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AI in Customer Experience: Why Automation Alone Won’t Fix Service

AI in Customer Experience: Why Automation Alone Won’t Fix Service

There’s no shortage of conversation about AI in customer experience right now. Most of it centers on speed, efficiency, and cost savings.

Faster responses. Lower operating costs. More automation.

And while those outcomes matter, they rarely address the deeper challenge facing fintech leaders and enterprise customer experience teams.

Because what’s quietly happening across organizations is this:

Teams are layering AI onto existing systems without redesigning the customer experience those systems were built to support.

The result isn’t transformation.

It’s friction.


The Problem Isn’t AI. It’s How Companies Are Using It.

Matt Price, founder and CEO of Crescendo AI, describes the current AI wave in customer service with a surprisingly simple metaphor.

Many organizations are approaching AI like a fast-food operation.

The goal becomes throughput:

  • How many inquiries can we close?
  • How many tickets can we deflect?
  • How quickly can we reduce queue volume?

Those metrics feel measurable. Operational. Efficient.

But they often miss the question fintech leaders should care about most:

Did the customer leave with confidence that their problem was truly solved?

In industries where trust, access, and financial decisions are involved, speed alone is not a customer experience strategy.

It’s simply a delivery mechanism.


Why “Just Adding a Bot” Often Backfires

One of the clearest themes from Matt’s perspective is that AI fails when it’s treated as a standalone fix.

Organizations identify a pressure point — usually volume or staffing strain — and automate one piece of the workflow.

A chatbot is added.

Routing is automated.

Self-service expands.

On paper, metrics improve.

But underneath, the customer journey often becomes fragmented. Context disappears between touchpoints. Escalations slow down. Customers repeat themselves.

Matt describes this as the danger of “bolting on a bot” rather than redesigning the experience around AI.

That distinction matters.

Because customer experience is not a collection of isolated interactions.

It’s a system.

And systems require design.


AI in Customer Experience Requires Service Design, Not Just Automation

This is where many enterprise AI initiatives stall.

Leaders treat AI like a technology deployment instead of a service redesign initiative.

But according to Matt, the organizations seeing the strongest outcomes are doing something fundamentally different:

They redesign how humans and AI work together.

That means:

  • Faster handoffs between AI and live agents
  • Shared customer context across channels
  • Resolution ownership across the full journey
  • Visibility into what happens before, during, and after escalation

AI works best when it improves continuity — not when it interrupts it.


Customers Are Fine With AI… Until They’re Not

Most customers are not resistant to AI.

Most customers are not resistant to AI. They already interact with it daily and generally value the convenience, speed, and self-service options it provides.

But expectations shift when stakes increase.

When the issue becomes more emotional, more urgent, or more financially sensitive, customers stop evaluating speed and start evaluating confidence.

This becomes especially relevant in fintech, banking, insurance, and regulated industries where a failed interaction carries outsized consequences.

In a recent episode featuring tech strategist Lisa Martin, she framed it clearly:

“Trust is currency.”

AI can strengthen that currency.

Or it can quietly deplete it.

The difference comes down to governance, escalation, and whether organizations design clear paths beyond automation.


Faster Responses Don’t Always Create Better Experiences

One of the most interesting ideas Matt introduces is that AI is changing channel behavior entirely.

Historically, email was asynchronous.

Chat was real-time.

Phone was escalation.

But AI is collapsing those distinctions.

Email can now behave like live chat.

Resolution can happen within minutes rather than hours.

That sounds like progress — and often it is.

But speed is not the same thing as resolution.

An instant response that creates confusion still creates friction.

A slightly slower interaction that resolves the issue fully often creates stronger customer satisfaction.

This is where many organizations misread their metrics.

They optimize for response time.

But customers evaluate resolution quality.


What Fintech Leaders Should Measure Instead

Traditional CX metrics often focus on efficiency:

  • Containment rate
  • Average handle time
  • Deflection
  • Ticket volume

Matt argues these metrics are incomplete.

Instead, leaders should be measuring the full customer journey.

His recommended North Star metric:

End-to-end customer satisfaction across the entire inquiry lifecycle.

Not just whether AI answered.

But whether the customer left feeling helped.

For financial institutions, this aligns closely with what Scott Lee Holloway, Head of Customer Experience at APS Bank, discussed in another episode.

Scott explained that trust must be measured the same way organizations measure customer satisfaction.

Because in banking and financial services, trust is not abstract.

It is operational.

If you’re exploring how fintech brands operationalize customer signals into service improvements, this companion conversation on social listening in banking is worth reading:
How Social Listening Is Changing Customer Experience in Banking


AI Is Expanding What Customer Experience Can Become

For years, CX was treated as a cost center.

Something to manage.

Reduce.

Contain.

AI changes that equation.

Because when service capacity becomes more scalable, leaders can ask a different question:

What kind of experience would we create if constraints disappeared?

Matt frequently asks clients:

“What would you do if you had unlimited capacity?”

That question changes everything.

It moves CX leaders away from operational scarcity and toward experience design.

Instead of asking:

“How do we reduce tickets?”

They begin asking:

“How do we create better customer outcomes?”


The Future of AI in Customer Experience Is Human-Centered

The companies that succeed with AI will not necessarily be the fastest adopters.

They’ll be the most intentional.

They’ll understand that automation is not the strategy.

Experience design is.

They’ll treat AI as a layer that enhances relationships — not replaces them.

And they’ll recognize something many organizations still miss:

Customer experience doesn’t break in one interaction.

It breaks in the gaps between them.


Related Perspective: Trust, AI, and Public Customer Experience

If this conversation raised questions around AI governance, transparency, and customer-facing risk, Lisa Martin’s episode offers an important companion lens.

Her focus is less about operational CX design and more about trust, accountability, and AI visibility in public channels.

Watch: How AI Changes the Trust Equation in Customer Experience


Where AI Strategy Often Goes Wrong

The pressure to implement AI quickly is real.

Boards want ROI.

Leaders want efficiency.

Customers expect responsiveness.

But speed without redesign often creates invisible damage.

AI works best when organizations stop asking:

“Where can we automate?”

And start asking:

“Where does the customer experience break down today?”

That’s where the opportunity lives.


Need Help Evaluating Your AI Customer Experience Strategy?

If your organization is exploring AI in customer experience — especially in fintech, regulated industries, or high-trust environments — it helps to pressure test the experience before scaling it.

Book a free consultation with B Squared Media to discuss how AI, social care, and customer experience strategy can work together without creating friction in the customer journey.

 

Why AI Customer Service Fails (And What Smart Companies Do Differently)

Read the Transcript

[00:00:00] AI Is Changing Customer Experience

Matt: A lot of the time is people thinking of customer service and AI, like fast food, you know, service. It’s like, how many burgers can I get out the door with AI?

But what you’re not seeing is are those customers coming back?

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Social Media CX podcast. I’m Brooke Sellas, and let’s talk about customer experience and how it’s entering a new phase for this show. Because AI, unless you’ve been living under a rock, is transforming how brands are delivering support. But the technology alone doesn’t always determine whether the experience still works for your customer.

It’s really more about the execution of how you use that AI for your customer. Today’s guest has had a front row seat to the evolution of customer experience technology. Matt Price is the founder and. CEO of Crescendo AI and previously helped launch the European operations of Zendesk, one of the companies that helped define modern customer service software. Today we’re talking about what CX leaders are getting right where they’re struggling, and how AI changes the way companies design customer experience. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt: Thank you so much. What a great intro. It is great to be here.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: I’m so excited to chat with you and let’s talk about your journey because you’ve been working in customer service technology for a really long time, including help build, as I mentioned, Zendesk European operation. What originally pulled you into the world of customer experience?

Matt: Actually, it was my first job outta college. Actually I was, I was trying to raise money to get my band on tour and figured I would go and join a company and I had a computer science degree and I answered that in the paper and ended up doing tech support for, c compilers for a couple of years.

Anyway, and the band never went on tour. It was such a great experience for the company to, you know, a few years later I was in California, working for a tech company. Like many people, customer service was the first part, my first jobs first part of my career, and I’ve loved, been in ever since.

[00:02:15] The Biggest Shift in CX

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: I love it. You’ve been in the industry for a while, and so I’m sure you’ve seen the phases that customer experience has gone through, especially, you know, the past several years it’s really sped up and gotten more attention, the attention that it deserves. How would you describe the major shifts in CX over the past, let’s say, decade of your career?

Matt: I would say in the past decade, was really saw the transition, the wholesale transition from, I would say on-premise to SaaS. you know, prior to that it was new channels coming in. You know, maybe a little bit of change on new channels in the last 10 years with social channels appearing, but really not that much change, you know, and even the shift to SaaS tools were.

They were more efficient, a little bit easier to handle. You know, we could CX leaders, we could handle them ourselves in many cases, but it was purely incremental, you know? And I think we all recognized the moment we just saw ChatGPT for the first time as, okay, this changes the game. And more than anything, I would say, more than anything else, not even.

The internet doesn’t compare the changing the internet. It was probably maybe the introduction of the telephone, to look a long way back to see the impact of a technology on the industry.

[00:03:38] What Companies Misunderstand About CX Today

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: What do you think companies misunderstand most about customer experience today? In the times that we’re living in right now?

Matt: I think the biggest misunderstanding of customer experience, and this has been a legacy from the times we’ve talked about. You know, it used to be the customer service was the gateway to building customer relationships and enhancing sales, you know, and building a long term.

And some way along the way. And probably with the telephone and contact centers, it became industrialized. It became an afterthought. It became, as cost, an necessary cost for the business. And, you know, there were some businesses that debunked that, you know. I think you can think about Apple or American Express, but guess what?

They had premium products and they built the increased price of customer service into their offering. So they were able to do that. And so I think the big misunderstanding, you know, really is what is the roots of customer care? And the reason I say that is the advent of AI allows us to get back to that.

And, and the reason for that is that the cost of delivering the service or building a relationship is no longer tied to the number of individuals that we can have sitting on seats 24 hours a day in order to answer. We can restructure that dynamic. AI can do a lot of the work, which means that, we can reallocate resources and reallocate people to the things that they’re good at and move from an era of deflection.

I hate these words, containment. And because no customer wants to be contained to an era of engagement. Most people are still stuck in the industrial production line monitoring, frame of mind, I’m afraid, at the moment.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Yes, I couldn’t agree with you more, I think, we tend to work with a lot of what we call outliers. Like our customers tend to be outliers because much to your point, they are really trying to be as customer centric as possible, you know? But when we look at, the majority of brands and companies that we buy from, it seems just based on a lot of their decision making.

Obviously we’re not in the boardrooms with them, but it seems like the message is always profits over people. And so it’s rare, I think that you find the brands and the companies who are trying to, at least show a good game of people over profits. Even if you know the mandate is still profits over people.

Matt: That’s right. You know, and good intentions are always there but I feel that most CX leaders have been boxed in and, we are living in this world of we’ve almost been trained not to push the boundaries too far because we know that asking for extra budget is difficult and we’re being beaten on day by day on escalations from the boardroom of customers that we’re not happy.

And so it is a tough period. Oh, it has been a tough period. The great news is that it doesn’t have to be like that anymore, you know? And we’re seeing amazing results where the narrative between, us CX leaders and the board has totally changed and into one of providing business insights and the economics of providing customer service have changed.

Such you can actually do 24/7. You can actually put live channels in, you can actually get rapid escalations. But it’s work. You know, this is not just a case of bolting on a bot on the front end because in many cases that deteriorates service. It needs to be a rethink. It needs to be a transformation.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Totally. Let’s explore that a little bit, because I know you talk with a lot of CX leaders in the work that you do. So from your perspective in the conversations that you’ve been having, what are some of the biggest pressures that they tell you they’re facing today? What are CX leaders saying that the pressures are right now in this time?

[00:07:31] The Pressures Facing CX Leaders Today

Matt: There’s so much narrative about, hey, AI can really help to optimize business expenses. So there is a narrative and business pressure to reduce budgets.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Mm-hmm.

Matt: um, Or reallocate budgets. Some organizations say, no, we don’t want to reduce budgets, but we need to see a dramatic increase in service or availability.

And so that’s where the pressure’s coming from right now. The challenge is for most six CX leaders. Nobody’s done it before. You know, nobody’s done AI, restructured it. And that’s one area that I think companies like Crescendo can help with in the fact that we’ve done it hundreds of times now.

And so what I’ve challenged my team to do is how can you be a partner to the CX leader and bring the experience that you have. And bring the experience that we’ve seen on constantly monitoring the performance of over 200 contact centers, and constantly improving that and bringing it to CX leaders and helping them through that transformation.

How can we be a better partner?

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: I love that a partner and not a vendor. That’s often like how we like to describe ourselves as well. Do you see a lot of operational pain points in the work that you do?

[00:08:52] Why “Just Adding a Bot” Backfires

Matt: All the time. And they become more apparent, you know, partly because of AI itself. And if you think, if you put aside for a moment, AI in its role as handling inquiries, that there’s a big development in AI for observability. And so for example, one of the components that we offer, and frankly, and to the point now is I won’t let a customer go live without it is end-to-end observability.

So AI can now look at how well, where the customer comes in, the bot interaction. The handoff if necessary to an agent, and then the journey to completion of the resolution. So, and this is really important, you need to get an end-to-end view, because if you don’t, then you are just gonna be ignoring a lot of, potential aspects.

So with observability, you can really get to understand what’s going on, within the environment and tune the experience, when you see issues and what we see. Unfortunately, a lot of the time is people thinking of customer service and AI, like fast food, you know, service. It’s like, how many burgers can I get out the door with AI?

But what you’re not seeing is are those customers coming back? You’re not seeing, did I give anybody food poisoning? And so what we start to see is once we analyze all of the data underneath, there’s a lot of toxicity that’s created by bolting on the bot.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Yes. I couldn’t agree more. I think too, it sounds like you’re hitting on attribution, which I know many organizations, feel like they don’t have through customer experience, but you’re saying end to end , and sounding to me like you’re saying at, you’re making attribution much more easier from the customer experience purview.

Matt: You can. We can actually attach it back and connect to see e-commerce systems now and actually tag, see how much revenue is being generated. We’re starting to see uplift of, you know, out of the gate, 1% impact on revenue for example, which is huge.

You know.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Yeah.

Matt: uh, Companies spend years, doing that in growth. But the bigger thing really is, I mean that, and that’s an economic one, but actually just really understanding what is happening. Is this really helping? Is it really improving? and I like to use one example is that everybody again, talks about this containment.

We’ve got 60% containment within an AI, you know, and let’s just say actually for benefit AI resolution, great, we’ve got 60% a AI resolution. How much of that is people just maybe bit pound of being resolved and opening up things on other channels. What we’re starting to see through our analysis and our research is significant drops in channels, where AI has been deployed through just a bolt on bot.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Oh wow.

Matt: We are starting to see a increase in desats, from when people just bolt on a bot. And the reason is, is that you haven’t redesigned the experience carefully enough. And so, because imagine a scenario whereby, let’s say you are getting, you know, let’s say you are getting 50% AI resolution.

What about the 50% that you’ve put through an extended journey now who now get transferred to a level one agent with no context and they, and the customer has to repeat themselves. And if you haven’t restructured the, your handoffs, and if you haven’t restructured the teams that are handling it, if you haven’t restructured the time resolution because you’ve given them a real time experience and maybe you drop them into an channel, that’s gonna hurt the business.

[00:12:46] What Actually Improves CX (Real Example)

Matt: And so what we do at Crescendo has helped customer companies take the savings that they they’re getting from an AI and Efficiency and help them restructure their operations. Such they do get that handle if you get it right. It’s incredible. One of our clients who’s one of my role model clients, Lovepop.

I don’t know if you know them. They do the greeting cards.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Yes.

Matt: They.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: On Shark Tank? Yes.

Matt: Exactly. When we first started working with them, their Trustpilot rating was, I think it was a 2 to 3.6, which is average below average. But they have an amazing product and actually they have amazing customer service policy within three months.

They were at 4.6. And if you look at their Trustpilot reviews. Now some, that whole change was down to customer service responsiveness and what they, and what we helped, were able to is partner with them. So they get great response from ai. But the most important thing was restructuring the human aspect such that people were available for rapid handoff and reaper resolution, and that was the unlock for them.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Yeah, I love that so much because that’s what we see for our clients who work with us for social care. You know, we use bots for certain things, but if anything’s complicated or complex or the certain words are used right, they come right to a human and we’ve consistently seen, you know, reviews, scores go up, CSAT scores go up.

All of those things go up because people are fine with self-service and they’re totally fine with AI until they’re not, and it’s the, until they’re not part that you need to be prepared for.

Matt: Yeah. What we try and do is, and again, what’s wonderful about being in a business right now, and it is being able to see the benefits, but also being able to uncover certain misconceptions that we had. And this is why it’s very important to think openly within from a CX perspective. When you look at this new challenge, I’ll give you an example.

We all got data to say that moving everybody to chat was a really good idea because you can solve things in the moment. You can have an interactive experience. What if an email can respond as quickly as chat? Which it can now, with AI they’re so what actually you are doing there is you’re turning what was approved previously an asynchronous channel into a synchronous channel.

[00:15:14] AI vs Human Support

Matt: So to give the idea of Lovepop again. I got greeting card. I’m sending it to a loved one. I made mistake. I think I’m gonna have to redo it, but I’m in the moment now. What I can do is send an email. Lovepop will respond in a few seconds saying, okay, how would you like us to make a change?

And then based upon what the customer comes back with, they say, okay, I just need to transfer you to an agent. And now the agent can actually come on and just assist. And it’s a two step process that gets resolved in minutes. What’s important is the customer is still in the moment. The customer is still trying to solve the issue.

They don’t have to keep coming back. They don’t have to worry again. They don’t have feel they have to check in. We’ve resolved it in the moment, so we’ve been able to take a process but not have to shift the customer on their channel. We make the customer where they are and allow ’em to do it and meeting them in that moment, connecting the emotional with the emotion in resolving the problem is what creates just this unexpected flow of five star reviews.

It’s a dramatic swing.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Yes, yes. There’s obviously enormous excitement around AI and customer service right now, but can you tell us just a little bit about what Crescendo does, because I have some follow up questions just so people know what exact, where you’re coming from, what your point of view is and how the tool works.

Matt: Firstly, we are a developer of AI for customer care. So we have, we created a new type of AI assistant. It can work on phone, it can work on chat, it can work on email, but it can also become multimodal, an interactive way. So, which means that you can, just switch. You can switch from text to voice concurrently, you can upload photos.

We’re the first company to have actually developed this. We just won the Enterprise Connect whole best of show against all of these very large companies, purely for that core piece of technology. What’s remarkable about that is that once you start to think about the use cases, and what we do is we make the AI smart and we tell it to, hey, understand the customer context.

So imagine now that I’m talking. And the AI understands I’m kind of in a public place and it asks me for some personal details. It will actually, it could actually prompt me to text them in at the same time, on the same channel. Imagine I am doing care. I’m asking somebody to reset their router. If I understand, and I’m asking ’em to do something with their hands and they’re texting me, I can ask ’em if they wanna switch to voice well.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Yeah.

Matt: they can talk me through it.

The list of use cases goes on. So we have these amazing AI on the front end, which really are best in class. We have full observability tools that can look at quality assurance, make sure everything’s going well, step by step, CSAT on every point of the journey, all the way through to the human. And then using that, we can develop business insights.

So for a shoe company, we can say you’ve got a sizing issue on this particular line, which is generating refunds. We will recommend that you adjust your sizing guide on the website. And these are real examples of how we take that. You know how we talked at front about bringing CX back into the boardroom.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Yes.

Matt: That leader, now, the communication between the boardroom is not, Hey, can I have some more staff? The communication is, Hey, I think we need to make this adjustment to our adjustment, to our sizing. Here’s a report, by the way, that my Crescendo AI has generated that we can send to the manufacturer and send to the website team so that’s the technology.

The final thing that we deliver is because we have operation. A lot of deep operational experience, playbooks for how you execute everything from quality assurance management, knowledge management. Even crisis management or spike management within the a of page of AI. So we can provide our customers with those playbooks and the expertise.

Actually, that wasn’t the final thing. The final thing, by the way, is we can also handle level one. We can also provide the level of support. So if companies who say, well, that transformation is kind of tough, I don’t really want to get my BPO, it’s gonna be hard to get them to adopt all of these new practices.

They choose us. As the company, they want to do the AI and the humans combined, and we’ll take full accountability for the whole process.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Very cool, very cool, very innovative. I think it’s incredibly timely for what we’re seeing right now with CX and AI. Do you, what would your message be for leaders who are listening and they’re thinking like, oh my gosh, this sounds so amazing.

[00:20:04] Rethinking AI in Customer Service

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: What’s your advice for balancing AI?

Even automation, which I know is an AI, but you know, there’s a lot of confusion out there, but just AI, how do they balance those things and the human interaction? Because it sounds like you’ ve kind of put a stake in the ground saying like, look, the human has to be in the loop, so how do you give them that advice about that?

Matt: There has to be some human oversight, at some point. But that actually can change. You know, the human doesn’t have to be in a loop for a lot of interactions. The AI, at least our AI, can actually do a lot of quality assurance and things like that. But there has to be something different.

I would recommend that people don’t think about AI as automating one small chunk of the process. Oh, I’m gonna, I’m gonna replace website deflection with Q&A with a bot now, because that, as we talked about, that leads to bad experiences. I encourage people to actually think about, and I often start with a question, what would you do if you had unlimited capacity?

What would you do right now? Where would you invest that unlimited capacity within your organizations? And it totally changes the journey. They said, well, the business really wants to expand in these three new countries. I would really like to get rid of the dsat that I’m getting because of this particular issue.

What that reframing moves us, a CX leader from most of them are at the moment, or most of us are as production line managers to service designers. And this is where, this is where our future is, you know, because companies like Crescendo can now come in and partner and in the same way that other organizations.

We saw this with within manufacturing, and you partner with an organization that’s incredibly specialized at doing these things, and it freed up companies to be the product designers. Now CX leaders can be thinking about customers, the relationship moves, they design it and we execute it for them with AI.

So AI is the unlock, but you need to be thinking about how you, what your objectives are and how you redesign your service using AI in support. Do not just bold it on, do not just automate one part of the process because you are gonna create issues and you’re gonna box yourself in even further.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: I mean, we’ve seen it, right? We’ve seen all the articles where companies have decided to just do it that way without any real thought or planning and it, you know, it didn’t go well.

Matt: Yeah.

[00:22:40] Where CX Is Going Next

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: In your opinion, what do you think customer experience will look like five years from now, knowing how quickly AI has kind of come onto the scene and changed the game?

Matt: Well, I mean, the first thing is that consumers are one step ahead. And so consumers, I think in the past when we saw major technology shifts, initially like internet or e-commerce, the consumer accessibility was not there. And so they were using traditional channels to do it. They didn’t have the bandwidth.

Nearly all consumers now have had an LLM based experience. Most consumers now have found a particular service where they have LLM based support and it’s done well. The new bar is you have to have great, you have to have a great LLM based support. The expectation is that you can’t be restricting to channel and most customers are expecting to be able to engage either by voice or by chat. I would say that swing is gonna happen within the next 12 months dramatically. If you’re not there, you’re gonna be in trouble.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Yeah.

Matt: The second thing related to that is then dealing with how do you move in a world where you now have the ability to do more interaction and more engagement?

And a lot of that is moving service from once you’ve got the hygiene right? Which I say is customer wants talk. You answer the question. How do you then expand out that and become a service led sales organization? And, that’s the exciting part. We have a number of customers who we are entering that era with now, and it, this is the big opportunity for customer care in the future.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: . What do you think the capabilities are that will define your customers and beyond your customers, right? But who will become the best at CX? What will they be doing?

Matt: They will be able to engage a customer wherever they want to be. But what they will do is they will reframe how they think about CX and they will say, okay, well how, rather than thinking about how can I minimize engagement, how can I maximize it? So if you’re a retailer, what if you could start answering questions about the products that you’re selling?

Not just the products, not just information. So for example, we can connect directly into an e-commerce system, and then the whole product catalog. So your customer service, a agent now understands the whole product, catalog and service. Incredibly powerful.

You know, it’s like the experience of nobody really wants to be hard sold to, but you know, if we think about the best retail experiences, for example, clothes shopping’s, when you’re kind of browsing, you know that they’re there.

They can kind of help and then they expand your vision as to what you might want to have. But you know, that’s the initial component. But what if a retailer? As a retailer, I then can answer many questions about the products. What if I say I’m a tech vendor and I can sell a printer?

Well, if I can answer most questions about a printer and then, handle those, rather than deflecting you to the manufacturer. Then I’m in a position where I can talk to you about toner cartridges or printed cartridges or add-ons.

And so these, the more forward thinking companies are, how can I use service as a way to promote broader engagement?

And then once I have that, how can I use that in order to drive up sales, increase shopping carts, increase add on value? This is why I’m so excited about it for CX leaders, don’t give that ride up to somebody else. You are the service leaders. Don’t say, that’s not mine.

Lean in and figure out how you can actually do it. And that’s our mission. And we try and we have a path for organizations to help do that.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Yeah, it’s consultative selling or service-based selling, like you said earlier. I mean, that’s the selling that works the best. Right. When it’s consultative. I mean, that’s all you’re saying. I mean, it just makes so much sense to me. But I know we’re both biased because we work in this world.

Matt: Yeah,

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: I’m right along with you though.

Matt: What we now able to do is provide the evidence from our observability, from our research center and observing what’s been going on. So what we find is that. If you put ai, mostly AI’s hidden in the website, if you move it to more of a prominent position, and people were scared to do this before ’cause they didn’t want an influx of service inquiries, which is fair because the only way you could answer them was with people.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Yeah.

Matt: We typically see a doubling of volume, which is scary to people at first until they realized that they can actually manage it. ‘Cause the AI actually comes in then we see. At least 50% of that increase in volume is sales related. And then, the conversion rates, go up 4x from what you would have on a traditional sales bot because you’re service led and shopping carts increase as well.

I think people are gradually starting to see the evidence we’re helping them do this. But, you know, it’s hard to shake off things in the past. It’s hard to see as an operator who’s been working in an era of scarcity to think about how to do that. And, you know, and let’s not put aside, this requires restructuring your teams.

That this requires putting people in different positions. This requires maybe understanding that certain people need to have their skills up leveled. Some people need to change this, maybe understands that you don’t need so many QA people now, and you need, you need fewer. That’s the hardest.

This is where I see people tripping up is they attacking on the AI, but not really doing the hard stuff on the transformation. And the ones who are succeeding are the ones that are looking at everything end to end and understanding what transformations have to be made.

[00:28:41] One Metric CX Leaders Should Be Paying Attention To

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: I love that. I’d like to ask you one more question before we wrap up, which is, from your point of view and your perspective, and you’re working with a lot of different companies, what’s the one metric you think is like the North Star? What one metric should leaders really be paying more attention to when it comes to customer experience or customer experience in AI?

Whatever your purview is.

Matt: From a CX perspective, end-to-end csat on every, on the full journey of every inquiry. And it’s hard to get, but that’s the significant one. And then obviously it’s, see, you asked me to give one, I’m gonna be two. But the other one on that is impact on sales conversion.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Yes, yes. Thank you. I think, yeah, I’m so aligned with you there. Like we put sales so far away from CX and that’s just not what we see in our line of work. It’s right there along with it. It’s all, you know, if it was a Venn diagram of CX it would be like marketing, sales product and like CX would kind of sit there in the middle of that Venn diagram.

But yeah, I am. Yes, say it louder. Say it one more time.

Matt: Think about sales conversion, but you know why it’s hard. Again, this is changing your frame of mind. There are so many people that think, okay, in order to get there. My telephony system’s not up to it. And I need to upgrade it. Oh, I need to consolidate my ticketing systems, or I need to upgrade from ticketing system, Zendesk to gorgeous.

Or from Service Cloud to Zendesk or, that slows things down with technology, architecture such as Crescendo, now you can just, you can layer it on top and don’t focus on the plumbing. Focus on the customer engagement at top. And the tools now are adaptable to work within that. So what if you’ve got a one team on Zendesk and you’ve got another team in another country on another ticketing system?

It doesn’t matter. Now you can aggregate that information and you can move it across. It’s hard though because you’ve got all of those vendors knocking on your door every day, promising, saying that you are the future. But for the time and effort it takes to migrate to ticketing system, you could, you could easily be enhancing the next level of service design using a next generation AI in customer experience solution.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Absolutely, absolutely. For listeners who wanna connect with you, follow Crescendo. I don’t know if you wanna share some of the research that you talked about or if that’s available somewhere. We can also put that in the show notes. Where can our listeners and people watching find you and connect with you?

Matt: Firstly, you can connect with me directly. I’m matt.price@crescendo.ai, and you can just, that’s the email channel, but it’s constantly monitored as you might think. And love to connect with people personally. Follow our LinkedIn page, Crescendo AI. You can follow me on LinkedIn.

I would be honored if you would. So that’s Matt Price Crescendo. I know you can try us on many channels. You can go to our website and talk to our very, very helpful AI bot and it will give it a spin. And of course I’ll provide you with the, I’ll provide you with, with all the links, Brooke, to link off to some of the cool.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: We’ll put all of those in the transcript of wherever you’re listening or watching. So just head on over to the show notes, which are the transcript again, wherever you’re listening or watching. And that’s where all of the links for Matt will be and Crescendo. thank you so much for being here, and I love that you’re changing minds and hearts.

It sounds like you’re doing some really innovative work, so I encourage you, if you’re into cx, if you’re into ai, which you should be, if you’re listening to the show, go check out Crescendo and be sure to connect with Matt.

Matt: It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you and what a great conversation. Thank you.

Brooke Sellas | B Squared Media: Thank you.

Speaker: If AI is becoming part of your public customer experience strategy, the State of Social Care report explores what responsible implementation actually looks like. We’re talking governance, trust signals, operational discipline, and we have a whole section on AI.

You’ll find the link to this in the show notes as well as all of Matt and Crescendo’s information. And listen, if this show is helping you think differently about customer experience and risk and public channels, please rate and review us. I would love you so much, be your best friend. It helps us bring on more thoughtful leaders like Matt and grow our community with intention. Until next time, think conversation, not campaign.

Brooke Sellas | @brookesellas: Thanks for tuning in to the Social Media CX podcast. If you loved today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review and share it with someone who needs to up their social care game.

 

Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to the Social Media CX Podcast on YouTube. And if your team is thinking about what responsible social listening in banking or financial services actually looks like at scale, check out the State of Social Care Report 2026.

Finally, as always, Think conversation, not campaign.™

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Brooke B. Sellas is an award-winning Customer Marketing Strategist and the CEO & Founder of B Squared Media. Her book, Conversations That Connect has been recognized nationally and is required reading for a Customer Experience class at NSU. Brooke's influence in digital marketing is not just about her accomplishments but also about her unwavering commitment to elevating the industry standard of digital customer experience and customer marketing.

Social Care Weekly

Written by award-winning strategist Brooke Sellas, this weekly 5-minute power-up will help you turn social interactions into loyalty, retention, and revenue.

Category: Artificial Intelligence, Podcast
Tags: AI Integration in Business, automated customer service

Social Care Weekly

Written by award-winning strategist Brooke Sellas, this weekly 5-minute power-up will help you turn social interactions into loyalty, retention, and revenue.

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