
Richard Owen
That could be another candidate for the conference title, get in the driver’s seat. ⁓ You know, it’s like get out, I’m not sure whether people are the passenger seat, they’re in the back seat, or they’re actually in the trunk. You know, that’s a question. We might have the management team actually locked up in the trunk right now. ⁓ But I think this idea of taking control and charting a path forward seems, you know, contrary to the way in which people are thinking. In the UK, for example, as you know better than I do, there’s been regulatory pressure on the financial institutions to say, you know, you need to be reporting levels of customer experience. Now, my own perspective is anything that comes out of regulation is highly unlikely to be ultimately business beneficial. It’s probably gonna be because it’s the government.
On the other hand, the reaction of the industry is pretty interesting, which is not, okay, here’s a challenge for us. How do we take advantage of it to become better at what we’re doing? It becomes a compliance question. How do we do the bare minimum we can do to comply? Now, look, I understand if we’re talking about capital ratios here, that compliance is the right philosophy. But if we’re talking about customer experience, the last thing we want is a compliance mentality, right? Compliance is exactly the wrong way to think about this. It’s opportunity.
Moira Clark
And again, that’s why I think with AI, we might actually have better opportunities if people are smart about it. I mean, if you think about the personalized customer experiences that you can get with AI, which would be just amazing to be able to have AI that almost understands you better than you understand yourself. I’m actually quite looking forward to this, you know. They understand my history, my preferences, my emotional state across multiple channels. I won’t have to keep explaining things again and again. And it has memory. So the conversation feels continuous and it feels coherent. And it can tailor its language as well and its content in real time, almost like a well-trained concierge, if you will.
And in fact, it was very funny. I know it’s only ChatGPT, but my daughter’s working on a big project at the moment. And she was using ChatGPT and at the end of the evening she said to ChatGPT, well, thank you very much. I’m really tired now. I’ve worked really hard. I’m off to bed now. And ChatGPT replied going, ⁓ gosh, you know, you’ve earned the rest. Seriously, hope you have a good night’s sleep and wake up feeling brand new and catch you later. Take care of yourself. Now she said she was doing this work in bed, her partner’s in bed next to her.
And she ended up chatting back and forth with ChatGPT. She said she almost felt like she was having an affair in the end with ChatGPT, but she felt that actually the comfort and the emotional connection was really worth it. This is sad, isn’t it? But you can almost imagine a scenario where people will get that personalized experience through AI rather than from the brand where they should be getting it from.
Richard Owen
There’s some studies, and I don’t remember how to cite them right now, but they’re part of the Customer AI certification program we’re developing. And one of the studies was looking into people’s attachments to AI when they start to engage with them. And the researcher found it so disconcerting how quickly people developed human-like attachments in these conversations. And then of course there was a piece in the New York Times quite famously when ChatGPT first came out where an early iteration of ChatGPT, they were very keen to point out, sort of went quite to the dark side and started suggesting that to the New York Times journalist that the ChatGPT actually loved him more than his wife did and he should leave her.
And of course it was just an algorithmic response, but his point was at two or three o’clock in the morning when you’ve been engaging with someone in a human style interface for a while, part of your brain starts to turn off this idea that you’re talking to a machine, because we’ve got a million years of evolution on how we process language and communication, right? We’ve now got 20, 30 years of experience as human beings communicating without visual reference through chat. So we’re used to reading a lot into chat.
So it’s not that surprising. And obviously the flip side is positive influence, but the potential for negative influence is absolutely massive and how much damage could be done with bad use and bad actors in this. We’re in a very interesting era, but I thought the broader point you were making, which I think is still relevant here is if you’re in the, if you’re in the customer field, you need to get in the driver’s seat here. And I think to some extent, what you were describing in some ways sounds a little bit like a lack of management.
Is it confidence or is it, dare I say courage that is needed to start to step into this space and move thoughtfully, and be willing to sort of learn and also steer and navigate the company because the winners five years from now aren’t necessarily gonna be the ones that got it right first time. They’re gonna be the ones that started and learned, right? It’s going to be the ones that actually, to use the American vernacular, started swinging the bat. And as opposed to sort of sitting there saying, well, we’re gonna be followers, which I think is really a sort of shorthanded code for, know, we fundamentally don’t know what to do and we’re a bit scared about doing anything.
Moira Clark
And I think that’s a real danger at the moment, Richard, because if you do decide to follow, if you do decide to sit in the passenger seat, because this whole area is moving so fast now, that by the time you decide, yes, now I’m going to engage, it’s gone, it’s too late. You’re so far behind the curve now, you’ll probably never catch up. And that’s a real danger here, I think.
Richard Owen
And especially in AI, because I think one of the things that people don’t necessarily appreciate is that I’d say AI is like wine, although probably that metaphor only goes so far. The nature of machine learning in AI is one where it continuously improves over time, right? It learns. That’s why it’s called machine learning. And so there’s a real downside to delay. You can’t catch up if you’re building models that are improving over time. If your competitor starts two years before you do, that is not a surmountable lead for you. You can’t just, you know, suddenly catch up with that two years of machine improvement and learning. And so there really is a kind of cumulative impact here, right?
Moira Clark
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I don’t know what you do then. I mean, that’s a real issue. It’s really going to sort out, as we say, the wheat from the chaff. But yeah, I don’t know what you do in that scenario. But that’s why I think we’ve really got to get with the program and really learn about this. And I think this is why people are beginning to panic a bit and go, we’ve got to get with the program.
Richard Owen
Yeah, so, you know, changing gears a little bit. I’d love your perspective on this in terms of Europe and the UK versus the US. I mean, from your perspective, obviously, you’re focused on a lot of British companies. Do you see things as being quite different geographically? Because I, as you know, go back and forward a lot between both the UK and the US. And one of the observations I would say about the UK, which I think is irrefutable, is that the UK has fallen below a productivity curve the US has enjoyed. Now, Europe has been the same, by the way. The Europeans, for those people who would yell at me and shout Brexit, I’d say, the European nations haven’t done terribly well on the productivity curve either.
One of the things I’m struggling to understand is why that’s the case? Why is it, especially when you think about the fact that the British are intrinsically a sort of Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurial nation, they’ve got in some ways a lot of the raw ingredients that the American economy has. There’s issues perhaps with capital formation that are bit different in terms of entrepreneurial behavior. But do you have a perspective on Europe? it fundamental to the European culture? Or is there something going on today in terms of European business conservatism that you seem to be alluding to that’s underpinning this fundamental ⁓ falling behind the US, frankly?
Moira Clark
Well, my view on this really is that since COVID, we’ve really struggled to be productive, certainly in the UK. And I think what happened during COVID times is that people became quite comfortable. You know, our government paid furlough payments, so we weren’t struggling. I do a lot of work actually in Africa, particularly South Africa. And in South Africa, there were no furlough payments. So people just had to work. They had to be proactive. They had to get on with it. Whereas in the UK, actually, you could have a really nice time. And people fondly talk now about how COVID was, if you were fortunate enough not to lose anybody, but you know, if you didn’t, yeah, people had a very, very nice time and they go, oh, do you remember how it was, how lovely it was? And I think after that, going back to work and the rat race and going back five days a week and working, you know, 12, 15 hour days or whatever it was, just wasn’t as appealing anymore. And I think a lot of people said, I just don’t want to do that. I want to actually have a better work-life balance. I think there’s that.
The other issue we’ve got in the UK is we’ve got seriously aging population. I don’t know if you know that from about 2010 maybe, something like that, we now have more people in the UK who are over the age of 65 than there are under the age of 16. So we have a hugely aging population. I’m gonna say that again, we’ve got more people over the age of 65 than we have under the age of 16. That’s massive. And what that means is we’ve got this older population. And of course people can still work, but again a lot of people after Covid took early retirement, they go why do I have to work? I don’t need to work, I can financially manage it. But even those who couldn’t afford to work, who were then getting government payments and so forth, they didn’t necessarily feel that they had to, or even if they wanted to get back into the job market, the job market’s become very difficult.
Richard Owen
So Moira, let’s talk a bit about this. You’ve been in the customer management, the customer with a capital C space for quite a while. What are the big passions that sort of drive you in this space to keep you energized, if you like?
Moira Clark
Well, one of the things that I’m really passionate about is the role that people play actually in driving customer retention and profitability. And one of the things, I have to be honest Richard, that drives me completely mad is this obsession that companies have with looking at employee engagement.
Now, I know that employee engagement is really important if you want to reduce attrition, if you want to reduce stress, if you want to make sure your staff aren’t absent all the time and so on and so forth. But from our research, and we’ve done structured equation modelling on this, so we’ve really looked at causality. What we have found, which is quite shocking really, is that the more engaged that employees are, the worse the profitability and customer retention is.
Now, when we first got this data, we thought, wow, that just can’t be right. So we trawled through the data again and again, is this really right? And do you know what we discovered in the end? We discovered that the more engaged the staff are, the more they view that customers get in the way of what otherwise would be a great day. So customers actually were a complete and utter inconvenience to their great lives. And it’s funny because the more I spoke about this at various conferences, the more people would come up and go… Moira, that makes so much sense because actually, you know, we have these great employee engagement scores and we can’t understand why our customer satisfaction and customer retention actually is in the toilet.
So what we found out from our research is the thing that really does drive customer retention and profitability from a people point of view is actually organisational climate. It’s the practices, the procedures, the reward systems of the organisation. That’s really what drives, you know, profitability and retention. It’s looking at, what do people actually do? So it’s not culture, because that’s about values and morals. It’s about what actually happens here. There’s a lovely quote by Sir Adrian Cabrie, which he says, you know, we judge companies or managers by their actions, not their pious statements of intent. So it’s what we do that actually matters.
Richard Owen
My cold capitalist heart is now beating even faster. This is music to my ears. Those of us who are somewhat, I don’t think it’s fair to say jaded or cynical about the emphasis on employee engagement, we’re always concerned that at some level we’ve got the mix wrong here. We’re overly focused on, you know, is this just a great place to work? And, well, is that actually contributing positively? And you are saying specifically quantitatively, employees who are super engaged kind of regard customers as an annoyance to ruin their day. You know, it’s kind of getting in the way of the lunchtime massage and sandwich bar. And if only the pesky customers wouldn’t get involved in everything, it’d be a great place to work. We really enjoy it here.
Moira Clark
So, what I talk about is employee engagement and customer focused enablement. So yeah, if you really want your employees to be so engaged, but for goodness sake, focus on the customer and make sure that’s, you know, the top of the top of your mind that’s central to everything you do, that they are constantly being reminded about the importance of the customer. At least some of these organizations are, and some of the data we’ve got on it’s very funny. And we’ve also done qualitative research on this. And some of the quotes are just hysterical, you know, well, actually just customers are a bit of an inconvenience, aren’t they? So when, you know, behind the scenes, when they’re being really honest with you, they will tell you that.
Richard Owen
And I have to ask as the parent of a 25 year old, is this generational? Because anyone who works with 20-somethings, and I don’t mean to disparage an entire generation, but there is a difference. We are seeing different attitudes and we’re seeing different approaches. And I constantly talk to companies who say, we’re struggling to find the right formula for maintaining energy, productivity and performance out of 20-something generation. And the 20-something generation would retort, well, you don’t treat us all very well. This is a terrible place to work. You’re crushing my dreams. So don’t be surprised if I don’t really enjoy it. So we’re in a bit of a standoff with that generation. And I wonder if that’s also affecting these kind of studies and the statistics. And we’re seeing differences in attitudes towards the workplace between an older generation who, and again, I’m massively generalizing, sort of feels like we’re resigned to the fact that, you know, we have to get up at the crack of dawn and roll out the tarmac before we get breakfast, and a younger generation that’s perhaps more aspirational in what they want from work, and therefore in some ways more disappointed by it.
Moira Clark
And I do think they’re more concerned with the work-life balance whereas we just said, stuff it, you let’s just work like crazy and the rewards will come. Now, what’s interesting is when we looked at, what is climate, we found it’s made up of a number of things. So things like reward and recognition. And we found that the best performing companies’ staff were more rewarded than punished. Whereas the worst performing companies are more punished and rewarded. And I’m not talking salary here. I’m talking about, you know, recognition. And what we do know for sure is that the younger generation, which we can call trophy kids, they grew up and it’s our fault actually, Richard, to be honest, you know, because when they were little, they came home with the certificates and we put them on the wall and we said, that’s so fantastic. So they’re used to all this recognition. They get it at school, they get it at university or college, and then they go to work and they get nothing. So, you know, they really want lots of recognition. One of the other key ingredients is warmth and support. So you’ve got to show that you really, you know, show that you care.
Moira Clark
Now again, if you’re a sort of more baby boomer generation, it’s like, well, that’s what you paid for, who are going to say, can I get on with it? And we have to remind ourselves that actually for a younger generation, you actually do have to show that you care more overtly, if you like.
Richard Owen
And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe the fact is our humanity’s got drained out of us and we’re left with this terrible attitude towards work. And we’re just being reminded that a little bit of humanity helps. We just had a wonderful meeting with Bruce Temkin, who’s now working on this whole humanity project, which is a big part of his focus. And the whole emphasis is on, how do businesses build companies that are both successful but just better for human beings? And I think it’s a fascinating trade-off.
And now you put artificial intelligence into the mix. And we’re in a transformative era of work. Now, I think that’s not an over-exaggeration. I everyone is super hyperbolic when it comes to AI. But if you work with any of the AI tools or the AI data, you can see instantly that the nature of work is changing. There’s no hiding this. And it’s going to change productivity. It’s going to change the way in which people do their jobs. And some of that’s going to be for the better. Any form of change results in this tension that exists in the workplace. And especially when technologies get introduced that change the nature of work, there’s a tension in the workplace. And so this whole topic of how people are contributing successfully to companies is very much a moving target that we’re yet to understand the impact over the next 10 years, don’t you think?
And what we do know for sure is that the younger generation, which we can call trophy kids, they grew up and it’s our fault actually, Richard, to be honest, you know, because when they were little, they came home with the certificates and we put them on the wall and we said, that’s so fantastic. So they’re used to all this recognition. They get it at school, they get it at university or college, and then they go to work and they get nothing. So, you know, they really want lots of recognition. One of the other key ingredients is warmth and support. So you’ve got to show that you really, you know, show that you care.
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Moira Clark
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. But I think this is a fantastic thing, actually. I think if you can put people together with AI, it should actually make our jobs much more rewarding and much more satisfying because you don’t have to do some of the drudgery. You you can focus on the things that are much more challenging and interesting rather than having to deal with a monotonous repetitiveness that we can sometimes get with work. So I think it’s going to be a whole great new era, actually, of what we can get with AI.
Richard Owen
The potential is amazing. mean, and I think that to me, it’s one of the biggest tragedies, and it’s probably a good segue for us to talk about the upcoming conference we’re both collaborating around, is that it very quickly gets translated into, here’s a way to cut costs. Now, I’m not a big fan of the notion that the contact center is the epicenter of everything customer experience. We know it’s important, but I think it gets exaggerated in its role.
But now we’ve said AI equals better chat bots, better chat bots equal chance to cut cost, and pigeonhole employees even more. I think we should reverse this trend and start to think about personal productivity and personal productivity, which by the way is a challenge in the Western developed economies anyway, in US and the UK, we need to improve productivity. If we can improve productivity, we have a real chance to improve people’s lives directly and get better businesses.
And I think that artificial intelligence is the great productivity opportunity of the next 10 or 20 years, but it’s going to come through different models of technology-human interaction than we’ve seen before.
Moira Clark
Yeah, absolutely. And as you say, from productivity point of view and also from a customer point of view, with having personalized experiences, which will just be amazing. And the technology can handle that way better than individuals can, or CRM systems or anything like that. And having that frictionless convenience as well, which will be amazing. So making it that ease of doing business so that it will just be a pleasure. And that’s going to build loyalty and customer retention and customer satisfaction ultimately.
Richard Owen
Let’s switch here and just shamelessly plug the conference for a little bit because we’re going to be releasing this conversation just before the upcoming Henley Conference, which is going to be July the 4th because apparently the English don’t fully celebrate Independence Day of the Americans for reasons that I can’t possibly imagine. Perhaps you could tell us bit of the history of the conference. How did this get started? Because it’s been running for some time now.
Moira Clark
Yeah, I think this is its 20th year, it’s been running for a long time. So basically, because the research centre that I run is a consortium of companies who are interested in leading edge best practice in customer management, and they tell us the things that keep them awake at night, the challenges that they’re facing, and we research those topics. So, we run a number of events during the year, but the Regatta Conference, which is during the Henley Regatta, and we’ve always had a conference on that day.
And typically, what we do is we have a half a day conference with some really superb speakers, and then we go down onto the boat, have a sort of, it’s going to be Pimms I’m afraid, because it’s England and it’s the Regatta and so forth, and then have lunch on the boat and go up and down the regatta course and network with people. But the most important thing is really that because we’ve been doing this research throughout the year and we’ve had our members telling us the challenges they’re facing, what keeps them awake at night, what we do for the regatta conference is we pick on the most, the best subjects that we have, know, two or three really, really critical subjects and we get the best speakers to come and speak on those subjects.
So it’s a fabulous opportunity to listen to those people talking about their views and what they’re doing in their organizations and sort of leading edge thinking. And because we’re always limited on numbers because of the boat, because of the size of the boat, to typically maybe 60 or 70 people which is a great opportunity for networking because you can actually get to speak to people rather than if you’re at a huge conference where you’ve got hundreds and hundreds of people you never get to speak to the speakers so it’s a great opportunity for doing that as well.
So it’s been massively successful and touch wood, I hesitate to say this, but touch wood, we have never had it rain on that Friday during the regatta week. So it’s not gonna rain this year, is it? But even if it does rain, it’s not the end of the world, but it’s a great institution, if you like. And to see all those, and there’ll be lots of Americans there as they always are racing in the regatta and so forth, but people from all over the world. It’s a fabulous place to be during the regatta time.
Richard Owen
Well, we’re super excited to be involved this year. And not surprisingly, the topic is going to be around the impact of artificial intelligence. And we know there’s a lot of events and conferences and presentations on this right now, but I think that there’s a real commitment to both bring out some of the results of the original research and also explore topics that aren’t perhaps as well-developed here, when it comes to the impact of artificial intelligence on customer relationships. You know, one thing that excited me was, not sort of going down the middle of the fairway here, which you see in so many conferences, which is how do we build better chatbots, but actually starting to look at the nature of complex business relationships and productivity of employees and how you can use AI to change the nature of your business to create better customer and profitable outcomes, right, which I think is a bigger topic and we need to step back and talk about bigger ideas here before we rush off and start to just implement very tactical AI type programs, which frankly may turn out to be quite damaging over time to our customer relationships because we’re seeing it through a simple cost reduction lens.
Moira Clark
Yeah, and that’s going full circle to what we were talking about earlier, Richard, in the first half of the podcast around strategy, being really clear about what your strategy is, what you’re trying to achieve here, and therefore the role that AI may play in that. So in other words, we’ve got the dog wagging the tail rather than tail wagging the dog. And I think that really what’s important here is to have that opportunity to do that.
Richard Owen
That’s a great place to leave it. So, Moira, thank you very much. And obviously we’re both very excited about the upcoming conference, July the 4th at Henley Business School on the banks of the Thames. We’ve heard it here already. There’s no chance of rain. We’ve been promised good weather. So you can put that in the bank and I hope many of you get to join us. And Moira, thanks again very much for joining us today.
Moira Clark
Not at all, it’s a pleasure, Richard. Thank you for having me. Bye.
ABOUT THE CX ICONOCLASTS
Professor Moira Clark is Professor of Strategic Marketing at Henley Business School and Founder and Director of The Henley Centre for Customer Management. Her work bridges academic research with real-world business applications. She is a leading expert in Strategic Customer Management; her main areas of research and consulting are in Customer Management, Customer Centricity, Customer Experience and the drivers of Customer Retention and Service Excellence. She has worked extensively in the area of culture and climate, its impact on retention and loyalty, and the critical linkages between employee behavior and customer retention.
She has researched and published widely on Customer Management, Relationship Marketing, Customer Experience and Service Excellence. Publications include for example, the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Business Research, Psychology and Marketing and International Journal of Management Reviews. She is also co-author of ‘Relationship Marketing for Competitive Advantage, Winning and Keeping Customers and Relationship Marketing: Strategy and Implementation’.
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