ICYMI: Unifying Data to Build Customer Profiles

A panel discussion from CX Summit event, on unifying customer data to deliver seamless service across channels. Panelists describe diverse customers and the consequences of siloed data, including repeated identity verification, poor experiences, and high stakes errors like incorrect benefit payments or misdirected medications.

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Intro/Outro Music: See a Brighter Day/Gloria Tells
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound

(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
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Transcript

Yohanna: [00:00:00] Hey there and welcome back Act. Diac hosts amazing events. Recently, we held our CX Summit with a theme delivering AI powered digital services in modern government. This episode features a panel discussion on unifying customer data for seamless service delivery across channels. Our panelists discuss why unified data matters.

Yohanna: It reduces repetitive information, enhances service. And prevents errors like incorrect benefit payments or misdirected medications. In case you missed it, here it is. Enjoy. 

Joshua Knight: Alright, I've got the thumbs up in the back. If you guys wanna join us, go ahead and find a seat and we'll get started with our unifying customer data, uh, session.

Joshua Knight: Really excited to be here today. I'm Josh Knight. I'm a principal in Deloitte's customer strategy practice, customer strategy and design. When we stood up our customer strategy practice, we used to say. We're the group that focuses on data and design for [00:01:00] customers. And, and this side today is really about how you bring together data, uh, to provide seamless customer, customer service.

Joshua Knight: We, I've seen a lot around this in the past, I would say year or so, where, uh, the customer focused agencies out there are really trying to figure out how do I. Integrate data across my silos, whether that's a contact center, the website, the mobile, how do I provide seamless service? So I've got this group together with me.

Joshua Knight: I'm very excited to have Denise kits. Has, uh, played a role in va, uh, both in the VEO and within, uh, the kind of the chief data officer space, the CTO space. I've got Oren Gruber, who works in, uh, Amtrak focused on, uh, customer technology, customer facing technology and data. And then we've got Sylvie, uh, Williams, who's been a customer leader, uh, with DOL.

Joshua Knight: Um, with, uh, SSA as well as IRS and has pulled together data [00:02:00] from a standpoint of kind of the, the human-centered designer. So excited to have you all here today. Um, why don't you start with telling me a little bit about yourself and what your, uh, favorite beverage is to stay warm in this weather. Do you wanna start us out, Denise?

Denise Kitts: Sure. Um, thanks for the, you already gave me a really good introduction. Okay. Yeah. So, um, recently separated from the VA with senior executive in the Veterans Experience Office. I spent about the last 10 years thinking about customer data, so super excited to be here today. Favorite beverage? Irish coffee.

Joshua Knight: Irish coffee. Can't go wrong. 

Denise Kitts: Can't go wrong. 

Joshua Knight: January. You're still in it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Not dry. January or? 

Oren Gruber: Yeah. Uh, let's see. I've been at Amtrak for nine years now, and throughout that journey I've gone through operations, technology, different stacks and the CX side. We're starting to branch it together as we're.

Oren Gruber: Moving into hospitality organization model versus transportation. So this has been a fun journey for us in CX as front and center of it. As far as my favorite beverage to stay [00:03:00] warm, probably. Coffee. 

Joshua Knight: It's coffee. 

Oren Gruber: I'm a coffee snob. All 

Joshua Knight: good. 

Sylvie Williams: Phil v Williams. Um, you mentioned I was with three different agencies, um, about 20 years in the federal world.

Sylvie Williams: Just jumped to CGI Federal three weeks ago as of today. Still supporting the Federal Agency Social Security Administration in the CX world, uh, my favorite beverage is tea. Chai. I'm from India. It has to be black tea with sugar and cream. And when you order chai, please don't say chai tea 'cause you're just saying the same word twice.

Joshua Knight: I love chai tea. I dunno what you're talking about. It's chai. Oh, okay. I got it all. Alright. Um, fantastic. All right, let's dive in. Uh, for context, tell us a little bit about your customers for your organization, who you think are, you know, with veterans Amtrak and, uh, SSA, and then like, why is it important to bring together their data?

Joshua Knight: So that they have a unified experience or maybe what doesn't happen [00:04:00] when, you know, we don't pull the data together. Um, Oren, you wanna start us out? 

Oren Gruber: Yeah, sure. Uh, we have a diverse customer base because we, not only do we serve customers across the country, we also serve states. Uh, we do, we have a specific federal buyback model, so we, we also run trains for different states.

Oren Gruber: So we have internal customers, external customers, and we also have. A little bit of travel that goes into Canada and there we go. Sorry about that. So between those customers, we have probably 50% are loyalty members. So I have good data on them, but the rest of it is really, really hard because we have people that can come in and pay cash.

Oren Gruber: We have people that might make a long-term reservation and you, if I know more about them, I can do a better job of serving them. So it's, it's a tough situation for us in that regard. 

Joshua Knight: Yeah. So, 

Sylvie Williams: so, SSA, um, our customers are everyone, right? We, um, SSA's [00:05:00] Mission is threefold, provide financial support, provide superior customer service, and ensure the security of everyone's information.

Sylvie Williams: So right now, SSA, let me make sure I have my numbers right. We have over 68 million folks that we provide benefits to. But beyond that, not just beneficiaries. At any day, we have over 500 million people who are visiting our website. We have about 450,000 people who are calling us and 170,000 people who are walking into our field offices.

Sylvie Williams: Wow. Right. That's a lot of people. It's a lot of people giving us their data. And that data is kept in, I just looked this up at, we have over 3000 databases. Small to large. I mean, some of those are just information being pulled for just something somebody needs to look up today. But that's a lot of databases and that data is duplicative, right?

Sylvie Williams: It's not, [00:06:00] um, and at any time when somebody needs to look up something, we don't know where the right data is, if it's good data. And so it's important for us to bring that all together in one place and to have it right. 

Joshua Knight: Yeah, 

Sylvie Williams: because somebody mentioned it earlier. When you call us and when you walk into field office or when you go online, you don't wanna have to give us that information again and again.

Sylvie Williams: And if you've ever called a government agency, you know you have to do that right now. 

Denise Kitts: Yeah, I would echo a lot what Sylvia said. Um, it's pretty impressive in terms of your customer numbers, but you know, at the va, um, there's like 17.1 million veterans that we deal with. Um, but it's not just a veteran who's our customer, it's family members, it's caregivers.

Denise Kitts: Um, it's really important that the veteran, you know, the veterans expect VA to look and act like a single entity. You know, they don't understand that there's three departments, three agencies, thousands of systems. [00:07:00] Um, so from a customer experience, expect customer experience perspective, they expect us to know who they are, know where they served.

Denise Kitts: Um, don't make them repeat their data. They're expecting an experience on par with industry. You know, they, from a digital experience, from a contact center experience, you know, these people are doing online banking. So when they show up at the government, they're expecting that experience to be, you know, on par with what they're experiencing out in industry.

Denise Kitts: And, um, you know, when we don't get it right, um, it's, you know, it could be anything from impacting the experience, which is, you know, every time I call a contact center I gotta repeat who I am. Um, you don't have any context for my last phone call. To anything from, hey, if we get a mailing address wrong, you know, between systems we could send, you know, pharmaceutical drugs to the wrong place.

Denise Kitts: Right. So it's, it's data's really important and it's really important that we get it right. 

Joshua Knight: Yeah. 

Sylvie Williams: Josh, sorry. 

Joshua Knight: Yeah, 

Sylvie Williams: I forgot to answer the second part of your question. And it's really important for SSA to get things right because when we get things wrong, [00:08:00] it's really hard on our, on our customers. Our customers are beneficiaries, as I mentioned.

Sylvie Williams: If we get something wrong, it could mean that somebody doesn't get their check 

Denise Kitts: right, 

Sylvie Williams: or that they don't get the right amount of money. Less money is. Obviously that's gonna affect them. Giving them more money is wrong too, because then down the road we're gonna ask for that back. And that's hard on somebody.

Sylvie Williams: 'cause when they're already depending on that money to pay a bill or you know, get gas for their car, et cetera, and then we're asking for them to pay that back, that's hard. Now, turning that around too, when we're not giving the right benefits or we're not doing the right thing, people are gonna call us more, right?

Sylvie Williams: They're gonna walk into our offices again and again, and that's putting more burden on our employees. We always talk about customer experience. What we haven't heard today is the flip side of that coin, the employee experience, which is then costing our agency more money, 

Joshua Knight: right? 

Sylvie Williams: In turn, our beneficiaries then also call their representatives, and then we're called to Congress to [00:09:00] explain.

Sylvie Williams: So all of that is also costing our agencies more money. 

Joshua Knight: Right, right. Like e every time you call in and you have to repeat yourself, you get more and more frustrated, or at least I do. Um, and, and that's, you know, that's because you have to repeat yourself. 'cause the data's not there for everybody. Alright, so, um, so this journey is kind of somewhat ambiguous, right?

Joshua Knight: Like how do we bring together customer data? Um, but there is some methods to doing it. I think Va you spent a lot of time both in the CTO and the chief data office, uh, kind of bringing that together. Could you tell us about what you did, what your organization did, kind of how did it get started? Tell us about the journey.

Denise Kitts: So it's definitely been a journey. Um, and I think where you start depends on where you're at, 

Joshua Knight: right? 

Denise Kitts: You know, with the va you know, foundational element to getting started is you gotta know who your customer is. You know, from a, from an, um, you know, from a, you definitely get to know who they [00:10:00] are so you can connect their data across systems.

Denise Kitts: So, in terms of getting started, VA was in a unique position with our hospitals in order to have electronic health record that spans, you know, 170 medical centers, 900 community based outpatient clinics. VA had to have a way of linking a patient's data across all these different systems. So we actually had a leg up, right?

Denise Kitts: We already like, kind of knew who a person was and we had a unique identifier and we were able to connect their data across all these hospital systems. So when it came time to, you know, the, you know, what we really wanted to do to improve the experience was creating a 360 degree view of that person. So not just with the, their data in the hospital, but on the benefits side and the cemetery side, and understanding their journey.

Denise Kitts: Understanding their experience data, their operational data. So really creating a sort of, um, profile of an individual, you know, to include their, you know, all their, all their data. So we had the identity. Mm-hmm. And then the way we really got started, and I would recommend this for everybody, is you gotta have a burning platform.

Denise Kitts: So coming up with a use case that really has an ROI [00:11:00] that delivers on the experience and has an ROI that you can communicate. So we started with something really simple. I mentioned earlier that if we could address wrong, bad things happen. So we started with, hey, let's just do change address, right?

Denise Kitts: Because, you know, we had thousands of contact centers, lots of lots of websites. Experience was dismal. You know, if you call one contact center, you had to call like 17 different contact centers when you moved to change your address. Um, so for an example, so we just started with change of address. Plowed through that, right?

Denise Kitts: In terms of connecting all the systems with meaningful connections and sharing address. And there's just a ton to unpack behind that because it, it required, you know, IT technology type changes, business changes, governance. There was a whole lot of things that had to be put in place just to tackle that one use case, 

Joshua Knight: right?

Denise Kitts: But once you lay that foundation, you then you can build upon it and all kinds of wonderful things can happen. 

Joshua Knight: That's great. Warren, what about you guys? What are you doing around [00:12:00] this? 

Oren Gruber: Well, as I mentioned, we have a diverse customer base and some of that is the permutations of that type of data, the unifying a customer.

Oren Gruber: We just started doing some, you know, front end identification, first party pixels we're trying to get cleared through. We've also started doing, um, marketing mix models. So we're trying to measure the effectiveness of non-traditional media, so radio spots or posters. And how that generates a sale or a secondary sale or a tertiary one.

Oren Gruber: And then we've got some other models we've been building out internally. Uh, some machine language lapse, customer churn segmentation. We pull all that together and then we have everything from what we hope is a more comprehensive picture about the customer satisfaction post trip, but also the operations that go in between.

Oren Gruber: So I want to ask, like on the new Acela, you know, how was your food service or. You know, did, did the seat feel comfortable? I know you said it was, but a lot of people haven't. Um, all different types of variations that, that we can ask. So we're trying to build up more real [00:13:00] time, but the reconciliation of that unified customer data, if they're not a member, I don't have a golden record, so it becomes a bit of a challenge.

Joshua Knight: Yeah. What was your experience, Sylvia? 

Sylvie Williams: Well, so for us, we, our customers interacted with us mostly in field offices prior to the pandemic. So when COVID happened, we closed all our 1200 plus field offices. Folks started calling our phones, you know, long wait times. What we realized quickly was one thing we did not have was an understanding of their experience.

Sylvie Williams: We didn't know where there were suffering more or less, or how, because up till that point we were collecting their experiences in the individual field offices. At the field office manager level on little postcards. So one thing we decided to do was implement an enterprise level voice of customer platform.[00:14:00] 

Sylvie Williams: Um, I'm not gonna say that we started and finished that then that effort had been in place for a while. It took us a few years, but the pandemic put us in sort of emergency fast track motion, right? Also at that time, the OMBA 11, the CX guidance came out. The cx EO. There were a bunch of things that gave us, um, some hammers in our hand.

Sylvie Williams: And, and I worked for David at that time. He knows there were some strong pushes from the administration, from our agency executive level. So we had, and then the pandemic emergency. So we were able to put that out and we put up our very first customer feedback survey on ssa.gov, and we were able to pull.

Sylvie Williams: That together and show where the customer pain points were. I make it sound like it's really easy and simple and we were able to get all the executives on board and get them to say, Hey, this is the one pain point. Let's focus on that. But it wasn't, what it did was it gave, was a centralized [00:15:00] place to collect that data.

Sylvie Williams: It gave us the ability to get real time data integration from all the different channels. Right. We didn't have that before. We couldn't get surveys from. People calling on the phone from people going on the web, from customers who were going into field, well, they weren't going into field office, but once field offices opened, we could collect that as well.

Sylvie Williams: Um, we could make role-based dashboards and show those to folks, uh, at the executive level, but then break it down to, at that point we had 10 regions so we could show it at the 10 region level, but then break it down to the areas in the regions and across channels and across our different. Well, silos are benefits.

Sylvie Williams: So we could say across the retirement benefit, how is, how are we performing across the disability now? But when we do that, as you can probably understand, the folks who own those aren't very happy. And we'll probably get into that too, [00:16:00] the, the barriers. But at least now we had one place for that data to sit and for people to be able to go in and slice and dice.

Sylvie Williams: And look at it. 

Joshua Knight: Right? And the, I mean, the dream too is that, that that field office manager can even look and see, hey, this person came in today, or they came in last time, or whatever. And you can integrate that feedback. It's not there yet, but that's, that's where we want to be able to go, go with these integrated profiles, right?

Joshua Knight: Yes. Yeah. But Right. But right now, the permissions, it's so hard to get the permissions to link all the data together. And that's, that's some of the work around kind of governance that has to come together for this. Um, what are, I was gonna ask a little bit about, you know, every time kind of A-A-C-R-M vendor or A-A-O-C-M vendor, you know, uh, feedback vendor, they all wanna own the data.

Joshua Knight: Like everybody, every tech vendor wants to own all of the data. I know you guys worked hard to try to take [00:17:00] ownership for the data. Could you talk a little bit about when you were going through this journey, how did you think about technology and how do you, you know, uh, you make it to where everybody can access it and it's not all across every single different system?

Denise Kitts: Yeah, sure. Great question. Kind of like Sylvia VA's got thousands of systems with customer data in it, and a lot of those systems are working really, really well, delivering benefits for the lines of businesses. So. The idea wasn't to be disruptive, it was really about augmenting and, um, you know, so I think from a technology standpoint, it's, you know, and then, and you know, at the same time we had all these systems, but we wanted to go through an effort for digital modernization in terms of our front door, um, contact center modernization in terms of our contact centers.

Denise Kitts: Lots of different vendors, lots of different cots products, SaaS products. And to your point, everybody wants them in the data. Like our product works really well if you just give us all the data. So we worked, um, we had to work really, really hard about convincing, um, all these different project owners and program owners to use [00:18:00] APIs.

Denise Kitts: I think you mentioned APIs earlier, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um, we felt very, we va felt really strongly that we wanted to own the data and not be painted into a corner by a vendor, um, and not be able to get the data out for lots of other things we wanted to do, especially knowing that we wanted to do advanced analytics.

Denise Kitts: And get into all that. So we felt strongly that we needed to have a place to put all the data so we could do the use cases that we wanted to do and not be relying on the vendor. So we worked really hard, um, to get a, a combination of kind of a master data management solution. Mm-hmm. You know, for that 360 degree view of the data of a, of a customer along with, you know, a data lake, you know, where we could do the advanced analytics.

Denise Kitts: And then we just have a really set of robust middleware and APIs. Not to get too technical 

Sylvie Williams: right. 

Denise Kitts: That we just prescribe and tell everybody that if you're gonna build something and you're gonna like talk about customer data, view customer data, update customer data, collect customer experience data, you have to use these APIs and the data has to go back into this kind of Coke can.

Denise Kitts: [00:19:00] Right? 

Joshua Knight: Yeah. 

Denise Kitts: Um, and it, but again, I made it sound really easy, but it was a lot of building on trust, building on governance. Uh, making sure you have robust APIs that are publishable and usable by folks, and then you've got a lot of legacy systems out there that a lot of times don't have the money to change and kind of be part of this new ecosystem that you're building.

Denise Kitts: So it's definitely a journey, but, um, I think. You know, and also working with vendors to get them to understand that your, your product's still gonna work really, really well, even if you don't own the data and you're calling, you know, a set of APIs. 

Joshua Knight: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're asking people to own an outcome, even though they don't own the end-to-end data, which is hard, hard for them to accept.

Joshua Knight: Yeah. Um, Orin, what are you guys thinking about as far as, you know, customer data, pulling it all together? 

Oren Gruber: Well, the compliance piece is different because we've gotta make sure we adhere to GDPR when we have international customers. And then as I mentioned, we have a different customer base. So there's PII that goes with it.

Oren Gruber: And then there's the other side [00:20:00] of it is, do I have a golden record And reconciliation? If they're a previous member, you know what their post travel is. And then as, as you mentioned, Denise, we have a varying range of systems that are in a maturity model or being sunset trying to build up new ones. So I would dearly want to have that type of situation where it's like all APIs for customer data go through here.

Oren Gruber: These are the all the attributes we need. This is exactly what happens. But it, it's been hard for us to get to that point. So far we're just 25% through that. So part of what we've talked about in the past is, you know, we'd like to get identity resolution there, get better with, you know, first party pixels and third party pixels.

Oren Gruber: And we have so many channels of collecting customer data or even making a reservation. There is a lot of data lakes we have sitting there, so it, it needs to be surfaced better, but we're getting there. 

Joshua Knight: Yeah. Sylvie, I wonder your perspective too, not, I almost as like the, you're the ux, ui voice here too. Um, or kind of how, how did you advocate for pulling this stuff together, uh, in your [00:21:00] different roles?

Sylvie Williams: I was just gonna say that some of the words they're using, I don't even, 

Joshua Knight: we 

don't, 

Joshua Knight: we don't know. No, 

that's 

Sylvie Williams: fine. I can spell them maybe. Yeah. 

Joshua Knight: Maybe, 

Sylvie Williams: um, 

Joshua Knight: you can spell a PII can I, I believe you can spell API. Yes, you can do it. 

Sylvie Williams: Um. I think for us it was starting to collect that feedback and then using that feedback, collating it with operational data, and then telling that story back to the stakeholders and to the purse string holders, and that was how we convinced them to them further invest in it.

Joshua Knight: Right, 

Sylvie Williams: because. I come from a UX back, right? My true beginning in federal world was UX research, and I got so used to hearing you only tested with X number of people. That can't be the truth, right? Five or nine, whatever we had funding for, you only spoke to 15 people in the field. That can't be true. Well, now we had 110,000 people said that this sucked, pardon [00:22:00] my French, or 20,000 people said they cannot find this on our website.

Sylvie Williams: Uh, it's hard to deny that. On top of it, Google Analytics shows that 73% people bounce after not finding. 

Denise Kitts: Yeah. 

Sylvie Williams: And on top of it, let's say, I'm gonna make up some numbers, 37% of people who called last week called about this problem. And when you merge all three of those, it's hard to deny it. 

Joshua Knight: Yeah. 

Sylvie Williams: So using that data and providing that.

Sylvie Williams: Is how we convince people. 

Joshua Knight: Yeah. And it points and it points to, to the need to bring all this together. Alright. Um, pivoting a little bit to the kind of the hurdles that you faced and how did you motivate people to change? I know, um, you know, you, you've all had incremental kind of successes so far. I'll, I'll let Sylvie start us this time.

Joshua Knight: Do you wanna talk a little bit about, I guess you just kind of covered a little bit of that, but like, what are some of the, the people hurdles and other hurdles you face? [00:23:00] 

Sylvie Williams: Well, any large government agency, there's organizational challenges and just, uh, just resistance to change. Also, when we're talking about unifying data, you're talking about taking data that's owned by different organizations, different people, and making it one or two, let's say, right?

Sylvie Williams: If not one, but that means taking it from somebody, 

Joshua Knight: right. 

Sylvie Williams: And that's hard because that equates to taking funding from somebody maybe. Um, so that's, that's a challenge. And it takes a change of mindset. It takes just bringing people over to your way of thinking. And I, we're not there yet. 'cause we're not there at SSA yet, we're not at the level that VA is.

Sylvie Williams: Um, and so it's just showing them the value of what you're doing and the value is in the money. 

Joshua Knight: Yeah. Yeah. 

Sylvie Williams: So it's showing that we're gonna save the agency money, we're gonna make the agency more [00:24:00] efficient, not just the cx. So I think that ex that we're missing here, we need to show that that other side of the coin, 

Joshua Knight: a hundred percent.

Oren Gruber: I mean, there's always that challenge of like, how do you show the return on investment, the return on influence, the value to different groups. And everybody has a, a stake in how they look at it. And in our case, obviously. The more data you build, you can start building out the use case that this will power more ticket sales, more revenue, more streamlined operations, more return customers, you know, organic growth, inorganic growth.

Oren Gruber: That's the goal. And it's, it's really kind of almost like a selling job to show everybody who's not invested in it the right way and digestible segments of like, this matters to this group and here's how we can attribute it to. Another $6 million 'cause we open up a new route or, um, you know, customers that they might give feedback and it's like, well, okay, I need to make sure that I can tie in the staff that was working on that train so we can, you know, reward that staff and, and that [00:25:00] that crew base and then that train route becomes higher selling, right?

Oren Gruber: So it's there, there's a, there is that kind of little bit of how do I convince people that this is a, a worthy effort and investment. And it, it just takes some time when you have limited funds. 

Joshua Knight: Yeah. And you, you have, like you, your marketing group versus your operations group. This is very oil and water kind of organizations to kind of very have to get together.

Joshua Knight: And you, I mean, from a data governance standpoint, have you guys made any progress on like, who's the decision maker around this data? 

Oren Gruber: That's another tough one because it's, well, there's, there's very, very different things between running a train or a depot hall or a mechanical hall versus. Running a customer experience and then we have selling tickets.

Oren Gruber: Yeah, those are very, very different curation levels of data and the governance and who owns it. I don't think we've really clarified that completely yet. 

Joshua Knight: Yeah, yeah. Alright. Tell us a little bit about your journey. I know you talked a lot about [00:26:00] trust. Uh, what were some of the hurdles? How did you clear 'em?

Denise Kitts: Yeah, so I, you just said the word trust. I'll never forget a meeting I had with VHA when I was trying to convince them to, hey, this was a great idea to like commingle all this customer data and blah, blah, blah, blah. Gave the whole spiel. And I just remember, you know, the higher up VHA, the hospital side of V just kind of looking at me And it really got down to a personal thing.

Denise Kitts: It was like, I trust you to do the right thing with the data. 

Yohanna: Wow. 

Denise Kitts: And it's, and it's so interesting 'cause. Every single line of business is happy with the data that they have. And when you're trying to get convinced them that to take an update that came from somewhere else, like I know, you know, typically in the hospital, your updates come from the registration clerk, somebody that walks in a face-to-face encounter.

Denise Kitts: Mm-hmm. And now I'm telling the hospital's like, well, we have this new portal called va.gov, and a veteran came in and gave me an update about their information. Will you take it? Right? Yeah. And I was like, well, no, they weren't here face to face. Yeah. But we authenticated them. Right. We know who they are.

Denise Kitts: Right. I mean, so there was this. Huge, [00:27:00] huge trust hurdles con, you know, for, you know, just getting everybody on board Yeah. To, you know, trust data that came from someplace other than an encounter that they owned. 

Joshua Knight: Well, you just changed their process map too. You right. It just changed the 

Denise Kitts: process 

Joshua Knight: map, like, right.

Joshua Knight: Yeah, 

Denise Kitts: so I think, you know, number one, the biggest thing was just trust and, you know, and doing all the due diligence and convincing people that you had the right technology and you had all the right business processes and you weren't gonna put bad data on top of good data and just bringing everybody along in that journey.

Denise Kitts: Um, and then, you know, the ROI that, you know, you keep talking about is like, it's so interesting because I think when you set at the enterprise level, you see the power of putting all this data together. You understand that like, oh my God, if we could have a 360 degree view of a customer with their experience data, with the operational data, you know, just it's unlimited in terms of what we can do from a prescriptive standpoint or just analytics in general.

Denise Kitts: But you have to be able to talk about a use case to a person that owns a line of business in their [00:28:00] world. Right? And so you've gotta get, well, you, you can't go at it from an enterprise perspective and say, Hey, this is just the right thing to do. You gotta be able to be really granular mm-hmm. With individual business owners to show them the power that's gonna deliver an ROI in their world and their domain.

Denise Kitts: So. You know, I think it's just a combination of kind of a top down 

Sylvie Williams: Yeah. 

Denise Kitts: Sort of approach. 'cause it did take top down leadership to get the money and the investment. Right. But a little bit of a bottom up. Right. Yeah. You know, where you gotta be able to meet the customers where they're at and help them understand why this is gonna be good for them.

Denise Kitts: Yeah. You know, by customers, I mean people inside the department that are gonna be using it. 

Joshua Knight: Yeah. And you can, I mean, change of address was a good punching bag to start with, right? 

Denise Kitts: Change of address, what you would think would be an easy thing. But again, like if I am a, if I own pharmacy in a medical center and I'm doing mail order drugs to 70% of my veterans and you're telling me that I'm gonna take an address from a home loan or you know, or somebody that called the contact center, I mean it, there's just a ton of trust that has to get built into the [00:29:00] system.

Joshua Knight: Yeah. Wow. That's incredible. Um, alright. Uh, you just, just real quick on that, how, like as far as motivating others and getting them to change, I know you did talk a little bit about taking a burning platform. Do you mind mentioning that real quick? How did you, you guys used a crisis, right? To kind of get people moving on this 

Denise Kitts: first time around?

Joshua Knight: Oh no. Maybe 

Denise Kitts: that's first, first time around. It was really, I think Marcy, I see Marcy in the audience. Yay. Marcy. You know, um, first time around we. It was a combination of two things. One, we had, we call him Secretary Bob, Bob McDonald, who used to run Proctor and Gamble as the CEO came in as the secretary for a brief moment of va.

Denise Kitts: It was, it was amazing. Bob comes in, first question, he asks, as a former CEO of Proctor and Gamble, who are my customers? And you know, how are they interacting with us? And you know, he just held these blank stares of like, well, it depends who you ask. We all have different answers to that, who the customer is in blank stares.

Denise Kitts: So there's a little bit of a burning platform at the secretary level. Yep. Where he [00:30:00] was like, dammit, I want veterans to be able to interact with us and have us look and act like a single entity. Um, I think the second time around burning platform was legislation. You know, when Congress tells us to do something and do it fast, and so we had a burning platform a couple years ago with some legislation that came outta Congress called the PACT Act, which was where we had to do a huge amount of outreach to get veterans enrolled in healthcare and enrolled in disability claims.

Denise Kitts: It was all about data. Yeah. Because really at that point it was finding customers that we didn't know about. Mm-hmm. And people that weren't affiliated and using data to kind of get at them and get them in, get them involved. So it was a burning platform. 'cause you know, we had to report out to Congress and the president every month, you know, in terms of how many people we were onboarding that were, you know, uh, originally unaffiliated.

Denise Kitts: And I think by the end of the year we had recruited about 200,000 people, um, through using data to, to find them. 

Joshua Knight: That's great. Alright. Um, kind of last thought, just wanted to get y'all's take on, you know, this is, [00:31:00] it's a, uh, it's something hard to build kind of unified data. You know, it's nobody's, nobody's job unless I guess you're CDAO or you're CTO and you can convince people.

Joshua Knight: But like, what are some of the, if, if you're a CX leader in the audience here or you kind of. See that this is something critical, where would you start? Uh, what would be kind of like, kind of final advice for folks as they think about this as, I mean, this is a critical input. If we want, we want AI to work well, we need trusted data.

Joshua Knight: We need trusted content about policies, but we need trusted data about the customer. And, um, so where, where do people get started with this? Or what would you recommend Sylvie?

Sylvie Williams: So I wrote down stay persistent, but because Denise is here, I'm gonna say, find another agency that did it before you and Yep, 

Joshua Knight: yep, yep. 

Sylvie Williams: Keep calling on them. 

Joshua Knight: Right. 

Sylvie Williams: But yeah, stay persistent and find a way to show the value in money. I mean, money [00:32:00] talks and Yeah.

Oren Gruber: To me it's about the speed of activation. What do you want to do? Depending on your market, how do you wanna engage with your customer and what's the outcome that you want? If it is a return on investment or return on value, in our case, selling more tickets or bringing more satisfaction could be improve operational efficiency.

Oren Gruber: There have to be those unique identifiers that pull those together. So whether it's surfaced in one data lake with singular APIs, or you're using different types of resolution. It's the activation cases that really drive that. So as long as your organization agrees to how you wanna engage and what you put the most value on, it gets a little bit easier after that.

Oren Gruber: 'cause we had, we had a hard time deciding what is a customer. It's like you said, it's like, well, I've got fuzzy logic over here. I've got four different emails over there. It's like, you know, how do we do the match merge? Right? So some of that comes down to a basic side, but if you, if you focus on the end point and the return, I think it gets a little easier.

Oren Gruber: Thanks, [00:33:00] Denise. 

Denise Kitts: I, I would double down on both what Sylvia said. Persistence. I love that word. Right? 'cause it's a journey. Um, it's not gonna happen overnight. Um, and then everything that, that you've relayed also, um, yeah. And I just think in terms of where you get started, all depends on where you're standing.

Denise Kitts: You know, right. So everybody has different environments, right? Right. If you're brand new, God bless you. Right. Bring in, you know, bring an assessment or cost vendor and build out, you know, and, and have fun. But, but I think most of us deal with heterogeneous environments, lots of legacy systems. Um, so I think where you start, I, I would probably just reemphasize that sort of finding a use case that cuts across things mm-hmm.

Denise Kitts: That can deliver some value. And as you're building out on that use case. Deal with underlying infrastructure, you know, getting all the, the pieces and the parts in place 

Joshua Knight: Yeah. 

Denise Kitts: Um, that are gonna be necessary. And I think typically it starts with the, you know, the, the [00:34:00] identity. Um, 'cause if you don't know who your customers are, then you, you can't really get started.

Joshua Knight: Yeah. I mean, I, I don't think a lot of, we do a lot of these CX conferences and we don't talk about how like important this is, but you want to talk about seamless experiences. Like this is, this is a foundational project for CX programs. I 

Denise Kitts: always found it really interesting 'cause everybody wants to build a portal.

Denise Kitts: Everybody wants to modernize contact centers and you know, and you try to talk about the importance of data and that, and you just kinda get this blank stare. Yeah. Like, well, you know, we just need to put a website up. And it's like, no, you really need good data behind it to have that seamless experience.

Denise Kitts: And I think we all hit on it, right? You know, regardless of the channel you're coming in, you expect them to understand who you are and where you've been and what the experience is. And you, you just can't do that without tying all the data together. 

Joshua Knight: Okay. Alright, so I owe you guys a couple hot beverages, uh, and I know everybody's getting ready for lunch.

Joshua Knight: We've got about 10 more minutes left, uh, that we can ask if anybody in the audience has any questions. We're, uh, [00:35:00] welcome to it. And then if, if you guys decide you are a question list, we can go out and get some grub. So, any audience questions? 

Oren Gruber: Other questions? 

Joshua Knight: Lunch, lunch. Uh, I saw I saw a half a hand, but We'll, we'll let it stay.

Joshua Knight: Alright. Thank you so much, uh, for joining us and thank you all for, uh, for being on the panel. Really enjoyed it. Nice. Nice discussion. Thanks all. Thank you.

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