ACCELERATING AI:

THE RACE TO ZERO-TOUCH BRAND

How to help your brand thrive in a zero touch world
Meeting the Demand
to Accelerate Brand
and CX Transformation:
• Reduce the Human Experience Debt

• Engage in a zero-touch world

• Bridge the AI and Data Chasm

• Redefining CX through Digital People

• Creating Brand distinctiveness and differentiation

“Strategy is about making choices,

trade-offs; it’s about deliberately
choosing to be different.”

-Michael Porter

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Introduction
A Revolution Accelerated
The challenge for any customer experience and brand leader is clear:
how to reimagine customer experience to answer the needs of a new
world in which human interaction is increasingly limited and stretched;
digital is increasingly imposing a human experience debt; and, zero-touch
is a requirement in physical environments.

Brand “Product” Customer

Workforce
Experience Experience Experience

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 Leaders are moving quickly to reduce this Human
Experience Debt by humanising digital technologies and AI.
In the process they are reimagining customer experience
and increasing the mental, physical and digital availability
of their brands. Underpinning this effort is an entirely new
consumer-to-brand interface, one based on the fusion of
AI, Machine Learning, Cognitive Science, and advanced
computer generated imagery (CGI) to create Digital People.

Digital People are expressed as autonomous, human-like

interfaces, enriching the way brands and their workforces
create interactions with consumers – reducing cost,
automating processes, and driving Brand distinctiveness
and difference.

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Current Approaches are Failing
Answering the need for human, brand and CX augmentation is the
new battleground, and most businesses are struggling to fight on it.

Amplified by Covid-19, businesses are experiencing:

Less than 5%* Less transformation,

of CX efforts result in the outcomes more customer switching
desired by those embarking on them. In the past year 49% of customers
changed products/companies to escape
poor experience, resulting in companies
Increasing losing more than $62 billion.***
Competitiveness**
32% of consumers report they will
leave a brand they love after just one
bad experience.

5 * Source: OCX Cogntion | ** Source: Delloite | *** Source: NewVoiceMedia May 2018
Amplified by Covid-19, businesses are experiencing (continued):

Digital showing value

Digital disruptors are attaining materially higher NPS scores
through new experiences, unencumbered by legacy systems.

Brand power is
declining rapidly The good news is that
Less than 50% of consumers able to recall a preferred or at least companies are
favorite brand, placing increased pressure to build loyalty aware of this challenge/
through CX.
opportunity:
The 1:1 promise
Four out of five companies depend
unanswered upon the quality of their customer
Demand for personalization is extending beyond “know experience (CX) to serve as their
my name” to demonstrating a deeper understanding of primary competitive differentiator,
the customer context and deeper interaction. Brands have but only 12 percent of consumers
become efficient at transmitting information, but remain feel brands have made significant
highly inefficient at customer interaction. Companies are CX improvements in recent years.
increasingly looking to AI as not just an accelerant of IQ,
but also emotional quotient (EQ).

6 * Source: OCX Cogntion | ** Source: Delloite | *** Source: NewVoiceMedia May 2018
 Eliminating Human Experience Debt
What is a CX challenge is equally a brand challenge for CEOs,
CMOs, and CDOs, requiring a set of key questions to be answered
to drive digital transformation from the Human up:

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How do we scale CX and create deeper, richer interactions
in a zero-touch, low human interaction world?:

Brands are infinitely scaleable (at a cost) while the services and interactions
required to support them aren’t. Forrester identified 2020 as the year of the
bot, with 35 per cent of firms planning to invest in bots to improve customer
service. Today, nearly 4 out of 10 internet users report that they prefer to
use automated services rather than speak to a human customer service
representative. This represents the first wave of technology to be applied
with the aim of automating customer interactions with the unavoidable
consequence of increasing Human Experience Debt.

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 Explore: Actions:
What if we could scale interactions infinitely, • Explore using Digital People to engage with
touching more consumers than ever in more customers at the start of journeys to deliver
human ways? If digital is omnipresent in our digital needed information and quickly path them to
lives, why isn’t our humanness present how we next best action.
engage with consumers?
• Deploy a Digital Person against a defined use
case (see Westpac’s use of a Digital Person to
engage with first time job hunters).

• Engage in defining how your brand could express

itself through a Digital Person – how it will be
expressed through voice, conversation, and AGI.

• Identify current high-touch human or digital

customer interactions (currently limited) that
could be served by a Digital Person (retail sales
kiosk, check-in counter).

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2
How can CX and Brand initiatives fully embrace the shift to
voice and mobile?

More than 25% of consumers are using voice search as a starting point in their
journey.* Consumers are as likely to trust product recommendations from
voice assistants as they are to trust salespeople. Voice remains the preferred
means of interaction and Conversational AI is accelerating its use in digital
formats ranging from websites to mobile apps to dedicated customer service
applications. Consumer attention has shifted to mobile where more than 50%
of all web interactions occur, increasing the need for simplification, immediacy
and personalization across every touch-point.

9 * Source: Gartner
 Explore: Actions:
What if our digital services and products • Use Digital People as virtual sales and support
we’re reimagined to be more human-like and assistants—similar to what SK-11 has done with
embrace voice and AGI? What if we reduced Yumi. (could insert short Yumi case study in here).
the task-burden placed on consumers to
make interactions simple and conversational? • Deploy a Digital Sales Assistant who goes beyond
transaction assistance to provide advice and
coaching to customers.

• Determine new zero-touch environments for your

Digital Assistant – digital sales kiosks and out-of-
home digital displays. Extend and express your
brand in new ways.

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3
How do we drive high-quality engagement through CX?

Digital technologies can make it easier for us to navigate through our busy
lives, but they also can erode the fundamental elements of human connection.
Despite efforts to replicate human behavior and gestures through automation
and AI, the essentials of human connection—eye contact, personal touch,
empathy, etc. -- have remained irreplaceable by technology until now. Most
digital transformation efforts are focused on selling and serving the customer.
Digital People and their intrinsic AI can afford the opportunity to deepen use
and engagement in products and services.

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 Explore: Actions:
What if digital become a means for full and rich • Consider a Digital Person for where engagement
human engagement? What if we could replace is vital to your business. Compliance training
the task burden placed on consumers with could be undertaken in a highly engaging and
simpler conversations? How will we engage interactive way with the employees engagement
with the customer throughout the entire journey measured throughout.
and add value to the product and service sold?
How can conversations with a Digital Person • Create new on-brand conversations with
enrich customer interactions in informative and customers where the tone and expression of
playful ways? the brand is experienced by the customer in
their engagement with the Digital Person.

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4
How can CX foster greater inclusion and address
new customer segments?

When digital connections—personal and professional—

lack a human touch, they create an environment where
people feel isolated, underrepresented, and unfulfilled. “When digital connections - personal
Human interactions offer a bridge to greater confidence and - lack a human touch, people can
and assurance. In 2013, a quarter of global internet users feel isolated, underrepresented and
agreed with the statement “technology makes life more unfulfilled. The rapid pace of digital
complicated.” By 2019, this had jumped to one-third. change is adding to a build-up of
these unintended consequences, or
experience debt.”

-Deloitte

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 Explore: Actions:
How do we humanize brands, product and • Consider a Digital Person specific segments.
services in a scaleable way? How can we In some cases this might be where digital
foster inclusion by making services and engagement is high (youth banking at Westpac)
products more accessible? or in other cases potentially low (Soul Machines
Covid-19 Companion).

• See how your brand ambassadors, influencers,

and heritage can be bought to life through a
Digital Person. Check-out how Will.I.Am was
recreated as a Digital Person.

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5
How can CX enable the reinvention of products
and services, and not just the transformation of the
status-quo? How do we address the resiliency of key
business functions such as call centers?
Rather than simply using CX to tune existing products and services,
startups and established brands must orient the elements of their
business around opportunities to create new products and services
that are magnets for consumer engagement.

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 Explore: Actions:
How, in a world of simplified, click-and- • Examine how Call Centers can be augmented
buy transactions, can we enrich customer with a Digital Person to scale customer
journeys with Digital People and create interactions without losing the impact of a
compelling new interaction patterns? How human interaction. Assess vulnerabilities due to
can our existing business capabilities be Covid-19 and increase your business resilience.
augmented with a Digital Person, increasing
our resilience and increasing our scale • Reimagine the customer interface to go
without the cost? beyond rigid digital pathways, accelerating the
customer’s time to an outcomes, through a
Digital Person and conversational AI.

• Examine how your existing conversational

AI implementations can be extended to a
Digital Person.

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6
How can CX democratize access to
interactions that are more human?

Human interactions have become a premium offering –

an air of “luxury” has emerged around human-driven, in
contrast to technology-driven, experiences. Consumers
are demanding greater intimacy from interactions and
authentic conversations. “The positive behaviours and emotions
human engagement elicits — think the joy
of a massage. Now education, health care
stores, everyone, is starting to look at how
to make experiences human. The human
is very important right now.”

-Milton Pedraza,
the chief executive of the Luxury Institute

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 Explore: Actions:
How will we create more human experiences • Deploy Digital People to augment and enrich
without adding more humans, democratizing high-value customer offerings. A Digital Person
access? How can our existing high-touch functioning as a concierge offering advice and
interactions, strained due to Covid-19, be direction.
scaled and automated without losing the
humanlike interactions customers value? • Examine how Digital People can provide
How can we accelerate the creation of scaleable new services (such as work from home
capability and capacity? assistance; Covid-19 advice and coaching; new
product introductions).

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7
How will we create a bridge between CX, data, and AI?
How will we build relevant and personalized interactions?

AI is coming to the forefront of how a company creates a better CX.

Machines’ ability to interact with humans is stronger than ever. AI will help
us make better business decisions, many of them positively impacting
the customer. The speed and precision of AI technologies and analytics
will provide a new kind of IQ/EQ operating system upon which to build
the customer experience of the future. AI technologies will enhance text,
sentiment, voice, interaction, IoT and even traditional survey analysis. By
2021, 15% of all customer service interactions are going to be handled by
artificial intelligence, according to Gartner, a fourfold increase over 2017.
Today’s dehumanizing bot-driven processes are driving consumers to
demand more from brands, in the form of real, authentic engagement.

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 Explore: Actions:
How can we know the customer beyond • Examine how existing AI projects and programs
historical data and respond to them based can be expressed through a Digital Person,
on their current emotional states and needs increasing their benefit to customers.
more effectively? How will we create a
bridge between the AI and data in business, • Implement Digital People as the next phase
and the customer? in maturing existing Bot-based interfaces,
humanizing them and accelerating the customer
journey through contextualized and relevant
conversations based on data.

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Reducing and
Eliminating
the Human
Experience Debt
Brand and CX leaders must move to reduce the Human
Experience Debt by building their ability to transform the
ways in which their businesses interact with consumers.

Value and experience continue to trump price. Unless a

company wants to be recognized as purely a low-cost
provider, the value proposition of good CX can protect
price and margin.

Emerging CX strategies extend beyond products and

traditional interaction patterns (website, bots) to include
new ways to communicate and engage with customers.

“You can’t solve a problem on the same

level that it was created. You have to
rise above it to the next level.”

-Albert Einstein
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