What you need to know

• The CEOs of three of the world's most respected brands say the interplay of customer and employee experience is critical in a world were the products is the experience.
• All three were speaking at this year's Qualtrics X4 conference earlier this month.
• Hilton's Chris Nassetta says his industry was built on looking in the rearview mirror. "Let's find out after our customers leave and they had a bad experience, how we did?" 
• American Express's Steve Squeri says company values are tested during the tough times - and he highlights Amex's decision to hold onto all its staff during the pandemic.
• Delta's Ed Bastian meanwhile, says selling on price is no longer sustainable in a world where value is increasingly being ascribed to the experience.
• The CMO of Porsche, Robert Ader, along with the Qualtrics CEO Zig Serafin and OpenAI CTO Mira Murati described the role of technology in bringing customer and employee experiences together.

For the CEOs of Hilton, American Express and Delta, managing the experiences of customers and employees alike - and understanding the interplay of the two - is a critical factor in helping to create some of the most admired brands in the world.

Each was speaking on stage at the recent QualtricsX4 event. Meanwhile, Porsche AG's CMO Robert Ader sees the value of boiling complexity down into a simple metric.

Chris Nassetta, now 17 years into his tenure at Hilton, told delegates, “The job we're doing for our customers is delivering on our promise. And our promise to our customers is to deliver the most reliable and most friendly experience".

"We do all the focus groups and have quantity / quality research out the wazoo. When you boil it all down, what customers want is: 'Give me what I want, reliably every time, for whatever product, whatever price point, whatever geography - and I want a friendly experience. Don't treat me like I'm an Honors number or a room number. I'm Jim or Sally or Mary. Treat me like a human being. That's what our customers want."

Nassetta said the stats objectively support the idea Hilton does that better than its competitors, but said that's not nearly enough.

"We have not broken away meaningfully from the competition in the way I think we can. I think our industry broadly has been slow to innovate, and is slow and backward thinking about the whole customer experience," he continued.  "The industry was built on looking at a rearview mirror. Let's find out after our customers leave how we did.

"We'll survey them and it's like they hate us, they love us. Then we as an industry try and correct that. We will give you a million Honors points or whatever to make it up. I mean, that's obviously a horrendously bad way to deal with your customers. That's just historically how our industry has done it."

Now Hilton is trying something new. As Mi3 reported last week, the company went live with Qualtrics in January this year after ditching a 20-year incumbent, believed to be Medallia. According to Vice President, Enterprise & Customer Analytics Hilton, Becky Polebaum, the organisation is using Qualtrics AI-enabled capabilities to collect and synthesise feedback across the entire guest journey for its more than 7600 global properties. 

"Individual hotels were good at closing the loop but corporate was not good across the common problems," she said. The implementation timetable was also incredibly truncated, from the decision to go with Qualtrics in the April quarter, a proof of concept in September, then cutting across to the new solution during December and January.

"The work we're doing together is incredibly simple, but it is to revolutionise the way that we address issues, opportunities, and problems with our customers in the moment, not in the rearview mirror but in the mirror, by dealing and addressing the wants and needs and problems that our customers have," Nassetta said of the project. "It is taking very simple things and connecting the dots in a way that really could change the equation."

Employees are an important part of such connections, according to Nassetta. "I got into the industry a long time ago because I love people. In the end, all the technology and all of that is about enabling our people. We are a business of people serving people - period, end of story. There's a lot of technology to make it more efficient, to give them tools and to equip them with things to do a better job. But it's all about the people."

Delta CEO Ed Bastian saw customers increasingly putting a premium on experience.

"The bifurcation we're seeing in terms of the upper end of the consumer is more pronounced today than ever ... At the lower end of the value chain, that group in the airline industry, and my guess is in other consumer industries, is experiencing a fair bit of stress," he said.

For many years, the airline industry saw value ascribed to low prices. "Who doesn't want a lower price? So we get that. But if that's all you're selling, that's not a sustainable proposition in a world where value is increasingly being ascribed to the experience," Bastian said.

Instead, the consumer mindset today is "I want an experience and I'm willing to pay something for it," he suggested.

"We've been leading that charge at Delta for well over a decade, breaking out of the pack and being seen as a premium experience. And our premium products and services are double-digit this year. That's on top of double-digit growth for the last several years. I see that continuing forward because value is now about what I get to experience, what I get to bring value to myself, rather than just trying to save a nickel," he said.

Bastian also tied this brand recognition into an appreciation of the impact of employee experience and engagement on the customer experience, ultimately driving that bottom-line outcome.

"Our people are everything. It's really important to remember our business is made up of big shiny planes, highly technical technologies, and really complicated airports operating in 250 locations around the world. It's easy to get distracted into thinking 'this is what you're doing' rather than who you are," Bastian said. "We are not a transportation company. Yes, we transport people. But what we are about is bringing experiences to life. We bring journeys and destinations to life. And the only way you can do that is with people. It's the warmth of the service we have." 

Technology is about supplementing the work people do, it is not about replacing them, he continued. "Our people bring the warmth, bring the caring and bring the judgment."

Getting the service delivery right is table stakes, Bastian suggested. Failing to do so means customers will not give you a premium attribution.

"But when you actually bring the level of warmth on top of the reliability and the care and in an industry where things happen sometimes you want to make sure you know your company's got your back. You want to make sure there's trust there. And trust is built by relationships, and relationships are [between] two people."

Technology can't replace that. "It's not virtual, it's in person. And it's not through technology. It's about the individual you can count on to get you to where you need to be. That's been the secret of Delta. And by the way, it's not complicated. It sounds relatively simple but it's something you have to do though every day."

A little bit of crazy helps

Over at Porsche AG, Rob Ader said customers basically become part of the Porsche family. "Then they expect a very unique ownership experience," the CMO said.

"This is basically what we focus on in marketing and sales everyday. We have a very simple marketing strategy, it only has three missions. One of them is 'Be crazy about every customer touch point'. And this is what we try to prepare every day. It's also one of the reasons why we have very high loyalty, " he said.

In a business like Porsche, which relies on dealerships it doesn't own, it is important to create a consistency of experience and culture.

"We only own 10 to 15 per cent of the dealerships. The other dealers are independent entrepreneurs. And I think what makes Porsche a little bit special is the collaboration we have with our dealer network. We really share one global database with all our customers in, with all our cars in, and with all the interactions with customers in it. And we have a very clear agreement on how to use the data," Ader said. "That enables us to to have a connected view of the whole customer."

Technology condenses all of this different feedback for Porsche. "For example, we have a lot of customers who give us open text feedback," he said. But that feedback was always saved in a structured way, and to feedback up to management.

"We basically now have one score that is super relevant for management remuneration," Ader said. 

It also makes it easier for managers to understand the problems customers face, how they feel about the experience of owning a Porsche, and for managers to take action quickly when necessary, he added.

Human connections

The importance of human connections and the role AI will play in enhancing them was central to the story of this year's QualtricsX4 conference. Qualtrics CEO Zig Serafin told Mi3, "Human connection is a driving force for growth in your company. It's about driving revenue, cost efficiency, being smart about how you're approaching things."

"How you use AI to make the interaction with the customer more profound is the next big inflection point," he suggested. "At the end of the day, what's really interesting is it's all about the basics of people wanting to be served in the way they would expect to [be served]. And it's about knowing what people's interests are and about being consistent."

However, Serafin recognised consistency at scale is a very difficult problem especially if you're running many different brands across different merchants with many different people in your workforce. That represents a highly dynamic system and is one where AI can manage complexity.  

"So yes, it is true as things become more machine-oriented you can lose the humanity in it. But conversely, the approach we're taking with people is as the AI model learns more about what the human being expects, it better prepares human beings to serve other human beings," he explained.

The point is to free frontline staff from mundane tasks that are better done by a machine. "Let the human being that is serving on the frontline focus on better things."

Over the Horizon

And on that note, CTO of ChatGPT owner OpenAI, Mira Murati, told delegates she believes there is a big opportunity for these systems to completely transform our relationship with knowledge, creativity. And that can be applied to every domain.

"[Generative AI] is really different from how we've developed technology before, where it tool quite a long time to penetrate society," she said.

It is already happening, Murati suggested, flagging the likely economic impact of technologies like co-pilots. "That was the first time we saw large language models enter the workforce."