Human Centered

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Human Centered. I'm Nick Brunker, a managing director of experience strategy at VML and your host for the show. Today, we're exploring a topic at the heart of every business, customer experience. It's a field that's evolved dramatically from simple interactions to sophisticated data driven experiences many of us now expect.

To truly understand where we're headed, it's often said we need to understand the past. Our guest today has done some deep thinking on this subject and more. He's chartered a course through CX's history and into what he terms the predictive and autonomous era, where technology and AI are set to reshape CX even further. I'm thrilled to welcome in Nick Yecki, executive director of experience strategy at VML, whose recent work in eXp Magazine actually sparked this conversation. Nick, welcome to Human Centered.

Pleasure to have you.

Awesome to be here, Nick. Thanks. It's gonna be get kinda confusing with all the Nicks thrown out today, but I guess we'll we'll deal with it. Thanks for having me. Excited to talk through this and hopefully some other things.

Likewise, man. And, certainly a busy time for all of us in the CX space. Before we delve into the evolution, that we're gonna spend most of our time talking about, perhaps you could share a bit about your own journey, both at VML and just overall in CX.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I feel like from a career perspective, a lot of things have added up to getting me where I am today with CX. I've got a, you know, I kind of came of age in the Internet era, right? Kind of the one one point zero, two point zero era, which was awesome and exciting. And I think we've lived through a couple of things, since with mobile and, you know, social and the mobile and, obviously AI now super interesting.

But my background is really, I was kind of a software engineering and business major in college. So super interested in how do we create things. I was really into graphic design in high school. If you go back to that, that year of myself. So just kind of enamored with computers and creating things and all that.

And ultimately I've had a bit of a history of entrepreneurship as well. I like to try things like to dabble in things. So my business was a breakfast delivery service in the Detroit area where I grew up. My mom was a high school teacher and we're just looking for some side income and so we kind of started this business together which is pretty cool. We collect bagels from a couple of great spots around town on Sunday mornings and deliver them but the smell of kind of sweaty cardboard and paper bags still gets me to this day because that's what our cars would smell like.

But anyways, love creating things and I've always done that. I've started a couple startups, raised venture in that world, spent a number of years in the agency world as well kind of by accident, building creative and building technology experience there. Then I've been a VML for about ten years now, is unbelievable. Time flies, as everyone says, but, and have been a part of this customer experience and experience strategy team with yourself, and a bunch of other phenomenal people. So yeah, here today and really kind of try to apply that creativity, that spirit of entrepreneurship and just at the core, like understanding what do people need and trying to solve problems for them on a day to day basis.

Going back to that small business that you set up, the bagel biz, is that an area that maybe ignited your passion for CX being able to deliver goods and services to people? What things like that along the way really ignited your passion for the space? Because you have had such a broad experience set, no pun intended. What got you interested in experience strategy and experience design as the capability is a thing became more of a major than a side hustle. Totally.

Yeah. And I think I, you know, it was nothing on purpose, right? As many things in life are are I, one thing I learned from that bagel business was something I kinda learned from my mom along the way. And you know, she wouldn't say she had any expertise in this but we're really just delivering bagels at right and so she's like hey what if we diversify the business we're getting these requests from our customers like they wanted wanted cream cheese and they wanted lox and they wanted orange juice, and a couple of people wanted Frosted Flakes for their grandkids that were coming over. And some people were saying, hey, do have muffins or cookies?

You don't want to go crazy in that. But I think what we learned and we did a nice job of iterating by chance. We added a few items to our stable of offerings and that really met customer needs, met them where they were and they were feasible for us to bring forward. So learned a lot there. I built a solar energy startup a number of years ago, which is a marketplace for for solar installers kind of at the cusp of that solar industry starting to take off in The United States or at least we thought it was taking off at the time and learned a lot there.

I think we missed on a bunch of stuff, right? And I think that's something to this day that kind of drives me forward of we really do need to truly understand at a deep level what customers need, what people, not customers even, what people need, right? Like what do people need? What are looking for? How can we help them?

How can we use technology as an accelerant to help them through that? And I think if I would have had a bit more of that mindset would have been successful in different ways in some of those ventures too. So it's just it's a clear lesson and it's kind of that true north that I always come back to is deeply understanding and and understanding broadly where people are and what they need, what the gaps are, what they love, and then kinda working around that to to bring new things to them.

You you hit on one of the eras and that's actually one of the segues I'll use to move to the next Yeah. Part of the discussion, which is as you wrote the article that we'll post in the show notes for eXp Magazine and and kinda sparked this conversation, you started to go into the history of CX and as a good strategist would, trying to simplify the complex down into a handful of of eras that you've seen evolve over time. We've talked about a few different ones on the show before. But in your piece specifically, you talk about the service era, the satisfaction era, the relationship era, and the experience economy. We can dive in a little deeper into each one in a minute, but for now, could you give us a sense of each and maybe highlight how each of those stages built upon the previous and really transformed how businesses engage with customers?

Absolutely. Yeah. I just I kinda nerded out on this. I hadn't seen I was doing a presentation for for a client, and, you know, they wanna what what about the future of CX? Right?

And I'm like, oh, awesome topic. But, like, we kinda have to understand the past to to know the future and see where it's going. So that's where that's where this came from. So I broke this up in in four eras, you know, in broad buckets. So you've got the service era, think pre nineteen hundreds to nineteen fifties.

So really a really broad period of time in our history, but this is you we start to get to the idea of personal interactions and transactional service. So you're thinking of like Woolworths, so you're thinking of Sears. This is the year in which like the Sears catalog came out. Those Sears catalogs came out. And so that was quite an innovation at the time for people to get, be able to flip through and choose kind of self discover, in kind of a quote unquote personalized manner.

Pretty awesome. And that's set the tone, right? That's set the tone for innovations moving forward from the corner store to something a bit more orchestrated. And then we move into the satisfaction era, which is a next kind of wide period of time 50s to the 80s, where we get into customer satisfaction and loyalty measurement from a business perspective, businesses seeing this as experience broadly, and engaging with customers is something important to their bottom line, which I think set us up for the future. We had the onset of technologies, the internet obviously in the 90s to the 2000s as we moved in the relationship era.

A big kind of transition transformation from The early days of choice, you started to see CRM systems and things of that nature come to bear, right? So we're building the foundations of customer experience. And then finally experience economy, is where we are. We have been probably since the twenty ten's ish through today, and you could argue we're accelerating into a new era with AI in it. And AI probably creates a new era moving forward that's informed by experience.

But experience economy is really about being data driven, personalized, immersive experience, bringing many more factors to play to help people get really custom specific experiences that help deliver value to them at the end of the day.

So I guess we could start with the service era a little more deeply. Yeah. Thinking about that, we'll just call it the start of what we're chatting through in the pre, nineteen hundreds through nineteen fifties, often described as maybe a center on personal interactions where trust and relationships were driving loyalty, where it really was more of a a one to one in a weird way because of you know, just that's how business was done then. What enduring lessons can modern CX draw from the emphasis on personal interactions built on trust and relationship?

I love that question because I think this is the root of experience, which at the end of the day, it's all about humans, right? I mean, the name of this podcast, Human Center, right? This is about humans and serving humans and people, and that's what was going on in that era. We were and it was simple. We were listening, helping people in a direct, uncomplicated manner, you know, be it at the corner store, be it through, you know, innovations like the Sears catalog, like I mentioned, but providing a level of service.

Right? Service was something that wasn't just getting the product in your hands. It was doing it maybe in a kind manner, right, in a value add manner where you explained how to use the product, how to how to use the medication that you were purchasing or the tool that you were purchasing for yard or farm work or whatever that may be. But I think overall, I think pulling this forward is like simplicity at the end of the day and listening and understanding people where they're at could be a very simple question, in addressing that head on so they can make progress, right? They can make progress in what they're trying to accomplish as your customer and or your partner, within the business.

So yeah, love the service here. Mean it's a wide set of time 1900s, pre 1900s even through the 50s. But it was a time of great change you know, obviously in The US as The US expanded significantly during that time too.

Yeah. And then you fast forward to the satisfaction era where you're we're talking nineteen fifties, baby boomers into the early nineteen eighties. You would, you know, in the piece talked about satisfaction, being defined through increased competition and differentiation and ultimately satisfaction being the, you know, the holy grail of of sorts. You know, you had mentioned in the piece about American Airlines, the advantage program as an example. Yep.

How do you think and why do you think we saw that shift and how it began to redefine customer loyalty? Yeah, I think, I

mean, I actually look at the satisfaction era after thinking about it more, probably more than anyone should or has, but this was really about, I think this is more selfish from a business perspective, business centric in this case, like businesses saw the value in creating great experience, right? And so we started to see things like the Advantage Program, which is awesome. I would argue it's maybe better for the business than it is for customers at the end of the day as many of these travel programs are. But that's okay, customers get value out of them, free flights and upgrades and things of that nature. But from a business perspective, they saw tremendous value here.

We actually have the systems available in this time, right? We started to have computing and databases and things of that nature available to us in this time. So, I think it was really, really about businesses accelerating and growing during this time of satisfaction, measurement of satisfaction, bringing that to the forefront in the boardroom, right? Like satisfaction being something important to measure beyond just sales, margin, etcetera. The other piece I think that was interesting in this era, which is a little more kind of advertising driven, but I think it impacts experience or it sets the foundation for experiences.

We started to see some more emotion enter the experiences during this time. If you look at Coca Cola and what they did over time with developing characters, the Santa campaigns, like all those things, I'm not saying they're exclusive to this era, but I think they really came into the mainstream. Yeah. McDonald's in a big way. Right?

They think of the characters of Ronald McDonald and like his crew really set a foundation of experience. And then that translated in a McDonald's case. I mean, remember when I was a kid, those characters would be all over the store. Oh my Right? And so the experience was differentiated.

I think it's a really interesting discussion point you bring up around the way that stories were starting to get told, how value is perceived, from a customer perspective. And it was just at the beginning, again, dating ourselves a little bit about the same time periods in which we grew up, where Yeah. You weren't quite ready in the, you know, mid nineteen eighties, early nineteen eighties to, you know, almost connect in a way that was beyond when you go to a store and you see these characters and, you know, they're you know, when you're looking on a TV commercial, like, you start to experience value through a completely different, prism, if you will, in the nineteen eighties. And then you shift into, the early nineties and into the February, which brings us to how you describe it, the relationship era. And it's where, really, technology started to mature in a big way, as all the CRM systems were starting to become a reality.

The Internet was starting to scale. Omnichannel experiences, even in the the later nineties, were starting to become a thing. Can you think back to at that that period of time, both in your research, but then also in your in your own experience? How did it how did technology start to fundamentally alter the customer relationships during that time? And how do you recall and remember some

of those things as you've grown up in that era? For sure. Well, I think, you know, like the concept of CRM systems maturing with software in development during that time was critical. Right? Just the concept of, like, having data on customers and being able to do things with that.

I think the other way I think about this too is especially with the Internet. Right? And this is maybe a bit bit just my perspective. But with the Internet, I think the experience became the business and the offering in a lot of ways. For me, a big kind of transformational moment, I remember it was like discovering eBay, right, in the nineties.

Yeah. And eBay was like, all of a sudden there was this world where the data and the information and the experience was the product and the business of eBay, This marketplace concept and interacting with people across the country or across the world to buy unique things, be it a music poster from a festival that I was interested in, right, or a football card or a baseball card I was collecting at the time, right, or some cool t shirt, vintage t shirt I wanted to purchase, but like that required the eras that came before it in terms of people's expectations changing, technology enabling this, data being collected over time. But I think ultimately the experience became the business and the offering and started to much more so in this era.

And and I just was thinking of something too when when you date ourselves again back to the late nineties when the Internet started to come up more, you're downloading music. You know, Napster was a big thing. Amazon was just getting underway. The the sort of things that you might think about, like what does connection with the brand actually feel like as technology was beginning to scale. We were still probably in its infancy stage, not even really infancy stage, even more premature than that to where we go next, which is the experience economy, let alone where we're gonna go in this new era of AI and anticipation and predictive area Yep.

Areas. But gosh, it does it reminds me of how little we were really connecting with brands in the digital space. And so we were still heavily reliant on all the physical react interactions, but we were also in a position where individually human to human, thinking like AOL Instant Messenger, and others, where where those new budding types of connections were starting to form at a personal level. So I found I find it interesting looking back to, like, how the experience economy was quite literally built, is the next, like, era that we talk about.

Yep.

How the way that that era in the, you know, let's just call it, you know, mid two thousands, to present would not have been possible if the the regular people, I'm gonna call it that humans, without brands, we're starting to reshape how interaction was done and how value was perceived. Like, could talk to you on AOL Instant Messenger, which was a completely new concept. We were years away from being able to connect with the brand that way, let alone be personalized in our communications from a brand to a customer. Having had a chance to sit back and think about it, man, how much crazy progress was made between, let's just call it 1998, '99 through 2005 even. And and how brands quite literally as we know them today were shaped.

Sometimes in cases created by the fact that those those little technologies that were starting to gain steam completely agnostic of any business took shape in that relationship era in the late nineties. It's crazy.

Yeah. And they know those concepts, right? You you mentioned concepts that are now I think critical to customer experience overall experiences that every, know, most if not every brand, big and small offers, you know, think about eBay and the concept of marketplace, digital marketplace wasn't something. So brands today, they either create their own marketplaces or participate in marketplaces, right? I mean, Amazon is the biggest example of that, that we have gigantic brands that are Colgate, P and G.

Right? Like everyone's people are selling cars within within that marketplace today. I think the concept of instant AIM, right? Ailments and messenger back in the day, like, you know they translate that out to chat right like I mean you get chat support and chat service and the progress that that's making from being like AI driven into the future and being insanely helpful for people. I think that really laid the ground with these kind of new brands at the time.

Then if you think about those brands today, they've evolved significantly, I think transitioning to the experience economy, which is, you know, as you mentioned to kind of twenty ten's, mid early two thousand's to present. I really think about this as you know, is a build, There's more data, more personalization, there's a lot going on. There's also some advocacy that goes on here with companies like Patagonia who are maybe doing things that are less digital in terms of creating a great personalized experience around people who want to support the world around them. They don't want to overbuy. So they create experiences that are relevant to those groups.

I think for me the biggest differentiator here from as I'm thinking and working with clients or looking at a business or looking at a market is we need to be much more full journey. The the view is much more full journey, in this experience economy. And Airbnb, I think is a great example here, right? Airbnb, incredible business, but what they've done over time is expand from just where you rest your head at night, right, into if you've seen any of their campaigns over the past six or so months, experiences. Experiences are where they've they've been building this for some time, but, like, that is full journey.

So it's not just about where you stay. It's about what you do when you go to a destination. Yeah. And I think they're even pushing those in your local cities now today. So, you know, part of this is if you look at I was watching a baseball game last night and they were talking about the sport the complex being built around the stadium.

Was actually the the Royals Kansas City Royals playing the Saint Louis Cardinals.

Yeah.

If you ever been to Saint Louis and been to the baseball stadium there, it's been there for a number of years. It was a nice stadium. It's been a long time since I've been there, but there's all bunch of vacant land around there. But now they've built a bunch of stuff up, which this is the norm. If you look at like Atlanta, if you go to LA, any of these cities, they've built up these complexes.

And so these are much more full journey experiences that clubs and these cities are building, right? It's not just about going to the game. It's about maybe spending a weekend around the game, staying near the game, eating near the game, going to a museum, right? Like full immersion. And I think that perspective of full journey and that goes beyond just the interaction that your core business has with a customer is really critical to the era that we've been in and that we're moving into as technology AI specifically accelerates.

Yeah. And the data behind that obviously enables, more, you know, intelligent recommendations. And, well, ultimately, what we've seen in the metrics is that people will pay more for those personalized experiences, which makes total sense. Why why wouldn't you? And I think the the Arena District as we we've called it in other places where they've got, you know, hotels and other events and things to do, they it really does become more than just the event.

And much like you're selling more than just the product. You're you're selling the experience around the product. And I think it's a really interesting, like, on ramp for a lot of brands that are still stuck in a, you know, product led, and not in a bad way, but just focused on on selling the widget versus, you know, the actual benefit the widget might bring and then saying, well, where else can we add value tangentially to our business? And I think that's been a really interesting area for for me as I've, advanced and and worked through my career is to see how a lot of unlocks have taken place even in the last ten years where companies are now moving beyond just here, I'm gonna sell you this thing that hopefully you will use and like to I'm actually gonna help advance and improve your life, which goes back to the idea of

Yeah.

As the podcast would would reference human centered and being able to add add values to the life, not just the business, which I think is a great segue to looking forward and to find For sure. What's next. Because I do get a sense, and I've talked to many of our guests about this. I feel like we're kind of in that same general window that we were in in the mid nineties when we were talking about, you know, the Internet was getting up to speed, pun intended, that more people were getting access to it. It was unlocking new ways to do work and business.

I feel like we're there in a lot of ways. And I'm playing back some of the things that we talked about when we were hitting on that era, but also just thinking about how we're being smart with data now, how things are becoming more autonomous. In the PC road, you were talking about the predictive and autonomous era, which is kind of where all of the stuff that we've been talking about the last few episodes about AI and the predictive nature of our business stacks, etcetera, are really interesting. And I feel like we're on the cusp of early stages of realizing the potential, much like we were in the nineties when we're like, man, this Internet thing, it's a thing. This is this is not just a thing that's gonna, you know, marginally improve the way that we have previously done things.

So much like you were talking building on the era before it, the key idea here is the company's ability to anticipate and fulfill needs proactively driven by AI, autonomy or automation. Automation and data analytics are really going to be the lifeblood or perhaps the death blow to these to these businesses exist the way they do today. Let's unpack that a little bit and what that really means for business and customers.

You know, one thing we are we we are absolutely at a I was one of the podcasts I listened to. I was the other day, and we're in a we're in a time of change, and I think everyone agrees it's not controversial whatsoever, but we're at a time of massive change similar to the Internet, as you mentioned. I mean, we've had kind of a crypto wave and a mobile wave and a crypto wave in there. And, you know, some of those have had a little more question to them. But I think in this this next wave, there's no question.

I think the biggest question is, how does it impact and what is the uptake, right? Like how quickly do people get involved and what does maturity start to look like? So I think as we look at like anticipating experience in the future and helping people out, think this is just simply the expectation, right? Like, my kids who are, under 10, but I don't I see a world where they never know any different, right? Like, things are going to be served up to them, you know, the products they need, the advice they need, all those things are gonna be served up on a silver platter as they're interacting with the chat GBTs of the world.

It's integrated into their watches or their phones or their glasses, their earbuds or whatever it may be. The thing that worries me about this is people are inherently lazy, right? Like we're pleasure seekers and we're inherently lazy and we've been programmed to expect this at this point which is this concept of like don't make me think which is one of the principles I think we often use in customer experience of like how do we improve this? Like you know how do we apply the principle of don't make me think here and I think we're at an extreme end of that at least the tool of AI can help us get to an extreme end of that. So I think that's where we're moving very, very rapidly where things are gonna become even more transparent for people, but we can you know, there's some kind of principles or pillars underneath this that I think get into some more specific use cases, which I really like.

Alright. Let's talk about a couple of those pillars. I think we Cool. You were hitting on some of the hyper personalization stuff, which I think Yeah. You know, evidenced in the story.

You're talking Spotify as just one of many examples. So that's pretty cool. The the other pillar is around AI driven automation and self-service, which I again, I think you hit hit the nail on the head. Much like I think the early two thousands babies and beyond, the Internet wasn't a new thing. It was just that it was inherent to how they live their life.

And I think we're we're probably gonna be seeing some of that in the very near future for our kids. I have kids as well, three three under 10. And and this is just the way it goes. Much like I think the best example of that most parents could probably, of our age at least relate is, what do you mean I have to watch an ad? Like, what do you mean I can't choose the show?

I wanna we're just gonna watch what's on. Like, that it's forms and then, yeah, that's absolutely what, you know, you and I and many people our age or older. That was just that was the way it was. What happened? Sorry.

That was the option. Yeah. And so My

my son the other day asked me about what was the question? We were watching something, and he said, Dan, why didn't the pictures have color in them before? Because we saw a black and white photo. I think it was a black and white photo in something. He's like, why did the pictures not have color in them?

And I said, it's kind of a difficult question to answer. Just, you know, my simple brain is that we just have the technology, We've advanced considerably. I said we didn't have television. We didn't have video, right? Like until somewhat recently.

So that rate of change it is. It is just I like those moments because they make you appreciate and take a step back on the advancements, which is crazy.

Yeah. I think what is fun about it is you get to really start to bridge the gap between was completely novelty and mind blowing. It's every day feels like there's a new mind blowing technology that starts to roll itself out. I mean, just at its base level, automation and self-service are playing and continue to play a critical role in making CX more efficient and accessible. You had a a really good example from the medical space combining old school monitors with digital enhancements.

Like, definitely compelling. There's something about that nostalgia there. Could you expand on how the integration allows users well, let's just keep it in the health space to track their health independently and how more industries might adopt similar, more cost efficient and also customer controlled experiences?

Yeah. For sure. The example I found I mean, I found it, I hadn't seen it personally was a company called Higgy or Higgy I believe and they what, it's those old school blood pressure monitors that sit in like pharmacies and such, which if you go into a pharmacy if you're waiting for a prescription ever, you'll see people have used them and it's great and keep track of your blood pressure. But what they've done is they've added basically an app interface to it, right? It sits on your phone so you kind of track and then get proactive recommendations on it.

So something that maybe seems obvious to us today, but what I love about that and this idea of like automation and self-service is what are things that people engage with today that maybe are a bit more a bit less advanced I guess, right? And how do we make them more simpler to use? How do we create simplicity? How do we create more power and more value out of that experience? And I think that's a great one.

I think from a spend a lot of time thinking about like contractors and construction and things of that nature in my day job. You know this is a simple one here. How do we think about the idea of like auto replenishment, right? So people don't have to leave the job site and how do you use data, contextual data, predictive analytics, things of that nature. So it's almost a self it's actually beyond a self-service experience at that point, right?

Someone their products show up at their feet so they can keep doing the job, making money, making their customers happy. That is an incredible automation and self-service experience for someone as long as you get it right, right? That's always the question. Do get it right? Do we send them too much, too little, the wrong thing, the wrong SKU?

But I think we're getting to a world where we have enough data on these customers, we know their behaviors, we know the jobs that they're in, that we can bring them some automation in case which helps everyone. I mean it helps them make more money, be more efficient, but at the end of the day it helps their customer too. The homeowner or whoever they're working for be happier with the project at the end of the day. So I think a lot can be applied there.

There's another fascinating area that I was talking with Brian Yamato about because he had come out and back from CES. This was many months ago now, but he was talking about the idea of emotion and context recognition as it relates to, like, devices you could have attached to you in some way. You know, as as creepy as, like, you know, microchipping to just having sensors and sweat sensors, those those have existed at least in some capacity for a while. But the idea that now with these advancing technologies married with additional technologies that have come online, we're enabling experiences that can adapt to the customer's emotional states, like down to physiological levels of emotional states.

Yep.

How do you see this emotion driven CX that's potentially measurable and and, like Yep. That based on not just what we kind of are feeling and thinking, but but science. And and that being a crucial differentiator, particularly in things like medical or high stress, high touch industries like that, or even travel?

Yeah, for sure. I think a very real application here is from an emotion perspective, if you're in healthcare or if you're in travel, how do we detect frustration? How do detect the level of frustration or the level of joy or happiness or excitement in someone's voice, tone, what they're typing? And these are things that can be done today. I think if you get back to the core, which again is like helping people out, right?

Like meeting them where they are and helping them out. If I know Nick, that you're super frustrated because you can't get this appointment rescheduled and you need it for your kid because they've got an ear infection or whatever it may be, or something worse, right? You're in a cancer treatment program and your loved one is maybe, and you're managing that for them, your frustration can boil over. And I think we don't always solve that well. And especially given the tools, right?

This is one of the knocks of being more automated and autonomous and self-service, right? Like we lose that human connection where a person can kinda sense sense the mood, sense what's going on and solve for it. But I think in this case like sensing that in voice and in tone is a simple way. I think your mention of getting into sensors and things of that nature. I think that requires some hardware and such, but I think in particular applications, I think deep into healthcare, deep into treatment makes sense.

I think another really just simple application here is like, as a travel company, you mentioned travel, we've all been there, right? Like we know the storm's coming, we know we've got a flight, we want to get home or we want to get out to our vacation. How can we use that context and be really proactive, and personalize and the travel company come back and say, hey, It looks like this weather's moving in. I can bump you up thirty minutes, or I could bump you up an hour or move you back to the next day. And here's a hotel that you could stay in that kinda maintains your trip.

Right? Like, some really simple things here, but, like, this is the idea of emotion and context recognition that I think is pretty, pretty deep and valuable to to find some new solutions or some some additional solutions to really help people have better experiences.

And and it's in that moment, not an upsell or, you know, here. Here's how you could spend more money. It's actually, here's how I can improve your day or your situation in context with other other things. And before, you were definitely reliant on, you know, individual humans being able to make those connections, whereas machines might be able to do that. And and again, empower the the frontline employees to do better, more impactful work, which I think is another Yeah.

Story and another podcast for another day of of the whole you know, doomsday scenario that people are bringing in our world, especially of, well, AI is gonna take all of our jobs. Well, I think there there's something to be said for being able to reshift our our priorities and how we as humans leverage this new technology to make better experiences for people at the end of the day. The other really interesting area that that you hit on in in the piece, and again, we'll link to it on our podcast show notes, is this concept of invisible CX. And it's an area that I'm really fascinated with because, you know, we all are creatures of habit, good, bad, or indifferent. And they you you know, you hear the word, and this is like the perhaps one of the most overused words in our space, especially in experience strategy is seamless.

And, obviously, back to the concept of Invisible CX.

Not Don't want a bad word at

this point. Everything needs to be seamless. Not and, frankly, sometimes the seams are actually what make the experience good because, you know, you need that that barrier or, you know, a shift in context or just a a mental repositioning to whatever a moment. Right. Yeah.

And, you know, there are things like Sam's Club does it. Mean, really everybody's taking after it now. The scan and goes where you could just take what you want and leave. And that that is seamless, but it's also a complete shift in the mental model. If the goal is to eliminate friction and save time, yet also help customers kind of do new things, have new behaviors and habits, how does the approach of Invisible CX reshape how engagement with brands will be making interactions still smooth and intuitive while also Yep.

Being aware that, you know, seamless doesn't always equal better.

Let me meander for a little for a here, and and I'll get I'll get get there. I think if we go back to emotion and then invisible, I actually this was just I saw this in something a couple days ago just reminded me, it's nothing new. Chewy.com Chewy user as a pet owner, order your food automatically auto ship, they kind of I don't know, I don't know if they invented it but they get a lot of credit for auto ship and things of that nature. Dog food was always something that are pet food and supplies are something people don't want to deal with. They've got this kind of magical story which I know many people who this has happened to, their dog dies, right?

Their pet dies and passes away, and then, their next auto ship comes and their food shows up and they're kind of crushed, right? It's I've I've been there. I've I've had a pet that that's happened with. And they reach back out and say, hey, cancel my auto ship, my pet type, whatever. And then they send flowers, right?

They send flowers to the home, know, $20.25 bucks or whatever it costs to send flowers. That's a customer for life. Experience of like, that's emotional and context recognition to a tee. There's some like invisible experience going on in there as well. It's like kind of weird on the back end of that.

But I just think it's a beautiful story and a beautiful reminder that any business or any person could find those moments and create special moments out of them, to bring them forward for others. I think in terms of Invisible CX and where I'm going here is with the experience at moments being invisible, it is so much more important that brands have attributes, have distinction, have things that make them stand out in the minds of customers otherwise because I would argue the interfaces are going to get more and more transparent and invisible over time. Right. So you think about, you know, I love the Sam's Club one. It was the time I had ever done scan and go was at a Sam's Club and it was kind of magic for me.

I'm like, this is sweet. I don't want stand in line. I usually go to Costco and I got to stand in this long line when I'm done. Right. Costco, I guess, is rolling out, know, as they do and those are fabulous companies.

Costco is rolling out a version of that as well. I just read an article a week or so ago about that. But I think as we move forward into new interfaces that collect massive amounts of data, right? Which is essentially what AI is, right? We've got access to all the data in the world and with a few keystrokes we can get something back that's synthesized and personalized for us.

So there is a day not far away where we're just talking to our AI and it's dropping stuff at our front door or it's getting our vehicle serviced or it's putting a new shirt in my closet, whatever that might be. And so I think brands, it's going to be critical that whatever those attributes may be, in the case of a Costco or Sam's Club, it's like, you know, they do curation, right? The products that they carry are well curated, they're well priced, they're done in volume, they're accessible, right? Those distinctive attributes are going to be really important because when I am working with that AI interface in the future and it truly is invisible experience, I'm going to be requesting stuff from that provider, from that company, from that retailer because there are attributes against it. So I think it is incumbent upon brands to make sure that those are deeply rooted in the products and services they deliver.

You're starting to see connector open AI. I think there's a new release or something that happened this week or within the past couple weeks and they introduced connectors or additional connectors like previously they had these connectors into just like Gmail and calendar and drive. Now they've got them going into a bunch of other places, GitHub and a bunch of other places where you can it's much more from a business use perspective, right? So how can I access my data to get greater insights and more action against my data? Those connectors are going to be to Amazon and Walmart and Sam's Club and Dick's Sporting Goods in the near future from a consumer perspective, right?

Where I can connect my account, they know like what my family looks like, what my buying preferences are, the types of sports or the types of you know deodorant I purchase, whatever that is and it's gonna have a much better profile for me to shop against. And so I believe this is just really doubles down on this idea of brands creating distinction and being firmly rooted in what their value proposition is because it could get easy it will be easier and easier for them to get lost in the future.

Put this last pillar that we're gonna get into into the same bucket of we could probably spend an entire episode or more talking about this. And that's ethical and trust driven CX because everything you just said is underpinned by the critical need to be grounded in ethics and trust. And I think well, like we we've talked about before, customers are willing to pay more for personalized experiences, and I think they'll they'll still likely be a, you know, look through the safety prism that a customer does when it's like, oh, I can connect this to this to this and it's gonna help improve my day. Great. But they're also, I think is likely going to be an even more significant, you know, look at, well, how comfortable am I with making brand a actually aware of what my family really looks like and what they do and what they buy?

And I think that comes back to, not to pull it back to the beginning of this conversation, the the service era and personal interaction. Yep. Whether it's truly like physical in person one to one experiences, but trust and being willing to say this brand that I'm going to be able to connect my life to in a sense, I'm willing to do that. And there are plenty of examples out there of brands that not in the AI era necessarily yet, but other brands who have have done wrong by customers by way of data. But I imagine and and maybe you can talk a little bit about this as we talk this pillar.

Why is it so vital for businesses to proactively implement transparency, privacy protection while also showing that they're ethical, but they're also gonna help you. And and some of that is a a value exchange of, I really can improve your life if you are gonna share with me this, this, this, and this and not get bogged down in, well, I don't know if I wanna connect my bank account to this, or I don't know if I wanna account

For sure.

My kids' data to this. How do you see that?

Yeah. I mean, I wish I was I was a bit smarter, but I think I I I think a couple things are going on here. I think there's an opportunity at the moment for, there's a lot of confusion, right? We're in a super hype cycle right now as it relates to AI and all the data that's being consumed. Even I think one of the prime things if you go and look at overviews of the various platforms that are out there, One of the criteria that people always talk about is like data and how is it shared and that's where does it go, does it help train the model etcetera, etcetera.

So we're in this crazy hype cycle. I think that presents an opportunity for brands and for companies and businesses to come out and have a really strong stance, be very clear and open about how they use data, why they need to use data in certain ways, how you can protect and have control over that data. Can I even see the data? Can I log into a dashboard? Can I delete things?

Do I trust that it's being deleted? Where is it being stored? I think these are things that have been a bit hazier in the past. I think now it's incumbent upon companies to take the wheel a bit, And I think it can be a differentiator and something that someone could actually accelerate themselves with by taking a really strong stance here. So I you know, it's I don't know where it plays out, but I know it's it is critical and people care about this and they're going to only care as you go deeper and deeper and deeper into the world of kind of consumers and normal people.

They're going to be even more skeptical, right? And they're going to care even more. Right now we are at the very early days, right? Like the earliest days of innovation, even if we have great usage of tools like AI, the earliest days where people don't understand all the implications. And I think that's gonna happen very quickly.

So big opportunity, I think here for brands to take control and even just start talking about this, and that will create action.

Well, and somebody had written, and I remember what slide it was in the presentation I saw, it was let's see I can find it. Yeah. The the the every model you interact with, that is gonna be the worst version that it's ever going to be from this point forward, which I think Yep. It's it's that just rings true for so many reasons, but it's crazy to think how rapidly the model you're interacting with at this moment. Your mind is blown.

In a lot of cases, mind is. I stumbled upon, you know, in doing research on on Google v o three, and it's just mind blowing.

Yep.

Yet Yep. To the point that statement is, it it is the worst it's ever going to be at this exact moment in time. And it it's a great segue to the challenges, the opportunities, and the path forward and and how brands and marketers, both CX pros and more traditional marketers can lead the way, in customer centricity. At the end of the day, and you put it nicely in in the piece you wrote, is putting customers at the center of everything is still gonna be the key to long term success. What does it take for companies to truly embody this principle and lead the way in putting customers but also shaping what the future of CX is going to be?

I think this goes back, as you said, to, just being grounded in in the people, right? Being grounded, understand their worlds, understand what they're concerned about, understand what they're trying to accomplish, understanding where they're at today, right? Like, and so that comes through knowing your customers, seeing how they interact in the world, understanding what their journeys are, understanding what those highs and lows are, right? Like I think none of that stuff changes. It just the tools that we use, the tooling that we use around it, the speed that we accelerate around it changes.

But I think at the end of the day, back to like the service era, know, pre 1900, it's like the handshake over the counter at the corner store that evolved into something a bit more personalized. Like how do we recreate that and make sure because in that interaction at the corner store there's a lot of care and humanity that comes through in that. So it's incumbent upon us all to not lose that the fever of technology and acceleration and all the cool interesting things that are happening again at the end of the day we're serving people. So I think that's where I would a council perspective, right? Make sure you're focused on the people, what they truly need, where their gaps are, what their hopes, dreams and fears are, and then use your tooling out to bring that to life.

Amazing stuff as always and as expected. Before we wrap up, let's do some rapid fire fun facts about Nick Yecki. Yeah. I I think that there's one thing in particular I I was not going to go off the the rails or down the rabbit hole earlier, but I'm gonna bring it up. You and I both went up to Miami University, the public IB in Oxford, Ohio.

You you mentioned the bagel, the bagel delivery shop. How did your business compare to and this is gonna be really inside baseball for those that don't go to Miami,

but This is great.

There's a little bagel and deli shop. It's what they call it. Bagel and deli in Oxford that is a just absolute staple if you go to the the university. How does your business compare to that business?

I should have worn my Bagel and Deli t shirt now that it's it's over in the other room. Yes. Much different. We would not have competed. We would have brought them their bagels so they could slice them in half and make delicious sandwiches out of them.

Alright. Good news. They were not a competitor.

Got it. Yeah. Always a cool Juul's fan and oh, man. What was I always get this. People make fun of me.

It was like the blueberry bagel, cream cheese, cinnamon sugar, and banana in it. I forget the names escaping me right now. Delicious, though.

I'm feeling it. You know, you Somebody who's listening from Miami is gonna be so upset.

Yeah. You get two bagels, and and that would always be, like, the dessert bagel involved. But

It's the best.

Yeah. That's a great place. I love it. It's still open from everything I see online. I took my family there a couple years ago when we were in Cincinnati, went down to Oxford, and they didn't love it as much as I hyped it up, but I thought it was still as good as it gets.

So they're still they're still young. They don't quite understand the power of a bagel or two. Exactly.

Exactly. So they don't.

They definitely don't. What else, keeps you busy when you're not on the clock?

Yeah, totally. I mean, I love this stuff. I'm a nerd as I mentioned a few times in here and listen to podcasts and reading a ton of stuff there. Young kids like you have too. So we spend a lot of time at the sports fields and in playing.

So, you know and I made a commitment not a bad one at all, a great one is like I'm gonna get involved as much as I can so I tend to coach all the teams at least assistant coach them so I get to know my kids and their friends and the parents and all that stuff. That that keeps me really busy kind of in this era and then my wife and I love live music. So we try to go as many shows as possible that when they come to town or we travel sometimes for stuff too. So actually when I was at Miami and one of the things I did there was I ran the concert board which we were responsible for bringing shows to campus. We do I don't know three or so's a year which is super fun and I learned a lot about the music business back then which is definitely very much service business, kind of a fascinating industry.

But yeah, love that as well but those things kind of keep me busy otherwise I'm just gonna take a nap from time to time.

Does that happen? I would love to

know. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't happen often that's for sure.

Let's ask them. What was the biggest or most memorable band you brought to Miami when you were there?

Oh, it's a good Well, we brought Bob Dylan twice, which was bizarre. Nice. I don't know why we had

him Did you work with his people directly? Like, were you heavily involved in that?

Bob wasn't though. Bob usually so you know, there's like the lore of the green room, right? Yes. The musicians, they tear up the green room or whatever, and you gotta get green M and M's or whatever, blue M and M's or take out the red ones. And that was the case for some, like we had widespread panic there, Bush and Moby, mean, think Yeah, likewise.

Back then. Those guys hung out, they were around a bit more so we could we saw them. But Bob stayed on his bus until he went on stage walked off stage went back on his bus and got out of it.

Sounds about right.

Not a lot of interacting with Bob but he put on a couple of good shows. Was fun just kind of fun to see the it's crazy man, setting up those stages, those stage hands, those crews they have are those guys are hardcore. Do incredible work in a very short period of time physically and the engineering that goes into it too. So that was a lot of fun. I I I miss those days, but that it was a great experience.

And then last question before we let you go. If you had to compare your coaching style to any NFL individual NFL coach, who would you liken yourself to?

In the heat of the battle, well, football, I coach a couple of fight football teams, and then and we're we're talking, like, and graders. You shouldn't be like that. But when you're trying to tell 5 or 6 or graders to run a certain play on a piece of paper and who is which one and I've color coded it, I kind of turn into Bill Belichick real fast. He's real grumpy, right? It's just it's it's a it's a grumpy mood going on.

Raise my voice a little bit, but we have a good time. It's, that's a blast. I I really enjoy coaching football. I don't just like the structure of it is is really fun watching the kids. It's hard.

It's it's a hard sport, right? These are sports for them to do, but it's it's a ton of fun to see them succeed and and learn a bit and the amount they grow. So I never thought I would compare myself to Belichick, but I I do get a little little grumpy in those in those huddles from time to time.

I'll admit, I thought you were gonna go Andy Reid, but, you know, Belichick is fine. And if you're if you're grumpy, then that that's on brand for for mister Belichick. I think Andy

Reid's working with the better Andy Reid's got a little better set of players. That's fair. They're a little more tuned in. A little more tuned in.

Well Let's see. Maybe we'll see what happens with my Bengals this year, and you could be a Zach Exactly. Zach Taylor. We'll see. Oh, man.

It's it's been so good spending time with you. Incredibly insightful deep dive as always, and it's it's great catching up with you. Thanks for making time for doing this. For sure.

Well, thanks for having me. This is a blast.

Hopefully we do it again soon. Likewise, man. And to our listeners, you can explore more of the thinking in Nick Yacke's article Looking Back, Looking Forward in EXP Magazine. We have, as mentioned, posted a link to it in the show notes. You can also find it on vml.com, where you can also read about our CX practice and our approach to the work.

We'd love to hear your feedback on human centered. Please rate us wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon, and many more. If you have a topic idea or just wanna connect, you can reach out to me on x at Nick Brunker or email the show. It's humancentered@vml.com. Thanks again for listening.

We'll see you next time.