Today’s interview is with Sid Banerjee, Chief Strategy Officer at Medallia, a leading provider of customer and employee experience management solutions. I first talked to Sid 11 years ago on this podcast when he was Founder & CEO at Clarabridge. This time around, we talk about what has happened in those intervening years, what brought him out of ‘retirement’, how to balance the human touch and AI in CX, the future of both CX and agentic CX, the role of LLMs in disrupting the dashboard–centric use cases for CX, trends in omnichannel and a whole bunch of other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Customer-centric innovation and Amazon’s PRFAQ – Interview with Marcelo Calbucci – and is number 543 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Sid:

• Sid was first a guest on the podcast 11 years ago when he was CEO of Clarabridge.
• When Mark Bishof called Sid about joining him at Medallia to help lead the business to the next wave of growth, he couldn’t turn it down, particularly after Mark said, “It won’t be the same if you’re not there.”
• Medallia has a fantastic platform for evolution, a very good track record, and, particularly over the last five to seven years, has made smart investments to prepare for this next wave of AI.
• I do feel like my past experience does prepare me well, hopefully, for this next wave.
• At Clarabridge, we understood language at scale, emotion and sentiment at scale, and how to actually complete ideas and make recommendations back in 2017/19/19 before LLMs came out.
• I believe that this current wave of AI technology is going to help unleash a renaissance of CX.
• We are going to be able to use the technology to get closer to and to ultimately build stronger relationships with customers.
• When you think about any new technology, it’s often initially adopted in very narrow silos and I think with large language models, the same is happening.
• AI-powered is the new thing. But under the covers, Omnichannel is still alive and well.
• Our approach to striking the balance between automation and the human touch seeks to cross that boundary between the human and the automation in a transparent way that also gives companies and individuals time to adjust to the change.
• We’re finding that in CX, you can use AI in a couple of different domains.
  • The first is to develop a better insight about what to do i.e If I see a negative set of interactions or an opportunity to improve a product or potentially an opportunity to kind of build a closer relationship with a customer, to drive more loyalty or revenue, we can identify that and then the human can make a decision.
  • The second wave is that we can actually recommend actions for that marketer or support person, or product person, to basically build a better product or capability to drive those actions. And instead of just giving you analytics, we give them recommendations.
• Where I think where we’re headed is a space (in the next year or two years or five years) where we as humans get more confident with the agility, appropriateness and relevance of AI generated actions, that we may start to take the high confidence actions and just push them through an automation workflow automatically. And at that point, the human may not be in the loop. But we won’t do that recklessly. I think it’s important to build trust that this technology is at least as good as a human, if not better. And I think we all have to adjust to that in a way that makes sense to us as organizations and as individuals.
• That isn’t to say I’m going to endorse throwing all decisions out to the robots. I don’t think we’re ready for that yet as humans, but I think we need to be very mindful of the fact that this technology is getting quite good quite quickly. And probably faster than many people sort of really appreciate.
• Very quickly, we’re going to start talking to our computers at work. And our computers are going to be able to do what LLMs are good at in general. They can analyze, they can synthesize, they can recommend, and with the capability of agentic AI, they can actually have agency, they can take actions.
• So rather than having custom-made dashboards and analytical charts and things, we’ll get to a place where we will ask the agent questions like “tell me what the biggest issues are with my customer base or in this segment or for this part of the country, over the last 24 hours? And then also tell me what we’re doing about it.
• AI is only as good as its master or trainer.
• In the world of AI, there’s this concept of model drift. You build an AI, and if you don’t check it on it every period, every six to 12 months, it might shift away from the reality of the practical world. So it’s important for us to make sure that we audit these models every few months or at least twice a year or so, and that’s going to be important for us. As executives, I think it’s our job to make sure that we manage the AI to make sure that it’s actually driving good brand-oriented values for our customers.
• Making big bets without anchoring yourself to what you have to do in the here and now can cause experience gaps.
• Blindly adopting technology just because you think it might be interesting is ultimately the path towards potentially disconnecting from your customers.
• Sid’s best advice: Don’t assume, because the technology looks easy, that you should build a solution from scratch.
• Sid’s Punk CX brand(s): Jaguar Land Rover and The Financial Student Aid (FSA) program in the US, which is part of the Department of Education.

About Sid

Sid Banerjee is the Chief Strategy Officer at Medallia.

Over a nearly 30-year career, Sid Banerjee has amassed deep skills building companies and solutions based on customer experience, business intelligence, and AI-powered technologies. Sid was the Founder and served as CEO, Chairman, and Chief Strategy Officer at Clarabridge. He most recently served as Chief XM Strategy Officer at Qualtrics. He presently serves as Chairman at Prolific, a high-growth technology company that provides a platform for high-quality, human-derived AI and research models. He was a founding employee of MicroStrategy and founder/CEO of Claraview. He also held executive and management positions at Ernst & Young and Sprint. He holds a BS/MS in Electrical Engineering from MIT.

Do check out Medallia, say Hi to them on X (Twitter) @Medallia and feel free to connect with Sid on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by Ahmed Carter on Unsplash