WiCX Talks Trends: Agentic Experience Orchestration in CX: Fixing the Foundations — and Who Gets to Build Them with Sierra Modro
In this episode of WiCX Talk Trends, Clare Muscutt is joined by Sierra Modro, Sr. Director of Software Engineering at ujet.cx.
As one of the few women building the technology that so many CX teams rely on every day, Sierra offers a unique lens on one of the biggest tensions in customer experience today: are we using AI to fix customer experience, or just speeding up what’s already broken? And why who builds the technology matters just as much as the technology itself.
Many organisations are racing to implement AI, but few are addressing the fragmented systems, siloed data and agent-experience challenges that limit its potential impact.
With extensive experience across Intel, AWS, Wacom and several EdTech companies, Sierra shares how her career has been shaped by one core question: what happens at the moment a human touches technology – and what does it cost when that experience breaks?
Clare and Sierra unpack why today’s CX challenges are deeply architectural, and what it takes to move beyond “shiny” AI solutions to a more holistic, human-centred approach that reduces friction for agents, improves customer outcomes, and delivers meaningful business value.
A must-listen for CX and technology leaders navigating AI transformation and looking to build smarter, more effective customer experiences.
Episode #005 Show Notes:
Clare
Welcome back to WiCX Talk Trends — where we bring you real conversations with the women shaping the future of customer experience and technology.
I’m your host, Clare Muscutt, and today’s conversation is one I’ve been really looking forward to. I’m joined by Sierra Modro, Senior Director of Software Engineering at ujet.cx — and, importantly, one of the few women building the technology that so many CX teams rely on every day.
Because right now, there’s a lot of noise. A lot of pressure to ‘just do AI.’ But behind the scenes? Teams are still dealing with disconnected systems, broken journeys, and rising expectations — for both customers and agents.
So the question we’re really asking today is: are we fixing customer experience… or just accelerating what was already broken?
In this episode, we’ll unpack what’s actually not working in CX tech right now, what that looks like on the frontline, and why who builds the technology matters just as much as the technology itself.
Let’s get into it.
Clare
Hey Sierra!
Sierra
Hey Clare!
Clare
So wonderful to have you with us today on WiCX Talks Trends.
Sierra
I am really excited to be here and get to talk with you about some of the trends in technology.
Clare
Yes, and I'm so excited to have you here. So today's conversation, I think, is one that a lot of us are going to recognise because right now in CX, there is a huge amount of pressure to ‘just do AI’. And yet behind the scenes, many of us are still working on systems that don't actually talk to one another. We've got journeys that don't quite join up and teams who are being asked to deliver more on top of all of that.
So the question I really want to explore with you today, Sierra, is what are we actually fixing when it comes to customer experience? Or are we just speeding up something that is, in fact, already broken? I'd love to start, actually, with your story, please, Sierra, because you've had such an interesting career journey that wouldn't be a traditional one by typical standards. So, can you tell us a little bit about you and how you found your way into the world of customer experience and technology?
Sierra
Sure. So the technology part is easy. That is basically in my blood. I work now as a Senior Director of Engineering at ujet.cx. And I got into technology quite young. I've been a geek all my life. But it's what I do.
Clare
I'm a geek too, it's fine. We're all geeks together.
Sierra
And so getting into technology was easy. But starting to really get into the areas that I'm in now, that was definitely a meandering path. I mean, I've been through practically every role around technology that you can imagine. And I've wandered through everything from deep hardware kinds of things when I worked at Intel, through cloud computing when I was working at Amazon, and education technology more recently.
Then I found out about customer contact centre software. Quite frankly, my experience with customer contact centres up until now has been dreading calling in to get support. That has been my entire experience. As I started looking into it, I realised that this was an area that was really ripe with a lot of opportunity.
And because of some of the things that you were talking about, Clare, where we've got too many silos, we've got too many friction points within what we're doing. And I saw a lot of opportunity to remove that friction and to really make an impact on basically two sets of customers from my perspective: the agents themselves, and then those people who were dreading calling in, the actual end user, the customer, and make a good impact on both of those people.
Clare
Love it. I know from our previous conversations that there's such a clear thread around how people experience technology when it works and when it doesn't. So I can really see why you got pulled into that space. One of the big things that I've seen you talk about is how we build or how we've built CX technology when it doesn't quite work in reality. So, it looks great on paper or in design, but probably more likely on a roadmap rather than necessarily having been designed. But for those who are living with this every day, what does it actually look like, and what are the signs that we should be looking out for when something isn't working the way it should be?
Sierra
Yeah, I do think it was designed to look really good on paper or perhaps in a flow chart.
Clare
Yeah, I'm thinking that too, actually, a process map that technology then created an experience as an output of that.
Sierra
Yes, the problem is that those are silos of technology. So you end up with an application that the agent interacts with that talks to a CRM that is talking to a database. And all of these are individual silos that theoretically connect together. But what ends up happening is that you see most agents have anywhere from five to 12 applications that they have to juggle as they're sitting at their computer, you know, valiantly trying to help a customer. And they're trying, the agent is trying to juggle 10 different systems to try to make that work.
That's something that I think is a systemic problem. And it's because we focus on little bits of the problem as we've gone along, without looking at it as a whole and without really looking at what the end-to-end solution is. What is the agent's journey through a conversation? What is the customer journey through a conversation? And if we look at that from a systemic level, then we can start seeing ways that it's not 10 different silos of information that should be working. They should all be working together.
Within technology, one of the things that we've been really working towards in a lot of different places in the past has been moving from having multiple different little databases that do things and having a data lake that can pull together different types of information and rationalise that information so that it's easy to get out data analytics and things like that. What we haven't done is taken that same thought process, and we haven't really applied that to what can happen in the customer experience space. One of the reasons I was excited to start working at ujet.cx is that I felt that they were really trying to start having that holistic view and start really trying to look at this as a systemic issue and how we can get that full system working together appropriately.
Clare
Agnostic of which technology solutions currently exist?
Sierra
Yes, it's because I think one of the things that happens a lot in tech is you look at what solutions are available and how you can patch them together instead of really looking at what is the problem I'm trying to address? And I think if we look at the problem first, then we're more likely to come up with a really interesting solution.
Clare
Yeah, 100%. And obviously nobody's doing this on purpose. They're not thinking, want to create more silos or more difficult journeys or a rubbish working experience for our agents. You said it's because nobody's looking at that whole picture or looking at it systemically. Why do you think it is that people aren't doing that?
Sierra
I think that…so here's where we start getting to the point where I get opinionated.
Clare
I love that, we're here for it. We want your opinions.
Sierra
I think in general, there tend to be too many men in the room and not enough women. And partly that is, let's be honest, at the engineering level and at the leadership level, because the people who are in the room are looking for solutions, and they're looking for cost-effective solutions. They're looking for ways that are going to make an impact for the business. And for the people who are creating solutions, most of them are software engineers who are so divorced from the customer agent experience that there's no empathy there.
I think that as we start looking at ways to really understand the agent experience, understand the customer experience, and then start pulling the right people into the room to understand how to make things work together in a more human way using technology, that's when we're going to really start seeing some more exciting solutions. And I've started to see more of that.
I mean, I've been the only woman in the room for a lot of my career. And so I understand how to work in that kind of environment, that space. I know how to make a difference in that kind of space. And I want to be able to pull that into what we're doing here within the customer experience journey.
Clare
I'm definitely going to come back and pick up on some of those points, particularly about being the only woman in the room, the lack of women in this industry and the impact that that's having. But I just wanted to bring us back to the point that you made around who's feeling the biggest negative impact of the way that things are done today, without that systems view of thinking. And it's, as you said, the agents. So they're the ones that are holding it all together, trying to navigate the silos, trying to navigate the systems that maybe aren't properly talking to one another. They're the ones carrying the context and having to deal directly with those customers at the end of the solution that they're being faced with at the user end.
What do you think is being either misunderstood or underestimated about the role that the agent plays? Because I know if you look at the kind of thing Sam Altman is saying, “We're not going to need people in customer service at all in the next few years”. Like the goal or the most disruptive industries are going to be things like customer service. So I'm just really interested to see what you think around that.
Sierra
Yeah, you know, Sam Altman thinks AI is going to change everything. And to some degree, I think he's right. But what I don't think is that AI or any technology is going to replace the human element, because, quite frankly, humans most prefer working with other humans and talking to other humans. And I don't think that's ever going to change. What I do think, though, is that we haven't paid enough attention to the amount of toil that these agents go through in an effort to try to be helpful to customers.
Going back to those five to 10 systems that they're trying to juggle, that creates a mental load that I think keeps people from being able to have the empathy to be able to interact as effectively with that customer as they could be. Because instead they're having to spend 20% of their brain power trying to figure out, 'Wait, do I need to be in this application or that application to put in this information?' And that kind of cognitive load, I think, is wasted energy. It's wasted thought. And it's frustrating for the customer service agent who's just trying to be helpful to the end customer. I want to remove that kind of friction, that toil, because it's not helpful. It's not improving either the agent's life or the customer's life for that matter.
Clare
Nobody's winning.
Sierra
It's nobody's winning at that point, yeah.
Clare
Yeah. And just two things are ringing in my mind. Recently, Women in CX has been on the road, having these amazing panel conversations between women about the role of AI in customer experience and what that would look like in a responsible sense. And I think this will probably tie into who's leading AI and the companies and the technology and the engineering and the development of this kind of thing. But it's coming up over and over again, just because we can, doesn't mean we should.
It seems like a lot of the goals that are being set by tech companies when it comes to AI are to remove as much human interaction as possible because the goal or the solution that they're trying to…the problem they're trying to solve is cost. Right. And also, who is setting the goals around that being the only currency in being able to do that? So I love what you're saying. There's so much mental load reduction that can be done with the inclusion of AI and technology that benefits people, benefits humans. But just because we could, in theory, remove people from customer service doesn't mean that we should, right? It is interesting.
Sierra
Yeah.
Clare
There's a bit of an ethical debate for me as well around where this could be heading and the value that we need to maintain around delivering, yes, of course, commercial impact, but also a positive outcome for people, too. And I just don't think there's enough of the former, the latter, can't remember which way around I said it now, you know what I mean?
You know, solving problems for people, because if we were thinking about it like that, as you said, this is where the exciting innovation arrives, isn't it? If we're thinking about what the human problem is to solve, or the problem to solve for the customer or the quality, where do we go from that? If we're reducing it down to cost to serve being the problem to solve, what is going to come out of that? It is going to be just something fully automated, isn't it? But is that the right thing? And do we need that? And does that solve the problem for the customer and the human in that mix? Possibly, probably not.
Sierra
Yes. But I think what's going to end up happening, though, is the same type of reaction that we saw probably five to 10 years ago when we were offshoring all of the customer service agents and realising ultimately that that doesn't work. They were trying to do it. That was a cost-driven decision.
Clare
That doesn't work.
Sierra
The customers, the people who are calling into these contact centres, basically revolted and started specifically choosing the companies that still had human-to-human interaction. And I think the same thing is going to end up happening with this entirely AI-driven customer experience, because I think that there's that value of the human-to-human interaction. And ultimately, I think the customers are going to demand that. And it's good. I hope they do. I hope we do. Because I think that ultimately, technology should be a tool, not a replacement.
Clare
Yeah.
Sierra
And I get concerned when I hear a lot of the male engineering leaders who are all saying that we're going to replace humans with technology. I don't want to replace humans with technology. I want to assist humans with technology. I want to make it easier for someone to get the information they need. I want to make it easier for the customer service agent to be able to find the exact details that they need to be able to assist the person on the other end of that line, because that creates that human-to-human interaction. And ultimately, I think that's that is true customer service.
Clare
Yeah. I guess I would much rather prefer a feature that, if we didn't need customer service, it would be because our service is so great. There aren't problems with it that mean we need to resolve them in the first place. Just something else that just popped into my head was about kind of, I don't know, you're a previous futurist, so I'm sure you've probably thought about this, but the question around agentic CX and like agentic customers or machine customers, as it's being called. Do you see a point at which it will be just machines talking to machines when it comes to service, or do you think that's potentially a stretch too far?
Sierra
Well, I hope that's a stretch too far, but I don't think it is. No, I think there will be points in time when machines are talking to machines. Because to some degree, that's already what we have. I mean, we're not doing it as much on the AI level right now, but machines talking to machines pretty much describes the internet. That pretty much describes the reason we're able to do a podcast today and distribute it to thousands and thousands of people. So machines are talking to machines at a level, but I don't think it replaces humans talking to humans.
Clare
I'll probably deep dive deeper into that and just keep on going forever because that's one that really blows my mind. Just thinking about lcustomers, agents talking to contact centres, digital agents and just the back and forth. But going back to the women in tech points, I think that's really important for this podcast, especially, you know, you said you spent a lot of your career in environments where you were the only woman in the room. And I think the audience would just love to hear a little bit more about the reality of that experience for you and how going through that has really shaped the way that you think about the products being built and the way that you work today.
Sierra
Yeah, it's like I said, I've been in technology since I was a teenager, basically. It chose me even more so than I chose it. But I have been one of, if not the only, woman in the room a lot of my career. And what it's given me is a perspective. It's made me recognise that I have to speak up because if I don't, then my entire viewpoint is going to get lost. It's a lot of responsibility, but it's also something that I think is vitally important.
One of the things that happens a lot, if you look at women in technology, the number of women who start in technology and then get to senior levels and then get to leadership levels and then get to upper management levels that that funnel, the number of women who drop out of being in a tech field is huge, which means when you get to the leadership levels, the people who are actually making decisions about technology, even the number who started, which is too small to begin with, even that number is now funneled down to tiny.
So I feel like it's important that I make sure that a different view is heard because we talk a lot about diversity and whether that's gender diversity, whether it's location, nationality, things like that. I think it comes down to diversity of thought and diversity of experience. If you start looking at the people who have been training AI, one of the things that was a big topic of conversation about, I don't know, about a year and a half ago or so, was that the information being used to train the AI models at that point was very gender biased.
Clare
Yeah, 100%.
Sierra
So the results that you were getting out of AI searches tended to be very gender biased. Now there's been a lot of work on that over the last year and a half, but to some degree that still persists because the people who are designing AI are predominantly men, and they don't necessarily understand or experience the same kind of bias that women in technology experience, that women in many fields experience. And that's one of the reasons why I'm looking at AI and wanting to make sure that we're using it in ways that I think that I personally, in my own ethical boundaries, that I think are going to be helpful for humanity. And for me personally, helpful for all parts of humanity. And, you know, that's something that I think doesn't get enough focus because a lot of the areas that AI is being used right now to start to automate and, as you were mentioning, try to take out that human element, are roles that are traditionally female.
Clare
By women. Yeah, I was just thinking about these are some Women in CX stats that are on our website. And part of the reason we founded our community was that, actually, the workforce is disproportionately female at the frontline level. So 70% of the workforce at the frontline level are women, 30% are male. And it is relatively similar at the management level split as the rest of other industries – about 32% women, the rest men getting into management. But to come from such a high proportion at that entry level, like you're saying at Tech, there are very, very few women in that pipeline. So if we've got disproportionate female representation doing the frontline job, we should be getting more women into management and into leadership, but it's not changed.
And I think for me – I know we had this chat before – this kind of compounding effect of that in customer experience and technology now, because the two things are so interconnected with so few women in AI leadership. So few women in technology leadership, so few women comparatively in that engineering space. That this is only going to get worse because that representation where it matters in positions of power, authority and decision making is totally off in terms of balance. So I know it's scary, but I'm going to ask you some more questions about the gender balancing shortly because I know that you guys have been doing something quite different at ujet.cx . But just going back to the AI part of our conversation, I think we've probably got a couple more things just to talk about around that space.
So what are you seeing when organisations get it right, and specifically, where are they getting it wrong? Because I'm thinking about the question we asked at the top. Do you think we're at risk of just layering AI onto problems that we haven't actually solved yet? I know my perspective as a CX practitioner and leader is AI and automation is just amplifying bad design. It's amplifying broken journeys. It's just getting more visible. Customers can see it more clearly and there isn't the opportunity to try to fix things in the moment the way that there might have been previously, but there's some terrible digital first experiences where they just switched off telephony entirely and made it digital only and prevented customers from being able to talk to anybody but not created experiences or journeys where they can get any of their needs met. So yeah, I'm just wondering what your points were around that.
Having just witted on, I'll remind you what the question was. What are organisations getting right? Where are they getting it wrong? And do you agree with my perspective on layering AI onto problems that we haven't already solved yet?
Sierra
Yeah, so I definitely think that you're right that we're layering AI on top of problems we haven't solved. And that goes back to one of my initial points, which was that we have silos when we should have systems. And I think that that's one of the things that we're, as an industry, getting wrong, which is we're creating AI solutions for silos instead of creating AI solutions for systems. And that's one of the things that I think a lot of people are getting wrong: they're looking at AI from a very narrow band when, once again, they should be looking at the holistic problem and trying to solve that problem. And instead, they're looking at what's the new whizzy tool…
Clare
Yeah, the shiny object!
Sierra
Yes. What is the new whizzy tool? What is the shiny object that I can place as a band-aid on top of a problem that we've identified? But the problem is just that it's one narrow part of the problem in one silo of their overall system. And that's where I think we're getting AI wrong. And the problem then is that you start ending up having, well, OK, now I've got four different AI agents in four different silo systems. And now those AI agents need to figure out how to talk to each other, but they don't necessarily speak the same language, so to speak. So that goes back to, are our AIs going to talk to each other? Absolutely, they are. And it might or might not work. But I think that's where we're getting it wrong, once again, looking only at silo solutions instead of systemic solutions.
Clare
Yeah, and really narrow problems that are usually about a KPI or a metric, not about human needs or, as you said, like the zoomed-out point of view. I know for me, I've always worked in the space of target experience design when it comes to technology. What is the experience we actually want to offer our customers, and what does that look like across a journey? And then how do we make technology decisions that will ladder up to this overall experience that we want to actually create for our customers?
For as long as I can remember, the technology decisions I've seen being made, the experience is just an outcome of those technology decisions, and it hasn't been choreographed or thought through. So my solution to that was, let's think about the target experience. But you've been building something very different over at ujet.cx and I'd love to talk more about AXO.
Sierra
Yes!
Clare
I know you guys recently acquired Spiral, which is a female co-founded company. What's interesting is not just what you've built, but also how you've approached it. So my starting question for this one is just in super simple terms, can you tell us what AXO stands for, what it does and what makes it different from what's already out there?
Sierra
Yes, so AXO, and I will enunciate clearly, Agentic Experience Orchestration. Lots of big words. And we got that agentic in there because, yes, this is another agent. But AXO, Agentic Experience Orchestration, is trying to be that system that brings those silos together.
And so that's its biggest change, its biggest benefit. The thing I'm most excited about is we're approaching an AI solution that isn't one of those silos or even two of those silos. It's really trying to bring a holistic view into the agent experience, the customer experience, metrics, all those five to 10 different systems that agents currently have to work with on their desktops and provide a single integrated experience. I mentioned earlier that we used to have solo databases, and then we figured out how to pull all the data into a data lake and be able to have different types of data all stored in a single place. And you can pull information from that.
Well, we're taking that kind of mental model, and we're applying it to the agent experience. So we can pull information out of the CRM that the agent has to work with. We can pull it out of a knowledge database. We can pull it out of previous conversations and understandings of things that have worked well in the past be able to pull all of that together into a single unified interface. That means the agent only has to work with basically one tool from their perspective that has its fingers in all of the different tools that they're currently having to deal with in a very siloed way right now.
Clare
It's super interesting. So I'm just thinking about how everything's just an evolution, really, isn't it? So at one time, 10 years ago, we were struggling to unify the view of the customer and their data in contact centre scenarios. And now we're trying to unify the systems that hold all of these silos of different data points because the lake wasn't enough. It was just too big a pool, wasn't it?
But there's something really special about what's happening at ujet.cx. So that is that, actually, it's a lot of women involved in leading and building the product itself. I don't know, can you tell us a little bit what it was like to work on that project where you weren't the only woman in the room and how having a well-represented team, including women, has influenced the end result of what you actually created?
Sierra
Yeah, so AXO, first off, a lot of the credit and benefit for AXO comes from our Spiral team. And as you mentioned, Spiral has a female founder. And Elena has been instrumental in what we've been doing.
Clare
Love Elena. We've met her. She came on a panel recently with me. She's brilliant. Yeah, love Elena.
Sierra
Excellent! Yeah, so she's been really instrumental in helping us to understand how we can unify that data experience and really create something that's going to dare I say, revolutionise how we're working with data and how the agent experience is brought together. And I think it's really…you're right, we've had a number of women working on this particular project. And I think that gets us a lot more viewpoints in the room and a lot more empathy to the agent experience and understanding of the agent experience. And that's something that, honestly, I think is one of the most valuable parts of what we've been able to do with AXO, is really start bringing in a better view of what the agent needs. And balancing that, because you still have to balance it, balancing it with what the company needs. Because, as you've mentioned a few times, the companies are really driven by metrics. They're driven by cost. And how do we hit those company targets while also improving that agent experience?
Clare
Do both. Yeah.
Sierra
And that's that kind of pulling everything together. That's what gets me excited about technology: I think with proper use of AI, we can do that. We can improve the human experience for the agents, improve the business outcomes, those metrics, and do it in a way that benefits all of us.
Clare
Benefits everybody.
Sierra
And that's that marriage I really love, when I can find that in a technology solution.
Clare
Yeah, but what was it like, though, for you to kind of having previously been the only woman in the room to then being a room well-representative with women? I just would love to know what that felt like.
Sierra
Yeah, it's definitely a different experience. There's a lot more listening than talking. And that, I think, is an important part, an important difference in how women tend to approach problems versus the way a lot of men do. And I'm talking, obviously, in very broad strokes here. But, a lot of men tend to approach a problem from the sense of, how can I solve this problem? And a lot of women tend to approach it with, " Let me understand this problem. And then we can work together on a solution.” And I think that that collaboration is something that ultimately, pretty much always, creates a better solution than that single hero kind of model that is very common in most technology.
Clare
I would definitely agree with that, but also adds, I think there's a difference between the length of time to impact that men and women view differently. So, to add to your statement, men are probably thinking and delivering value in this quarter, whereas women are thinking and delivering sustainable long-term value as soon as we possibly can to the benefit of all of our stakeholders, including society, rather than just the bottom line and the P&L, in my experience anyway.
So moving to the future now, then, back to your futurist foundations in your previous career. If we actually got this right, and we actually fixed the foundations of CX rather than just adding and layering AI on top of them, what do you think the future of CX could look like? And within that, I would just love to bring us full circle back to the conversation we had earlier around all the talk about AI replacing people. Where do you see kind of humans figuring in this view of what you think the future of CX could look like?
Sierra
Yeah, I think that, to look at it from a management terminology, I think the future is hybrid. Because I think that there will be places where it will be easiest and fastest, and frankly, good for everybody, that we have a virtual agent who is able to answer very quick, simple questions. What is the delivery date of my shipment? Okay, it's going to come on Tuesday. That's fine. But I think that there will always, always be a human in the middle. And I think that there always, always ought to be a human in the middle. Because I think that if we want the most effective customer experience, then that's always going to be humans with humans at some level.
I want us to be creating the AI solutions, the technology solutions that support those agents, those humans, to be able to make the best connections that they can and to be able to provide the strongest service that they can. And that's going to be being able to help them to have the access, quick, fast, easy access to as much information as they can, so that they know what has worked in the past. And they're not just reading through a script. They're not just following a playbook. They can find innovative solutions based on things that have happened in the past
And that's where I think we're heading towards with some of the solutions like AXO that allow agents to have access to a breadth of information that gives them power in ways that they currently don't have because they don't necessarily have all of the information that they need to be able to really effectively do their jobs. And I want to give that power to the agents so that they can make the connections, resolve issues, and honestly improve the agents' job satisfaction as well. Because I know one of the things that people get concerned about is agent burnout, and are they only gonna be dealing with the really challenging, difficult, nasty problems…
Clare
Yeah, complicated.
Sierra
And I don't think that that necessarily has to be true. I think that there is a balance point and that there's going to be times when it's vitally important to have that human in the middle, to have that human-to-human, agent to customer interaction. And I think that technology can support that in ways that make it effective. And effective for the customers, effective for the people, effective for the bottom line, because we still have to think about that, but effective across the board. And I think that's something that technology can do. But we have to have the right people creating those solutions.
Clare
I remember a few years ago when LLMs were looming, I was talking about, ideally, it would be augmented humanity with AI. Not just when it comes to customer experience, but more broadly.
But also, I guess, thinking about the role of the human, absolutely nobody wants the job of just dealing with really highly emotional customers all day, like in really difficult situations and talking to agents that, you know, they say actually some of that mental load as it might be perceived actually gives me a bit of a break from what would otherwise be a really intense role, essentially.
So obviously, I don't have all the answers. I think it's really interesting to see how this plays out. think there are some brilliant women leaders in the Women in CX community who are navigating this right now and setting a precedent about how you can do this brilliantly, how you can introduce AI and technology in a way that delivers not just the commercial outcomes, but the positive employee, agent experience, outcomes, and significantly improved customer experience. That means the business outcomes are even better.
So if you're thinking of the roles that the humans do today may well become redundant, that you always see there being a human somewhere within that, whether that's still human-to-human contact and conversation or humans making decisions and they response might actually come from an automation, but there's somebody using or checking the logic to make sure the right decision's been made. What do you think the role of the human in this world of customer service actually becomes?
Sierra
I think that there's – I want to kind of dig into that mental toil that you were talking about, you know, only dealing with the challenging and angry customers and having some of you know, when's my order being delivered as kind of a mental break in the middle. And I think what's going to end up happening is that right now, a lot of the customer agents are call to call to call to call to call to call or chat to chat to chat. But they're pretty much constantly on. And I think what's going to end up happening is that the mental break time, because we are still humans and we need that mental break time, but the mental break time is going to be coming more from working with the AI on improving solutions.
So like you said, if we have an entirely AI-driven journey, verifying that the AI is doing the right thing and being able to get a little bit of difference and break in your day from doing other things that are related to the customer service journey that are not necessarily just taking another call or taking, you know, doing another chat session. I think there's going to be more around it that needs to happen because, as much as we like to think that you just flip the switch, turn on AI, and you're done. Boom, it all just works. It doesn't work like that.
Clare
It doesn't work like that, no. There's training it, teaching it.
Sierra
There still needs to be humans babysitting the AI and making sure that it's doing the right thing. That it's connected to the right sources, I mean, some of the newer AI experiences like AXO can learn from things like reading the transcripts of conversations from calls that happen or reading the chat transcripts, things along those lines. They can learn from those things. But there's still that element, I think, that we haven't taught, we have not yet taught AI emotions. AI doesn't have empathy. AI doesn't understand your problem. And I think one of the things that we realised when we, in the first days of some of the AI agents, particularly for like automated chats and things like that, is that we try to program into the script the appearance of empathy, and it rang so false that there was we just stopped doing that.
Clare
False, yeah. Cringy. Yeah. I can imagine.
Sierra
You know, it was because it was bad. It was just bad, and we can't do that. So that's one of the reasons I think there will always be humans, because there is ultimately something that happens when you have another human say, "I understand your issue. I understand your anger. I understand your disappointment. I understand your fear, and I'm here to help.” And that's something powerful that I don't think we're going to be able to program into computers anytime soon.
Clare
No, I agree. And I can't believe how quickly the time has gone, Sierra. We are out of time now. So I'll finish on this because a lot of women and men out there are listening and navigating this challenge in real time. So what's one thing you'd like them to hold on to or think differently about as the industry shifts based on the conversation we've had today?
Sierra
I think I would probably leave with an understanding of where humans have the most power and where AI has the most power. And don't forget. Don't forget the power that we have as humans. AI is our tool, but we are still the ones in charge and lean into that.
Clare
Love that! And build a responsible future with it using our humanity.
So it's so awesome to have you with us today, Sierra. Thank you so much for coming on Women in CX Talks Trends. I've learned lots. And yeah, I'm sure we will have many more offline conversations to continue this because there was just literally so much there to discuss. But thank you so much for coming, and I'll see you all next time. Bye for now.
Sierra
Okay, thank you, bye!
Clare
Thanks for listening to the WiCX Talk Trends podcast with me, Clare Muscutt.
If you enjoyed the episode and you don’t already, please, please, please do drop us a like and subscribe to our channel – the bigger the following, the bigger the impact we can create on our mission to amplify the voices of women working in CX and technology!
Thank you so much to ujet.cx for sponsoring this episode of WiCX Talk Trends.
Contact centres are drowning in conversations and starving for insight. UJET is building what comes next, the Experience Center, where Spiral listens to every customer conversation and surfaces what they're really telling you, and AXO turns that intelligence into action. It's a different way of thinking about customer experience entirely. See what they're building at ujet.cx.
Well, that’s all for now! I’ll see you again next time!
