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On this episode, we discuss talent recruitment in a competitive job market — and the ways brands can innovate to stand out.

Episode cover image for Questions for now, a TELUS Digital podcast, featuring an illustrated character holding a telescope looking to find talent.

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How can brands leverage innovation to recruit top-tier talent?

Robert Zirk: Brand loyalty isn't what it used to be.

Research from TechSee, a technology partner of TELUS International that provides visual customer experience solutions, shows that more than one in three U.S.-based customers aren't brand loyal and would leave for a competitor if the right opportunity presented itself. And the SAP Emarsys 2023 Customer Loyalty Index found a 14% drop in the number of U.S.-based consumers who considered themselves loyal to one or more brands.

Those numbers might seem alarming at first glance, but they don't mean that loyalty is going away altogether. Today's customers are looking for personalization, speed and convenience, and as technologies like AI continue to be leveraged to enhance the customer experience, this represents an opportunity for brands willing to put in the work to swim against the tide.

So today on Questions for now, we'll ask: What does customer loyalty look like in the age of AI?

Welcome to Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS International where we ask today's big questions in digital customer experience. I'm Robert Zirk.

Robert Zirk: Before we get to our big question, we need to start by clarifying that when we're referencing loyalty, we don't mean "loyalty programs" like frequent flyer miles or a freebie after a certain number of purchases. That's a distinction one of our expert guests was keen to emphasize.

Shep Hyken is a keynote speaker, author, host of the Amazing Business Radio podcast and customer experience expert with more than four decades of experience in the field. He views loyalty programs more like incentivized marketing programs. They can be a great tactic to deploy as part of your overall marketing strategy, but shouldn't be confused with the overall concept of customer loyalty.

Shep Hyken: What it really drives, and I love this, is repeat business. Now, my question to the people that do these types of programs is simply this: if we took away the perks and the points, are we strong enough in the experience to make customers still want to do business with us? That's true loyalty.

Robert Zirk: In his book, I'll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again, Shep dives deep into the concepts of customer loyalty and retention, and clarifies the difference between repeat customers and loyal customers.

Shep Hyken: Sometimes we think customers are loyal to us because they keep doing business with us, but sometimes it's just easier to do business with us than switch to a different vendor. Sometimes it's, you feel like, "Eh, these sticky solutions make me want to stay. Even though I'm experiencing frustration, I still stay."

So one of the things we want to find out is why does a customer keep coming back? Is it because, if we're just, say, a retail location, is it because I'm closer than my competitor? What happens if a competitor moves one mile closer to my customer or even just a quarter of a mile? Does that mean I'm going to lose the customer because that customer was more interested in convenience? Then they were my store, I just happened to be the more convenient store at the time.

What about price? We advertise low prices. Does that mean the customer is going to go wherever the lowest price is? If that's the case, they're loyal to the price, not the business. Maybe it's somebody inside our business. This happens, especially in the B2B world, where an inside sales rep decides to move to another company and in the process may end up taking customers with them because it turns out that the customers love the rep and it just happens to be where they were working.

So all of these factors need to be considered to understand: why does a customer keep coming back? And are they truly loyal or are they coming back for other reasons?

Robert Zirk: Shep challenges leaders to think about customer loyalty as something that's built one interaction at a time.

Shep Hyken: I did a keynote speech for an organization and we talked about loyalty and I said, "Here's the way I want you to think about it. Think about: 'What am I doing right now as I interact with this customer?'"

At this moment, as the customer interacts with us in any way that they do, to ensure that the next time they do what it is that we sell, they're going to come back and want it from us because of the experience we're giving them right now.

If it's people to people, are we doing all the things that are expected? Are we showing empathy, concern? Are we supportive? Is it an easy experience? Was it easy to reach a person? Was it easy to get an answer? Are the self service options intuitive? Is AI being used to deflect human-to-human interaction, or is it used to support and augment the interaction?

All of these things go toward creating an experience that makes the customer want to come back.

Robert Zirk: In a TELUS International survey, 62% of US-based consumers said if they had to choose between the two, they would prefer a more personalized customer experience over one that takes less time. Furthermore, 55% of respondents said that nothing excuses a bad customer experience.

And while it's important to consider the questions Shep raised from a business perspective, it's also valuable to take a step back and look at how your customers think about loyalty.

To do that, I spoke with Colin Shaw, who's dedicated the last 22 years to helping leaders and brands improve their customer experience. He's the author of seven books, co-host of The Intuitive Customer podcast and among the top 150 business influencers on LinkedIn.

To demonstrate his thesis on loyalty, Colin has a question for you:

Colin Shaw: Who in your life are you loyal to?

Robert Zirk: Consider anything and anyone in your life. Take a second... Okay. Did any of your answers include your partner, family or friends?

Colin Shaw: Absolutely. And that's what everybody answers. Everybody answers family and friends and your family and friends can do things to you that you don't like and that bug you and annoy you, but you still love them and you're loyal to them.

Robert Zirk: So now, Colin has a follow-up question.

Colin Shaw: If I was to turn around and say, "I've got this really great family. They're a lot cheaper to run than your existing family. Would you fancy swapping?"

Robert Zirk: Which... you'd almost certainly say "Absolutely not."

Colin Shaw: And that's the point I'm trying to make is that loyalty, true loyalty, is an emotional attachment. You have an emotional attachment to your family and your friends and they can do things that you don't like. But it's not based upon price. It's not based upon the running costs of the family. All too often, businesses look at loyalty as a transactional thing when it's not.

Robert Zirk: In other words, it's important to remember that loyalty isn't built only on rational decisions, but also emotional connections that are formed through memories.

Colin Shaw: Loyalty means that I have dealt with this company in the past and I am now going to go back to this company. So, by definition, there is a memory. If there was no memory, you wouldn't be loyal. because you wouldn't know that you'd been there and therefore it would be the first time and it's like the first time every time you went to that company.

But you are making a decision based upon the last interaction or the first interaction that you're having with that company. So the really interesting question starts to become how our memory is formed.

Robert Zirk: Colin cited research from psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman, who found that people tend to remember and assess life experiences based on two points of that experience. The first is the emotion they felt at the peak or the point of greatest intensity, regardless of whether it's good or bad. The second is the emotion they felt at the end of the experience. This concept is known as the Peak-end rule.

Colin Shaw: One of the phrases that Kahneman uses, which I love, and this is probably one of the biggest things I've learned over the last 10 years, is we don't choose between experiences, we choose between the memory of an experience. Okay, so it's a subtle difference.

So if I was to say to you, "Okay, I'm coming into town, tell me a restaurant I can go to." You would then say, "Oh yeah, go to so and so." And you're basing that upon a memory. So again, memories become really important. and therefore, the peak-end rule becomes really important.

Now, let me now apply that thinking to customer experience. What that says to me is: where is the peak emotion that your customer is feeling in your current experience? And what again is the end emotion that your customer is feeling currently today? And is that what you want them to feel? Because again, most organizations won't be able to answer that question.

And what you should be able to do is you should be able to design an experience that evokes the emotions that you're trying to evoke. I can't just say to you "Hey, right now, be happy. So let's just create happiness." Happiness is through an evolution of feeling some of those other emotions like trust and cared for and valued.

So when you think about someone who feels that, if I feel cared for, then typically things like: they respected me, they spent time with me, they went out of their way to do things for me, okay?

Now, just simply put that into the business context. If you want your customers to feel cared for, you need to spend time with them. You need to respect them. You need to go out your way for those customers. And if you do that, they will feel cared for. And if they feel cared for, that increases value and that goes towards making a customer feel much more loyalty because loyalty is an emotional attachment.

Robert Zirk: And Shep noted that CX leaders don't need to overthink the process. Loyalty can be built on small improvements that create a better and more consistent experience.

Shep Hyken: If you can create an experience that consistently and predictably is the tiniest bit better than average, or a hundred percent of the time meets the customer's expectations, they won't want to take a chance of doing business anywhere else.

Why? You know what? "They're always, whenever I call, they're always so knowledgeable. They're always so helpful. Even if there's a problem, I know I can always count on them." So you've got this word "always" followed by something you want the customer to be saying about you. And "always" means it is consistent and predictable.

It's like Amazon. How much true interaction do we have with Amazon? It's totally self service. So we're interacting with a computer. Yet, they create this incredible amount of comfort and convenience and confidence because the moment I place the order, boom, I get an email. Your order's placed. Next, your order's been shipped. Here's tracking information. Next, here's a picture of the box outside of your porch. They give us this great communication in addition to this digital experience that just makes it so comfortable and confident that things are happening the way they're supposed to.

So this is what companies need to be thinking about. They don't need to be Amazon. They don't need to be big brand, small brand, it makes no difference. What they need to do is understand what their customers want and expect and deliver on those expectations because nobody can argue with "They always meet my expectation." Why would I want to do business anywhere else?

Robert Zirk: Shep shared a personal story involving Costco that highlights exactly how brands can set themselves apart from competitors by setting expectations and consistently meeting them, which he illustrated with a statistic from his 2023 Achieving Customer Amazement study.

Shep Hyken: Half of American consumers, actually 51 percent compared to last year, it was 48%. Half of American consumers felt customer service was more important than price. Specifically Costco. I can speak from experience. I love my Costco membership. And we bought carpet from Costco and had our whole home carpeted with one of their vendors.

And we got the price and I said this seems a little bit higher than what I thought it was going to be. And I looked at competitors and sure enough, it was a tiny bit higher, not much higher. I thought I was going to get this incredible discount by doing business with Costco. Here's what the vendor said to me.

"On this particular item, we'll be happy to price match. That's not an issue, but we're not going to be lower. We can't afford to be lower, but I'll tell you why you'll want to do business with us: the Costco guarantee. Put that carpet in. A month later, if you don't like the color, you don't like the shade, something's bothering you, we will rip the whole thing out and replace it." Wow. Okay. That's the Costco guarantee.

Robert Zirk: I asked Colin, as AI plays an increasingly important role in CX, how is customer loyalty changing?

Colin Shaw: The reality is, the human being, the customer, is not changing. The way that you deal with that customer through AI is the thing that's changing. So it's a bit like when people talk about social media. All that social media is doing is providing the platform for already social animals, us human beings, to be able to communicate through that means.

What you're looking to do is you're looking to turn around and say, "We want our customers to feel this at the end of that experience. So how are we going to design it?"

And lots of organizations don't have that amount of data on customer emotions to be able to design their experience. And the other issue then becomes do the CX professionals even understand the result that AI will be able to provide?

Robert Zirk: Colin compared this to the depiction of AI in Douglas Adams' s book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Colin Shaw: One of the things that it talked about was that there was this planet and they had a big AI machine and the population wanted to know what the answer to life, the universe and everything was.

And this computer called Deep Thought went away for seven and a half million years to process what's the answer to life, the universe and everything.

And it came back with the answer. And the answer is 42. And clearly, that's ridiculous. It's not ridiculous. What it was really saying is, you don't really even understand the question. And that's my fear, with people with AI implementations now, it's going to come back with answers that CX professionals don't understand the answer to, yeah? So it's either not going to come back with the right answer because it hasn't been trained well enough because it hasn't got the emotional data, or it will have that data and it's going to come back with the answer, the equivalent of 42. And people are going to go "I don't understand what I'm meant to do with that."

Robert Zirk: One of the strengths of AI is pattern recognition, and Colin shared an example of how this might be applied to behavioral patterns that don't factor in the emotional aspect of decisions.

Colin Shaw: Disney know when they ask their customers what they want to eat at a theme park, Disney know that people say they'd like to have an option of a salad. Disney also know that people don't eat salads at theme parks, they eat hot dogs and hamburgers. So what customers tell you and what customers do can be very different.

So the issue becomes that, in my view, there's going to be a big issue or a lack of understanding about customer behavior at that behavioral science level to be able to interpret what the customers are actually doing.

And let me give you two examples of that. So there was a telecoms company in the States that asked, through its AI, we want to identify customers that are leaving us. AI went away and came back with a list of "Here's all the customers that are going to leave us." Then they asked it, why are they going to leave? It couldn't answer that, because it hadn't been trained on how to understand that.

Robert Zirk: According to a Zendesk study, only three out of 10 CX leaders are using AI or machine learning to predict customer interactions. So there are opportunities to get ahead of the competition. And Colin demonstrated examples of how AI can provide proactive experiences based on behavioral data.

Colin Shaw: Just think of Google when you type into Google something to search for. I've got a Jeep, and I was trying to search for, in England I would call it a towing hook, in the States it's called a hitch. Okay, but when I type "towing Jeep", Google starts to put words in there of what it thinks that I'm looking for. And that's based around one really important word, which is intent. So what is my intent? What am I really searching for? Because I may not be expressing myself very well. But it's trying to help me go, "Look, typically this is what people are looking for." So it's understanding human behavior at that level.

And then from a CX professional perspective, it's being able to understand what is happening and to get into a more positive perspective, how can we use behavioral science to design our experience? How can we predict how our customers are feeling?

Robert Zirk: Research from McKinsey indicates 71% of consumers count on brands to deliver personalized customer experiences. And when that doesn't happen, 76% report feeling frustrated, placing the brand they're interacting with at risk of losing future business to a competitor.

Predictive AI can play an important role in delivering a more personalized experience, and Shep shared an anecdote from a demonstration he saw that showed how predictive AI could support agents in a contact center environment.

Shep Hyken: Not only did it feed the agent information because the agent knows how to properly ask the question, they were typing in what the customer was asking and getting a good answer back, where sometimes customers don't do so well typing in their answers into a chatbot, and getting clarity to the bot so that they completely understand. Again, this agent now can reflect that information the way they need to interpret it and give it back to the customer.

But here's what else that AI was doing. By the way, and I'm going to paraphrase, this customer is the same as 3,000 other customers that have called in and asked the same question, have bought the same products, have the exact same buying patterns. So whether this customer knows it or not, this is the next question they are going to ask. So why don't you answer it for them so they don't have to call back?

By the way, this customer doesn't realize they are going to be buying another product from us. They just don't know it yet. Why don't you share with them what it is so they don't have to call back and take the time filling out an order form?

So it is able to predict with uncanny accuracy, what customer behavior is going to be, what customer future purchases are going to look like. And the data that we're getting is going to allow for these types of one on one interactions to feel completely hyper personalized. And I love that. Personalization is going to be more powerful and better than ever. And we need to do it the right way so the customer isn't creeped out.

Robert Zirk: Colin has noticed some organizations implement AI in silos within different teams. And he cautioned that, to best serve customers, AI needs to be holistically deployed across the organization. He shared an anecdote of the early internet, where different departments of the same company would often have their own web pages that were distinct from one another rather than one unified cohesive web presence.

Colin Shaw: I think there is a danger that things are going to be implemented in a siloed perspective. And therefore it needs that more holistic view answering those questions, what's the experience that we're trying to deliver to our customers and what emotions are we trying to evoke?

Robert Zirk: And then, CX leaders will need to decide the right tactic for the right point in the customer journey.

Colin Shaw: So let's go to our example where the delivery is late and we can get AI to send out some messages, etc. That may be fine, but there may be a group of high value customers that a phone call is going to be best, yeah? So where is that? And with what group of customers is that?

We need to determine that and that then goes back to the beginning part of our conversation about loyalty and emotional attachment and understanding which emotions are driving value and where do we, therefore, deploy that? My worry is that, as with everything, it gets driven by cost and people start to deploy AI too much into areas that should be still being dealt with by people, and therefore destroy value, so defining the areas where the experience drives most value and determining how to approach those.

Robert Zirk: And there isn't a one size fits all answer. Colin reinforced the importance of understanding context and how it connects to customer preferences.

Colin Shaw: There are a number of things where I am happy to use chat or whatever else to overcome a problem and I don't want to speak to a human. But there are also different times when I definitely do want to speak to a human. And that again goes back to understanding customers. It's like that Disney example. What customers say and what customers do may be different. So, I may turn around and say, "Yeah, actually, I'm fine just dealing on chat." Yeah, that may apply 75 percent of the time, but actually this 25 percent of the time, it's really important that I speak to a human being. And actually, I am a high value customer and therefore you should be doing that, because if you do, that will keep me loyal because I feel that you are responding to me, and that you understand me, and if you keep shoving me down this loop of just dealing with chat and having these messages come up that I can't interpret, then you're gonna lose me.

Robert Zirk: Shep cautions that AI can become a "loyalty killer" if it isn't properly deployed. Instead, he emphasizes that the optimal role for AI should be to enhance human interactions.

Shep Hyken: So if AI is going to make a recommendation, then it should be one that the company is comfortable making. Okay. However, AI is also smart enough to realize, "Wow, this is something that I need to pass on to a human being." And it should automatically flip. And if it's in a chat bot, it should automatically flip to a live chat with a live person. And that way we can get empathy and sympathy and talk about alternatives, something that might not be quite as cut and dry as what that AI is typically going to do.

Robert Zirk: Shep shared how automated interactions, with an option to receive support from human team members when necessary, can create seamless and frustration-free experiences for customers.

Shep Hyken: The other day I was on a panel and I didn't want to correct the person, who was a very, high level executive, when they said, "Amazon customer service? You can't even get a person on the phone."

That's not true! You absolutely can. But what Amazon does is brilliant. And, by the way, this is not expensive to do anymore. It can be done even with very small companies. It's a minor investment. If I've got a problem on Amazon, I'm going to get to customer support and it's going to start asking me questions. And there will be a point where it says, "If you need to talk to somebody, click here." But I can keep going if I don't want to. And by the way, I'm oversimplifying this, but essentially, I keep going down the path until I do need to talk to somebody. They do not give me a phone number. What they do is ask me for my phone number.

And I put it in there and I hit enter, or submit, or whatever the word is, and with almost, I'd say it's almost instantaneous, my phone is ringing. I'm not waiting 30 minutes. I'm not waiting 30 seconds. The phone is ringing and it says, "Please hold for the next available Amazon rep." And it's usually within seconds that I get somebody who now is going to ask me questions based on what I've already been filling out. I don't have to start over again. It is an omnichannel experience, but it's allowing me to move to a human-to-human experience from the digital. And this is where companies make the mistake: they deflect, not recognizing that once in a while, somebody's going to say, "Hey, I need to talk to somebody."

Robert Zirk: And AI can be used to streamline processes that would normally be tedious for customers.

Shep Hyken: If you've gone to a doctor's office and they tell you, "Hey, before you get here, we want you to go online and fill out all the forms." It frustrates me that I have to put my name, my address, and social security, insurance card information more than one time. I shouldn't have to do it. This is such a simple process, right? Ask me once and then later on ask me to repeat it again with a check mark rather than having to type the whole thing out. Or just auto populate it for me.

There is such a simple example of how you can increase the experience to still be compliant, get the information to the provider however they need it and yet make it easy on the customer. And I think that's what all of this is headed toward is how can we make this as easy and frictionless for the customer as possible?

Robert Zirk: As you ponder that question in relation to AI, it's important not to lose sight of the human element in your customer experience. After all, your customers are human, so your experiences need to be designed in a way that reflects how they interact with technology.

Shep highlighted how AI can make customer support more accessible, which he details in his book, The Convenience Revolution.

Shep Hyken: If I call you at 10 o'clock at night, I bought a cool thing at the store and I'm building it, and I call customer support because it can't seem to figure out how this works, and I get the message "we're only available from 7am till 6pm, Monday through Friday." We can now, with chatbots and ChatGPT and generative AI and all the tools that we've been talking about, we can create almost 24/7 support.

And if we can't answer the question using these technologies, at that point, we might say, "We've tried. Here's what we need to do. We're going to take your information and somebody is going to call you tomorrow morning between these hours and these hours, unless it's more convenient, put in the time that you want..." and you're able to punch that in, "...and we'll get somebody to get back to you." Again, it might not be the most convenient solution at that point, but at least they're giving you options.

Robert Zirk: We've spoken about how memories are formed and the roles those memories play in shaping customer sentiment. Today, with the advent of AI, Colin envisions that organizations won't just map the customer journey — they'll map the customer memory as well.

Colin Shaw: So think about AI being used to map the interactions that they've had with you for the last five years And I'm now assuming you've got an all encompassing AI across all the channels and it can understand all those touch points.

But think about, knowing that this customer three years ago had a problem with their delivery and this is what they did, and therefore being able to predict that we've just had the same issue, so that customer is likely to act in the same type of way.

So effectively, you're mapping that customer's memory. And what we know from the Kahneman work, again, is that the memories that are the most vivid to us are the memories that have got the most intense emotions. If I was talking to you about some either happy event or some tragic event in your life, you can remember exactly where you are, what you were doing, how you feel. And that is because those are intense emotions, and those intense emotions burn more of a deeper memory into you.

Now again, let's apply that in the customer circumstance. If a customer has really got upset with you about something, imagine now that those memories are evoking some really intense emotions. Then, again, AI will be able to go, "This was an intense emotion, therefore that's going to be a larger memory," et cetera.

How many times currently do you contact a company, and you have to repeat to them 27 times about all the problems that you've had because they haven't passed on the details and, you know, the person who is dealing with you is really happy and they're the third person that you've spoken to about this, and they start off the conversation in a really bright mood, not taking into account the fact that you're really frustrated that you've been on the phone for the last two hours trying to deal with this.

Robert Zirk: And Shep shared an example of how automation and AI were deployed proactively to create a positive experience out of an issue that otherwise would have been negative across the board.

Shep Hyken: I'll share with you something. I had a wonderful lost luggage experience. How's that to the set?! (laughter)

Robert Zirk: That is a sentence I don't think I've ever heard before. (laughter)

Shep Hyken: I know, I know. And this is what happened. American Airlines lost my luggage. I land in San Francisco and I'm on the beginning of a very long two plus week trip, so I did have to check my bag. I walk off the plane and I received a text message from American Airlines. It's automated, but it says, "We sincerely apologize" - and I'm paraphrasing - "but your luggage is not going to be delivered" when I got off the plane. "However, it is going to be delivered on a later flight. Please, put in your address and it will be to you by six o'clock tonight," or whatever time it was.

I thought, "Wow." Two things, three things are happening here. Number one, they're informing me of a problem proactively, very powerful. Number two, I now don't have to go down to the luggage area, wait to see if it's going to come off the carousel before I walk into the office next to baggage claim. All I need to do is give them the address where I'm going. And as soon as I did, I got a confirmation back. And then, about the time, I wasn't expecting, it actually came early. I received a message.

On this episode, we ask big questions about how customer loyalty is formed — and how AI can be leveraged to build stronger connections with customers.

Episode cover image for Questions for now, a TELUS Digital podcast, featuring an illustrated character holding a tablet and giving a five-star rating as they receive support from an AI-powered bot.

What does customer loyalty look like in the age of AI?

Since publishing this episode, we've rebranded to TELUS Digital.

According to TechSee, a visual customer experience solutions provider and technology partner of TELUS Digital, more than one in three consumers in the United States don't consider themselves to be loyal to brands and would switch if it proved beneficial to them. It is here where brands have an opportunity to capitalize on the growing demand for personalization, speed and convenience.

By exploring the emotional aspects that shape consumer behavior, our expert guests provide actionable strategies for the use of AI to foster true customer loyalty.

Listen for the informative insights of customer experience keynote speakers and experts Shep Hyken, author of I’ll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again and host of the Amazing Business Radio podcast; and Colin Shaw, author of The Intuitive Customer: 7 Imperatives For Moving Your Customer Experience to the Next Level and co-host of The Intuitive Customer podcast.

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Intro: TELUS International Studios where customer experience meets digital transformation.

Patrick Haughey (PH): TELUS International takes great pride in company culture. At the start of the pandemic when global workforces had to be mobilized, it posed the question for companies all over the world: how can we make sure we’re staying connected and looking after our team members? Workvivo is a comprehensive digital employee engagement platform that has the look and feel of a social networking site. Now, usually on the podcast we talk to companies about their customer experience approach. Well, today we’re switching things up and becoming the customer. At TELUS International, we have a uniquely branded Workvivo site called Cosmos that we use internally. If you can imagine: it sees nearly fifty thousand daily active users. We will get more into how TELUS International champions company culture with the help of Workvivo at around 17 minutes, but first let’s hear from Gideon Pridor, chief marketing officer at Workvivo about the platform. Gideon Pridor, you are very welcome to TELUS International Studios, how are you doing today?

Gideon Pridor (GP): I’m doing excellent. Thank you.

PH: Good, good. Now my first question for you. Traditionally have intranets, are these sort of internal communications platforms, have they been difficult to get people to engage with, to get your workforce to really buy into in the past?

GP: I think that is probably the biggest understatement of this chapter Patrick. Intranets have been, you know, something that people don’t like to use. The difference is that people used to sort of use stuff like that because they had to. But we’re undergoing such a huge shift, especially driven by younger, you know, generations on what people use or don’t use at work. And today, employees, the modern employee, they use things because they want to use it, not because they have to use it. So, you know, the research shows that intranets are being adopted, used - actually used - less than 10 percent, and sometimes they take like two years to implement or build them yourself. But people don’t use them. They use them when they have to, because they have to. For this announcement or reaching that, this or that thing, they are not, almost ever, becoming that glue, that thing in the middle that people actually go to in order to get informed and connect. So that model didn’t work, became slightly better with newer consumer-like social intranets. But as we’ll talk about going forward, even with TELUS International, greater change of the paradigm of internal comms was definitely needed, and that’s what we’re seeing today.

PH: So would you describe Workvivo as. Is it a type of intranet or is it something totally different?

GP: We don’t like calling ourselves an intranet at all, but they’re for the vast majority of our customers, let’s say the vast majority of our customers end up decommissioning their intranet, using us as their intranet. But what we’re seeing today, especially since 2020 and us living what used to be the future of the workplace and is currently the present of the workplace, you know, we’re going through the greatest, most extreme transformation in the modern history of the workplace right now, and we don’t even know what, know what to expect a year from now. We’re learning new terms, you know, fatigue, anxiety, you know, for video conferencing and stuff like that. Next year will be 10 new things that we sort of like, you know, learn. We think that the biggest thing that will happen, technologically speaking, is the shift from what we used to call an intranet, which I think will eventually die in the upcoming few years and be replaced with a new concept - an employee experience app. Something that every employee gets as soon as they get onboarded. You can call it a platform, an app. We like to call it an employee experience app, and it has a sort of - gives you sort of the entire company in your pocket. At the heart of it, there is communication. Other stuff like accessing documents, sharing files, even integrations to stuff will come on top of it.

GP: But the core, the heart is meaningful communication. And that would be something that would be mobile first, that people could carry on in their pocket, use it at home, in the office or in the front line. But at core, this would be the terminology and in two or three years, if you ask me, the question would be if you have an employee experience app, it would be which one you have and it’ll be communication and community led. It will be designed in order to foster culture digitally, not necessarily in an office. And bring people together, get that emotional commitment, that social glue that we kind of lost in the absence of the office footprint in a way that is actually far greater than before because it lives on digitally at one place and gives people that never used to be that connected in the front line the field an opportunity to really be a part. And I think that would mark the end of the era of the traditional intranets and it’ll have intranet functionality. So that was a long answer to say yes, we replaced the intranet. But I think that we give much something that is way greater than that, and it’s much more than accessing information. It’s community first, and it’s based on creating that emotional connection between people in the company, people in each other wherever they work from.

PH: Ok, very good. No, lovely answer. So then in your own words, maybe describe Workvivo. What is the company and what have you guys set out to do?

GP: So I call it an employee experience app, before some customers call it like in different names. But the important thing is what it is. So Workvivo is a tool designed in order to foster meaningful bonds, meaningful communication, connection between people and their organizations, making it much easier, simpler and more engaging to find, reach and communicate with each other. Either with your peers, with people reporting to you, feeling your leaders, your managers, people that in the absence of the office, you might feel that you’re completely disconnected from them. It’s designed from that. It’s based on a community structure, so it pushes you to actually include people and give them a voice. Not saying it needs to be chaotic. You need permissions and you need definitions. You know, an employee usually can’t reply all to an email in a big company for a good reason. But putting this aside, it’s designed to give people in the company a lot more freedom and choice in how they consume information, giving them a lot of options like not only posts on your timeline, but the comments and likes and kudos and podcasts like this and live streams in order to really, really communicate and engage not in a single stream top down, but in a much more democratised, bi-directional way, engaging people for real. And in this sense, it’s a communication platform. It’s an employee engagement platform. And it acts as your employee app. It acts as your intranet streamlines all of your communication in one central place and integrates to anything else that it needs to be integrated to, acting as that central communication hub. This is what we do.

PH: The way you describe it, it sounds like - it sounds familiar, it sounds like you’ve taken some of the things that we love most about the traditional social media platforms that we use every day Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and bring them together in a sort of a new context. So am I right? Have you tried to make it feel familiar to people?

GP: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for the question. Absolutely. It’s eh. I told you before in your question about intranets Patrick. We don’t believe that the modern employees use tools because they have to. They need to want to. And in order to do that, we wanted to provide a familiar consumer level experience that works on any device that is delighting, that is well designed that you go to and use because you want to. You don’t need long training setups and rollouts and onboarding. You could just go out and do it even if it’s not the most polished in the world. And that’s exactly what we achieved with this. And yes, it does resemble a lot to consumer community platform social media platforms because in a sense, this works. It’s much less rigid, it’s much more fluid, and every company has different structures as well. You implement this thing and through the way that it develops, you discover social, you know, carriers, advocates, ambassadors, people with opinions that you didn’t even know. So these things develop and teach you things about your own company. So we definitely learned a lot from that playbook and married that with a lot of like enterprise features that are necessary in order to govern it, to control it, to give you data, to give you analytics, integrations to other tools that you’re using. How do you use it alongside, you know, Slack or Microsoft Teams or Zoom and create less noise and less distraction and not necessarily like just another tool? So we took that playbook and mirrored it with the business requirements and companies like you need.

PH: Yeah. And actually, you’ve raised an interesting point, which is this is not just another tool that you have to decide between Slack or whatever you integrate, however you integrate Workvivo into your company. So maybe give us an example of how does it integrate with things like Slack, which I would have thought may have been a competitor as opposed to a partner.

GP: So there is an overlap, but they’re not a competitor. We’re actually a lot of our customers are using Slack or Microsoft Teams. The problem with these tools, for example, it’s actually very good that you raise this since the pandemic, since we’re, you know, experienced that thing that I call the new present of work. You know, then these tools that are amazing tools, they make you use less emails and find people. But they’re also very, very disruptive and noisy, and we are overusing them in a big, big way that creates fatigue. It creates a fear of missing out, you know, do not miss out something important. You need to be in these channels all day long. Waiting, waiting, you know, it’s not natural. I could answer Slack’s from dusk till dawn and not do any work. And it creates anxiety. People are, we’re not using it as it was, as we’re supposed to. It’s an instant messaging tool. It’s not what it was designed to do. So with our people, you have the whole concept that used to exist in an office environment of asynchronous communication, meaning I could like I’m the CEO and I could post something.

GP: You could prefer to read it on your way back from work on the subway. You could do it in real time. You could do it like over lunch, but you lose that fear of missing out. It creates a more relaxed, more quiet environment. I could find you in our beautifully designed people directory and read about you, Patrick, and see your skills. Say which spaces you participate in, what your team office. And then I could click a button and Slack you as well and use Slack as my channel for instant messaging with you. Same goes when we talk inside a space inside like a group what we call a space and Workvivo So you integrate, you use Slack for instant messaging, or you could start a video call on Zoom. We’re not doing that, but they weren’t designed to be the heart of the company. They were designed to have an instant meeting or instant chat, and we sort of become the heartbeat of your company where all of that happens. Leveraging these tools in order to do exactly what they were supposed to do.

PH: Very interesting. And of course, you mentioned a couple of minutes ago the data and the analytics that comes with this, so I guess, you know, at the at the heart of this as well. Running alongside the desire to bring everyone together and make communication better and more fluid is being able to measure and tap into the heartbeat of your workforce to see how engaged are they? What are they doing? So maybe talk a little bit about the analytics and and the employee engagement measurement that Workvivo facilitates.

GP: Sure, sure thing. So yeah, data is very important. It gives us the confidence to know that we are on track. I think that today this transformation that I talked about from office to whatever it is. Wherever it is, we’re going from here. Hybrid, flexible. We’re still, I think, exploring this like sort of like worldwide, we we need to also know what we’re pursuing. What are the right North Star metrics? As I started to talk about before, we believe in a change of paradigm in not only informing you as an employee about stuff, sending you an endless newsletter or this broadcast on your boring intranet. We believe in engagement. We really believe in engagement. We believe that the only way actually for communications to work in the world of today internally and we adopted is if people are included, are engaged and feel a strong emotional connection to the company, its culture and its purpose, even if they’re not working in the same office space. So it means that it’s crucial. It’s not even like a nice to have to measure things like engagement. You know, we have data about the amount of likes or shares a lot of stuff that you use to form a social network. Comments discussions that are taking place and we could give you. An engagement score that you could actually measure in order to see improvement, understanding that that’s correlated to how much people actually feel that they belong.

GP: We measure adoption in order to see in a meaningful way how many people are actually using this thing. And it’s not the 10 percent of an intranet you should try to get to 80 to 90. You know? Adoption, engagement. And then you get to the interesting part, which is the more qualitative part, meaning we have polls and, you know, surveys inside the platform. And you could ask your people stuff and you could ask them even the same questions, the same polls or surveys, like every now and then and then you could develop your own scores to things like sense of belonging, emotional connection, purpose, you know? And people answer that in a meaningful way, compare it to the last quarter, and suddenly you have your own index for measuring what your leadership, your CEO cares about, and you see it by people anonymously or not anonymously answering stuff. So combining the power of polls and surveys, the data that you see on adoption, on engagement and on what people see with the platform already gives you a lot of insight into how participative people actually are. And you could see that improving and improving and improving as you put more content, more stuff like this amazing podcast that you guys are doing and measure the impact. This is the new way to measure employee communication and see that it actually works.

PH: Yeah. And what - I guess there’s still, there’s people, there’s still plenty of people, probably obviously a minority of the world’s population who don’t really go on to social media too much or they’re not the type of person who goes in and devours everything and clicks like or engages. They might read through it as an employee, but they’re not engaging. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything bad for the company or the type of content. It’s just that they’re not that type of person. Is that something that needs to be factored in in the measurements? Because that essentially it could be seen that kind of lack of engagement, albeit just a natural part of that person, might bring the average score down, whereas it shouldn’t, because it doesn’t mean that the company is doing anything wrong or the communication is wrong. Is that a factor that should be kept in mind?

GP: Actually, it’s a very it’s a very interesting point that you’re making. You’re right, and there are a lot of people that are even reluctant to engage in all that. We’re not trying to change, you know, the core behaviour of people. We’re actually trying to do the opposite. Our mantra is all about giving more flexibility and freedom. This is what I talked about when we talked. I talked about Slack being so disruptive and hyperactive, right? So we want people to have the flexibility, the freedom to not only communicate with the consume information in the way and cadence that they please. And that means that in the analytics, for example, we don’t only check engagement. We also check how much you’re using the tool, how much you’re reading like stuff during your day and if you’re actually consuming the information. If you’re not engaging and you’re not consuming any information, we’re doing something wrong because we do think that people want, or a lot of people increasingly, want to be in the know, want to be at least informed and involved as much as they would. So we could check it, check the passive indicators and the more active indicators and get a good picture. If we have an account and people don’t really adopt it, they signed in once and that’s it. We know something is wrong and then we try to help them with our customer experience team to understand. Maybe it’s a matter of content, you know, building some creative modules like, I don’t know, ask the CEO questions once a week or whatever. Maybe it’s a matter of implementation and maybe it’s something else, but people need to at least adopt it and consume the information, know what they need to know, and you’ll see the general the average engagement rates going up because you have a lot of people that have this need and never had the opportunity.

PH: Interesting. In a couple of moments time, I’m going to play you a little vox pop  that sort of encapsulates how some people use it, use Workvivo and like it. But before I do, I guess it’s important to mention that it’s not always the case that a company will have a Workvivo, you know, you log on to your Workvivo there’s actually a white label element to this, isn’t there? You can brand it in terms of however you want to brand the Workvivo platform for your own company.

GP: Yeah, for sure. Just like you guys did. So there are different sizes and different types of companies and we give a lot of branding flexibility. So if you want to use it as is, you use it as is. And if you want to build your own brand internal brand inside Workvivo, we give you the opportunity to do that. Anything that will make that would fit into your culture and your internal communications strategy in the least disruptive way. You guys have an amazing internal comms strategy at TELUS International and I have a lot of comparison points. It’s really world class. And so we could like fit in with your Workvivo white label brand in order to let you use it exactly as you would have imagined with less constraints. Other companies want to take it as is and just like implement it, but it’s part of that whole mantra of flexibility and fitting into what you need on the content side of the brand side on the technology and integration side. You know, we don’t make you choose by between teams or slack or having nothing at all. So it’s part of the same thing, a lot of freedom, a lot of flexibility. And yes, you can have your own brand.

PH: Very good. Look, in TELUS International it’s called Cosmos, and we did a little poll of TELUS International team members of all levels to see how they use Cosmos and what they think of it. So let’s take a listen.

Speaker 1: All of our global and local announcements are posted in Cosmos, which is how we branded Workvivo within TELUS International. As many of our team members continue to work from home, this is where we do and promote a lot of engagement and recognition activities. For example, our team in the Philippines had a drag queens contest during Pride month in June and the winner of the Miss Congeniality award was selected via a poll on Cosmos.

Speaker 2: It’s very familiar to users as it really kind of mirrors a lot of social platforms. The things that you’d expect to see.

Speaker 3: Recognition and appreciation, of course, is very important in any workplace. We’re no different. Every day you’ll see people posting their kudos for team members and Cosmos. This is a simple thing, but it has a real, high impact on the culture of our team to see people being called out on a daily basis for the great work they’re doing or for some support they gave to a colleague. It really feeds into the positive workplace culture that we’ve created. Our senior leadership team interact with these posts as well. So I suppose it helps to break down the barriers that can form between the different levels or departments.

Speaker 4: The platform also helps connect our team with our leaders. As an example, our president and CEO Jeff Puritt posts a weekly update. Typically, articles that he finds interesting, but he also shares jokes. It’s also great seeing how quickly we can on board team members who joined TELUS International. They can learn more about the company in Cosmos from day one.

How to engage a remote workforce with technology

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