Hello, everyone. I wanna thank you for joining our fourth relevance roundtable of twenty twenty one. My name is Tracy Carson, and I work on the global marketing team here at Coveo. It's a privilege to be with you today. We have three expert speakers. They're joining us, and I'm really happy to introduce you. First, we have James Lang. He's a manager in Deloitte's HR transformation practice. James has worked across a variety of industries, primarily supporting organizations while they frame and implement their large scale transformations, including operating model design, process optimization, technology strategy assessment, and selection. Recently, this has taken the form of people and workforce strategies, which acknowledge that HR as the stewards but not the sole owners of the employee experience. So lots of interesting thoughts to come. We also have Eric Hemmer, who has spent twenty five years consulting the last nine at ServiceNow, where he is a principal solution specialist focused on the employee experience. Eric started the HR service delivery product line at ServiceNow, and he's currently focused on making work easy for employees with an at in front of it, so please look it up, by helping customers institute a digital employee experience strategy, breaking down organizational and technology silos. Last, Barry Brooks joins us. He is from Coveo and is a twenty year software veteran providing sales engineering support. And as a Coveo principal, he's focused on helping customers design and implement search and relevancy platforms. His mission is to bring the modern experiences we love as consumers into the workplace. Barry is gonna lead the discussion today. Barry, thanks for joining us. Alright. So all our speakers have their cameras on except James. I'm just gonna ask you to rejoin us on camera. Next, we're gonna go over the agenda very quickly. It's not overly complex. We didn't call this a relevance roundtable just because it has a nice ring to it. We can tuck away at ServiceNow events in person or CAM World or even our own Coveo impact, but we know we all miss these types of conversations. We want safe spaces with professional peers who are ready to share their knowledge. This is called a roundtable because we want everyone here today to participate. We want you to ask your questions, challenge our experts, get ready guys, and walk away with some great ideas as to what to do next in your own organizations. So raise your hand and I can unmute you. You can use the chat and even let me know if you want to join us with your camera on that would be great. Today's session is going to be recorded and you'll receive the presentation in your inboxes within twenty four hours so you can share amongst your friends as well. So first we're gonna do a poll. It's gonna really start to get us thinking about the topics that that everyone's gonna discuss today. So on your screen, I'm going to launch a poll and you should be able to see it. So please input your answers to the question, what is the most important characteristic of a world class employee experience? I'll give everyone a few minutes to participate. Few minutes, few seconds. Let's we're gonna keep on everybody on a clock here. We've got a lot to talk about. So and we're just about at thirty seconds. I know our speakers can't vote, so there's no bias here. I love at the bottom. It actually says that host and panelists cannot vote. Yeah. You're our Eric and James, we don't we don't get a say in this. We're we're purists here, Barry. We need the right data. I appreciate you. Alright. Got it. That's great. Okay. So let's wrap that poll, and I am going to take a quick screenshot so I can throw that information back in the chat. But I'll give everyone a sneak peek at the results. Can everyone see that on my screen? So it's all important. It's all in. We need it all. Right? We can't define the two them separate from one another. Alright. So that was great. I really appreciate everybody participating there. Barry, it's your turn to take it away. Thanks, Tracy. Good morning, everyone. So, you know, when we talk about AI and we talk about the employee experience, you know, it's it's it's nearly impossible to do anything online and not not be directly influenced by AI machine learning. It's it's dramatically changed how we interact, obviously, with people and information. And as someone that thinks about AI all day long, I think it's been both dramatic and subtle. It's dramatic in terms of the technology. Right? The the machine learning models are quite literally learning every single day. They are smarter and smarter. But I think it's also subtle in terms of of expecting a great experience. You know, I don't always recognize a great experience. I I think that's just the the expectation. That's just the bar that's been set. I do, however, know when I have a bad one, and those are the ones that I always remember. And the consumption of AI and machine learning in our personal life is really changing the way we need to deliver service. And the and the starting point for many organizations is that employee experience. And, Eric, I'd I'd like to kinda start with you. You know, ServiceNow has been a has been a disruptor in the service delivery space for many, many years. And you guys are have literally carved out a BU that you lead in support of the, you know, the employee experience. But how do you define it, and what what does it entail? Sure. You know, there there are different elements to employee experience. Some are, you know, intangible and and have to do with things like culture and compensation and your workplace environment when we were all in a physical workplace together. But the digital workplace experience is what most of our customers are really focused on improving these days. And a lot of that has to do with making it easy for their employees to make a difference to stay in the flow of work and feel like they're having a meaningful impact. And to do that, what they really need to do is eliminate that friction, which stops employees from focusing on the things that they think are important. So when you have a question, you need to go get the answer to that, or you need some help from a different department. They don't want their employees spending a lot of time trying to figure out first, well, which team provides this answer or this type of support. Who do I need to go to? Right? They just wanna have one very simple starting point that employee can go to. And using things like unified search and machine learning, it will help them find their answer very quickly so they can get back into the flow of work and focus on things that they find meaningful and impactful. Eric, a follow-up. Do you think it matters the size of the company? It doesn't matter the size of the company. Right? There's a lot of smaller organizations, right, that can be very nimble and can streamline experiences just based on their size. So I do think in in one introspective, it means that larger companies can actually struggle with this more, and it's even more important for them to create this one single starting point for their employees to be able to search across multiple different silos of information. Because historically, a lot of the different departments made decisions independently. They would purchase different software that they felt was best suited for them, but that led to a lot of technology sprawl, which just conflated the confusion for all the employees, and employees ended up more frustrated and spending or wasting a lot more time trying to find what they need. Yeah. I would agree. James, you've said in the Deloitte HR practice that successful outcomes are a lot of times linked directly to the employee experience. What does that mean? What does it meant for your group just in terms of strategy? Yeah. It's a good question. And I think I mean, most people would probably agree that the employee experience, the concept kinda started around if you treat your employees better or give them what they need to do their job well and focus on what strengthens them, that will end up making its way to the customers, and improve the the customer outcomes. I think as we've researched and understood employee experience a lot more, the outcomes are are very, very broad. There's engagement related outcomes. So we see employee experience as a driver of engagement. And assuming you have employees, I like what Eric said about kind of the purpose. Assuming you have employees aligned to a purpose in an organization, engagement ends up becoming the discretionary effort that those employees are are going to, go above and beyond in order whether it's, delivering for your customers or delivering for your employees. I think the secret here and and when it comes to strategy is that outcomes are are very broad when it comes to employee experience, and organizations have to take time to understand what outcomes they're actually trying to drive. If they're a customer service organization, great. If they're very focused on learning and innovation, maybe they're really focused in on AI and employee experience as it relates to continuously developing the skill sets of the employees. And I think that's the most interesting change we've seen in strategy is if you go back two or three years ago, it was, how can I be more like Google? Or how can I be more like Facebook? And I think organizations are starting to realize that it's not just about taking what is perceived to be a good employee experience at another organization and adopting that for to be a good employee experience at another organization and adopting that for themselves. It's a little bit more about, customizing it for themselves, and that's what we kinda work on mostly is understanding outcomes first and and then building the strategy. It seems like there was a time when the Internet, or this concept rather of the intranet was was at the forefront. You know? Every shop had it, and it was a a big push. And then it it seemed like it kind of went away for a while. Is it is it coming back? Is it is are are is that something that shops are now talking about again? I think it is. And I think, this concept or promise or or whatever you wanna call it about one single piece of technology that encompasses everything we we need to do is is maybe going by the wayside a little bit. And organizations are starting to look at tools like a ServiceNow to say, how can we put a layer in between whatever the back end technology is and how our employees are going to experience it? And I think intranet is a good example of that. There are always gonna be multiple areas or ways to collect information in an organization. And as long as you kinda have that front end or the piece where you can make it searchable and make it understandable, it almost doesn't matter if you have ten, one, a hundred back end systems. If it's easy and intuitive for people to search through that, they're not gonna pay attention or or understand that. So I don't know if the concept of the Internet is is coming back, but I think the concept of one Internet and trying to get every single piece of information into one system is is maybe going away a little bit. Gotcha. Yeah. Makes sense. We talk about this this poll, Tracy, and I know we put a couple of things in there, search personalization, AI relevance, and recommendations. ML case assist, most people said everything, all of the above. If I had to put you kind of on a spot error for one, the top one, what would you say you would put in there? Yeah. No. When I was trying to vote, I I would have hit all of the above also. But I was I was really leaning towards, personalization. I could have to pick one of the other ones. And and I do think I agree completely with James in terms of what he was talking about with the Internet. I think the legacy term Internet has so many bad connotations with it. That's not really what customers are striving to do. They don't want just a better Internet anymore. A lot of those were based on content management systems. And in order to help people find what they needed, you just had to put more and more and more content in them. And then it just became the wild west or is what one customer told me at our knowledge nineteen conference, a flea market. They didn't know what was broken, what was compatible, what was old, how many times it had been used, you know, all those types of things. I thought it was a great analogy. So what they're trying to do now is is use something with intelligence behind it, like the ServiceNow intelligent platform to create that personalized experience that understands your role and using things like Coveo, right, to understand and and look at your activities or your actions. What type of things are you searching for? What types of knowledge articles are you reading? And based on that, proactively making recommendations so that you don't even have to go to a search bar, type and hit the enter key to find what you might need. You know, for example, it might notice based on what somebody is looking for that she's interested in advancing her career, And it could start recommending courses on Cornerstone or on LinkedIn Learning that'll help her do that or maybe even giving her, awareness into internal job postings so that she will stick with the company and develop her career rather than look outside. And that's very valuable to an organization. I always think about back to my kind of my personal experiences and I think about Amazon. And and I know for example that, you know, a third of of everything that kinda comes through that portal is from that recommendations engine. And I think that that's important. I think that that's certainly something that we should always be thinking about in that employee experience. And Eric, to your point, you know, let's let's let's use the technology to help drive those. And so we I think about this as kind of a funnel where we can take these these portals, we take the information, we take the the search results, we dump them down into this centralized place that could say this is probably what what you're looking for. And and if this is resolved, what you're looking for, this is maybe the next step based on who you are, what group you're in, or, you know, what you sort of look like in the organization. Meaning, you know, maybe I've been there for less than six months, and I work in the in the support group, and I tend to deal with these, eight or ten different folks. You know, James, when you're having conversations with with your customers around that employee experience, what are they telling you? What are they asking for? Is there a, you know, have they have are are customers thinking about this in the same way we are? I I mean, they're absolutely thinking about it. I I don't know if everyone is thinking about it in in the same way. I think I I just wanna pick up on kinda Eric's point about personalization because that is one of the most difficult things to get right. And I think it goes against the trends or or the way of thinking in the last several years, if not decades. If you think of, you know, ten, fifteen years ago, process standardization. How can we make a process as standard and repeatable as pros as possible to cut costs? That actually goes against kind of the idea of employee experience and about it being a very personal, very, felt thing. So so that's something they're always talking about and wondering is how do we use tools and technologies to make an experience as personal as possible. But I I think two other things. One is how do we make this work practically? Because a lot of the, you know, conversation and thinking around employee experiences is very high level. It talks about physical space as much as culture, as much as technology. So I think that's question number one is is what does this look like for us, and how can we get some quick wins or or institute this, very, very quick And then I think the other thing we talk about a lot or or the questions that that come is how much of a responsibility for creating a good experience actually lies with individuals and leaders within an organization too. Because you can give great technology, you can give great physical and workspaces, to people. But if your leader or the person you're interacting with is is still making you feel like you don't wanna show up for work day after day, then it might be all for not. So I think those are two of the things that that we talk about the most is is culture and the development of the behaviors that are required to to also, make sure the experience is great. And then just what do we do tomorrow if we were gonna try to start this thing? I definitely that resonates with me. You know, when I think about portals, I I do get a sense for the company when I'm inside of that portal, you know, or, you know, when I'm engaging in that experience or whatever that is, you know. So whether it's a a chatbot Barca it it feels, a little too robot y, you know, or whether it's a search that doesn't really provide me anything. It's, you know, it doesn't have even kind of that that sort of natural language that I'm expecting, you know, or or whether it's just, one of these these concepts where I'm I'm trying to search for something. I'm trying to, you know, resolve something. I'm trying to learn about a specific product, and I get pushed into somewhere where where I don't wanna be. That's really frustrating for me. And I think that, you know, personalization, for me, is is probably one of the more important pieces. You know, Eric, when you guys are are out and and you're engaging in projects, you know, on the ServiceNow side, do do what are kind of the common goals that the customers have? Mhmm. You know, I see a lot of it is centered around employee productivity, which also leads to better satisfaction. And and I've seen some forward thinking customers have these initiatives like, you know, the the next generation workforce where they wanna provide their employees more flexible options, not only in terms of where they work, maybe having a flexible schedule and being able to work from home or the office in the future, but also in the types of work that they perform. So cross team training them. There's a large retailer that, of course, you and I worked with together, Barca. And they want people to be able to work in one store on one day and then also another store in a different day and also change roles. Maybe they're working in a particular department one day where they have some knowledge and expertise and can directly support the consumers that are shopping. Maybe another day they're picking up a shift where they're processing complex returns. So understanding that it's going to allow these people to, develop their careers, have a more interesting, and valuable work life balance, and keep those employees rear there rather than handling the significant churn that we typically associate with retail. Customers our customers are definitely always there. Our internal people are definitely always our first customers, for sure. That customer that you're talking about, Eric, one of the the kind of the one of the the things that I thought was kind of interesting is they have that this concept of the expert. And so regardless of wherever it is that you're at inside of that organization, you can you can, submit videos or you can submit, answers, and they all go into a central place. And and so now you you have this concept of people that are experts, maybe not necessarily right where they're at. You know, I I happen to be, you know, excited about AI and machine learning. So I tend to kind of, you know, lean into that direction. But it's kind of interesting to be able to be in our portal and find experts like that regardless of where they're at. I think that's a a really interesting way to connect people as well. Absolutely. Yep. Let's switch over a little bit to AI and let's start to talk about some of that tech, that's delivering some of these experiences. You know, James, question for you here is is, you know, when now that we have access to some of the new tech, right, AI machine learning, it's out there. People can take advantage of it. It's it there there's no heavy lift and shift like there used to be even two or three years ago. But but what does that bring in terms of just a better employee experience? Well, I think it's the personalization piece. It is the biggest, is the biggest side to it, and I'll give two kinda specific examples of of where we're seeing it play a huge role. One would be in the space of learning and development, and I think, Barry, you alluded to that a little bit early on. Second would be in the space of health and well-being. In particular, in the last year as as COVID has kind of brought things like mental health and well-being and burnout to the forefront, having a tool that can understand your preferences, understand what you've looked at in the past, read in the past, or or how you've taken advantage of something that's offered to you, both allows an organization to then start to know suggestions. It also allows an organization to invest their money better. Right? So when I think of health and well-being, how cool would it be if if we get to a a world where, every organization is preventing issues instead of reacting to, which is really what they're what they're doing now. And and that's such an important experience across a lot of kind of moments that matter, when it, when it comes to taking a leave of absence or when it comes to going and getting some sort of of critical care. But from an organizational stand actually using the AI to tell them, you know, that four thousand dollars of of mental health support that we've released to you. How many people are actually using that? What are they using it for? What's their sentiment around that? And so being able to personalize it from both sides, both from the organizational side in terms of choosing what they're gonna kind of invest in and what they're gonna offer to their employees and just from, providing a better experience itself. But, yeah, that personalization piece is is really, I think, where AI plays a huge role. James, the the metrics, I think, that that companies that have gone down this road are seeing, I think you're right. I think a lot of times even they're surprising and people are saying, oh, I, you know, I didn't realize that customers were engaging us for this or that customers were were trying to get, this level of support and service, but they were doing it someplace completely different. And and I think, you know, back to Eric, what you talked about earlier, you know, I as a customer, I don't necessarily care where it goes. I don't, you know, care what it looks like in in the background, you know, knowing that we have multiple different groups. I just would like to have a someplace that I can start from and and have a system be able to say, oh, I think you need to go here or, you know, this is a person we need to talk to. So that's it. That's very interesting. Eric, do you think that do you think that there's another, another layer to this though in the larger service delivery? So if we think about AI and machine learning, you know, employee experience is is a piece of it. It always sort of gets layered underneath this larger service delivery umbrella. But what what types of things are do you think that we can that AI can leverage in in that broader in that broader scope? Sure. Yeah. It's extremely valuable, and you could look at it from the perspective of both the employee as well as the support person who's trying to assist the employee. And first of all, you alluded to it. You're right. We we want to eliminate the burden of forcing an employee to know first which portal or site to go to in the first place based on their question. And one of the classic examples is you have an issue with your paycheck. So maybe you need to go to payroll. Is payroll in finance, or is it in HR? Right? It's you probably have a fifty fifty shot. So rather than force them to do that, why not allow them to just say, I have an issue with my paycheck and allow machine learning to interpret that and determine where this should go, lead you to the right, you know, potential answers to your questions so you can support yourself, you know, and and deflect that case, or enter some type of a ticket, which ServiceNow is now calling a universal request as of our Quebec release. Allow machine learning to triage it and take it to the correct group based on what it's learned from other employees with similar, you know, short descriptions of their issue. And then from the agent's perspective, right, if they do get some type of ticket, whether it's an IT incident or an HR case or a finance case or whatever, using that artificial intelligence to make recommendations to the agent that they can send back to the employee. So that way, you have an agent even if they haven't been there for a long time and know everything. Artificial intelligence can say, hey. With ninety percent confidence, I think this is the right answer to this question. So it can really accelerate their learning curve and help them be successful too. So universal request. It's interesting. The role of service delivery is changing a little bit. And so, you know, I I certainly feel like, you know, technology as as much of is an enabler as it always is. Sometimes it allows us to kinda rethink that that it the the entire space in general. You know? So I hear what you're saying is, you know, maybe a bit of a more of a, a unified certainly approach when it comes to, you know, a customer coming in to make a a specific type of request. Meaning, you know, I come in kinda free form and just saying, hey. Today, I'm I'm having something around this. So maybe it's a hardware issue, you know, but I'm also curious about benefits because we just had an open enrollment. And, oh, by the way, I heard something on the news about something else. So I think that that's that's interesting, and there's there's probably another another roundtable we could probably start to to just on some of that that changing role. But but, James, are are you seeing kind of just the roles change inside of organizations? Yeah. I think so for sure. And and you're right. We could probably have a whole round table on how kind of the operating models and things like that are are changing as a result. I think one of the cool things about, you know, ServiceNow and and those types of requests is is the time it opens up for other types of service delivery as well. As I kinda mentioned before, part of employee experience is that personal touch, the human interaction in in some instances. Right? So if you're not kind of taking up your time to answer the standard repeatable questions, you can spend more of your time coming up with strategies, ideas, or or working with, customers one on one. I think of pre COVID when we were in the office, Deloitte is I felt that a good job of this where we had we have service now and have for several years. We also have a area on our fourth floor called d four one one, and it was basically a a tech support group. So if you wanted to simply go talk to a human, and get a quick fix to a technology, that option was still available to you. And because we had a ServiceNow and some other tools in the background, it allowed us to do that. And it allowed us to to not hire essentially double, double the support staff. I think another thing we're seeing a lot is the IT group and HR group come closer together, when it comes to HR and IT service delivery. And and so a lot of centralization of some of those tasks and experiences itself. Onboarding, really good example of that where you you'd be challenged to find a lot of organizations with employees who say we do onboarding really, really well. It's it's always kind of a pain point. But HR has a big role to play in onboarding just like IT does in making sure you have your laptop on day one, just like maybe security does in getting your badge and and access. So I think bringing some of those groups together in a service delivery function and focusing on the overarching experience versus just the components of function owns is is another thing we're seeing a lot of. Yeah. People had to get really had to get really good at onboarding. Then the The new hire process was was under a microscope, and a spotlight for sure. We did a a bit of a survey ourselves at Coveo last year, and we got some kind of interesting numbers here. We're a data company just by our very nature. But some of the things that we found, two point five hours a day just still searching for stuff that we don't find. That's a huge that's a huge number. I certainly feel it. I think probably everybody does as well. You know, I nobody likes to search for information. And even further from this, it also pointed out that half of the stuff that they found maybe wasn't even relevant. And so we're doing searches and we're finding stuff. We're still having to sift through that that's the the content that we are getting to find some of that stuff. What else was on there, Tracy? Tracy? No, Barry. That that that reminds me of a really relevant story, though. I have I'd love to share it. I spent part of two thousand nineteen with, one of our customers who was running an employee experience workshop. And as James had mentioned, this was a specific case where HR and IT were coming together to deliver a more unified experience. So I was actually shadowing and interviewing one of their employees. And she explained to me one day that her laptop stopped working very well. It was kind of on the fritz, and she needed a new one. So she started searching for ways to get a new laptop, and she said she spent forty five minutes searching for how to get a new laptop. And to make it much worse, she had three coworkers standing over her shoulder making suggestions and trying to help her. So now you have four people spending forty five minutes searching for something that should have taken ten seconds. The truth is and the reason behind this was that she was on their intranet site, which had no notion about the content that was in ServiceNow. So if you think about what would have happened if they were leveraging Coveo, well, first of all, she could have been in any site, even their intranet, and it would have found what was relevant to her in ServiceNow. And it could have been, here's how to order a new laptop. And by the way, you're eligible for a a laptop refresh because we know how old your old asset is. But it could have also taken her to one of those employee forums you were talking about where somebody said, my laptop was also on the fritz one day, and here's what I did myself to fix it really quick. So by understanding that relevance, but also creating this digitally connected experience, you know, she would have been so much happier and and saved so much time, and gotten back into to doing what she likes to do. Yeah. And that that was exactly the third data point, Barca. What you were looking for is sixteen percent of these responses to the survey said that the lack of trust they had in what they were getting or the lack of relevancy in what they were getting actually made them wanna quit. It was just such a big point of frustration for them. You know, I can see people flipping tables and walking out with with bad laptops, right, or old laptops left alone. But that was the last data point there, Barry. You should never flip the table in your own house, Tracy. I know. Working from home, it's a little messier. A little dramatic. Go ahead. No. I was just gonna say and and it's an interesting example too of where that kind of human behavior comes into because, absolutely right. And and what we're what we're kinda seeing, one of our biggest change adoption issues is, again, that mentality of fifteen, maybe even five years ago, knowledge was kind of power. You were the knowledge holder, and so there there's sometimes some hesitation to to adopt the tools or to put your own knowledge articles up on those tools. So I think making that business case for those individuals, is is really important as well. Because even with the tools in place, it's pretty easy to come up with your own SharePoint or set up a WhatsApp group or set up a Slack in in today's world. And so it can almost snowball and and have that effect if you really don't have the employees buying into the tools and and leveraging them, in terms of how they're supposed to be. It it might not work either. So Yeah. You bring up some stuff around culture, James. I wanna, I wanna circle back on some of that because there is a culture shift that's that needs to happen, I I I think for sure. But just to stay on this just on this AI topic, do you think that companies have what they need in terms of the technology? I mean, do do we have it? So do is is it available? I think it's unbelievable how much better it has gotten in the last two years. I I can remember doing we call them art of the possible labs three, four years ago where we kinda just go in and inspire before we start a strategy project, and we just show what others are doing. And and, really, the biggest thing we were showing was was chatbots. And and at that point, three or four years ago, there was still concern over, is a chatbot really easier to deal with than a than a human? I know a lot of the AI use cases at that point were recruitment as well, and just kind of unconscious bias and and concerns in and around that. So I I think I think the promise of AI, if I can call it that, is is finally here, and and we're seeing some unbelievable use cases. I do think some are gonna they're hesitant because it was such a short period of time ago that that maybe it was very complex for them to adopt these technologies and implement them. So short answer to your question is, I would say more often than not, unfortunately, the answer is no, where where you see more organizations kinda relying on the intranets of the world and trying to force fit things into an ERP system or an HRIS system, without maybe layering on AI and experience tools on top. But I don't think it's as difficult as they assume it is to start getting them in place and and getting some of those quick wins I I mentioned either. Gotcha. Eric, you know, what do you think needs to happen at these shops? So, you know, this customer that you were talking about before, obviously, they're a really, really large shop. I think they've probably been thinking about it for a while. But for for just a, you know, maybe a a smaller organization, what do they have to have in place, do you think? Right. It just has to do with cooperation. And there's still a lot of organizations where, and I'll use HR and IT as the example here. It's kind of like oil and water where there's some mistrust between them or even some animosity to be quite honest. What customers need to do in order to create a better employee experience is really get together, create a a team of stakeholders from different parts of the organization. And I often see corporate communications becoming involved these days too, especially as they're talking about, collapsing or consolidating their Internet to inside of the ServiceNow platform. Right? Corporate communications is sometimes the lead stakeholder, but the idea here is you need some centralized governance to create consistency and create standards, and and make sure that it's going to be a starting point that's consistent for employees, and they can find what they need. Without that, the teams are still going to, create these disparate experiences, which doesn't really benefit the employee nearly as much, as it could. Yeah. James, other thoughts on that? I was gonna completely agree with that. And and in the cases where I've seen it done really, really well, it is always at least HR and IT are at at the same table. And in lots of cases, marketing and communication to your point as as well, Eric, whoever knows human centered design and things like that in the organization, whether that's HR or Barca, them coming to the table. I think one example that I think of was a a global, telecom company we were working with a couple of years ago, and they did a really good job of that. And and we had a bit of a session, a a couple of sessions actually, where we used a tool called business chemistry. It's similar to Myers Briggs or HBDI, but it's all about how how teams work together. And we had a couple of really good sessions where, really, we kinda came to the conclusion that, you know, HR, you've got that human centered design understanding of what the employees want or or need. IT kind of has that expertise, and they're trying to play in each other's world. Right? Where IT was maybe at the time trying to do a little bit of human centered design and understand business needs a little bit more, and HR at the same time was really trying to take back ownership of their HRIS that they were implementing. And I think instead of looking at it as a us versus them to to Eric's point, unfortunately, there is animosity in a lot of the organizations we work with. So instead of looking at it as an us versus them, the way they started looking at it is how can IT actually build the digital skill sets HR needs, and how can HR coach them through some of the things like gathering employee requirements versus just technical or security requirements? After that conversation was had, the the rest of the the project was was quite successful, and it's one of the best examples I've seen of kind of not just technology, but culture and space elements coming to to fruition as well. I like this concept, and I think that organizations that embrace it this way certainly have been successful. I'm certainly seeing a lot of folks that have employee experience right in their title. So it's not unusual to talk with a a chief experience officer, and I and I think that what you're talking about makes a lot of sense. Are there channels maybe that that maybe the folks on this call, should be considering that that maybe, you know, on a in a typical implementation or evaluation, maybe that they wouldn't. Meaning, maybe, you know, we we get so used to doing phases, and we think, well, in phase one, we'll just add this and this and this. But I do you think that it makes sense to broaden the channels? Yeah. I I think so. I think a more agile I mean, not to use all the buzz words, but a more agile and more heck of pilot take them off. Approach. Yeah. Exactly. No. I I do think and that's one of the things I think that the the IT organization need to wrap their heads around a little bit is these are no longer two year waterfall like implementations. Right? If if you're gonna make a difference around employee experience, COVID's a great example of that. Who would have predicted that we would be in the situation we are now, let alone a a year later? Right? And so I think one of the the things organizations need to realize is that the technology doesn't necessarily need to be perfect. It needs to be able to capture information and be able to start to understand what people like or dislike about the experience that's being done. And so we're seeing a lot more of these kinda six, eight, twelve week sprints to implement something very, very quickly, maybe throw a Qualtrics type or engagement survey out there and start to measure feedback in real time, and then just make tweaks as as you go along. Piloting it to different types of groups is probably another big example where we're seeing. Right? Going back to this kind of piloting it with, the director level or with this geography and then rolling it out in the the next geography after it's it's successful. I think certainly the technology supports that. You know? And maybe this is one of the most unique experiences with technology and that it needs signals. And so, you know, if you you think about machine learning model, it needs to learn and it needs to learn inside of the organization. It needs to sit right where the people are. It needs to learn how they ask questions and and the types of things that they ask and how they how they find, how they search, and then ultimately, what do they get. So, you know, the more the more signals that you can throw at us even in an evaluation, the smarter that these things become and the more valuable they are. I do wanna talk about measurements, because I'm a you know, you have to obviously be able to measure anything that you that you really wanna manage. But, and, James, just kinda kinda follow through your thought a little bit. You know, how do you measure an employee experience? Yeah. I think there's a couple dimensions. Productivity is is one that we've talked a little bit about, and and that's a big one. Just how much time are you buying back for your employees. And engagement would be another one. I I think the issue a lot of times with engagement is we measure it, and we don't necessarily know to what end. Meaning, we ask the questions. We say, great. We hit seventy percent, and our people are engaged. Or we hit sixty percent, so our people are disengaged. But what are we actually going to do about it? And so I see a lot more organizations starting to be very, very explicit about the fact that engagement, again, is just your general level of happiness or, or the discretionary effort or your alignment to purpose. So I see a lot of organizations going down to one, maybe two question engagement surveys. And that's just your baseline. So are you engaged or not? And then really deep diving into measurement of the moments that matter. So that's kinda where we're seeing a lot of organizations move to is defining what are the critical, critical moments for us across our life cycle. If it's a customer facing organization, maybe it's about interaction with customers. Right? If it's more of a if it's a consulting organization like ours, a lot more to do with health and well-being right now. So if you start to measure those experiences along with engagement, then you can just focus on changing the experiences where there are issues and seeing whether that has an impact on engagement and productivity or not. So if engagement and productivity are the outcome, you're kinda testing and measuring the experiences themselves and then just seeing the impact that it has. Eric, you know, ServiceNow, does a lot of work always on the front end with value. And it's always, you know, usually part of those those initial projects, even to such agree that that I've seen the dashboards get set up first before anything actually happens just to to make sure that people are tracking. You know, can you talk about, you know, what will AI what what does machine learning what are somebody's capabilities doing, in terms of of not just new type of stats, but but also, changing existing kind of what we would call maybe, you know, that that boiler plate or that watermark. Mhmm. Sure. Yeah. And and I agree with James again. I think there's different ways of measuring the success. Our CIO, Chris Betty, had a very good relationship with our former CHRO at Waters, and he'd like to say he'd measure success using key performance indicators or KPIs, and she'd like to measure success in smiles. So you do kinda look for different types of metrics, or feedback, let's say. And and, you know, within life cycle events such as onboarding or a transfer or relocation, frontally, whatever it might be, it's nice to be able to catch those signals frequently, not wait till the end of something that may have taken three weeks. And that's where ServiceNow came out with listening posts more recently. So you can catch these little, micro signals, along the along this this overall journey. And I think where AI has the potential here is to pick up the patterns and the trends because you're still relying on a person, a human, to look at all this data that's coming back and then make sense of it and identify areas where you can make improvements. But AI can take a look at it much more quickly and say, hey. For the most part, your process is pretty good. But for these certain types of employees, maybe they have certain characteristics associated with them. This portion of this overall journey is not working out as well as it could. You know, it could be some type of a personality. It could be how savvy they are with the technology you're putting in front of them. It could be that they feel like they need a little more interaction with their manager, because they're feeling uneasy. So to be able to correlate that is is a huge opportunity for AI to raise those, you know, raise those, revelations, to the surface so that people can do something about it. Yeah. Let's not wait until we see the Glassdoor, reviews to to understand that maybe the onboarding isn't isn't the best that we think it is. Very true. Smiles for miles. I like that as well. Eric, just follow that through a little bit for me. What do you think the the risk is to organizations that that are they're just not not willing to adopt some of these practices or just kinda sitting sitting by? Yeah. Well, COVID made it pretty dire in a sense for businesses that had a a digital plan, but they were really slow rolling it out. It forced them to accelerate their plans to digitize, and and it really was a matter of survival for that business in many cases. The ones who don't digitize may not make it through this, you know, pandemic even though we we all hopefully kinda see the the light at the end of the tunnel. Things will never truly be quite the way that they were before. And so using machine learning, taking more of an employee centric view, and what I mean by that is when each department was doing their own thing independently, purchasing technology and there was all this sprawl, it was very much an application centric experience. But putting together these teams and cooperating to put the employee at the center of this experience and allow them to branch out from there and using AI to help them find or get what they need is going to be imperative. A lot of people are still gonna be working from home. They don't have the luxury of walking down the office to find somebody who they think knows the answer. So creating that more consumer like experience just like you would find an answer through Google or YouTube, being able to allow them to do that from their mobile device or their browser if they're sitting at their desk is really, really important for for businesses that want to thrive moving forward. You know, I I think a lot of us on this call here are probably long time work from homers. You know, but, James, you know, your comment around the four one one at Deloitte, you know, I I miss that occasionally too. Thoughts? Yeah. I I I mean, I think the four one one is is a funny one because sometimes concepts that we thought would maybe go away come back, and I think that keeps coming back to the the personalization and and things like that. Yeah. I mean, at at the end of the day, I think organizations that don't there are still always going to be maybe organizations that can get by on kind of cost cutting operational efficiency, but I think those are going to become fewer and further between. It's just not the way employees want to interact. Their employees are actually okay working more than forty hours a week if they're happy and excited and passionate about opening up their laptop. Right? So I think the idea of, like, let's limit work week, time and things like that are are going away. And part of having that passion is I get to spend as much time as possible on whatever my strength or passion Barca is. And in an ideal world, that purpose, that strength, that passion aligns with an organization's passion. And you should feel connected and feel like an organization is investing in you, whether that's learning and development, whether that's health and well-being. You feel like you're investing into the organization. You wanna feel that same thing back, and I think employee experiences is the way to do that. And it'll have to become more and more prevalent. Otherwise, it'll just become really hard to attract talent, especially in a work from home environment. I could work other than tax regulations, I I could join an organization in Germany or Italy right now just as easy as one in downtown Toronto. So, I think that war for talent, because of the pandemic, is gonna become even more of an issue, and employee experience is kind of a way to win it. I've almost forgotten where people are at, James, and I don't know if anybody else feels the same way, but sometimes I forget. Where are you? I I what what part of the world? It it truly doesn't matter. So we just have a couple of minutes left. I wanna I wanna Eric, I want you to kinda close us out a bit. You know, given everything that we've talked about, what do you think the best place where's the best place for a for an organization to start? Sure. Well, I I think it it is coming up with a strategy. And in many cases, that is is leveraging a partner such as Deloitte, right, to help them figure out what they need to do. They may need to restructure us to a small degree to create this centralized team of of stakeholders and some governance in order to, curate the technology on behalf of all these different departments, come up with these standards so that things like knowledge articles look similar and surveys look similar. And, of course, the way that you, find and consume services, is similar. But I really think too just having a digitally connected experience. Right? There's all these enterprise functional systems, your different HR systems, your different collaboration systems, your travel and expense system. You can and and we started talking about this at the very beginning. You can go back to having a lot of best of breed systems and create this this experience that's unified where somebody has one starting point. I like to call it the one start shop rather than the one stop shop because stop shop indicates it implies that you stay there. I like to think of it as the one start shop. You know where to start, and it will take you to the right system or the right person or the right information that you need based on your role. And, hopefully, it does that in a personalized manner, and it's using AI so that it's always relevant for you. That's perfect. Well, thank you guys. I see that most of our questions have been answered. Tracy, anything anything pop up on your radar? You know, one that occurred to me, and I think it goes back to the planning and understanding your organization really well, and I know this is true in our service roundtable conversation. We started talking about the demographics of your employees or or in that case, your customers and their preference for different service channels. Is that something you're seeing organizations take into account based on the fact that they simply just prefer phone? They prefer to go to that floor. Obviously, in a digital context, they can't do it. And and what are those considerations for content types and channels? We we touched on it lightly, but I'm thinking mobile apps or YouTube videos versus knowledge articles and documentation. Any any kind of closing thoughts? I don't wanna leave us too short for time, but but any any ideas, guys? Well, yeah, I actually have a funny example of an organization we were working with a couple years ago, and they were an oil and gas organization. And, you know, we got down this entire path of making information accessible and and mobilizing everything, only to kind of be told and should have known this, but but there were regulations against their people in the field even having a cell phone on them. So we got down this entire path, and and then it just wasn't going to to work for them. Right? And and so I think to Eric's point about strategy kinda gets a a bad word sometimes, and and you can overstrategize things for sure. But I think, like, starting with knowing what outcomes you're gonna drive, we see a lot of persona work that that is very valuable to do exactly what you're saying. Like, understanding you still need to understand the different requirements and the different nuances of of different types of employee groups, because their employee experiences is going to and maybe has to look a lot different from someone else in a in a different geography. So, yeah, I think starting with that strategy, understanding the different types of internal customers you have and what outcomes you're trying to drive for them. For those field workers, it was all about productivity. You know, they they didn't care as much about kind of the the bells and whistles. For their corporate environment, it was a little bit more about engaging and experience and and things like that. So, So, yeah, most organizations are doing that, but I think going back to my very, very early comment, we still see too many organizations saying give me the Google package or give me the Facebook package and not kinda considering their unique nuances. Yeah. So important. So important. Eric, anything anything else before I skip ahead to the end? Any thoughts? Yeah. The the last thing I would mention, based on your your question, Tracy, is that AI can also help people make decisions. So let's say you're an employee who needs, help and you've already exhausted your search of the knowledge base. It can give you options at the bottom. It could say, hey. If you use the chatbot to try to get your answer, it's likely that you'll get it within four minutes. If you'd like to chat with a live agent based on this time of day and what we know about their historical, staffing levels and and volume right now, you'll probably get an answer within twelve minutes. And if it's not that important and you wanna submit a case, it's very likely that you'll have your answer within twenty four hours. So allowing AI to understand what are the turnaround times based on that channel will help them decide which one is is best for them at that moment. Yeah. It's almost like retraining the employees. They're probably a very typical channel they use, but understanding that these other channels are open to them, they just have to be willing to sort of engage in that way and with that within that wait time. Okay. We could talk about this all day, and I think I've got a thousand ideas for our next round table. So I want to thank everybody for their time. James, Eric so generous with your time and energy. Thank you again. Very fantastic facilitation. You're a gift and I'm really thankful for your time as well. As I mentioned we're going to be in touch with the recording in your inboxes twenty four hours ish to give our time, our team time to send the email out. As a next step I'm inviting everyone to get a workplace assessment. If you haven't worked with either your customer success team or a business value team already. And if you're new to Coveo or, exploring Coveo, this assessment gives you direct access to our experts, and I highly encourage you to take part. Other than that, again, thanks to all for your participation, your contribution, and we hope to do this again real soon. With that, have a great Tuesday, and we'll talk soon. Take care. Thanks, everyone. Bye, guys. Thank you. Bye, everyone.