Thanks Steve. And good morning to everyone
and thanks for having me here.
I'm excited the way that you do this.
I'm always happy when I can go to B2B companies
to talk about customer centricity
or the future of marketing.
And in my feeling,
most B2B companies still think that B to B stands for
"boring to boring".
And this is not the case here.
You've got a rock-and-roll CEO.
You've got a vibrant event.
So I'm feeling at home instantly.
So, thank you very much for having me.
I prepared a presentation that's called, "When digital becomes human".
And I think this is a topic that is being discussed
in almost every company around the world today.
To think about the future of customer centricity
and customer experience and asking yourself the question:
Which parts will be done through digital interface?
Which parts will be done through a manual or a human interface?
And that's what I would like to talk with you about.
And I'd like to kick off with one of my favorite examples.
I'm not a Disney fan.
I'm probably more like a Disney addict, is what you could call me.
And the moment that I figured out that they
invented a new customer experience system in Orlando Florida in Disney World,
I organized my own research trip to figure it out what was going on there.
So if you go to Disney World in Florida,
it's fantastic what they've done
because they're basically an offline experience, right.
And they managed to create a digital layer on top of that.
So if you go to Disney World
every member of the family will get this Magic Band
which basically does everything for you.
So it will open up your hotel room,
it gives you the entrance to the park.
So you don't need the plastic tickets anymore.
These are the payment terminals.
So the only thing you need to do
is just hold your bracelet against the Mickey sensor.
Mickey sensor turns green and oops you've paid.
Now I can tell you from a personal perspective
this system works very, very well.
That's extremely dangerous for someone like me.
I'm walking around there, like this, wfft-wfft- wfft-wfft
And it's really fun.
But five days later, the bill comes in pretty hard.
And then you think, okay this is probably
just me,
I'm such an impulsive easy victim of these technologies.
But that was not the case.
I was extremely happy to read the annual report of Disney,
and this was one of their headlines:
The Magic Plus Wristbands are magic moneymakers.
I wasn't alone.
Truth is people with a bracelet spend about 30%
more than people without the bracelet.
So life's pretty easy in customer experience in the digital world.
Make it fast, easy and fun for people to do business with you
and guess what, they do.
They make it fast easy and fun to buy stuff for you.
And I think that's just a very simple thing.
But it's something that a lot of companies forget.
But I tested it - everything.
It's completely waterproof, don't worry about that.
But the best thing is the interface with the app.
So if you go to Disney World
you make your right reservations through the app.
So you say, okay I want to go on Space Mountain
you make the reservation on the app, you go to Space Mountain,
bracelet to the sensor, Mickey turns green and off you go.
You make restaurant reservations through the app.
And then the fun thing is
in one of their restaurants in Magic Kingdom
they have this new restaurant. It's called, Be Our Guest
from the Beauty and the Beast video.
So the general theme of this day are Disney movies.
As you can see we had the Lion King,
now we're in Beauty and the Beast.
So, the Be Our Guest restaurant in Disney World
has sensors placed on the road to the restaurant.
So they can basically virtually see you coming.
So you're walking to the door of the restaurant
and just before you arrive at that door
the door opens up and they're saying,
"Hey Steven, we were expecting you my friend!"
"And we know that you have small children"
"So, the two high Mickey chairs are waiting
there for you at your table."
"Enjoy your dinner my friend!"
And I have to tell you that is a perfect experience.
That's the moment that no one complains about privacy in Disney.
They call it magic. That's the word that they have invented for it
and I like that philosophy that you don't complain about privacy
but that you create magic for your customers.
But the fantastic philosophy behind this idea is that
what they actually do is they use technology
to allow their people to deliver a better service to the customers.
And that's what I believe in.
I think we can use technology to lift experiences
and that we use technology actually to make people become
even bigger stars in customer experience.
And that's what they do in Disney World.
And this is my one slide summary of customer relations in a digital world.
What if computers can do all the work
that is more or less operational?
And because of that you just create time and space
among your people to excel in the human tasks.
And I think as humans we need to be good in those things
that computers are not good at.
I'm going to talk about that later during the talk.
But this sounds so easy, this sounds so
easy
but I meet so many companies.
so many companies, where they see digital
purely
as an enabler of the these two first lines:
cost-cutting, efficiency, replacing people.
And we don't have to be naive
customer service will probably be done
with less people in the future
But the people that are still there
are gonna have a more important role than ever before
And I just want to show you a few examples.
Like this is an example from a small company.
It's in fact the company of my sister-in-law.
She has a small pharmacy in Gantt, city in Belgium
and she has behind the scenes robot.
And this robot is brilliant because every morning
all the small packaging with medication come in to her pharmacy, right?
So she gives all the packaging to the robot,
the robot puts it on the shelves.
When a customer comes in
she types in the kind of medication that
she needs on her computer.
The robot gets it and through a tube system,
it pops out next to her computer.
Now, she went to school for five years
to become a pharmacist
and before she had the robot, about 30
percent of her time
was spent with walking around with boxes
from the truck to the shelves,
from the shelves to the patient.
No time to talk to patients.
Waste of energy. Waste of talent.
Since she has this robot it's complete shift.
She has a team of five people.
They are truly excited because now they can for the first time in their careers
they can actually share their passion,
their knowledge about the pharmaceutical industry, about healthcare.
The customers, they think: "Wow this is actually a pharmacy"
"where they have time for patients. That is becoming rare."
So the customers are excited, word-of-mouth is coming in,
and her turnover increased with 50 percent
over the last 18 months.
And this is behind the scenes robot.
No one knows that it's there
and it's actually a digital application that
makes the humans become a bigger star
than ever before.
And I really believe that this is a flip in strategy for a lot of companies
because in the old strategic world
they said have to choose between
operational excellence or customer intimacy.
You can only do one.
I think that is no longer true
I think in today's world if you are good in digital
that enables you to work in a more efficient way.
But at the same time, I think, because of that
we can create better services and a better
emotional relationship
between our customers and our company .
Now to keep on talking about Disney movies.
It really is the theme of the day, was no joke.
Have you seen this one, Inside Out? Who has seen Inside Out?
It's a brilliant movie. Everyone that is into customer service
or in sales or in marketing should look at this movie
because it tells you how our brain works.
It tells you about the basic emotions.
And it mainly tells you the guy or the person
that programmed the human brain made a huge mistake.
It's badly programmed because we have
five key emotions,
one positive one - joy
now we have sadness, we have anger, we
have disgust and we have fear.
So we have five emotions and four of them are negative.
That's why we complain the entire time
because we were badly programmed.
But if you plot all those emotions on this scheme
this is what I think is happening.
If you're good in digital
you almost, you know, disable all those negative feelings
and you allow joy to score points
Now some companies think,
"Hey but we're good in the human part, digital not that important "
"as long as we have the humans we will win."
That's no longer true.
Because if you don't have this,
this human will not excel in customer service
because the consumers and the customers are complaining
because your digital interface sucks.
So it's that combination of the two that is actually making you strong
and that's what I would like to talk with you about.
How can you reach that point?
How can you become strong in digital and make the difference to the people
in the organization reach that point where digital becomes human?
That's my vision on the future of customer relations.
But... I don't know if you guys feel it as
well.
2016 has become a really interesting year, so far.
I truly have the feeling that it's the end of a phase.
It's the end of the probably second phase of digital.
We had the arrival of websites.
We had the arrival of mobile.
We're there, right? Everyone has a mobile.
All your customers are using mobile devices.
All your customers are using technology as a sixth sense.
The moments that we're offline are like the moments that our battery is flat.
The whole digital detox thing is not happening.
We are connected like crazy.
I don't know if you've seen this picture.
If you've seen this picture it was all over the news last week.
And I really love it because when I see a
picture like this
I always try to imagine how would we have thought about this 10 years ago.
Just go back to 2006, 10 years ago, 2006
All of us were sitting here with a Nokia - 2006
iPhone came out in 2007, seven-day battery life.
Most exciting thing that happened was an SMS.
Whoa getting an SMS must be something
important going on.
If we would have been here ten years ago and I would have been here
and I would have told you that if you're two meters away
from the next president of the United States
that you would turn your back on her
pull out some small crazy device and do a maneuver like this
I don't think we would have believed that.
Surely, we wouldn't have believed that.
And now it's the most normal thing in the world.
We have new dangers. What's happening in walking has its limits.
As as you can see, so it is.
It is extremely interesting to see
how society is adapting to this.
And throughout Europe you see these signs now.
I want to talk about the next phase that's coming
because I think it's going to be more interesting for a company like yours.
It's the moment when it's not just users that are connected
but when the entire environment is connected.
The moment when the context becomes digital
and sensors are collecting data everywhere
I think that's going to be a flip for your industry and for many industries.
Let me give you a small example on what the impact
of that connectivity will be on customer experience.
One of the companies that I work with,
they makes smart central heating systems.
So what they do is is brilliant.
The machine sends you a text message a week before it breaks down, right?
And it sounds like this, it says,
"Hey Steven, this is your central heating system."
"I hope you're okay but I'm not."
"I'm gonna probably die in the next two or three days so you're gonna be cold."
"But let's let's prevent that. I've got a solution for you."
"Push OK now and I will send someone tomorrow to fix me. Warm regards."
That's important - warm regards
"Your central heating system".
Now I think that's brilliant and because today if it's a cold day,
maybe after this beautiful event it would be a really bad end of your day
if you come home and you realize that your central heating system is down
and then the whole, you know, thing starts
the customer service thing starts you have to make phone call you have to rely on the
goodwill if they will solve it or not you're afraid you're gonna be cold.
So, even if customer service is done,
right, we don't like it.
We don't like to spend time on that even if it's done right.
This is pre-emptive customer service right?
This is solving the problem for the customer before the customer even knows that there's a problem.
I'm sure this is extremely relevant for the business that you guys are in.
But not just for the business that you are in
but also for the customer service that you're applying.
The challenge will not be to react fast to customer issues
but to solve them before the customer knows that there's an issue.
And that's  a complete flip in customer centricity.
It's from being good and reactive to becoming proactive.
And we're gonna see this in many industries.
I think in B2B, this may be the biggest opportunity ever you know
because this was the old world, right?
You have the whole, this is simplified chain.
But you have the chain of B2B to the end user.
Truth is, these guys are talking,
those guys at the other end they don't know what's happening.
Today with sensor information everyone in the chain
can have fantastic information.
And with that fantastic information you can create fantastic services.
I fully agree with what you said
data is a crucial asset to deliver the customer service levels
that you want to achieve in this today's world.
But if you think about it,
I love that idea of products coming to life.
I think that's exactly what's gonna happen in the next decade
Products are coming to life.
Digital is no longer something for the digital world.
That's actually the physical world that is becoming digital.
So it's gonna be stupid to talk about the difference between a digital division
and the other guys because the other guys don't exist anymore
because even in the physical world everything is digital.
Just think about the evolution of books.
You know Amazon is the market leader in Kindle e-readers right?
Next year in the U.S., prediction is that for the first time
they're gonna be sold more eBooks than printed books.
But just think about this, who is reading who?
Ever thought about that. If you read a book on your eReader, who is reading who?
The answer is very simple: the eReader is reading you a lot better than you are reading that eReader
Think about what Amazon knows.
They know if you actually read a book that you buy.
They know if you start in the beginning or if
you start in the end.
They know if you skip chapters or if you reread chapters.
They even know if you fall asleep.
My publisher - me, about my books I don't know anything about them.
Every quarter, I get a sales report.
We sold so many books. Yeah, but I don't know if people actually read them
or if they use them to put their monitor of their computers like five centimeters higher.
I don't know what they're doing. I don't know if they read chapters.
I don't know if they skip chapters. I don't have a clue.
This is fantastic. Think about the value for
the algorithm of Amazon.
To update that algorithm. And 2016 is the beginning of the new phase.
The phase where artificial intelligence and machine learning is taking over.
And the most impressive thing that happened this year
is related to a company in the UK that is called DEEPMIND.
DEEPMIND was started or was created in 2011 by a young guy in the UK
and he became famous because he wanted to create the smartest computer in the world
that can beat humans in certain tasks.
And the first thing that he asked his computer to do is beat humans in this game.
Who has played this game in his or her life?
Ok. That was the age question in the presentation guys.
Space invaders. We played that thirty years ago on our Ataris.
Now DEEPMIND, the founder of deep mindset, he said,
look DEEPMIND, this is an ancient game from humanity
and this is the all-time high score a human has ever achieved on this game.
Beat that high score. And DEEPMIND said okay. Okay, I'm gonna try.
So DEEPMIND started to play the game.
The first five minutes, a disaster. A total disaster.
But 45 minutes later,  DEEPMIND had broken the all-time high score a human has ever achieved.
And the world said, Wow! Wow!
And it was one company that said, "Wow we're gonna buy these guys."
And that company is a guest on your show here in the next two days.
And that company is called Google.
Google said we're gonna buy this. And Google bought that for an undisclosed amount of money.
You know what that means, an undisclosed amount of money.
It means a shitload of money that
they paid for our company. That's what it means.
And then we didn't hear about it
anymore for two to three years until this spring.
This spring something happened, and my apologies for the language.
But it was the, oh fuck moment, in artificial intelligence.
It was not supposed to happen this year.
It was planned for 2025 and it happened in 2016.
It was when Google challenged the world champion in Go.
And Go is seen as the most advanced board game in the world.
These are the number of combinations you can play with Go.
Which makes chess a game for toddlers if you compare it with Go.
But it's a it's a tipping point in artificial intelligence.
You may remember that in 1995, DEEPBLUE from IBM, won from Kasparov right?
That was a pre-programmed computer.
So the brilliant people from IBM pre-programmed every possible move
and the computer then played it by itself.
And everyone said the moment that a computer can play Go, it's a tipping point
because there are so many combinations that it is impossible for a human to pre-program it.
The computer has to learn it by itself.
So you can already guess what happened.
They played five games against each other.
The end score was four against one.
Four for the machine, one for the human.
And that was a moment that people said, "Hey we're ten years ahead of our schedule, right?"
This was planned for 2025, it happened in 2016.
And that's the tipping point in machine learning.
Now this has a huge impact on companies, any sector.
It has a huge impact on customer service. Like you guys are doing a great job in customer service.
I just heard you got a Net Promoter Score of about 40, which is amazing. That's fantastic.
So that means that you're probably really
good in your processes.
That means that you measure what you need to measure to improve stuff.
And that you have a culture that puts the customer first.
If you looked up to all companies today, that excel in customer centricity
they excel in these three levels and that's fantastic
But the question is: will this be good enough for the day after tomorrow?
And the answer is very simple: it won't be good enough.
You won't be able to achieve the customer service levels that people want
if you don't add artificial intelligence to that
any sector, any company around the world.
So it means that we're at the edge of a new focus.
You know, if you guys had a PowerPoint somewhere with a strategy in 2013 that says,
from now on we're a digital first company. That was okay. That was good in 2013.
Today, that's not good enough anymore. Today its mobile.
You guys are working on them. You have the mobile site.
A lot of companies don't have that. But today it's mobile first.
There's no one in this room sitting here with a laptop.
And there's 100% sitting here with a mobile.
Every industry, mobile first. But tomorrow, it's gonna be artificial intelligence first.
And it's that move that we need to talk about.
How can we move from digital first to artificial intelligence first.
And I would urge you to look at the world with that information that I'm sharing with you today.
And you will see it every single day.
Mark Zuckerberg presented his ten-year roadmap of Facebook a few weeks ago.
This is no longer about uploading pictures and videos.
This is about artificial intelligence. That is what these guys are playing with.
I've got another demo of something that's not live yet
but that RayBan is developing right now.
And it's eCommerce through bot in Facebook Messenger.
So imagine that you want to buy sunglasses and you're saying,
"Okay what do you want? Okay, I'm
150 max price for men aviator design."
"Okay," the bot says, "Let me pull up the five most popular ones."
"Okay let me take a look. I like this one here. All right! Looks good yeah."
"I want that one." Oh, but the bot says, "You need to try it on. Like in a store."
Okay, I'm gonna try it out see if it works.
"Hey how about your girlfriend? Let's FaceTime your girlfriend here to see if she likes as well."
"Yeah she likes it."
"Okay. We're gonna deliver it tomorrow by Uber business at your address that we already know."
Now imagine this with your products.
You go how many? Two million? Five hundred thousand? I forgot. It's a lot.
A lot of products. Huge amount of products. It must be hell to find your way through that.
So, I can imagine that the search is one of the most important things for you guys.
Imagine something like this would be fantastic
that's artificial intelligence first and that's tomorrow's customers world.
And I'm convinced that people will start to make more decisions
based on an algorithm than ever before.
Today, we still make more emotional gut feeling decisions.
That's gonna decrease. And that means that there's gonna be more pressure and pressure .
That's that's the bad news about this
But it's not new. It is something that was invented I think by Amazon.
They started with this in 1995 already. When they kicked off they said,
"If you buy book A you need to buy book B
right?"
If you ever done that, you made a decision based on an algorithm.
Same for Netflix. If you like House of Cards, you will like something else.
If you made a decision based on that, you made a decision based on an algorithm.
But we're gonna see it everywhere in all kind of markets.
This company, I really like to work for. Maybe you know them, it's ISS.
It's a facility management company. one
of the largest in the world.
A Danish company. A payroll of 500,000 people, huge company, traditional industry.
But these guys set up a partnership with IBM Watson
to see if they could apply AI in their facility management world.
And what they're doing is brilliant. They're testing it out now with a few companies.
They're installing sensors actually in the facilities of their customers
and they do two things with that.
First of all, they can give more knowledge to their customer about how the facility is
being used if certain meeting rooms are used, some meeting rooms not.
If certain restrooms are used more often than others.
So that helps them in their facility management.
Next to that they do now services in a perfect timing because they set with coffee machines.
We were always like too early or too late to refill the coffee machine right?
And you're never there at the right moment .
Through the sensor information, you get there at the right moment
So the cost for them is lowering and the service is higher, it's getting higher.
And I think that's fantastic to see how actually a B2B company in a commodity business
is using an algorithm to improve their services.
But believe me, all these things that's still the Mickey Mouse part of algorithm based decision making.
I think it's gonna go much deeper in our personal lives than we can imagine.
Think about health care. Think about how we will take decisions, our children, not us.
We're gonna be to - yeah it's gonna be difficult for us
but our children, imagine how they will take decisions
about their personal health based on algorithm and information you get from data.
Are you guys familiar with 23andMe?
A fantastic company started by the founder of the - started by the wife of the founder of Google
their goal is to create a biggest database of DNA samples in the world.
$99 and you get a full analysis of your DNA.
It gives you the information that you are an above average or below average potential
patient of breast cancer or Alzheimer's, all those DNA related diseases.
Now some people are saying, "I never want to know" and other people are saying, "I really want to know right now."
But millions of people are already taking decisions
based on those kind of information and algorithms on their health today.
The most famous one is a guest here today. It's our good brave lady here.
Angelina Jolie, she was in the news with
other things lately.
But you may remember why I pull up this slide right now.
In 2013 she wrote this breathtaking piece
this breathtaking column about her personal health in which she says,
"Look I've done this kind of research and I've figured out."
"I found out that I have an 87% chance of getting a very aggressive form of breast cancer."
"Well, I'm not gonna sit here and wait until that disease strikes."
"I'm gonna go for pre-emptive surgery to make sure that I will never get that disease."
Now I don't know what you guys think about this.
But this is heavy stuff. This is very personal. This is very brave. This is very emotional.
But it is, my friends here at RS Components.
It is making a decision about your health based on an algorithm.
Now, if we're going to do these kind of things imagine what it means for your business.
It's gonna be the Mickey Mouse part. If you will need a component spare part of
something that's Mickey Mouse decision-making compared to this.
So it's gonna go really, really fast and I think
that's a mindset that we need.
That we're gonna see this more and more
and that we have to make that evolution from digital to mobile to AI first.
Amazon Echo is another example. I think it was released recently in the UK.
You have it now. We don't have it yet in Belgium, in Holland.
But I've seen it in in the U.S. It is a huge hit for Amazon.
they almost got two million installed pieces of this right now
and if you look what people do with it on the one hand you know
it's basic stuff like setting a timer, asking for a song that's fun.
But what really triggered my mind was this year.
Buy something on Amazon Prime, one out of three people that means that about
600,000 households in the U.S. are ordering something from a device like
this one through a voice control controlled interface.
So they're actually saying, "Alexa buy me the DVD of The Lion King" and Alexa says, "Its on its way, Steven."
Now imagine how this will change search, how this will change interfaces in eCommerce.
The company, I don't know if the guys from Google on in this room
but the company that is really scared to death about the Amazon Echo thing
is Google, of course, because this could kill search as we know it.
It's no surprise that they launched this thing extremely fast, extremely fast.
30 percent cheaper than Amazon's. 30 percent cheaper.
They're extremely afraid because they think that this could replace their 70 billion dollar market.
And they have to figure something out to replace that.
Just imagine how we would buy airline tickets in a few years from now.
You have a bot in your house and you're saying,
"Okay, dear mister Googlebot. I need to go to Barcelona. Get me a ticket for any airline."
And my Googlebot starts to talk with the bots of the airline.
Or maybe if I need a hotel, my booking - my Googlebot will start talking to booking.com.
An booking.com, the bot of that company will start to talk to the Starwood bot.
The guys from booking.com are afraid of this because today we look for hotels on Google.
They spent five billion on Google advertising.
So you cannot book a hotel without using booking.com, but what if Starwood
makes a bot that has a great relationship with Google, then they overrule booking.com.
We don't even know about it anymore.
We don't care about it anymore as long as you have we have a good hotel for a good price.
This is not happening tomorrow, but I think
this will have be happening in the day after tomorrow at five years to this
technology and it's going to be the most normal thing in the world.
So this evolution is happening at high pace.
Now part of that means that convenience is getting higher and higher.
I think it was on on the slide of Guy and his presentation that said make our life easier.
I fully agree with that. This is my mantra: convenience is the new loyalty.
People don't fall in love with brands. They fall in love it interfaces today.
And people are extremely, you know, flexible with interfaces.
I love this one. The leaves are falling. Don't clean them like this.
Just use your drone to clean the leaves from your front yard.
It's gonna make you look a lot cooler for your children.
But this is my favorite, you know.
If you're getting your hair cut you need a little jacket like this one.
If you don't get that it's an old-school place that you're going to.
So change a supplier at that moment.
But we see all these new interfaces just popping up and they have one thing in common.
They're extremely, extremely easy to use
Now let me ask you a question: Who sometimes uses booking.com raise your hands?
Okay. Same as always. 95% market penetration.
Can you shout out a few things that you like about booking.com.
What do you like about booking.com? Okay this is the interactive part in my presentation, okay?
The reviews...yes.What else? personalization..yes, you have to speak up a little bit
Free cancellation, that's a winner,  absolutely. What else?...pricing, a lot of choice.
Have you tried the app? App is really good.
No pre-payments most of the time. Anyplace in the world you will find a hotel.
Second question: who is secretly a little bit in love with the brand booking.com?
Okay this is crazy right? We've got a 95%
market penetration of booking.com in this room.
If I ask you to shout out positive things it's very easy we love the interface.
But the brand, we don't care about it.
I was at their place yesterday.
I've done - I've told him about this experiment and it made him really, really sad.
They think no one, no one loves us.
But they know that and they know that they have to put something next to that.
But that's, I think so interesting to see that people don't buy from a brand anymore.
They buy from the interface.
Think about Uber. Uber is fantastic. I love the interface.
But do I care about the company or the brand? Not really anymore.
And that is a challenge for companies that don't have that digital DNA.
This is a challenge for you guys. You are doing a fantastic job!
But still, this is the challenge compared to those digital native companies
And I made a short video too really prove my point.
We want your customers to use your app or your mobile site.
If they want to order something,  most of the time it works perfectly but sometimes this happens.
Now let's watch this a second time and pay attention to the role of the father.
This is not about your company. It's about all other companies.
This father plays an important role in all other companies.
He's the customer service department that arrives too late at the scene of the crime.
It's a challenge. The interface is becoming the brand
and this is not jump something that I just stayed here with gut feeling.
This is research-based.
This is a very important article from the HBR, from Harvard Business Review
Customer relations are more important than brands.
They've done a study and they looked at
thousands of companies their acquisition value
and they figured out that in 2003 the main driver for a value of a company was its brand.
Intangible right? Intangible. Disney.
Customer experience, customer relations was important but less than the brand.
Over 10 years time, this has completely flipped.
Doesn't mean that a brand is unimportant.
It just means that a brand has become less important than a customer relation.
Now how do they define customer relation?
The work of existing repeat customers that are known in person.
I believe that this is a huge step forward for you guys
because you know you're all your customers right? You know them by name.
You know where they are and they're all of them, I think, repeat customers right?
So this is extremely value driven.
This is an asset that you guys have that not many companies in the world have today.
And it's the key driver of growth and value creation at this time.
The interface is the brand, so you know them.
Now you have to make sure that that interface work perfectly.
Make their life easier and they're gonna buy like crazy.
And this is exactly how interfaces are evolving right now.
This is the old world, remember? The VCR remote control?
300 buttons we didn't know why we had them. But hey, we got them, free of charge.
Now we're evolving towards easy-to-use interfaces.
Tomorrow we're gonna have automated interfaces
and in the day after tomorrow, we're gonna have augmented interfaces.
And you see that evolution happening right now.
Amazon is a brilliant player in this field. They truly understand that evolution.
I'm sure you're familiar with Amazon Dash,
the small buttons that you push put next to your coffee machine or your  dishwasher.
If you're out of coffee you just push the button automatically
the products gets added to your Amazon shopping basket
and one hour later they deliver it if you're an Amazon Prime member .
Brilliant, brilliant.
But, some people are saying, "This is not good enough you know."
One-hour delivery if it's toilet paper, that is kind of risky.
We need to do better than this. So Amazon said, "Ok, the one button thing that's easy."
"But we have to move towards zero  buttons automation."
And then they're starting to work together with companies
that are making washing machines, laundry machines.
And what if they put a sensor in that machine so they know exactly how often you use it
so they can send you detergent before you actually know that you need it
and you get a subscription from Amazon and they just send it to you.
That's a really interesting model for you guys to look into.
If you know Amazon Prime, right? Amazon Prime.
Half of the US population is an Amazon Prime member which is crazy.
They're actually paying $99 a year to become a loyal customer.
They're paying to become a loyal customer.
In the old world, that was like buy 10 breads and get one for free.
That is not creating loyalty. It's decreasing margin.
These guys are letting their customer pay for a lock-in
and half of the Americans have done that.
Today Amazon can deliver at 44 percent of the U.S. population within half an hour time.
Imagine that they have sensors in all these household machines
and that they offer a subscription model to Amazon Prime members
that they're going to deliver this as soon as Amazon knows that they need it.
This is a Trojan horse like we've never seen before in the retail industry.
Walmart must be scared like hell for a system like that.
Why couldn't you invent the Amazon Prime for your business, you know.
I think we need to learn from these guys and just steal their ideas.
They have pretty good ideas and no one else in B2B is applying them.
It's just waiting there for you guys to steal their ideas but convenience is the new loyalty.
I'm convinced that this is the mantra of today's digital world.
Today, the world is moving from simple to automated.
Many companies are still stuck in complex.
If you want to win, you need to make this movement as soon as you can.
Now,
I really believe that even though I talked a lot about technology
that the consequence of all these evolutions is more important than ever
and the consequence of these digital evolutions are very simple.
The customer is more demanding than ever before.
Digital first actually means customer first without compromise.
And I'm afraid that again the big technology companies are leading players in this field.
I take many European executives to Google in Silicon Valley.
We, last week, I was doing a trip there.
Then we go to 20 or 25 startups and bigger companies to see what the vibes are.
And this is my favorite slide if we go to Google.
I don't know if they will present it to you guys later on
but this is my favorite slide because it shows their commitment
And I would invite you even to take a picture of this
and share this with your teams because it's quite amazing.
If the user can't spell, it's our
problem.
If they don't know how to form a query, it's our problem.
If they don't know what words to use, it's our problem.
If they don't speak the language, it's our problem.
If there's not enough content on the web, it's our problem
The last one is maybe the most impressive one.
If the web is too slow, it's also our problem.
I think this is strong. We all know that many companies blame the customer
if something goes wrong or if a customer doesn't use it
we're saying our other customer is not smart enough.
We were too fast for our customer.
No. If the customer doesn't use your stuff, it means that your work wasn't good enough.
And this is fantastic and just plot the innovations of Google next to it, you know.
If they can't spell well, they autocorrect you and they say,
"Hey Steven you probably meant this." And they're always right. They're always right.
And they don't point a finger they say, "All right now. Don't worry about it."
If you don't know how to form a query they also fill it out
and most of the time they're right.
You don't speak the language, they've got Google Translate.
Web is not fast enough? That's not their responsibility.
It's the responsibility of the ISPs and the TelCos
but they launched balloons that fly from Brazil to New Zealand
and back the entire time to speed up the Internet in those in those regions.
So they are actually doing this and you see that
people adore that quality of delivery more and more.
But most of all, it doesn't really have to do with technology. It has to do culture.
It has to do with the mindset.
Again Amazon.
I recently bought a bunch of gift vouchers of fifty pounds from Amazon
and I made a mistake about 20 of them too much.
So I was worried.
I was worried that they, that there was like an end date on those gift vouchers.
What's the average end date in the UK for a gift voucher?
A year? Yeah, same in Belgium a year.
Now. I'm starting to doubt if the companies that give you those vouchers
if they're really, if they want you to use the value?
Or if they hope that you won't use it so that they can just cash the margin completely.
Sometimes I have a feeling that they're hoping for scenario two.
So I was worried. So I said. "Let's look at the small letters here in the Amazon vouchers."
Ten years.
Has nothing to do with technology.
That's just a mindset. We're not gonna do the one year thing to,
to you know, take advantage of our customers.
I don't know why it doesn't have an end day. There's probably a legal reason for that, I don't know.
But ten years is something else than one year.
Every time now that I get a voucher that has a one year date limit on it I become angry.
I've seen this. It's too late, it's too late.
This is not technology. This is culture.
Earlier this year, i was at Zalando in Berlin.
I was impressed. I have to admit, I showed them a case study that happened in Belgium.
A Belgian newspaper. A journalist tested out two service levels of Zalando
They bought a bunch of clothes and they basically destroyed them.
So, they used scissors, they used paint, they used toothpaste, and they destroyed them
and then send them back to see what will Zalando do right?
You can already guess what Zalando did. They just refunded the money no question was asked.
For many people that was the evidence that Zalando would never have a stable P&L.
For some people, that was the evidence that they're not well organized.
But the truth is they're pretty well organized and their P&L is improving quarter after quarter.
This is just a mindset and we talked about them and we said, "Guys, how does it work?"
"You know, if you have so many people that take advantage of your rules, how does it work?"
And they asked us a question. They said this.
They said, "What kind of relationship do you want with your customer?"
"A relationship based on trust or relationship based on control?"
And they said, and I think they're right they
said,
Most companies have have a relationship based on control.
Which means that if you have a fantastic customer service idea
and one customer takes advantage of that. That you organized a meeting,
and you say, "Hey our customers can't handle that. We need to change the rules "
And if you change the rules it means that you're lowering your customer service, right?
Who are you punishing?
The normal customers.
Just the 99% of your normal customers
What Zalando does is completely different.
They believe in a relationship that's based on trust without being naive.
So you can fool them once, right? You can do that once.
But they flag you in the system.
You can betray their trust even twice. That can happen in a relationship.
No problem. They flag you too, twice. But three times is strike.
And if you do it three times they will hunt you down, and they do whatever they can
to make sure that you will never ever buy again at Zalando.
They know who you are you. They know your credit cards.
They know your work address and your private address.
They know the kind of clothing style that you like.
So, you will have to go through an identity
switch basically to be able to buy again from Zalando.
But they will never ever punish their 99 percent normal customers
And that's a relationship based on trust. And I think that's important.
I think that's a form of extreme customer
centricity that we're not used to.
But these guys are doing that and they're raising the bar.
And what you see until now in my presentation is that we're
actually entering this world of automation right?
And I have to admit, it excites me.
I cannot wait until everything is automated and I'm really really excited about that.
But in today's world many people are getting scared because of this and they're thinking,
"Okay if customer service is being done by a bot like we've seen, what's gonna happen to my job? "
"If sales is gonna happen through a bot and an automated interface what's gonna happen to me?"
And I think that's a very normal question at this point
because we see in the news that people are getting fired.
and then the reasoning behind it is automation.
So in customer relations, do we still need humans? I don't know.
Let's talk about that. The good news is if you lose your job I found an alternative.
You can guide people that are still playing with their text messages and with their phones.
You actually save lives by doing so. So there is a way out. So, don't worry.
But it is it is a very good question. It is one that we need to address.
I'm convinced that humans are crucial in
customer relations.
But I'm also convinced that the role of humans in customer experience will completely change.
It will change completely and drastically.
And that will happen fast
because of the digital transformation humans will have to change as well.
And the human service is going to become a more premium service than ever before
But if we want to be extreme customer centric
a company like RS is going through a double transformation
You guys need to become a digital business. 70 percent of your business is digital.
So in fact, you know, you are a digital business, but you guys became big.
You're an old company. You're a very successful company .
You became big because you have better people than the rest of the industry.
You're better than average that's because you were successful and that's why you became such an,
you know, long-living company.
Now at a certain moment you guys felt we need to move, you know
we need to move digitally and then you have two choices:
you can do this or you can do that.
If you go to this quadrant it means that you're actually
replacing the strength by a weakness at that point because when you start out
your weak in digital, you're still strong in humans.
So moving into this quadrant for most companies like yours it is a suicide mission.
Because Amazon will always be better in digital than you guys.
So if you want to fight here, you need to play digital on an Amazon level
I think there's only one good strategy for you guys.
It's going to this quadrant where you're really, really good in digital
but you make the difference through the humans.
And if you succeed in that, you create a new sort of customer relationship
where you use the strengths of digital and you combine them with the strengths of humans.
And at that point, you reach that point where digital becomes human
I think as humans we need to be open to this
I think what we're going to see in customer relations is a move from AI to IA
which means that we going to work with those systems
and it's going to be intelligence augmented
I think we're going to be able to deliver better service
thanks to the augmented intelligence that we get from the artificial intelligence
But the question is, what do humans need to do if computers can do so much
And I think the answer is very simple.
I told it in the beginning of my talk.
We need to be good in those things that computers are not good at.
And in today's world that's easy.
Emotions, computers are not good in emotions.
Probably 15 years from now, it's going to be
a lot more difficult for us to find something that we can  that the machines cannot do.
Let's talk about that in 10 years.
But today it's emotions, empathy, passion, creativity,
that's what I expect from the teacher from that of my children.
That's what I expect from my financial advisor.
That's what I expect from a customer service person that I speak to on the phone .
That's what I expect from a salesperson when I actually see someone in real life
You don't meet emphatic passionate creative computers.
But you meet a lot of people that are good in this.
If you would look to your sales and service machine
and you would get the people that excel in those departments
I'm sure they're excellent in these skills.
And the funny thing is the more digital the world becomes the more valuable this is
and that has everything to do with an old economic law.
And that's the economic law of scarcity.
If something becomes scarce it increases in value.
The human part and customer relations is becoming scarce
and because of that it becomes more important than ever before.
and I think that's a huge opportunity.
Just a few sentences to to show you what I mean.
Computers personalized, people make it
personal.
It sounds the same but it's completely different.
Personalization is about data.
It's important. Personalized personal, it's
human emotion.
And we have to go to Kenasalar.
Ah this is my favorite company in the world.
It's the local fish store captain Chris run it and it's a normal fish store.
They don't have a Twitter wall in their store
They don't have screens they just have great products.
But they have something that sounds easy but is very, very unique.
They have this authentic interest in their clients. These are the kind of people
that remember the names of their clients. They remember and remember the family relations.
They know that I have two small children. So they're always like two little bags with candy
that are gonna be hidden somewhere in a little bag with fish.
They know that for certain fish, I like to add lemon to it and for others that I like to make a sauce they know that.
And they're gonna add some surprising ingredients in my little bag because they know that I'm gonna
be delighted when I see that. They always
have like postcards ready handwritten
cards because they listen to what happens in the town and they have
cards to congratulate their customers or to send condolences to their customers.
And you know what the great thing is? These guys they don't have strategic meetings.
They don't have budget plans.
I'm pretty convinced they don't even have Microsoft Excel running on their systems.
I think they just have that in them and because of that
they're still in business and because of that they are extremely successful
they make it personal and that works like crazy today.
Computers predict, people surprise. Think about this one.
When was the last time that you had a positive surprise ready for a customer of yours?
Because in today's world we don't get positive surprises anymore.
We check everything online before we go to an experience.
If you go to a hotel you check it out up front
If you go to a concert, you Youtube to the concert to see if Coldplay is worth the 100 pounds per ticket
and then you buy it because you think, "Okay that looks cool."
If you go on a city trip to Rome you're standing in front of the most the Colosseum
and you think, "Oh yeah exactly like Assad and Google images."
You know our world my friends this is really sad
because our world is like this we go offline to check if what we saw online is actually right.
That we play the game look for the seven differences around the world the entire time.
So positive surprises are extremely valuable because they're scarce.
This is one of my favorite examples. You know you are in a cool business
but imagine that you're in a boring industry like washing windows from office buildings.
Well if you then have the brilliant mind that when your people have to go
and wash the windows of a children's hospital and you put them in superhero suits
Wow! That is a positive surprise you cannot Google that.
Now you can, but before that you couldn't Google that.
The hospital lobster hopefully the children loved it and those four guys have a cool story
to tell to their buddies when they go to
the football during the weekend.
And this is a two hundred euro marketing action and it's for superhero suits.
If you think that too expensive buy them on eBay it's cheaper.
Computers deliver, people over deliver. I think in this world we need people that don't follow the script.
We need people that don't follow the process in favour for the customer.
Because computers follow the process.
Google follows the process. Booking.com follows the process. Facebook follows the process.
They cannot color outside of the lines. You guys can, humans can.
And we need them because that's what customers value that they know that there was an
additional effort done in favor for them.
Even if the customer was wrong, even though, that's when you win the business.
Computers confirm and people can smile.
You guys became world famous by the sentence surface with a smile.
That's what you want to bring even more in the company.
Well that's when you need humans.
Computers they send an email say, we've got your order it's going to be delivered tomorrow.
But you need two people for the smile
And I think this is gonna be the biggest differentiator that companies have today.
I think the digital part will be the easy part for everyone.
You can buy that you, can program it, you will outsource it.
You know, you just have to get a few more people over the canyon.
But at the end of the day it's the easy part. This is the most difficult part.
This is the most difficult part, but also the most valuable part.
And it's interesting to see how digital and human parts just work together.
And to round it off, I just want to summarize a few things.
This is the slide that I started off with.
I really believe that this is the future of customer relationships for a company like yours.
Use digital as much as you can, you guys are a digital company
and your business is coming from digital.
But if you can use that to create you know the space
and the resources to create that additional human layer
then people don't just fall in love with your interface
but they also fall in love with your brand.
And it's based on that law of scarcity the human part is becoming scarce
and because of that it's increasing in value.
But the role of humans is changing.
Its from more operational work to more emotional work.
Means that you guys are facing a double transformation
not just a digital one also the human one.
And again the human one will be the most difficult one of the two.
But there's no other choice.
Markets are becoming digital markets. Every market is becoming digital.
AI is moving in rapidly. You need to speed up your game in that field.
So there's no other choice than to be digital.
But at the other hand, this presentation is also like a warm invitation
to think about how you guys can add value through the humans
and add a layer of emotion in a commodity business.
I think that's gonna be crucial to make sure you keep your margins where you want them to be.
And that you reach that point where digital
becomes human.
