Understanding the shifting priorities of IT leaders with Zendesk’s Paulette Chafe

I'm actually really excited about that making its way into customer experience and CS. Imagine being able to respond to a customer and create a new sales piece on the fly, perfectly tailored with images and video and links. Like, that's really where this is going pretty quickly. Welcome back to Conversations with Zendesk, where we explore new technology and trends in customer experience. Each episode we speak with industry innovators and experts to hear their thoughts, unpack industry trends and discuss the most important ideas around CX. I'm your host, Nicole Saunders. Today's conversation is with Paulette Chaeve, who leads the Thought Leadership team at Zendesk. Her team of insights and trends professionals identify emerging trends and research-based insights, which are relevant to customer experience and service professionals. Her team is responsible for developing Zendesk's annual flagship Thought Leadership Report CX trends. Coming up in this episode, we dig into a recent survey that Paulette's team conducted with IT leaders to understand what is top of mind for them. She shares some great and informative insight that we discuss ways to navigate some of the challenges ahead. Stay tuned to hear our conversation. Ready to take your customer experiences to the next level? Build lasting relationships, the Zendesk complete customer service solution, so that you can exceed every customer's expectations. Sign up for a free trial at Zendesk.com. Welcome to Conversations with Zendesk. How are you today? I am great undelighted to be here. Well, we are so glad to have you. So I understand that you recently conducted a global survey of IT leaders to put together one of our Zendesk insights reports. I'm really curious about what you discovered in this conversation and what is really relevant to that audience right now. So over the past several years, digital transformation has been one of the big themes that we have been seeing in IT leadership roles. A lot of organizations really moving towards how they are leveraging all of the new technologies. But it sounds like there is maybe some shifting priorities happening. What are you seeing? What is top of mind for IT leaders right now? Well, you know, it's a really interesting question and I'm glad you started with digital transformation because it has been a top priority for years for IT leaders. And it seems that a lot of them have really dug in deeply into that. But we've noticed that over time, it's being replaced by other ones. It's still on their list and it's still important, but actually it's being surpassed by several new priorities that are sort of moving to the forefront. We're actually seeing three big shifts happening right now. From a priority perspective, one is their desire to strengthen cybersecurity and data privacy. That's always been on the list and has always been near the top. But it is the top-ranked priority right now. This is now followed by enhancing customer experience and service experiences, which is new and moved up rapidly into second place. And then that's followed by better utilizing data and insights for the business. So we've seen a pretty significant shift happening over time. And it's really these changes are really being embraced by IT leaders globally. So what are some of the challenges that they're having as those priorities are shifting? One of the major changes that's been a driver of this, which then feeds into some of the challenges that we can talk about, they're really under more pressure to create richer, more personalized customer experiences for their organization. So they've had a business priority shift, which is then now feeding in and having a ripple effect in terms of what they as an organization actually need to lean into. They're now on the hook for delivering improved and enhanced customer experiences. And adding new channels, creating more personalization. So that's why we see the three that we see. And all of that creates its own set of challenges. And clearly one of the challenges has to do with, because this leans in so heavily to personalization and customer experience, they need to collect, monitor and manage data in whole new ways that they never had to before. It's collecting, it's the labeling, it's the quality, it's the building out the AI models, it's allowing consumers to opt out. It's a really dense complex topic. So when you think about, oh, I need to create more personalized customer experiences on the surface that's straight forward. But it does open a bit of a Pandora's box for the IT leaders in terms of what do they even do with that data. And then the next giant challenge is to how do they actually deliver an up-level personalization. It's easy to say, I need to deliver personalization. But what does that mean? And the IT group is the group that is essentially left holding the back. They need to figure out how to connect the data. They need to figure out how to create those 360 views of customers and get insights out of it. And frankly, they're then dealing with lots of silo data across all those departments that they're connecting. On the surface, these simple priorities are really pretty complex. And they bring with them a whole set of weighty issues and challenges that the IT leader and IT ward then need to sort through as they implement their plans. Sounds like a lot. So there are different things to focus on. What kinds of solutions are you hearing? What is helping them through navigating all of these different evolutions and the experiences that they're offering? There's a lot of things that they're exploring doing it. I wouldn't say, you know, there is one set path that you'd absolutely follow. But in terms of dealing with some of the challenges that they have, training and development is actually really key of their current team. Because they have these new pressures for new capabilities, their existing teams don't have the skills. So making sure that they put training and development front and center is one surefire way that they can start to grapple with the pace of change and managing it. Another thing that we've heard very clearly from them is that they're looking for more strategic partnerships with their vendors. You know, because they have this skills gap that I just referenced and the fact that they need to up level their team and up level those plans to stay on top of emerging technologies. They want to lean more heavily into their more strategic vendors, understand the roadmap, understand guidance, understand the landscape. So there's actually a lot in there that they're looking for their partners to really provide for them. So it sounds like there's a lot of opportunity for those partners to level up and really make sure that they're leaning into all of the challenges that you just outlined. There absolutely is. Like there are very specific demands that IT leaders have from their partners in the skills and the requirements. It's not necessarily a short list. Are there a top two or three that you're hearing more frequently? One is expertise in cybersecurity and compliance partners who can provide enhanced security infrastructure real time monitoring. It's critically important because personalization is driving the demands on data, which is driving better experiences. But foundationally, this is such a critical element that we can't ignore it. I would also say like maybe the second one is support and using AI and CX in the enhancements we're making. You know, they need people who can bring to them AI driven solutions that are able to personalize the customer interactions. They don't want to build all these things from scratch. They're looking for partners who can automate routine tasks, provide actionable insights. These are fairly hefty demands because their teams don't have these skills in house. So they want as much as they can get in advance and they want to feel confident that the partners, you know, are not learning on the fly that they've already got these skillsets to deliver on. So everybody just needs to have an experience in AI right now. Definitely in terms of what it means for CX. You know, there's AI in the broader big old definition of AI and there's applying AI to customer experience and customer service experiences, which are radically different as you move through that. So they don't want to have that learning curve. They want you to bring that expertise. They want you to bring those best in class practices along with the technological innovation so they can hit the ground running. That makes a ton of sense, you know, with the technology that's coming up very quickly. We already know that the organizations that adopt it effectively are going to get a huge leg up over competition that is maybe taking their time to learn it or think about it or debate about it. So I can definitely see where it would be important to have a partner that can just bring that right away. We don't have to sit down and figure it out, but you already know that you're doing the right things and how to do it. And they're thinking about security. and compliance and all of those other pieces that you're speaking to. You just triggered like the third point that I think is worth knowing because you definitely were referencing it. Knowledge transfer, you know, partners who just don't take it and keep it all enclosed, they want a partner who will actually tree and transfer information to their in-house teams so that they can get up and running and they're learning and they're growing so they can understand and maximize the technologies. Like it sort of falls out of the first and the second item, but very literally they do want partners who are willing to give them that knowledge transfer, bring those best in class practices and share them with them. Makes a ton of sense to me. Within that AI space because we know it's such a big hot thing right now, are there specific areas that you're hearing them most interested in using AI for? Is it primarily internal use cases, external use cases, specific parts of the business, or is it more about offering some AI technologies across the board? It's definitely an interesting combination. I think most of the initial pressure is around bringing AI capabilities to the more customer facing experiences like where in the journey can we up level the journey and put AI into automated, surface the right insights, help those experiences. So most of it, the initial push was on there. But as we've learned from the research, they're also really interested in employing AI, in employee experiences, in-house experiences because they're seeing some of the similarities and they also have some challenges in-house. In terms of, they know that they need to upgrade their employee experiences and they see AI as being an available solution. So most of the initial pressure was external with consumers and customer experience. Now they're starting to see the transference because they actually feel that's an area where they can have a pretty big impact pretty quickly because they haven't necessarily been doing a great job. And from an IT leader's perspective, they feel like EX is out there on its own. Nobody really owns it. It's actually ripe for a lot of innovation and ripe for improvement. So clearly, priority-wise, CX is there, but EX is definitely not far behind. I've been hearing a ton of buzz about employee experience and the whole EX space over the last few months. I know that our CX trends report last spring talked about those customer demands. So it makes a ton of sense that external facing use cases are important, right? They're looking for personalization, customers are looking for more responsiveness and they're looking for more data security. But then you too start to hear more about those internally use cases. Are there specific areas that organizations are focusing on? We've actually seen two areas pop from an EX perspective, from a trans perspective. IT leaders are really looking for quick hits. And they do see the two quick hits from an EX perspective be AI and personalization. And it's not water the other, it's the power of the end combination. Because if you think about a simple employee experience, wouldn't it be great to, if you had the slack channels, feeling employee requests of groups going out of Brentley, you would know that or you understand their situation or their life event is a combination of AI and personalization, not sharing information with the entire employee base. So they actually see both being heavily applied. Obviously they care about data and security, but really there are two hop buttons. Our AI and personalization within the EX space overall. So we talked about some of the things that are top of mind. We've talked about some of the challenges that they're facing. Was there anything that surprised you in the results from this survey? I'm glad to ask you that. I was surprised how highly rent CX was. We worked in customer experience and in customer service and yet it's something that we embrace. We didn't believe it was necessarily top of mind IT decision makers. As they were leaning in and making the decisions, but clearly because of the changes in the priorities, I have to say I was surprised. I knew it would be on the list. I just didn't think it would be number two on the list. So that's what I'm saying. It's like I knew it was up there, but just to be so close to cyber security, which is mission credit goal. We also did in addition to this research. We did series of deaf interviews. We wanted to go talk to IT leaders like, why did you answer this the way that you did? What's the underlying motivation a little bit behind it? And frankly, this is a group that is on the hook and is getting a lot of pressure from the rest of the organization to deliver that world class customer experience. They own a lot of the channels, they own a lot of the infrastructure and now it's about bringing it together and making it seem. And that's really one of the reasons behind why it's so growing in importance. And honestly, we don't see that changing anytime soon. It's interesting you mentioned how intertwined these things are because while you were surprised that CX ranked so high right up there next to cyber security, it kind of makes sense in that you can't offer great customer experience. If you can't also have security, have data privacy, have all of those pieces in place. And you also can't offer great customer experience if you don't have a great employee experience. We talked about that. I'm going to have a previous episode, but there's no way you're going to offer great customer experience if your agents are having a hard time finding the information that they need. So it seems like to some extent there's a collapsing of all of these things. You can't have any one of them without having all of the others in place. There's definitely a dependency happening that they are interrelated. And I can look at the rank order of them and you definitely see how one feeds into the other or as it relates to personalization, how that then has a ripple effect into data privacy and security and the data is secure and backed up. And IT is on the front line for that one, very, very clearly. Things are just morphing together and it will be interesting to see when we repeat this study, how the priorities begin to shift. But I do think the richness comes out of the actual conversations with the IT leaders around these topics and we get underneath them to understand what are the true drivers within your org. And one thing I can say about the life of a senior IT leader, they are under intense pressure. Not only is that list of their priorities mission and business critical, you know, they're under pressure from their own orgs to do more with less. They're under pressure to do all of this even with tighter budgets. A number of them were facing budget cuts. So it definitely is a real juggling act. And I think what's really interesting coming from this is because they are also interrelated, there might be some natural synergies and efficiencies by looking at the top priorities together and how you can approach them as a collective rather than three individual solves. So it sounds like you're talking to people who are, like you said, under a lot of pressure, getting pulled in a lot of different directions. If you were going to sit down with a group of IT leaders, what would you tell them to focus on? Would you have any recommendations for them? I think that they know internally what their priorities are and they know what the end game is. Per the challenge is how do they get there, right? Like what are some of the common sense basic types of blocking and tackling that you need to put in place, right? One of the things that has been a huge struggle for IT leaders is trying to demonstrate and prove out the business value. They have all these great ideas. They know what they need to do. And so what they really need to do is figure out the value, the ROI of the effort. We've seen business leaders and IT leaders be very successful in demonstrating positive ROI. So even though it's a priority, they still need to get the buy-in and they still need to get somebody to open the purse and give them the budget in order to make the change happen. And so I think job one is proving out the ROI from the efforts and the value that will bring for the business and doing that basic business blocking and tackling to be funded correctly to make the changes that they do want to change. So I would say, don't jump over that step. Some folks just jump right into this is the solution I'm on. I'm happy with it. Do the job. You still need to build that business case to get more money in the future to fund the other efforts. And then I would say the second one would be foster a culture of continuous learning and adaptability. There is the human side to this. The technology is there. They need to go get the budget, but then they also have people in their organization and they're managing through a lot of change. And so creating a culture of continuous learning and upskilling and bringing your team along with you is just as critical to your success as actually getting the budget to fund it. And so I think sometimes the soft skills, portion of this has a tendency to sort of, you know, be addressed adequately, but these are teams managing a lot of change with a lot of pressure. And I do think that needs to be another important consideration at 4.2 liters. I'm so glad that you raised that. We've talked about how to keep the human side of things top of mind while implementing AI because it is so easy to think about all the things AI can do that can just replace a person doing those things. But the reality it is, and one of my favorite quotes that I've heard, I forget who to attribute it to, but it was that AI is not going to replace jobs. Humans who know how to use AI is what's going to replace existing jobs. So it sounds like there's a lot of opportunity there as well for change management teams, for internal communications teams, for education and training and professional development. And it strikes me that we're just at this really interesting, kind of tricky spot right now, where so many teams across so many industries are trying to do more with less, and trying to learn a whole new technology and think about how they can leverage it all at once. So I'm going to ask you to predict out a little bit in the future. What do you think the impacts of this are going to be if we look back in a year or in a few years, most people have figured out AI, we've started implementing it. What do you think that's going to look like for businesses and what do you think the impacts are going to be? That's a big loaded-- I know. A loaded question. It's happened here to have a machine and come back and tell us in a minute. It's a really interesting question. And one of the conversations, I have with folks here at Zendesk, is around, it's going to keep changing. Frankly, we are just at the early stage of AI. And what we've been referring to here at Zendesk is the era of intelligence CX. We think this is early days. And we don't know what we don't know. But we do anticipate there will be a whole lot more change in addition to the gender to AI that's so much conversation happening. Because we know IT leaders, they want to get themselves in gender to AI too, and they figure it out. It's not one size. It's all. I do think that in the future, what will happen with a lot of AI and AI capabilities is it becomes integrated into offerings. Because right now what's happening is we're all dealing with-- there's this AI solution over here. There's this AI solution over here. And I think what's going to happen is existing tools will start to bring those in and naturally integrate a lot of the AI, a lot of the generative AI capabilities, like similar to our generative knowledge, our generative box, in generative knowledge base. Once it's integrated in, it becomes less of a separate lift. And because we're going to bunch of one-offs right now, it's going to be more integrated capability-wise. And I think that's going to take a lot of the pressure off of teams who are now happy, their leaders saying, I need more AI, get me more, it's going to just become part and parcel with solutions going forward in the next 12 to 18 months. It'll always be built in. All right, we'll check back in a year and see how your prediction played out. I know that you also have been working a lot with our own company's internal adoption of AI. And you've probably gotten exposed to all sorts of different ways that teams are experimenting that use it. What are some of the most interesting or inspiring things that you've seen out of that? - It's been a lot of fun. I have to say, as we look at AI, generative AI, and capabilities, just from a personal perspective, and amazement at what people have been able to do, simple things like transcribing Zoom recordings and summarizing notes in next steps. What a time saver that is for a lot of people to scanning handwritten notes and deciphering them and summarizing them to trans creation services. So we're translating content and pieces in other languages to, on even on the research side, looking for patterns in research cross tabs. It can read spreadsheets. It can create images and write headlines for you. So I totally believe in your earlier comment around, humans might replace humans, but I do look at a lot of this as value at. It's almost like having another person to go do some things for you and free you up so that you can think more deeply about some of the, you know, more manual tasks or labor intensive activities. But we've had a ton of experimentation, even from creating images. So it's still early days for us, internally, as well as, you know, our customers and AI and customer experience itself. But I'm really excited by the promise of like what it can bring for us. - So how about yourself? Do you have any favorite ways that you're using AI or things that you have figured out that are really enriching your job or making you a little bit more efficient? - I do spend a fair amount of time looking at competitor messaging. And, you know, I can go scrape their website, pull the information down, put it in charts and do side-by-side comparisons. That is like something of true value to me in terms of an application that saves me a ton of time. What might take me two days would take me two hours. I've also created art using it. Just the experiment, like experimenting with different styles. And so I do think the one thing I'm most excited about, AI is multi-modal AI. AI that brings together text, video, images, to create that single piece of content or experience and so I'm really enraptured by that portion of where AI will end up because, again, to that everything's in silos right now, it's all gonna be coming together and more freeing with new skills and capabilities and be embedded in tools. - Well, I think that that's really inspiring. And I think that that's a great place to end our conversation today because I know it's energizing me. Now I wanna go play with all of those tools and figure out some new and different things that I can do. Thank you so much for joining us today, Paulette. I really appreciate all of your insights. Sounds like there's some really great takeaways for the IT leaders. And really a lot of what you talked about applies to leaders in any organization at any level of the company. We just all need to be experimenting, thinking about how we're transitioning and helping everybody along and keeping our customers in front of mine at all times. - It was a real pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. - I really hope you join us for our next episode when I speak with Diane Lai, CIO of the Electric Vehicle Company, Rivian. Diane is an incredible leader with a breadth of experience and Rivian is doing some truly amazing things. We'll talk about how her values drive her work and why that's important. Lessons in leadership, how she's approaching the rapid growth and expansion of the company and the inspiring future for Rivian. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share with a friend or colleague or you could write us a review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening and for being a part of our community. You can always join the conversation at zendes.com/community or connect with other zendesk users or zendesk user group meetups. Find one for you at usergroups.zendes.com. Until then, I'm Nicole Saunders for Zendesk, the intelligent heart of customer experience. Build lasting relationships, the zendesk complete customer service solution so that you can exceed every customer's expectations. Sign up for free trial at Zendest.com.