Customer Insights – how to find them – E45 with Federico Cesconi

Episode released on: 25. October 2021

The CX Goalkeeper in collaboration with the European Customer Experience Organization (ECXO) had a smart discussion with Federico Cesconi

LinkedIn Headline: Founder & CEO @sandsiv the number one CXM solution powered by 🚀 AI | writer @HackerNoon | Ambassador @ECXO | In love with NLP using transformers

In this episode you will learn:

– Some highlights on the ECXO

– How Sandsiv+ was created to support the Customer Experience Management (CXM) process based on 5 pillars: Capture, Analyze, Integrate, Improve and Measure to create value out of this process

– How Sandsiv+ will shape the future of CXM based on i) native Cloud, ii) integration in an ecosystem and iii) Artificial Intelligence

… and much more

His book suggestion:

– Competing in the Age of AI : Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World, by Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani

Federico’s golden nugget:

Follow your passion! @FedericoCesconi on the CX Goalkeeper Podcast @sandsiv
Tweet

Federico’s paper: “Measuring Digital Transformation: An Empirical Approach to Measure Phygital Journeys integrating the technology acceptance model and customer experience”

https://www.researchgate.net/lab/Federico-Cesconi-Lab/

How to contact Federico:

· https://www.linkedin.com/in/federicocesconi/

· https://sandsiv.com/

Thank you, Federico!

Thank you European Customer Experience Organization (ECXO)

#customerexperience #leadership #cxgoalkeeper #exco #cxtransformation #podcast #customerintelligence #artificialintelligence #VoiceOfTheCustomer

Transcription:

Gregorio Uglioni 0:01
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the CX goalkeeper podcast. Your host, Gregorio Uglioni. will have a small discussions with experts, thought leaders and friends on customer experience, transformation, innovation and leadership. I hope you will enjoy the next episode.

Ladies and gentlemen, a big big pleasure to have the next session of the CX goalkeeper podcast today is a special day because on the stage, I have not only super expert on customer experience, but also a friend. Federico Cesconi, Hi Fede, how are you?

Federico Cesconi 0:43
ciao Gregorio, Are we talking in English or in Italian?

Gregorio Uglioni 0:49
Let’s always do the big question. I think it’s important to switch to English that everybody can understand what we are discussing, and the audience can profit from from the discussion because I am really thrilled to, to discuss with you, first of all about the European customer experience organization. And then secondly, about the new strategy of Samsung plus, I think you are really going in a specific niche in a really interesting field. And I would like to deep dive on that. But before we start, thank you very much to a European customer experience organization to make that possible. This is also a big advantage of being a member of this great associations because I have two opportunities to have chats with really seeks professional seeks expert great minds in customer experience, Federico, before we deep dive in all this discussion and everything we would like to discuss, could you please introduce yourself? Yeah,

Federico Cesconi 1:50
first of all, I have to say, you know, we are competitors. Because I run my own podcast, they CX PUNK chat, by you were a guest at that podcast. So now basically, you you exchange, we exchanged the roles in the podcast, but I’m, I’m really happy. Yeah, that European customer experience organization, I think is, is a very interesting organization is very interesting initiatives. Because the aim is to include the, you know, European customer experience experts in an organization what I like a lot, and I discuss a lot with one of the founder of the organization, Ricardo, is the inclusion idea of the organization. So because you you know, a little bit, you know, my way of thinking in customer experience, and I’m not really I’m, I’m more focused on the p&l side than, you know, the emotional Wow, wow. Of side, probably these because also, you know, my background in telecommunications moved me more on pay attention on the p&l. And I think that it’s important to have different aspects and consider different points of view, when we think about customer experience at the end, there is not a single through that say, Okay, this is the way customers experience should be done. And what I love and I like a lot in the European customer experience, organization is the respect that people have to the other opinions, you know, I for instance, I, I, you probably interviews other other ambassadors, member of the European customer experience organization, and you probably show different points point of view that are different from me, for instance, from my point of view, but this is, you know, this is the really the nice, the nice things and, you know, I a stronger believer that we have, you know, to investigate and respect the opinion of the others and how they perceived, or they see different things in customer experience. So, this is this is definitely something I like a lot. And I love to be part of the European customer experience organization.

Gregorio Uglioni 4:29
And then if you already answer also the next question. I know that, it’s like, because you’re a CEO, and you’re not really listening to the question I asked to introduce yourself, but you already introduced the European customer experience organization.

Federico Cesconi 4:44
I thought I thought it was more you know, focusing on the European customer experience organization. I think European customer experience organization is more important than me in this in this stage, but yeah, can do, I can say a couple of words about myself, basically, you know, I study Law at the University, so I have a PhD in law, then I have an MBA. But basically, you know, when I was at the university, I used to work for a marketing agency 50% In my time, and, you know, I was really in love with marketing, with advertising. And meantime, you know, when I was young, 1415 years old, I was really passionate about computer at that time, I use a spectrum that x 81, which is very old, it’s more like a computer to connect to the television. And I had always this passion to combine technology, and support marketing with technology. So I come from, from that background, worked a lot in in telecommunications, work a lot, using, you know, creating machine learning models back in, in 2000. Here 2000, and my old man. And, and yeah, and then at certain point in time, this passion was transformed in a venture and I start sciences 11 years ago, more or less now. And yeah, was quite successful, because I still exist after 11 years. So it’s a good they say, is a good sign.

Gregorio Uglioni 6:34
I can confirm that I think this is what Sanjay is doing. In the customer experience, what it’s a really outstanding, short comment on what you said, I will pay attention on what I’m going to say because if you study law, I will pay attention.

Federico Cesconi 6:50
Don’t worry, don’t worry about it.

Gregorio Uglioni 6:53
And I’m not checking the close below what we are discussing. And at the end, we are not competitors. Also with the podcast, you have an outstanding webcast is c x power chart. And it’s really great people discussing with you in your one to one I really like and enjoy. The way you are discussing, it’s a bit different, it’s not always the standard by one standardized one. But therefore it makes sense to listen to it. And more than happy also to share in the in the show notes that link to your CX puncture, because there is a lot of value there. I think we are playing in the same team, we are playing together in the customer experience. Professionals world, you are a CEO, I am a sales professionals. And I think we have all the same aim the same goal, the same target. And I think we are sharing also a lot of values that the European customer experience organizations as perhaps you already spoke about the European customer experience organization. And I think it’s important to mention that if somebody would like to join, there is a direct link, you can find that in the show notes. And it’s free of charge, it’s it’s really free, you can start having a look or look at the platform, the platform is really full of content, and perhaps Federico, why should somebody join this organization?

Federico Cesconi 8:19
Well, I think it’s important to get knowledge, you know, from from the other peers. In you know, the day life when we don’t know something, we go in Google we search. And we basically ask to the crowd, asked to the crowd and answers. So if this crowd is specialize in customer experience, or you know is is is a big team of customer experience professionals, I think definitely you can get really, you know, good feedback, good advice. There are very good articles written by the people. Of course, as I said, from the beginning, there is not a unique view. So maybe you can find something that probably you don’t fully agree or probably, you know, make a click, you know, in your brain and say, Okay, this is an interesting point of view. Let’s, let’s think about it. So I think there are big advantages to be part of this community and as you say, is totally free. So I think it really makes sense to to join the community.

Gregorio Uglioni 9:40
Thank you for the record. And I think it’s really important to mention that and also you can create new friendships, new discussion and understand also, older point of views from an European point of view. I think we discussed about to European customer experience organization, as a matter of fact that if the big opportunity to have you on the show and we are able to share some insights on Sanjeev perhaps before we start discussing about your future, your future vision about Sandsiv+, what is all about Sandsiv+?

Federico Cesconi 10:15
Well, Sandsiv+ was born, as I said in 2010. And one was born with the idea to create a solution to support the customer experience management process. So, we base and we still base our solution on a framework I designed around 2008 five pillars capture, analyze, integrate, improve and measure, and the old, the old platforms is design and design, to basically support and to create the values and benefits out out of that process. So yeah, this really explain, you know, in a nutshell, in a very bad way. So as I said, we started 11 years ago, we come, we mainly serve the enterprise market. And we are quite successful, along along our journey that’s

Gregorio Uglioni 11:24
based on the fact that you are saying that, why are you so successful? Or the phrase in another way? What is differentiating sensitive plus from the older competitors on the market? And also the big one?

Unknown Speaker 11:37
Okay, this is a very interesting, interesting questions. You know, the first thing I would say is, you know, when, when we started the customer experience, management was not really a hot topic, I remember my, my partner, when I told him, okay, let’s, let’s focus, you know, our effort in creating something to support customer experience, the day after he came to me and said, are you 100%? Sure, because I searched in Google. And I got something like 80 pages, searching for customer experience. And they said, Yeah, I’m sure I’m sure, let’s go in that direction. Don’t worry. Thanks, God, I was lucky. Now, if you search customer experience there, there are more than 80 pages probably in Google, then, you know, we really go through the whole journey, because at the beginning, we had for instance, to offer consulting and the technology because no one was open, a you know, to take the technology without the consulting, and there were no possibility to find really consulting focusing in customer experience, then three or four years ago, we decided, okay, now we have you know, we have partnership with Accenture or with E&Y, we also boutique consulting, you know, our friend Beppe in, in Switzerland Nexa, let’s, let’s do some advertising to him, and NEXA. So is, is and we have such kind of boutique consulting around the world, in South Africa, for instance, in other in other areas of the globe, so we decided to basically focus, you know, our efforts just on technology and become scalable in order to be able to offer to offer the technology. And now we are we are really focusing just you know, working with partners and or providing the solution can say for instance, we sold the solution to several companies also in Switzerland, and we were able to work with the internal people and deliver deliver the solution, but there are other other customers or clients that prefer to have, you know, kind of manage service. So for instance, this solution, we are we give the solution to consulting partner like Deloitte, or E&Y, and then the consulting delivers the full scope of the projects to the final client. This is a little bit the small, small history of but, record, it’s very important to mention, we were born from scratch, serve the customer experience management process. And this is important because we never we never been market research platform, our survey platform that then try to basically transform in a customer experience management platform. And this is important because I always say to my clients, you know, you have Excel and you have word, and you can create a table in Word and write a letter in Excel, and it works. But probably if you do the opposite will work even better. You know, this is what I usually say to my clients.

Gregorio Uglioni 15:21
I think what you’re saying makes totally sense. And there are plenty of really good customer experience book. But I didn’t found in any of them, these the insights that he were offering to the to the customer, and I think this is the customer, meaning the corporate enterprise that want to start the customer experience transformation. It’s something that we never discussed. And you can say, I don’t agree, don’t worry about it. That’s the open discussion. Even if it’s not, it’s not your bank chat. But we don’t need to agree. But my view is really, it’s not stated in the books. But if you want to start a customer centric transformation, the first thing that most of the enterprises are doing is serving the customer, trying to get feedback from the customers, and then starting working with with the feedback. And you mentioned the five pillars. And I think I summarize them in three P in three, it’s asking the customer, understanding what the customer are telling to you, and then creating actions and solution like sands if are there in order to harmonize the data that you are getting, creating an enabling these acts to define these actions. And again, we don’t need to agree basically what the customer are telling you. It’s not that it must be your first priority. And no only work on these 10 or 15 ideas. But at least you have an order source of inputs in order to really focus on the customer, because these customers are the customers that are buying your products, your services, and Sands is really offering this opportunity in a super easy way serving the customer, understanding the data and creating actions out of that, for me was mind blowing in discussion with Federico, he was talking about the technology behind that. And therefore, it’s not only about these three steps that I mentioned, but a lot more. And now we are coming on to the next phase. That’s what you are offering what you did with all your tools that you are offering, let’s say what would be or what is the next step?

Unknown Speaker 17:37
This is a very interesting question. And this requires a little bit of contextual contextualization. And as I said, we are focusing on the Enterprise Client. So for several reasons, we always focus on enterprise clients. And what we have seen in the last three years in the market was something extremely interesting. And I think every everybody that is in, in, you know in it, and basically looks look around, in a very attentive way can see so big investments in the clouds. So nowadays, big companies, including banks, that before was the kind of no way today is we must do that.

Unknown Speaker 18:39
But, you know, I was talking with a customer that we recently acquired, he told me in 2015, we started in the migration of our it in the cloud. And nowadays, we don’t have any single applications that run on prem, we have everything in the cloud, the next wave will be, you know, the multi clouds approach. So the big we see also the big investment in in Google in Microsoft in Amazon. So this is, this is a trend and it’s there. We you know, if you want to compete with revolute, you need to be a agile and faster in order, you know, to have your system support your strategy. And this is something that basically, we started to think three years ago. So we wrote the full rewrote the full applications and the full architecture of the applications in containers. And we are able to basically orchestrate the containers using Kubernetes. So today, Sandsiv is available in the cloud of your choice in the not geographical node of your choice and and it takes 20 minutes to set up, you know, a new instance, wherever you want. So, the cloud native cloud is important and is different from SAAS, you know, I’m quite provocative and I am saying, you know, SAAS is dead, the end, at least for enterprise customers that move the infrastructure in the cloud. Why? Because you need, you know, security, you need agility, you need to be able to backup your own data and restore your own data, you need to ensure data privacy, you need to ensure security. So it’s a totally different competitive game. And this game is played the, you know, in containers in Kubernetes. And in the cloud, this is the first step. The second step is the integrations. So integrations with the ecosystem and the system that our target clients use. So for us, it’s very clear things like Salesforce, like SRP, like Microsoft Dynamics, like whatever other system, tag managers marketing automation tools that run in the cloud, and we are able, you know, create these automatic package to easily integrate those scripts. Second, second pillar. Third, the end, those pillars are all connected that don’t, don’t take me This is disconnected from from these. So the fact that we are in the clouds means we are open and we can communicate to whatever other unity in in the cloud, we need to be Netflix, not blockbusters, this is this is the message this or we need to be revolute I don’t know whom compare revolute. But we all know the value, devaluation or revolute compare other other, you know, financial, or banking services. The third important pillar, and you will laugh because it sounds like, you know, a buzzword is artificial intelligence. But when we talk about artificial intelligence, our view for the future is very clear. You know, on one side, we need the relay to make, you know, the possibility to have this artificial intelligence integrated, integrated, integrated in the cloud integrated in the communications with the full ecosystem.

Federico Cesconi 22:46
The second things, and this is what we already worked a lot in the past in our application is to offer a no code, artificial intelligence. So the really the ability for business people without any knowledge of Python, or Java, or whatever, to build models, in our platforms, models that make sense for your business and produce immediate value for your business. I’ve seen no clients, big clients of our platform, building, you know, topic detection, model sentiment, model churn risk model, by themselves, business people, not data scientists, and deploy the models directly in our platform. So these those three are really, you know, three important pillars in, in our, in our basically view for the future, the one in the artificial intelligence pillar, another important point, you know, because I’ve wrote a lot, you know, articles about it. And also, I created some posts in LinkedIn and some articles is, you know, the Transformers words. So, we are going to release these months, the first beta of, you know, an algorithm that we offer to our clients based on the Transformers work, and it will create a big advantage for our clients. What is the advantage basically, I tell you the name internal internal coding name of that specific project is called the magic button. So the magic button means you have, you know, a collection of feedbacks, or text or whatever you push the magic button, and the algorithm discover automatically all the topics and creates already out of the box are training files that can be used, then to build more solid models to do classification. Topic detection and sentiment analysis, this is the first step that we will have in our platform for you know, customer experience people and these will generate really higher accuracy, you know, short time to value short time to market for for all our clients. So, those are a little bit the things that we are working on, and everything is basically towards what I think the migration from a customer experience management, you know, projects or, or platform to wide customer intelligence. And when I, when I talk about customer intelligence, I talk about the possibility to have, you know, these solutions in the cloud, as I said, at the beginning, integrated with all the other systems, so, be able to communicate by directionals with with the, with the other, the other system as sub a Salesforce whatever, and provide a intelligence, you know, and this is the way in the, in the next years, the company will compete, you know, I was attending a fantastic presentation of, you know, Alibaba, like with Ali pay, and there is an insurance company of Alipay, you know, a data flow and artificial intelligence models connected in the data flow, the benefit goes in two hours, in two hours, the client is able to open the case, at the insurance company, after two hours, he received the money, if, of course, everything is okay. And everything is basically analyzed the by artificial intelligence model. So this is the word we are going to, and this is the way we have to compete in the future. And in the future, you know, everything will be in this world of interconnected clouds, and we have us, we have really, to be ready for that we cannot anymore pretend to have a, you know, on prem solution legacy systems, that makes us really slow. And, and, yeah, it’s impossible, it’s impossible to compete with the revolute of the world, or, you know, the Netflix of the world. If you don’t, if you don’t have a change, you know, in your mindset.

Gregorio Uglioni 27:48
I think it was a really long explanation. But this is the way to go. And it was really interesting, as I know, what you were, well, you are, you spoke also in a technical way, but to make it understandable that the technology is there to be everywhere to get data from everywhere 24/7, and to create these customer insights, and I know we are running out of time, but I think this is really important to have this discussion. And to make that understandable. For for business people that can mean what you are saying is what you can create, or what you created already to be discussed, is, is really to have not a, let’s say 180 customer view or degree or that reality, but we are already on the next level. Everything really all the data that you have in a company, let’s say financials, data, operational data, and the speciality of of Sciences, the customer data to put them together, and then leverage and make magics. You mentioned the magic button, make magic out of this data. And we are not speaking about only being quick and giving the opportunity to somebody that is in insurance to get them on a deck. But we are really speaking about finding the best insights to optimize the return on investment, exactly your company. It means it is not possible to compete with this solution, everything and sorry to say that a C suite sitting in at the round table and taking the season and saying this and that because all the companies like Alibaba and there are order insurance is another great example. Use already machines to prepare this decision. And can these are the models, run them and see them? I thought the big opportunity to see one model running, providing feedbacks out to take one big issues. That was something that human beans were not able to define because we would not be able to calculate to get these insights for the machine was it’s a one night calculation, let’s say, God feeling a one night calculation, and he wants the best insight to maximize dramatically increase revenues compared to the old threshold. You mentioned that Excel calculation.

Unknown Speaker 30:25
But Gregorio imagine, do you know, how many how many users have Alibaba connected to AliPay in China, I’m talking about active users, I tell you 460 Millions, so users, I don’t know how many transactions they done daily, but without machine learning without deep machine learning that automize and take decisions on certain processes is impossible to work. So, those are the companies that we will have to compete in the future. So, I think, you know, legacy company here in Europe, need really to think, you know, deep and understand what they can do to change because otherwise in the next years, such a kind of companies, they will build a competitive advantage that will be impossible, you know, to basically to run to run behind. And and, and this is, you know, the competitive field, we will we will have to play in the next years and also for us becoming, as you said, and you summarize very well in a business way, becoming, you know, the intelligence system, the customer intelligence system that we provide, you know, informations to system like Salesforce, marketing, automation tool, ERP, etc, etc. In order to make automatic you know, decision on customer what kind of what kind of campaigns I have to send to Gregorio today, based on information. If Gregorio has not been incident, please don’t send the campaigns because it’s useless and is counterproductive. So, all this kind of, you know, information, basically, we want to provide and

Gregorio Uglioni 32:18
what you’re saying, and then we can conclude this discussion, but really important, it’s, it’s a lot of companies are speaking about personalization of experiences, what you are mentioning is not either personalization, but is individualization of experiences, I can create a specific experience for Federico because I know Federico, as an entity, leveraging data that if and all the information that I can individualize experience, it means it’s already choose step forward compared to what we are discussing

Unknown Speaker 32:54
for me, for me, the point is this experience to you, Gregorio must be relevant, you must have a relevant experience, not a personalized experience, a personalized experience, in my opinion, I cannot really understand very well what could be better relevant, if I send you the information, the content that is relevant to you, for you, in this moment, this is important, it makes the difference, in my opinion,

Gregorio Uglioni 33:24
way much looking forward to see this solution, these tools in place, because these are the future. And, and I think it really makes sense. I’m thrilled to listen to the official presentation that you are going to, to have, and I think after I will publish the podcast later, but we can share them the links together that you can get all the tech, we are coming to an end. But I would like to ask two or three questions to you, Federico, and this is a bit more on the human side. Is there a book that you would recommend to the audience and saying this is something important that you should have a look at?

Federico Cesconi 34:06
Yeah, I would say based on what I tell you before is a book if I were remember, I recommend also to you and probably is competing now I don’t remember the title very well, but he’s competing on artificial intelligence is is a book written, you know, by different professors of Harvard, Harvard Business School, one of the professor’s is an Italian one and is from Rome. And I think that book really opened me the eyes on the reality for instance, we were talking about Ali pay or and group as equal today. Those those giants are really, you know, unbelievable and and we need really to To better understand them how they do in a way that we still can compete to them.

Gregorio Uglioni 35:07
There is a running joke that everybody’s telling, sharing. But I would like to mention it also in this in this podcast, I cannot say the source because everybody’s telling that but some people didn’t know that it’s uberize your business before it gets kodaked

Federico Cesconi 35:27
Exactly. This is one of the slides I have in my presentation. So I said before, would you like to be Netflix or blockbuster? This is this is the decision that you have to take it to you.

Gregorio Uglioni 35:40
I think there is no way to decide there is only one way to one way to go Federico, if somebody would like to contact you, what’s the best way?

Federico Cesconi 35:49
Well, they can. They can contact me on LinkedIn, I always answer to people in LinkedIn. So definitely LinkedIn, they can find me on LinkedIn, Federico, just go on here, you can see here the name and yeah, in LinkedIn, definitely, I’m quite active there.

Gregorio Uglioni 36:08
And as you’re saying, not what is on your right side Federico is going to LinkedIn but also on your left side, you can find also Federico on the European customer experience acquisition platform. And it’s it’s full of great insight. And you will find all the way

Federico Cesconi 36:26
there you find people smarter than me. So I suggest to go there.

Gregorio Uglioni 36:34
Thank you for the call. And now we are coming to the last question is the usual question that I always ask is Federico golden nugget. It’s something that we discussed or something new, that you would leave to the audience.

Federico Cesconi 36:48
No golden nugget. I don’t have a lot of golden nuggets. To give. The only things I can say, you know, and this is in general follow of your passion. So follow your passion because, you know I’m now 56 years old, and I can tell you the life is really short so don’t don’t lose time and Follow Follow your passion.

Gregorio Uglioni 37:17
Thank you Federico. And as usual, I’m not commenting the Golden Nugget because it’s Federico’s golden nugget. One thing I wanted to manage to at the end, Federico wrote also together with a friend a great paper about measuring the digital experience of the physical experience. It’s something that I would like to share also, in this podcast, because if you have the opportunity to discuss with you, let’s really share these additional golden nugget. That that it’s really makes sense, it’s easy to understand. From the mathematical point of view, it’s a bit complicated. It’s really something that helps understanding how to measure all this transformation can be a digital transformation can be a business transformation can be a customer centric transformation. But it makes always sense to measure something. And I think Sands is a really a great platform also to measure customer satisfaction.

Unknown Speaker 38:13
Just Just one comment that paper is published on researchgate.net. So is, if someone is interested, is is it’s quite successful, I would say, you know, and yeah, probably people think is, is helpful.

Gregorio Uglioni 38:33
Thank you very much. And really I have that the audience enjoyed this discussion as much as I did, because it’s always outstanding to discuss with Federico, the big issue that I have is when we say we meet for half an hour to have a coffee and then at the end we discuss one and a half hours. But that’s the case if both people are passionate about the same topics. And I really enjoyed this discussion. And again, thank you very much to you Federico, and to the European customer experience organization to making this discussion possible. Thank you.

Federico Cesconi 39:06
Thank you, Gregorio and thanks as well to the European customer experience organization.

Gregorio Uglioni 39:12
That’s amazing. If you enjoyed this episode, please share the word of mouth, subscribe it, share it until the next episode. Please don’t forget, we are not in a b2b or b2c business. We are in a human to human environment. Thank you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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