Boosting the Human Touch with the help of AI : Aligning Your Org to Think Bigger and Create Moments That Stick

[Speaker 14]
Thank you.

[Speaker 1]
Thanks so much, everyone. I know this is the last session of the day, and so I decided to do something a little bit different. We're gonna think really big, and we're gonna have some fun.

Well, hopefully we'll have some fun. I'm Gianna. I'm COO and co-founder of Champion, and as was, well, I should take a step back and share with you that I was a GM at a company called Aircall before joining Champion.

And as GM, I was responsible for everything from field marketing all the way through customer success. And so I had to think about growth on both ends of the spectrum, how we get new ARR in addition to how we grow our customer base. When I joined, it was during COVID, a French company, and I joined the US market, and I had a disenfranchised team, and there was a lot of finger pointing, and that's how it turned up.

We were not hitting targets both on the new growth side, and we were not hitting targets on the NRR and GRR side. Fast forward, we did. We started kicking ass.

How did we get there? I walked into the C-suite. We had weekly meetings, and my colleague at the time, Jeff Reeker, CMO, he's now my co-founder at Champion, walked in with this fantastic workshop, a framework used to think big, think bigger, and align around what that customer journey looks like and what it could be.

And so we went through this as the C-suite, and I thought, aha, this is my ticket to aligning my teams across the customer journey, from field marketing to sales, partnership, onboarding, and customer success, of course. And I thought I'd bring it here today where we could all think big, and this is going to be a tool that you could bring back to your teams. Perhaps you want to drive some alignment, but more so, let's think about how we could break through the noise of AI and bring back the human touch.

So let's take a step back for a moment, and I would love to ask, what's a brand or service or product that you champion? You may have seen our booth out in the, I know you have, we're asking this same question here, but would love to just ask anyone in the audience for a brand that you champion, and why? Thank you back there.

Apple. Why? I love it.

Have you ever recommended an Apple product to a friend? There we go. Anyone else that might have maybe a less-recommended brand that they love, that they'd like to share with us today?

Say that again? Monday. Monday.

Monday. Okay. The bank.

The bank, oh, clearly I'm from the U.S., please tell us why.

[Speaker 7]
I love that.

[Speaker 1]
And you don't even have to learn how to use it. It's intuitive, it's easy. And so why are we talking about this, right?

This is what we want to create. We are in such a tough marketplace today where I'm sure we're all facing that same argument of build versus buy, or as we heard on the keynote today, it should be build and buy. So how do we really position ourselves to make that buy conversation super easy, super intuitive, and a no-brainer?

Well, I believe that it boils down to not only how we use technology, not only how we offer our software and the developments that you do to make it super easy, but it's also the service, those human touch points around it. So show of hands, who here is on the CS side? The majority of the room.

Do we have some community folks? Okay, so we've got a nice mix here. So I love this because this is really what the workshop is going to allow us to do, to think about how we all influence, all of the different teams could influence the experience of the customer.

And again, where we may want to infuse AI, but today let's really focus on that human touch. And how we're gonna do that is exactly that exercise that I mentioned. So my co-founder and my colleague from Aircall, Jeff Reekers, did not come up with this exercise.

Instead, it was derived from Brian Chesky, who is of course co-founder of Airbnb. And what he shared on a podcast, and we will send this out afterwards so you'll have access to listening to this podcast, but I'll give you the TLDR. And that's they did an exercise that looked at one part of the product, and then they extrapolated what would be a five-star experience. Then they went crazy.

So they really thought big. And this is what we're going to do today. So let's walk through what they mapped out.

So a five-star experience for them, you knock on the door, open the door, you come in, and you say, okay, it worked, it was nice, but it wasn't that mind-blowing of an experience. You'll probably go back, it was easy, but you could have easily have done a hotel as well. Their seven-star experience, you knock on the door, the host opens, you have a beautiful welcome, there's a gorgeous kitchen, and they happen to know that you love surfing, and so there's a surfboard waiting there.

Not only that, but you have access to their car if you need it. In addition to the hottest restaurant in town, you have a reservation. Now that's pretty darn cool.

I would probably go back to that experience and tell some friends about it. The 10-star experience. Okay, now he and his team are really dreaming big.

So, it's very much a Beatles check-in. I think we've all seen the videos. 1964, you get off the plane, 5,000 people are screaming and cheering for you, and they're welcoming you to the country, and they get into the front yard of your house, and there's a press conference, and that would be, I'm gonna curse, a mind-fucking-blowing experience.

All right, so, can we give more 10-star experiences? Well, they went further and said, what would be the 11-star experience? And that's sending folks to space.

Now, obviously, the Airbnb team cannot send all of us Airbnb users to space, but what they realized was that there was a lot more accessible in star seven than they initially would've thought. Our mindsets allow us to believe that, oh, four stars is pretty good, 4.5 is great. Let's shoot for that 4.8. But now they realize that that seven star, where they have a surfboard in the Airbnb, okay, it might be logistically difficult, but is it that outlandish to be able to create? Now, they did this exercise 10, 15 years ago, and if you still use Airbnb, you will know that they launched their experiences, an entire new product line, and there are other influences that you can see in these descriptions that they've added today. So I thought this would be a very cool exercise to bring to you today. So why is it important right now?

Well, the world is more competitive than ever. I think we think about our own use of technology. We are starting to adopt AI more prevalently.

It's easy, or easier for some. I still have some challenges. I have my IT guy here, though.

Thanks, Travis. He's like my ongoing coach. But the point is, we've got new expectations, and our customers have new expectations.

And so again, we need to create a balance between what they're experiencing with our offering and what they're experiencing with the human touch. I love to relate this to dating. I, to share with you, because I know Americans overshare, I'm gonna share a little personal with you.

I'm on my second marriage. This one's going quite well. I think we're this good.

He's a keeper. But I dated a lot, a whole lot. And what I realized and found in the dating world is that that first date really matters.

It's the first impression. But it's not just that first impression. It is every single touchpoint afterwards.

You want consistency. You want enough text, but not too many texts. That right balance.

And this is exactly what the modern day consumer wants. Well, don't we all, right? We want that right level of care.

We don't want someone too intrusive and annoying, pushing new things on us all the time. But when we have a need, we want them to be there. And we want them to be able to kind of predict what we need before we may even know it, as you shared.

And so this is why it's more important than ever to meet cross-functionally in your in-house teams and dream big. What could this look like for your product or service? All right.

So let's create a baseline. Before we get into the workshop, feel free to scream for simplification. We're not gonna look at, as Airbnb did, a product line.

Instead, we're gonna look at the customer journey. And when you bring this back to your teams, you can either separate people in groups like you see here today cross-functionally, and you can assign different phases of the journey, or you could have them score it, which we'll do in a moment. And then you could pick the one that might be lowest or the biggest opportunity.

So we would start here, awareness and education, evaluation and decision. So this, of course, being pre-sale, and then onboarding and adoption, success, expansion, and advocacy being post-sale. What happens in these stages?

Awareness and education. This is a lot of demand gen, right? These are the customers or prospects starting to learn about you.

The next would be evaluation and decision. Somehow that has lost, apologies. This would be, okay, we want to learn more about you.

They might be, they will have a lot of conversations with you, and there's probably a lot of back-channel research and a lot of back-channel referencing happening as well. This is where they decide, do I wanna move forward with you or not? Onboarding and adoption.

Of course, we understand that, as I'm sure this room knows it better than anyone, if they don't have a very good onboarding experience, if value is not perceived right in those first few months, it is 5X harder to routine them later on. So a very critical point in the journey. And then success, expansion, and advocacy.

This is where you create your customers. You help them derive so much value from your product or service that they are growing alongside you and are perceived partners with you. Okay, so exercise number one, you've got worksheets on here.

I'd love for you each to grab this page right here. Think about your product or service, right? And just rank where you believe your company, right, or your team, and you may not know enough about awareness and education, fair.

Maybe you have a perception around it, score it that way. Or feel free to skip and just focus on the ones that you feel well-equipped to kind of grade. So let's take five minutes to do this, and then feel free to write some of the steps that happen and kind of the why behind your scoring.

All right, would love to ask for a brave soul to share one of their scores and rationales. Anyone? It's okay if it's a two.

Well, I'll share. When we did this at Aircall, overwhelmingly, the team all focused on onboarding and adoption. And what we uncovered and discovered was that there was a lot of opportunity to improve.

And it was incredible to hear what the team came up with together. And we're gonna go through that exercise in a moment. And so most scored it between a two and a three.

And we transformed in six months the onboarding process to have a new focus, a new structure, new programming, with just simple, small tweaks that the team, the field identified, which made it so much stronger when implemented, because they believed in it. They came up with the solutions. And it was incredibly powerful that in six months' time, we redid it and folks voted a five, six.

Which was a huge impact. And we saw, of course, the difference in our numbers as well. Anyone else would like to share any discoveries in this?

Thank you.

[Speaker 7]
I felt that there were a lot of name changes. But also, what you said, the name changes. Strong, yeah, strong reputation.

We don't really do enough to stay in that position. Yeah. We don't really do enough to kind of maintain that.

Thank you. Although there's market awareness, we're not actually actively doing it.

[Speaker 14]
A bit complacent.

[Speaker 1]
I love that, complacency. Even though it's good, we can do so much more. And part of growth is not only fixing what's not working, a broken metric, a bad metric, but also leaning into fantastic metrics and figuring out what more can we do there.

So I especially love this example. And in the workshop that we're about to do, you would have your team ideate around this in the frame of the 11-star model. So thank you for sharing.

Let's hop to it. So again, our advice is, you're going to take this back to your teams. If you can, create cross-functional teams and do this internally as an exercise for your field to be a part of not only pointing out from their perspective and the customer's perspective, what could be fixed or leaned into, and then create the solutions around it.

So let's create some solutions. Now, obviously, you all work at different companies. And so we wanted to do this as a group exercise.

And Mo, we can't all do that since you all work at different companies. So I picked one for each of us that we're all going to do together. And we're going to frame it again on Airbnb's 11-star experience.

So to recap, their three-star is if they don't open the door and you have to wait 20 minutes to get into that apartment, right? Versus six-star, there'd be a welcome gift and some wine and some things that they know you would love. And that 11-star is you're going to space.

And so the idea is each star, there's a new level of awesomeness, a new wow factor. So because we don't all work at the same place, one thing that we've all done is go through airport security. So we're going to use airport security as our example.

So if you don't mind, please team up with each other at your tables. If you'd like a larger table, feel free to join another or do a dynamic duo right there. And we're going to take the next 15, 20 minutes, about 15 minutes, and that way we can do some standing and sharing.

But create an 11-star experience. So three stars, five, six, seven, 10, 11 on airport security experience. Wow, folks are really moving through this.

Nice, have you guys, are you guys done? Dang, that's, all right, we could leave early. Am I, should I be excited by that?

[Speaker 14]
Are you guys done?

[Speaker 1]
Wow, everyone moved through this like really well. A little bit more time, a little bit more time.

[Speaker 14]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
All right, I think we're going to take a few more minutes and we've got a bunch of teams done. You guys good here? All right.

I think airport security is a good one to do. How are we doing here? All right, we're going to wrap up in just a few minutes.

Cool. I'm going to call on you guys.

[Speaker 3]
Pressure, pressure, better be good.

[Speaker 1]
All right, we had some very passionate folks about airline security. I'll tell you a little secret if you're 11 star is to not have to go through it. Fly Lufthansa International first class and you won't have to go through security.

They will drive you to their lounge and arrange it for you. Oh yeah, it's pretty nice. And you get, yeah, in a Porsche also.

All right, so let's hear from some of the groups. We'd love to hear a three star experience. Sounds like we've got some teams still working through, but all right, we've got a team over here.

Hey guys, we're going to get a group table, table room, room regroup, okay.

[Speaker 4]
What we a lot experienced today, right? When we have a long queue to wait and you need to like take care, put your bag and maybe take out a laptop and gets canned and you wait and you wait and it's just taking a lot of time.

[Speaker 1]
So today, the reality. Anyone else, any other team had anything different for a three star, any more pains and woes that they experienced today? Yes.

Yes.

[Speaker 8]
It always involves the fear of missing a plane.

[Speaker 1]
Oh, excellent point. So fear evoking because of that line that you spoke of and all of the things to do, you fear missing your flight. I agree, because I'm always last minute as well.

[Speaker 8]
Pardon? It gets dangerous when it says last one in California.

[Speaker 3]
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. Anyone else to add on three stars?

[Speaker 11]
Yeah, we thought three was more of a neutral experience.

[Speaker 3]
Okay.

[Speaker 11]
So not bad, not great. So there are queues, but they're moving. The staff aren't happy, but they're not grumpy.

So neutral staff. Neutral. Just a, you know, run of them at like.

Forgettable. Yeah, doesn't stand out.

[Speaker 1]
That's okay. What I love about this is it's, numbers are so subjective, right? This is actually why I hate MPS.

Sorry guys, for those of you that love it, but it's so complicated because numbers are so subjective. All right, I think we had a team in the back that wanted to share as well.

[Speaker 5]
Just on the three star, and this may be unique to airports in Ethiopia, East Africa in general. I've gone through as many as six security checks from when I got in the door to a flight to Heathrow.

[Speaker 14]
Whoa!

[Speaker 5]
And that wasn't fun. And so I'd say anything less than six would be great.

[Speaker 1]
Wow, okay. Anything less than six, I, you know, we're asking for a lot here, the group over there. That's insane.

So yeah, you don't want to have to do the same thing over and over again, right? One and done, thank you. I think we had maybe something else in the front team here.

No? You had your hand up. I don't know if that was like a reaction.

[Speaker 2]
So when we are looking on some feedback systems, usually three stars, it means bad experience.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
So in our opinion, so it's acceptable, you can get your plane, but you have some bad experience. So in our case, it's some long queues when you fear that you can be late, et cetera. But finally you get a plane.

So it's, you can have enough passion for it, but it's totally not a positive experience.

[Speaker 1]
So the bare minimum, not positive, but you still get to do everything that you're supposed to do. Fair enough, okay. So now let's go to the five star, right?

And the five star is what most of us kind of create that ceiling around our mindset of let's get five stars and that's what we should offer. So what does that five star experience look like at airport security? Let's hear some of the changes.

Anyone? Oh, there, there, there.

[Speaker 12]
More than two or three gates open at a time.

[Speaker 3]
Again, I feel like we're going really low standards here. All right, to the front.

[Speaker 2]
So five stars of my opinion, when you have some expected result and it goes as you want. So nothing special, but as you want in case of the airport, you just get in time, you're not nervous, you have short queues. So you are not surprised, you just got the service you expect.

[Speaker 1]
Wonderful, so that just sounds like smooth. No lines, you're going through, it's not anxiety inducing, you don't miss your flight. It's really obvious the differences between Europe and America because we have much higher expectations.

I like you guys here of like five stars. It's like, you know, it's just supposed to work the way it's supposed to work. I appreciate that a lot.

[Speaker 3]
I need to move here. Middle team.

[Speaker 13]
So we said a three minute line or less was a good expectation.

[Speaker 3]
He's American.

[Speaker 13]
Yeah. No restrictions on liquids, don't have to take laptop out and maybe get a joke or a smile out of one of the security officials.

[Speaker 3]
I like this.

[Speaker 1]
Any other fives? Otherwise, let's hop over to the seven stars. Seven stars, I hope we're starting to do good here.

We've got the front. I hope we've got more of the same old.

[Speaker 8]
It's beautiful. You will love it. You're on the mic.

So basically we call it the Tantra Walter experience. It's basically, we completely get rid of security because we have our own plane, which is directly connecting to our house.

[Speaker 3]
I love how five was just like, you know, it's supposed to work the way it's supposed to work. Seven stars. Any other seven stars?

[Speaker 10]
After you go through security, you get a little spot treatment as a, you know, thank you for this, for being a participant of making the airport secure. So here is your wet towel that smells nice, your drink of choice. And then you move on to your duty free.

[Speaker 1]
Beautiful, beautiful. Any other seven stars? I just love the dreaming big here.

This is the fun part.

[Speaker 9]
Our seven star was a little bit of a low budget. So just FYI. Was more efficient.

So fast scanners, you just walk in with your luggage and there is whatever technology that just allows you to be scanned directly. There is no zigzag line, which we all hate apparently. So no private plane yet, but still efficient and better than what we have today, I would say.

[Speaker 1]
Fantastic, thank you. So it not just allows you to walk through and it's scanning everything for you. I believe we had one last seven star over in this middle table.

[Speaker 4]
I think it's very similar where you were just saying, you know, at least having the experience, the same experience as a FastTrack. You don't got to pay for a FastTrack, but you have it, so no wait time. It's kind of really smooth and just go through it.

No need to like put the bag for scanning, et cetera.

[Speaker 1]
10 stars. Now we're really gonna see. 10 stars or 11 stars, let's mix these together.

Wonderful.

[Speaker 5]
Just to do two in a row, a 10 star would be staff that are like actually happy to see you, like quite happy to see you, like semi-alarmingly happy. And then the 11 star was champagne on arrival. Beautiful.

[Speaker 3]
Okay, yeah. The table here is very excited. So let's have a quick reminder, they have a private jet.

So let's see where we're going now.

[Speaker 8]
Okay, and now we have the Star Trek version. Basically, if we are able to teleport, then you can totally skip security.

[Speaker 3]
Oh, beautiful.

[Speaker 2]
Just, yes, the best experience when you don't need to pass security at all. So, teleport.

[Speaker 3]
I love it, I love it.

[Speaker 6]
For the 10 and 11 combined, we set a personal cart that would take you through, so you don't even have to walk. You just get taken around the area. You've got a dedicated bag handler who does all your passport control for you.

Your own plane, expensive gifts, and you also get a support puppy or kitten whilst you're on the plane. But they also stay with you then for the rest of the stay. So they become your butler, your shopper, your cook.

Anything that you want, they will do that for you on your holiday.

[Speaker 1]
Again, sign me up. This sounds fantastic. Any other 10s and 11s that care to share?

[Speaker 3]
Get over here.

[Speaker 12]
I think we were a little bit more grounded. We just talked about no physical security. The whole airport is just scanning you as you go through, so you don't even have to worry about that or passport control.

[Speaker 1]
Which it probably is anyway, right? Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that.

And I think this is... This is what brings that back to reality and sharing. You can dream big and realise that you're seven stars of being able to just walk right through security.

You don't have to put your bags down, create technology that can scan you. That technology probably exists today, so it's not that far-fetched. And I heard a lot of, it would be nice to have folks who are happy to see you, who greet you with a smile.

Again, that's training, proper onboarding of your staff. These are things that are more than likely within the realm of possibility for airport security. So we're going to send this to airports locally.

Hopefully they'll take our advice and feedback. But what we do ask is that you take this exercise back to your team. So let's talk about how we bring this to reality.

So when I was at Aeroflot, I mentioned that my colleague and I did this exercise with our entire company. We created teams cross-functionally that ranged from product to onboarding, to CSM, to field marketing, literally everyone, that we felt really understood the customer or should understand the customer and should hear what it's like from their perspective and their team's perspective of what the customer journey was like. So instead of doing airport security, we first did that grading exercise where you look at the different stages of the customer journey, and you could either have your teams decide which one they want to focus on and have every team do the same one, or you could have different teams doing different ones so that you get an action plan from that exercise.

So again, they would grade, they would talk about why, and then they would do the 11-star experience where you actually have them do one through 11 of what instead that part of the customer journey could look like. And the second piece to that is then what needs to happen. And so you can have them ideate, and you can come back together and say, okay, here's where we are today within our control.

The power is that you're having your internal teams cross-functionally build this, and let me tell you the power, the pride, and the camaraderie that this will create will give long-lasting experiences for your customer, stronger processes, and of course, that all drives stronger business outcomes. And so we're going to give this worksheet for you to bring back to your teams so that you can facilitate this. And you might say, you know what?

That's just not realistic. I don't have access to cross-functional teams. That's okay.

Do this with your own team on the area of focus that they're responsible for, and you will generate really powerful ideas. And I would imagine they'll more than likely be more honest than you think, and then create really strong ideas that they probably already have in mind. And so again, we're going to give this for you to go back to the office, and then these are the different stages, right, of the workshop that you can do with them, and then you can put these in place.

So the result of it will be pick top three changes in each of the criterias or stages, and just focus on three changes, three action plans that will help improve that stage of the customer journey, and report on those outcomes, report on the progress, talk about it with your internal team so that they can also see that you're listening, that you're putting into effect plans that they've created, and again, the buy-in and the culture you will see really grow, and then you're creating a culture of constant improvement and a solution-oriented team. So, thank you. And with that, 53 seconds on the clock.

Happy to answer any questions about the experience that I had with Aircall, ruling this out and champion today. Otherwise, I believe it's happy hour, so happy times. Thank you.

Thank you.