Today’s episode features a chat I had recently with Ping Wu, CEO of Cresta. We chat about a range of issues, including how many brands seem to be suffering from a split personality disorder, why CRM technology is fundamentally not the right type of technology to develop the type of conversational intelligence that is needed to drive better outcomes and why taking an automation-only approach to customer support is like ‘taking a shower with a raincoat on.’

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Transforming experience for business outcomes – Interview with Sid Banerjee, Mike Murchison and Paloma Paraja – and is number 575 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 Ping:

• The “Split Personality Disorder” of Brands: Many brands suffer from inconsistent customer experiences across different touchpoints (sales, service, marketing), lacking a shared context from previous interactions, which hinders long-term customer relationships.
• CRM is Insufficient for the Future of CX: Traditional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, built on sparse, structured, relational databases, are fundamentally ill-suited for capturing the full, raw, unstructured data of human-like conversations and interactions needed for deep personalization.
• A New Data Paradigm is Required: The future of customer relationship context will require a new type of storage—like a “Facebook feed” of all historical, raw, unstructured interactions (conversations, website clicks, ads viewed)—to be leveraged by AI agents for personalized future interactions.
• The Simplicity of Unstructured Data: Counterintuitively, storing data in its original, messy, unstructured form is seen as “easier to build” than maintaining the highly structured, low-entropy data required for traditional relational databases.
• Automation-Only is a Mistake: Adopting an “automation-only” approach to customer support is likened to “taking a shower with a raincoat on.” It only solves a part of the problem and creates silos between AI and human agents.
• The Three Pillars of True Transformation: Real customer experience transformation should be built on a multi-pillar approach: Analyze (understand the root cause of calls), Automate (handle simple, repetitive tasks), and Augment (assist human agents).
• Tapping into Human Intelligence (Tribe Knowledge): To achieve optimal automation, organizations must capture the “tribe knowledge” and institutional intelligence locked in human agents’ heads, as a significant portion of complex queries cannot be solved with existing documentation.
• Emergence of “Ambient Agents”: A key trend is the rise of non-customer-facing “ambient agents” that work alongside human agents, autonomously performing background tasks like logging into multiple systems or gathering information to increase human productivity.
• The Agentic Contact Center: The entire contact center ecosystem will become “agentic,” acting as a “central nerve system” that proactively surfaces actionable insights—process improvements, surging issues, customer feedback—and pushes them directly to business leaders.
• AI as a Revenue Driver, Not Just a Cost-Cutter: AI is being used not just for operational efficiency or call deflection, but to perform new, proactive, personalized services that humans don’t have the headcount for (e.g., pet care service proactively reminding owners about grooming sessions).
• Ping’s best advice: Start with observability and generate conversation insights to really understand the deeper reasons why people call in.
• Ping’s Punk CX brand: Zappos and United Airlines.

About Ping

Ping Wu is the CEO of Cresta. One of the foremost experts in the field of customer experience AI, Ping co-founded and led Google’s Contact Center AI and Vertex AI platforms. An engineering leader at Google and YouTube, Ping joined Cresta in 2021 to build the future of AI-driven customer experiences. Ping holds a PhD in computer science from University of California, Santa Barbara.

Find out more about Cresta, say Hi to them on X (Twitter) @cresta and feel free to connect with Ping on LinkedIn.

Image credit: Photo by Nellie Adamyan on Unsplash