Ever wondered how a company can craft a customer experience that feels not just personalized, but completely holistic too? Spoiler alert: it’s all about understanding the internal operations of an organization and fostering an ongoing dialogue between business and technology. This is the fascinating world of experience architecture in marketing technology that we’ll be unpacking in our latest episode.
Mishel Justesen, DCX | Principal, Marketing Technology at Capgemini, guides us through the maze of the customer journey and the technology stack, offering insights into the vital role of relationship building and politics in achieving this. And if you’ve ever struggled to effectively communicate the importance of experience architecture to different stakeholders, we’ll help you get your message across, harmonizing the technology, cultural, and conceptual elements involved.
This episode of Customerland is sponsored by
Read the full transcript below
Mike Giambattista
I can’t remember how the chain happened here, but I saw something somewhere about the term experience architecture, and it was a new one to me a couple of months ago, but it encapsulates the thing that I’ve been wrestling with and we, as the customer, have been wrestling with for three, four years now, which is how do you say this, how do you bring all these disciplines together so they make sense holistically, so that you’re addressing all of the needs, wants and concerns of all the stakeholders? And I think experience architecture kind of does that.
Mishel Justesen
I agree with you.
Mike Giambattista
And if that’s the case, I guess my work here is done. Nothing else to say.
Mishel Justesen
Maybe not, because I think there’s lots of different flavors of experience architecture, right. I’ve debated that just with some of my colleagues about why am I so focused on the marketing technology side of it, and my argument to that is well, marketing technology is what creates that experience for your customers, right? But in order to get to that, you have to understand the people that are trying to provide that experience as well as your customers, right? And I think that’s where the nuance is. For me is it’s not just about. I mean, at the end of the day, what I do is I help marketers sell a product or service and we want to have someone hand over their credit card to pay for that product or service. At the end of the day, that’s all that marketing technology is really doing is providing that experience so that you can sell that experience, right? But when you think about all of the things that have to work within an organization to be able to create that great experience, there’s so many different ways you could go.
Mike Giambattista
Completely.
Mishel Justesen
Yeah, yeah. So I don’t think your job here is done, mike by far, I think.
Mike Giambattista
I was looking for an early retirement out here, but it’s not going to happen.
Mishel Justesen
Well, I’m sorry, sorry. I was listening to one of your other podcasts and one of the things that struck me was that I’m starting to hear the same story that I tell about why I do the things that I do. I think one of your guests said that he was, you know, the other day he was a frustrated marketer. And yes, yeah, so I am also a frustrated marketer, and the reason why I do what I do is because I want to take away that frustration for other marketers.
Like me, I want the technology to work and, like you, mike, when I was struggling for a long time to figure out how to articulate that to a non-technical audience, and when I found the term experience, architecture just nailed it for me. Because what it is? It’s a combination of you know the experience that you want to create for your customer, or, in some cases, the customers know they want to create an experience, but they don’t know how to get there, and then you have to have all of this beautiful technology to light it up, and in order to do that, you really have to understand the internal workings of an organization, right?
Mike Giambattista
And the components, the text acts and I know I said culture before, but I feel like the more I have these conversations, the more it ends up being a, you know, a cultural thing like. Speaking the same language, rowing the same direction, whatever your analogy is.
Mishel Justesen
It’s hard, it’s like herding cat sometimes.
Mike Giambattista
Yeah.
Mishel Justesen
It really is. I think you know I’ve had a lot of amazing clients that I’ve kind of helped through this experience and I you know what I’d like to do I’ve been calling it marketing technology strategy but really, you know, I’m thinking about changing my tune a little bit and going more into the experience architecture piece because I think it it really Explains what needs to happen. But For me, I’ve I’ve found the most value that I’ve been able to provide to customers, as what I call a mark as being a marketing technologist is the, the ability to really put myself into the shoes of of the customer and the person that has to create that experience. And it’s been an interesting journey because Every Organization I’ve walked to, walked into has had most of the same issues, but there’s always been a different way to solve it right.
Mike Giambattista
Interesting. I’m glad to hear what those commonalities are.
Mishel Justesen
You know, um. Well, let’s talk about personalization. You know, um, personalization is a big term, right, and there’s. You know, the customer wants to be able to correct. You know, the or sorry. The organization wants to provide a personalized experience for their customer, but that experience is going to be different everywhere across the board. It could mean, you know, with client service, or for the help desk, it could mean, you know, the ability of someone at a point of sale system to help survive, serve up the right experience for a loyalty program, right, I mean, there’s just so many different flavors of it, right. But at the end of the day, it’s about, you know, internally within the organization, understanding who is in charge of each of those pieces of the experience and then making them Champions of the holistic view of it.
Mike Giambattista
I love that.
Mishel Justesen
Yeah, it’s, it’s worked really well for me. I’ve, I mean, I’ve worked in a lot of industries and Across the board and for some reason, the franchise industry keeps coming up into my Ecosystem and the franchise industry is very interesting to me anyway, right, the inner workings of, of a franchise industry. I think my first customer was a smaller taco franchise, that is, you know, really a regional taco company in Southern California which is a classic place to get a good taco, right, and they were smaller, they’d just been purchased by a family investment company and they’re they really needed to understand. Well, gosh, I have to have a website For my brand, but then I also have to have a portal for my franchisees, right, and, and that’s, that’s two different types of technologies that you have to figure out how to bring in, right, and then the franchisees were all it was a fun brand and really big on social media from the original store, but then how do you manage that social media presence Across the board, right?
Mike Giambattista
so, and I don’t know, I don’t know when that was, but Managing a social media was was interesting at first, then became hugely complex and now it’s a massive undertaking like you really Understand that ecosystem to play effectively there.
Mishel Justesen
Yeah absolutely.
And you’re going to have specialists in those different areas too, which you know. I’m glad you brought that up and because you know, for me and the, I lead really large teams now and you know I have to have those experts on my team To be able to handle each of those work streams right. And that’s again it all ties into that that experience architecture that we’re trying to create Right. So it’s an interesting thing because and going back to your question about what are some of the similarities, well, I now have a very large franchise client that I’m working with that has a global presence it’s not just, you know, located in Southern California and many of the challenges that I looked at or had to help solve for with my little small taco client, same exact thing I’m doing now, it’s just on a bigger scale, yeah right.
And I’ve learned a lot in between. Well, are you able to elaborate?
Mike Giambattista
on what those Scaled differences, the scaled similarities were. I mean, without giving away anything you shouldn’t give away. Yeah, of course listeners would love to hear like oh, that’s the same thing. Same thing I’m dealing with.
Mishel Justesen
Yeah, well, I mean, I could think of two different paths and I’ll give you the option to choose. Okay, um, I can think of the internal path the organizational version.
I have a good example there. But I can also talk about the external client experience, which I think is probably what you’re going to choose. Which, which path can I choose? Both. I want sure, why not? Why not? Okay, so, um, let’s talk in two. So, um, let’s talk internally first. So that’ll be a shorter story. I think, um, one of the things that that was a challenge for that’s a challenge for both customers is Um really understanding the team that’s needed to support. You know this overall experience right, and it’s not just it. You know, a lot of times the it department um in these, well, in the bigger organization, not necessarily in the smaller one, but the it organization is tasked with figuring out what is this marketer trying to talk to me about? What are they trying to tell me? How do I support this?
Mike Giambattista
Right, um, and I just say like yeah, like when you can’t see this because this is a podcast. But I just want to comment on how you are describing how an it group has to try and interpret what a marketing group is saying. And I could see in your body language what you were reflecting. Anyway, I think your flag is like I don’t understand what these guys are saying. Which is the most universal truth I think you can say about that relationship.
Mishel Justesen
Yeah, you know, in my case, I’ve really trained myself to speak it. And marketing I, I learned the marketing. I was a frustrated marketer, right, but my mission has been to speak it so that I can bring the two, two pieces together, right, so that that is. That is where, um the experience, architecture, you know, someone like me comes in to help bring those two worlds together, and that’s really what I learned from the smaller or two, because I had to do the same thing, right. So so the conversation between business and technology internally, um that that traditional, you know, difference between how it thinks and how marketing thinks, or how the loyalty business side of things think, or how the, you know, depending on the organization, the marketing function just gets bigger. But the challenge between translating what marketing and it are there to support, that’s really right. There is where architecture and experience comes in, right so Completely agree with this.
Mike Giambattista
I mean I’m just loving. I mean we’re singing off the same song sheet here awesome but, uh, but it also requires, um, Kind of a lot of politicking, I think, and I’d love to hear your, your, your thinking and your experience on that, because there are two different cultures, there are two different languages, there are two different outputs and outcomes that they’re going for.
Mishel Justesen
Right.
Mike Giambattista
Partly so. How do you reconcile that? How do you create one conversation there?
Mishel Justesen
You know, um, In smaller, with smaller clients, it’s easier. That’s the bigger clients that gets much more complicated. You’re very that’s a very astute statement. A lot of my day is spent negotiating and translating.
To be honest, yes, and not only with my own. I work for a very large IT consulting company, right, and so my target audience is usually the IT department. So I come in on the IT side and then they say, okay, good, you can go talk to the marketing team and tell me what it is they’re trying to ask me to do, right? That’s really the secret sauce and the amount you have to do a lot of relationship building internally, right, because, again, people have set up their processes and the things that they do in a way that makes sense to them.
Mike Giambattista
No.
Mishel Justesen
And, I’ll be honest, that never really translates easily to how IT or how technology is going to translate that process right. So you have to really be able to say listen, I got it. I understand the experience you’re trying to create for your customer. Totally get it. We have these beautiful customer journey. We have this experience map that we’ve done. In my head, I can tell you exactly which technology is going to light up each stage of that experience. But we’re going to have to change the process a little bit so the technology can match what your dream is right, and that’s where the negotiation and politicking comes in.
Mike Giambattista
That’s probably topic for another 10-.
Mishel Justesen
Oh 100%.
Mike Giambattista
That’s, we can’t even go there today.
Mishel Justesen
I know.
Mike Giambattista
It’s really interesting because it’s, I’m going to say, 95% of the folks that I interact with. That’s the nature of the problem. It’s reconciling different KPIs for different parts of the organization with technology stacks that were built for this, with some flexibility. But now we’re looking over here and we’ve got to kind of mash these things together that may or may not really play well together, but we got to figure that out, and then all of the stakeholders that have something to do with all that conversation. So it becomes a big deal.
And I know that I mean you sit at the, I’m going to just say, the top of the heap for a lot of organizations and you have a perspective that I think can be really valuable here, because I probably speak with for the most part I call them senior execs and some C-level leaders, but for the most part they’re senior executives who are all going okay, we’ve got this deal we have to figure out here. It’s a new customer filling the blank, customer engagement, customer loyalty, customer retention strategy, whatever it happens to be, and I know there’s a technology component that I have to deal with, but I’ve got four different groups here that are all completely necessary to be involved and yet it’s maybe well, historically difficult to get those people to speak and to hear each other. It’s just a listening thing.
Mishel Justesen
Yeah, I’ll confess a secret to you, because we all like it when somebody confesses something. I think one of my most favorite things is to walk into a really large organization that has siloed business stakeholder groups, siloed groups, and discover that there’s been some shadow IT. That’s happened.
Mike Giambattista
Oh yeah.
Mishel Justesen
Right, oh yeah, you know, I love it because that happens a lot.
Exactly, and I think a lot of that the shadow IT comes like. Marketing usually has a huge budget. You know well, in enterprise orgs which I’m used to working with, now right, marketing usually has just a vast budget. You know, if you think about the cost of just managing social media and the agencies that help with that, now right, you know throwing $2, $3 million at a marketing technology tool when you have like a $20 million budget just for social media. I mean whatever right.
But if you don’t have the strategy behind it, then you’re going to get frustrated and the marketers aren’t really tuned in to all those data silos that happen, right? Oh man, I love that because I like to come in and with me, understanding what a marketing team is supposed to is trying to get to, or the loyalty team, if they’re separate. You know, if they have a separate loyalty team, try understanding what it is they’re trying to do and then helping IT say hey, if you consolidated onto this particular platform, you’d be on a platform for growth, the marketing team would be less frustrated and they wouldn’t have to spend money on this shadow IT that they have. It’s like taking candy from a baby for me, you know, because just being able to understand both sides of the fence, the experience and the architecture, it’s such a powerful thing to be able to do. So I don’t know, I kind of nerded out there but, secretly.
What I love to do is unwind that mess.
Mike Giambattista
Well, I think the fact that you’re good at it is probably more about you than your method. I mean, you’re passionate, clearly, about this.
Mishel Justesen
Yes.
Mike Giambattista
But from my conversations that’s one of the most difficult things to do. You’re unwinding a mess that nobody really wants to get into because, there’s a very limited understanding of the whole project process and intended outcome.
Mishel Justesen
Right.
Mike Giambattista
Hats off to you.
Mishel Justesen
Oh, thank you, Thank you.
Sponsor Announcement
I want to take a quick break from the conversation to tell you a story – our story – the story of TheCustomer.
As of the air date for this podcast TheCustomer is officially 4 years old. And if you do the math, that puts our birth date just before the pandemic hit in full. And if you operated in this space at the time, you’ll know that business – at least in our world – came to a screeching halt. And it didn’t really come back to life for another year plus. To say those were difficult months is a giant understatement. They were for a lot of businesses.
But we got lucky.
Right around that same time I was introduced to a person – and his company – that literally transformed this operation and got us on solid footing, on a solid path. I’m happy and proud to say that TheCustomer is now stable and strong. And a lot of that credit goes to a group called Relationshipping Consulting.
Relationshipping is the brainchild of George Weidemann who, if you’re not familiar, is founder, and CEO of one of the largest ad agency conglomerates in the world. His tenure leading the efforts at Time, Inc. and Grey Direct were transformative to say the least and now George and his team are helping organizations across the customer-engagement ecosystem to build healthier businesses and happier shareholders.
I can’t say enough about the effect of those efforts on TheCustomer. Suffice to say – if your business operates in some corner of this big ecosystem, and if you’re looking for a growth partner and strategist, you should really give Relationshipping a shout.
Or reach out to us at TheCustomer and we’ll put you in touch.
Mike Giambattista
I think that’s kind of what I loved about and still love about the way experience architecture is articulated. That it is. It’s a central idea with componentry that supports all of these different necessary disciplines and efforts, and I don’t think I’ve I really don’t think I’ve seen that articulated well up until now.
Mishel Justesen
Oh well, I’m glad it can help be the one to start telling that story properly, right?
Mike Giambattista
Why just me? Because I’ve been living in a cave for a while. But the I don’t know.
Mishel Justesen
You have some pretty interesting guests on your show. I really like the content you put out there.
Mike Giambattista
Thanks, but there is a universality to the problem and I guess when I first saw the term experience architecture, and I’m starting to go, oh my gosh, that really says it. Well, that’s really. I wonder if you could graph this together so you produce some sort of chart with all the components and everything feeding into the right. Anyway, I nerded out, but then I started.
Mishel Justesen
Did you try putting something together?
Mike Giambattista
No, but I did a lot of Googling on it.
Mishel Justesen
Like there’s lots of different flavors.
Mike Giambattista
But I started thinking about, you know, not only the cultural hurdles and the technological hurdles, but I think there’s also kind of a conceptual hurdle, Because I think the people you speak with their light bulbs are going to have to go off pretty quickly when you start saying things like experience architecture. They have to get it.
Mishel Justesen
Yes.
Mike Giambattista
And it’s a term that isn’t really an lexicon for most markers or for most IT folks, so it sort of says it intuitively, but it almost always requires some explanation when I’ve said it.
Mishel Justesen
Yes.
Mike Giambattista
So your experience, you know you’re bringing this new idea. Or maybe it’s just a new phrase, a new name for something we’ve all struggled with. I don’t know, but there’s a conceptual part of this that I think your light bulb has to go off somewhere in this process if you’re going to get it.
Mishel Justesen
Oh no, I totally agree. And how do I do that? How do I help explain?
Mike Giambattista
that is, I think, what you’re trying to ask me right, it’s a better way to phrase that than I do.
Mishel Justesen
Got it Well for me. I, you know, like you said, I’m very passionate. I love what I do, so I think my enthusiasm about the topic really helps out a lot. Right, it’s easy for me to make friends within an organization and get them excited. Right, but not everybody’s like me, okay, nobody. Not everybody wakes up every morning going, yeah, I get to do marketing technology, right. So, and not everybody wants to be my friend either. I’m not everyone’s cup of tea all the time, right.
So how do you, how do you get someone excited and understand the concept of experience architecture? For me, it’s about telling a story. You know, you know, once you know an organization and what they’re all about. You know whether you’re selling tacos or sandwiches, right, you, you just need to be able to tell a story so that brings all of the people across those stakeholder groups. Here’s an example.
So we have some new data from our about our customers. We learned some new things about our customers and we want to sell a bunch more tacos over the next couple of months, and we’ve discovered that our crazy chorizo taco is the most loved taco. It’s got a cult following on on social media. So here’s what we need to do. We need to be able to give our customers what they’re asking for. We need an easy button for them to purchase this taco. Maybe we need to, you know, put out a buy one, get one free offer out there. You know just anything we can do to encourage our customers to get excited and, you know, continue to engage with our brand with this fun taco Right. So everybody understands that. I mean, you guys eat a, you guys like tacos, right? You eat tacos.
Mike Giambattista
You bet.
Mishel Justesen
I love tacos.
Mike Giambattista
Who doesn’t like a?
Mishel Justesen
taco, yeah, and I mean I like to take selfies with my food too. You know I love that, and when a taco is really beautiful, I like to take a picture of it, right? So what I’ve just explained to everyone in the room is here’s the experience I want to create and here’s the story, and I’ve made it personal, right. Like I love tacos, you love tacos. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could provide an easy button and a free taco to our customers, right? And then I say, okay, now let me tell you how we light up that experience, right. And then I explain there’s several different pieces of technology that have to make that happen. And then we also have to make sure the people selling that taco know how to be excited about it and give the customer their free taco, right.
So once you, once you like, I could map out that story and then I could draw, I could literally have done whiteboarding sessions with this, and I’ve said, okay, here’s your point of sale system, here’s your people that need to be trained on this, the offers technology, and here’s what your marketing team needs to put together. And, by the way, if this data is going to go somewhere, we need to make sure it goes into these systems so that we can send the emails and the push notifications which you know. Those are those fun little things. You click on with your mobile phone Right To open the app, to buy the taco and get one free, right. So that’s how I do it.
Mike Giambattista
And everybody nods accordingly and next thing you know, everybody’s rolling in the same direction.
Mishel Justesen
Usually no.
Mike Giambattista
Well, you make it sound intuitive and easy. And I’m sure it’s not that, but you know.
Mishel Justesen
Yeah, If the technology is already implemented in an exists then it’s usually an easier story to sell to the IT people because they already know that they can do it. But if you’re talking about like a personalization strategy, then it becomes more of a getting that simple little personalized email or offer out there turns into six months of work.
Mike Giambattista
Yeah, I can imagine I can. Yeah, I’m just curious to jump topics just a little bit Sure. So when you’re interacting with these organizations and we’ve acknowledged that this concept of experience architecture, at least as a term, is fairly new, how do you find marketers specifically respond to the idea? Is it something that marketers can easily adjust to in their thinking? Can they deal with and start thinking through holistic processes? I’m interested because it seems to me that most marketers I know the practitioners, the leaders we have our KPIs and we charge hard for them. We are going to make those numbers.
Mishel Justesen
Yes.
Mike Giambattista
It ends up producing kind of a myopic, kind of narrow field of view on what you need to do to accomplish that, I think.
Mishel Justesen
Yes, that’s a really excellent question and I have my opinions on that. But what I’ve seen out there is that there’s also many different flavors of marketers. I’m sure you’ve noticed this. There’s been a trend for a marketing team to have many different types of roles. So you’ll have the traditional CMO, even the CMO. I think we could call that CXO, because a lot of times the CMOs are being asked to be in charge of driving revenue and handle sales as well. It just depends on the type of organization, right? You have marketer, you have CMOs, who are really all about just promoting a big brand, and then all the other pieces get merged off into different areas of the marketing team or the business, right? So to answer, to make a short story longer, which is what I love to do- Me too.
This is perfect. What I find is you have to have a different tactic depending on who you’re talking to in a marketing department, and most likely most of the time, the marketers I work with are the more technical marketers, right, the ones that are actually maybe the admins of the different tools that are used, maybe the admin of the back office operations tool that runs the workflows for the agency and approvals Right.
Or maybe it’s the marketer that knows how to code some HTML and build content in an HTML template for email messaging, or even understands a bit of HTML to be able to post content on a website, right. So I tend to be. I tend to find that the message resonates more with more of like the marketing director or the technical marketing director, and then they become the champion of that, and then they’re able to help speak to their boss in the language that their boss understands. So that’s really how I’ve been successful. I’m certainly happy to talk to the CMO or the CXO, but I will be very high level vision. This is if we do this personalization strategy. I have seen X amount of lift with your campaigns Right, and this is this is, in general, what you can expect.
Mike Giambattista
So I’m thinking about a couple of conversations I’ve had recently. So one of them is a good friend of mine, actually very opinionated guy, and his view on this kind of an attempt is that all you need to do is change the incentives.
Mishel Justesen
If you, oh Right, so you’ve met this kind of person already.
Mike Giambattista
You know how that’s good and I think there’s a lot more to it. I really do. I think, yep, changing their incentives is is a smart, probably core thing you want to do. But anyway, I’m going to answer the question. I’d rather you answer because I think that’s one component, but maybe not the whole. Thing.
Mishel Justesen
Yeah, so, um, changing the incentives, I think works within certain organization types, Right? Um, I think I feel like it’s a stick when you really need to give cake, right? Um, sure, you can change the incentives, or you can cut, you know the organization can come up with. I want you to drive a million dollars in sales with this one campaign, right, and I’m going to give you this amount of money to work with it, and I need you to double that money, whatever, right? And if you don’t do this and you’re not getting promoted and you’re not getting your bonus, right, well, it doesn’t make sense to me if that incentive is not aligned with what can actually be accomplished, right? So, so I think incentives are fine as long as it’s done with Reality, with the reality of, I mean and the reality can be in many different things it’s the digital maturity of the organization itself. How ready are they?
Mike Giambattista
Good point really.
Mishel Justesen
You know, personalized and experience. Are they still doing manual processes just to build segments? Do they really understand the story that their data is trying to tell them right? So Sure you can. You can say you know I want you to do this big campaign, but this infrastructure and the people that are actually in charge of that experience and that architecture, are they really ready to help support that? If not, then you need to focus on getting them ready to be able to get, to Be able to achieve that incentive.
Mike Giambattista
So I’m going to introduce you to my friend so you can talk him off the cliff. Great or a terrible. He’s a really smart guy and I’m making fun of him and I’ll pay for this later. But the other conversation I’m thinking of is Was speaking with a group that that is. They’re basically CX consultants and it’s the version of CX where it’s very focused on journey mapping and kind of whole enterprise CX as opposed to the version of CX which is more customer service orientated, oriented and their view Was squarely in yeah, we are tasked with these monumental Changes, organizational changes.
It’s there’s a lot of culture that has to happen there. But if you can get the, the employee experience right, the ex, as your starting point, then everything else is there’s a golden from there.
Mishel Justesen
I so agree with that.
Mike Giambattista
Do you, I because. I thought yes, but yes with asterisks on it.
Mishel Justesen
No, tell me what you think about that. Well, so you know we started our conversation and you notice that you know we, we are very focused on getting someone to hand over a credit card for to buy a product or service from us, right, you’re creating that experience, they’re making them, making you that that that customer a brand champion and you know that sort of thing right. But I have had the best success when I’ve focused my initial work on the internal organization, and the reason for that is because if they don’t understand the holistic picture of the experience they’re trying to create for their customer like, for example, the help desk doesn’t know that we have a big offer campaign that’s gone out the door and how often does that happen all the time all the time
Right. So if you, if you focus on making sure you bring that story internal of the overall experience and Really focus on the change management of it which is why I love what you said about your cx friends If you, if you can really focus on the change management needs to happen across the org and make everyone really excited about it. It helps so much Because you know you call hey, I just had a problem with the offer it didn’t redeem and you’re calling the help desk and they’re like what versus?
oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. Let me pull up your profile. I’m going to refund you right now. Right, you know we’re having this campaign right now. Let me offer you this other incentive. The word incentive stuck in my head. Let me give you this other offer to make up for it. Right, I mean, that’s such a better experience, don’t you think?
Mike Giambattista
completely, and I’m also Thinking of in all that the crazy, cool Innovations that AI is bringing to the customer service world. Yes, we had to talk about it. You know it was going to come up. I was ready, I’m ready, I know and, having seen some of this technology in action, it’s really cool how they can mimic empathy and care Digitally at scale. That’s just really neat stuff. But I think what you’re saying is, if you engage your employees First, it may never get there. You may never need that.
Mishel Justesen
Well, how are you going to train the AI models to?
Mike Giambattista
well, right.
Mishel Justesen
If you don’t want it, you have to have a person that understands the experience that needs to be created so they, so they can explain to the data scientist how to create that model. Right, and I love all the stuff that’s coming out with AI, right, I love it. There’s so many different flavors. You know there’s lots of different flavors of everything. I love that that saying. But you know, there’s AI for creating content, there’s AI for help desk, there’s AI for you know, we got chat GPT out there, that that everybody loves.
Amazing, it’s amazing just seems so smart.
Mike Giambattista
Right, it is amazing.
Mishel Justesen
Okay, so for me I’ll just go back to where I was. For me, when it comes to AI, if you don’t understand the data that you’re, the story that your data is trying to tell you, and where the gaps in that story are, which chapters are missing, you’re not going to be successful with AI, because it’s data Right. How are you going to train the AI to do what you need it to do? And I think that you know it doesn’t matter what size organization I’ve worked with, it’s the data is always the biggest challenge. It’s also aside from the organizational silos with the different areas in the business. You’ve got all of this other. You’ve got all the different areas in the business. You’ve got all of this other. You’ve got all this technology pumping out its own type of data.
Mike Giambattista
Right.
Mishel Justesen
And you know, you got to figure out how to harness the power of that data before you can be successful with, with AI. That’s where I stand right now. That’s where I’m. You know, organizations are just starting to figure out what is this AI thing? It’s a new shiny object, right? And you’ve got, yeah, absolutely, and you’ve got all sorts of things that you need to think about. You know, governance. You know, is it going to take over my job, which I’m not. I’m not certain that that needs to be a concern yet.
Mike Giambattista
Yeah, that might just be the media telling us we need to be concerned.
Mishel Justesen
Absolutely.
There’s been a lot of Hollywood movies that you know make people think that you know, but you know, at the end of the day, it’s really harnessing the power of your data and being able to automate Responses and using this technology to really be able to create an experience that’s that’s faster, you know, and more efficient, so that you know when you do have to get to a human to help for help, or you know you have to interact with a human at a point of sales service, your point of sales system or you know, whatever you’ve enjoyed the experience up to that point and it’s gotten you there faster, which means you hand over your credit card faster.
Mike Giambattista
Right, right, right after that Right.
Mishel Justesen
Yes, exactly.
Mike Giambattista
I want to keep this conversation going indefinitely, because there’s so much to talk about.
Mishel Justesen
So many things yes.
Mike Giambattista
And it’s all fascinating and it’s all incredibly important right now, yeah. So, however, I’m going to do you a favor and not take up the rest of your day here, but I would really like it if.
Mishel Justesen
I think we could do that very easily.
Mike Giambattista
I know, I know and there’s I mean, just there is so much yes, but if you think that you have an appetite for continuous conversation and we can get back on your schedule, that I absolutely want to, because it’s fun and it’s vital and really important to the people who listen to this podcast.
Mishel Justesen
I would be happy to join you.
Mike Giambattista
You didn’t have to say that. By the way, I know I set you up a little bit, but no, no, I, honestly, I, I would love to.
Mishel Justesen
I would love to do that with you. I think there’s a lot of really interesting things to dig into here, because the concept of XA versus, you know, just building a technology stack and how that needs to merge together. I really feel, like, you know, we have in marketing land, we have a lot of acronyms that come out and you have these terms that come out that are, you know, things like CDP. Now CDP isn’t really CDP anymore, right, but I really feel like this term experience architecture helps bring together business and technology in a way that makes sense, and maybe we can be the harbingers or the messengers of how that really that story gets told and how it gets explained to the outside world.
Mike Giambattista
I think there. Yes, yes to that, and I’d love to continue it, and I know of a few other people who are singing the same song and maybe we can all get together at some point and harmonize.
Mishel Justesen
No we’re not singing on this show. Let’s definitely stay in touch.
