Experts of Experience - #33 The Power of Proximity in Enhancing Customer Experience

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

On this episode, we explore the concept of proximity and how technology is enabling products and services to be delivered faster and tailored to individual needs with authors Robert C. Wolcott & Kaihan Krippendorff. They discuss real-world examples of proximity, such as vertical farming, 3D printing, and on-demand pharmaceutical production, and highlight the impact of proximity on customer experience demand, including the expectation for customization and immediacy. The conversation also touches on the sustainability benefits of proximity, such as reducing waste and greenhouse gas emissions, and the importance of cross-industry exploration and learning from other industries to stay ahead of rapidly changing customer expectations. Key Takeaways:Proximity is the ability to compress capabilities into smaller packages and distribute them closer to each moment in time and space.Technology is enabling proximity in various industries, such as vertical farming, 3D printing, and on-demand pharmaceutical production.Customer experience demands are shifting towards customization and immediacy, driven by the expectation of personalized and fast delivery.Proximity has sustainability benefits, including reducing waste and greenhouse gas emissions.Cross-industry exploration is crucial for staying ahead of rapidly changing customer expectations. Never assume you know what the customer wants; continuously challenge yourself to discover and meet their evolving needs.Understand the complete customer journey and avoid myopically focusing on your own strand in that journey.Embrace technology to enable proximity and deliver value to customers where and when they need it.Think beyond the current constraints and envision new possibilities for your company and its offerings.Facilitate workshops and conversations to encourage out-of-the-box thinking and explore the potential of proximity.–How can you bring all your disconnected, enterprise data into Salesforce to deliver a 360-degree view of your customer? The answer is Data Cloud. With more than 200 implementations completed globally, the leading Salesforce experts from Professional Services can help you realize value quickly with Data Cloud. To learn more, visit salesforce.com/products/data to learn more. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org 

What if you could produce food on demand? What if you didn't pick the tomato until someone walked into the store and wanted the tomato? It wouldn't go bad the next day. This is proximity. This is bringing the production close to the moment of demand. So you only produce what exactly you need.

The real constraint is our imagination. The real constraint is our ability to think about the models within which our companies currently operate. How do you stand back from the standard model and envision how it can transform? Everybody can look at a new technology and say, what can this allow us to do better that we already do? That's great, but that's not enough.

The big question is, what can this do that we could never have done before? And that's where breakthroughs come from. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. For today's episode, we are going to discuss how customer expectations are changing and how technology enables products and services to be delivered faster and tailored to individual needs. It's a big topic and it's something that we talk about a lot on this show. And today I'm joined by two guests, Rob Walcott and Kaihan Krippendorf, authors

of the newly launched book, Proximity, how coming breakthroughs in just in time transform business, society, and daily life. So on today's episode, we're going to discuss the concept of proximity and how CX leaders can stay ahead of rapidly changing industries, consumer behavior, and customer experience expectations as a whole. Rob and Kaihan, so wonderful to have you on the show. Great. Thanks, Lauren. Yeah. Love your podcast. It's great to be here. Amazing. Thank you so much. Well, to kick it off, I would love to just give a quick intro

for the both of you, because I know you both have deep backgrounds and expertise. So I'll start with Kaihan. Can you please give us a quick blurb on who you are and what you're all about? Yeah. Well, I organize a group of chief strategy officers and we're calling an organization we call Outthinker Networks. I've also published five books. This will be my sixth. My passion is really strategy and innovation.

And I also have a podcast. And so that whole world of digital experience delivered through innovative strategies is my passion. Amazing. And Rob, how about you? I'm a professor of innovation at Kellogg and Booth, the two business schools in Chicago. And I've co-founded a group called

the World Innovation Network or Twin Global. And really happy to be here with you today. I summarize my personal professional purpose as helping people envision the future and finding their places within it. And it couldn't be anything better than your podcast. Thank you. Well, let's start off by defining the name of your book, Proximity, because this is really a concept that I know both of you have been studying and thinking about a lot

over the years. So one of you or both of you, please explain to us, what is proximity to you? Sure. Well, the word itself is just the word. It means how close or far you are from something, your proximity to something. And Kaihan and I have said, we're going to usurp that word. We're going to usurp the word to mean something very specific about technology, business, the future, in much the same way that disruption has been usurped in a very productive manner to mean something very specific. So what is proximity? Proximity observes the fact that digital technologies of all sorts have one common underlying characteristic that drives change in

the economy, and that is they allow us to compress capabilities into smaller and smaller packages and distribute them all over the economy ever closer to each moment in time and space. And we've been seeing this for decades, but now it's exploding everywhere. And as a result of the distributed nature of digital technologies, getting closer to each individual moment, each individual consumer at each moment, digital technologies push the production and provision of value, product, services, experiences, ever closer to the moment of actual demand in time and space.

And we don't just mean like a little better supply chain management. We literally mean setting us up to procrastinate and do as little as possible until there's an actual customer ready to buy our product, service, or experience. That's proximity. Great. Could you give us an example, some real-world examples of how you've seen this concept of proximity really embedding itself in our world. There are many, and we can share ones that are kind of emerging. But go back. Amazon has one with proximity, getting what we needed closer to when and where. But when we overlay on that, say, 3D printing, it's actually going to allow us to produce things closer to when and where it's needed, right? So you see dark factories that are robotically enabled getting smaller, and we can economically put them closer to, we see a lot of car parts, which costs more to ship than to manufacture, getting 3D printed closer to where. So I just want to kind of open

it up that what I think is changing is while digital experiences have always been able to be delivered closer to the moment, also now physical experiences or physical elements of the experiences are also going to be able to be delivered closer too. Lauren, that's a really important point Kaihan made. It's digital, but it's also physical and they're converging. So two quick examples. In December of 2022, I visited the largest vertical farm in operation in the world. It's in Dubai. And it's a partnership between Bustanica and Emirates Airlines. And first of all, I got to say the produce grown in this place is as good as anything in a French farmer's market, no offense to the French. But the exciting part for me, the next morning, and this is part of the reason they shared this with me, because they knew what Kyan and I were working on. The next morning, and this is part of the reason they shared this with me, because they knew what Kyan and I were working on.

The next morning, I got on my Emirates Airlines flight back to New York, and the lettuce in my salad was picked in that factory the night before. It was three miles from the airport. Now, compare that to the existing model. You grow lettuce in Spain. You harvest it weeks in advance. You put it on a ship. You put it in a warehouse and then hope it's, you know, edible compared to pick it right before exactly what you need, where and

when you need it. And then digital products, I mean, that's obvious. We already have proximity of provision on Netflix anytime, anywhere, anything. So it's coming for, it's been happening in digital for a long time. It's coming for physical all over the world. I'll just add to that. Miele, the German appliance manufacturer, for example, they have dismantled appliances and from the parts built what looks like an appliance, but it's actually a vertical farm that can fit in the, where your microwave used to be or where your refrigerator used to be, right? So this is actually a product

that's being sold now. So in both of those examples, right, you are producing closer to when and where. And it's really feeding this consumer desire of immediacy. Like we are now expecting things to be more immediate because we're seeing, I think there's very much so like an Amazon effect where we think, well, why can't I get this delivered like tomorrow at the latest? And it's something that I hear about a lot in the conversations that I'm having on this show about how leaders need to be looking to other industries, other verticals, and taking the inspiration from how are they really driving this customer experience in a way that is more conducive to what the consumers are wanting. And immediacy is very much a part of that. And I

think the digital world has really inspired the physical world in that way. And it's just something that we have to constantly be looking at. Like what are consumers really wanting? And not only consumers, but also in B2B context, like we are all experiencing the Amazon effect or the Uber effect of being able to have something right when we want it. And so I think this is so interesting to hear these examples of how companies are producing and they're really thinking about how their supply chain impacts their customer experience because it really does. Right.

Like if I get something right away, I'm going to like you more. I mean, if I like the thing you sent me, of course. But Lauren, to underscore that, your point about cross industry exploration, I couldn't agree more. You learn a lot more looking outside your space and then you can transfer and translate in by finding something somebody's already doing, they're making money at it. You just need to translate it into your environment. And actually, Kaihan and I designed the book specifically with that objective in mind. So as you know, the chapters are how we work, how we eat, how we create and produce, how we prevent and cure, how we power, how we defend. And the last chapter is about the two horizons of the 21st century, which are virtual reality and space,

which are both entirely proximate, which we can talk about later if you'd like. I would love to. Well, do you want to tell us a little bit about it now that we're here? I'll say something about space, Kion, and if you want to pick up a little bit about virtual reality. When we were doing research for this, we were reaching out to our friends in various industries and environments and saying, here's our idea. What do you think about it? What are you seeing? And one of the great people I reached out to in the space race is Dorit Dinoviel. Dorit is a professor of space health. Yes, believe it or not, that's a real thing. She's at Baylor University in Texas, and she also runs NASA's grant program for research in space health. And I was explaining this thing about proximity.

And she said, Rob, you know what? Everything we're investing in to drive research to help humans be in space is to drive proximity. I didn't know that. We didn't have that word for it. But think about it. If you're on a spaceship for seven months to Mars, you've only got what's on the spaceship. So it doesn't matter what you need, food, entertainment, health care. Let's say you have a medical emergency. You've only got what's on that ship and the other people who are there with you. So all the research and development going on everywhere on the planet right now to get us out to the stars is trying to figure out how to make proximity happen. So that's that's Horizon One space.

And then, Kion, if you want to mention something about virtual reality. Yeah, I mean, there's there's so many interesting things happening virtually, but just pick on space. You know, Japan Airlines has invested in a company that is putting like robots in spaces and that allow you to experience those spaces through you being an avatar. So, you know, it can hear, it can see, and there might be a robot, you know, perhaps at the Olympics in Paris. I don't know if it's going to happen, but you could be, and you could say, hey, I want to experience being at the Olympics and Paris. I don't know if it's going to happen, but you could be, and you could say, hey, I want to experience being at the Olympics and you can do that.

And going back to space, they also plan to also put this like in small satellites so we can experience space being there without actually having to pay the millions of dollars it would take you to get your physical body up there. I was interviewing someone at Niantic, the augmented reality company. And so it's really interesting to hear how they're using that technology to now allow, again, going back to the consumer and the people who are purchasing things to really enable them to shop by trying things on.

We don't need to drive to the store to go and try things on. We actually can just, in theory, put on a headset and see what we look like. Or even we don't even need a headset as much anymore. There's amazing tools and technologies that will allow us to like try on the glasses. And it actually works now. Like we're getting to a place where it's not like it was a few years ago where it was kind of janky, but now we can actually like see, oh, this is what it looks like. I don't have to spend the time to go and pursue the right item. It's right in front of me in this moment. It's immediate. Or view a house, right? Like, you know, I know you have some real estate experience, but, you know, drones and creating 3D experiences. And I can visit, I can do 50 visits in a day without having to leave and then decide where I want to go. So transmitting that physical experience in a digital form

allows it to just be right there in our living room at three o'clock in the morning. So it sounds like we're living into that less janky future. We already are. Yes. Actually, as you're saying that, because I was working at Compass, the real estate tech company when COVID hit. And for the real estate industry, this was a huge problem because agents can't show homes. So we had to come up with what's the virtual version of this? How do we build buyer trust in a property that they're going to purchase sight unseen? And I'm curious to know how you saw, and I'm not sure when you started working on this book, but how did COVID impact this push towards proximity? It actually was visceral for

people. So before COVID, I started thinking about this about 2014. I didn't have a word for it at the time. And then 15, 16, I started talking about it publicly. And it was clear to me that a few people were getting how profoundly different this proximate future was going to be. But most people would hear us and say, oh, you know, they're talking about better supply chain management. And I just slapped my forehead and I think, okay, we all love supply chain management, but that's not really what we're talking about. And then two things transformed the ability for people to see this because they felt it. One was COVID. And within a matter of a week, we're all thrust into our home offices and we're doing online meetings. And is it as quote unquote, as good as being together?

No, in some ways, but in other ways, it's actually better. I mean, look, Lauren, you, Kyan, and I can have this conversation from anywhere, and it's pretty darn high quality. It'll only continue to get more high quality. That's the first thing that opened people's minds. But the one that really blew them open was ChatGPT. Because when that launched in late 2022, we went from a world where if you needed a crappy speech for your daughter's wedding, you started with a blank screen. You worked for hours. You had a crappy speech. Now, you go to ChatGPT or Pyre or Claude or something. You type in a prompt.

And seconds later, you've got a crappy speech for your daughter's wedding. Now, you've got to edit it. You've got to make sure it's what you really want to say from the heart and all that. But you see how visceral and immediate that experience was. That's proximity in a big way. Yeah. And what both of those things did was suddenly surge demand for proximate solutions. Because let's say Compass was maybe talking to a tech company that would enable you to provide more virtual showings, right? And you might think, well, a certain percentage of our buyers or our sellers would be interested in that. Now, suddenly COVID hits and now it is everyone, right? So now it makes economical sense to invest in. So that also drove investment in proximate technologies.

Yeah. It went from a nice to have to a must have. Yep. Yep. Like right now. Yes. Overnight. Yes. So I'm curious to know, like, how is this proximate revolution, if we can call it that, how is it really reshaping traditional customer experience demands? What are people really asking for now that leaders of customer experiences within their organizations can really take note of? Well, one thing, and ChatGPT is one example of this, I think it used to be in the past about speed. I'm going to go pick something that I like that was maybe manufactured far away. And there might be a lot of other people who like that, but I want it quickly.

But now as the value gets broken down into components and can be reconfigured in a personalized way, we also expect customized experience. So it's one thing to listen to a podcast, right? But you can also chat, talk with chat GPT and sort of create your own interactive customized podcast experience, right? Going back to the cars, you know, I can have a car that has lights of a certain color that have my name on the bumper and, you know, and I can customize it. So it's raising the expectations of customization as well. I forget the name of it, but there's a Coca-Cola vending machine that you've probably seen it

in movie theaters and you can press a few buttons and you can get a hundred different, you can get your diet, caffeine-free, cherry, vanilla, Coke. The freestyle machine. Freestyle machine, right? And what it does is, I mean, that's been around for a while, but it basically, the value of mixing syrup with soda is not done in a bottling plant. It's done at the moment of demand. And so that not only reduces the cost because you're not shipping bottles, right? You're shipping soda and then a little bits of syrup. So it's more economical, but it also, because you're now taking value and putting it into smaller components,

it allows you to customize more. So now that it raises the expectation of customization. Yeah. Lauren, I'm not sure if you noticed it in the book, but there's a story of Dr. Jeffrey Ling, who with DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, who's a medical doctor for the Army, they developed a system to produce pharmaceutical drugs on demand. And I'm oversimplifying a little bit, but essentially it's like a refrigerator-sized piece of equipment that has all the basic components in. And if you need 300 doses of ciprofloxacin, it produces it on demand right there from scratch. Or if you need 1,000 doses of atropine, it can make hundreds of different kinds of

generic drugs. And this has already been confirmed by the FDA that they come out exactly like they do from the pharmacy. And it's already being rolled out a little bit in military, but there's a commercial application right now in Tupelo, Mississippi, and it's serving a chronically underserved community with chronic generic drug shortages for many years. And since they switched it on, they're focusing on six injectables first, just to test it to make sure it's right.

Since they switched it on in January, this hospital system in Tupelo, Mississippi, has had zero stockouts of any of those injectables for the first time in their history. This is proximity. This is bringing the production close to the moment of demand. So you only produce what exactly you need. And it's the same underlying technology as the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine at the Fuddruckers. Wow, that's so interesting. And it's something I'm just thinking about, like all the different applications of this

and also the added benefit of less waste too. Absolutely. I would assume even though the technology, investing in that technology is more expensive. If we think about the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine, they don't have, I mean, I really like the Cherry Coke. My partner really doesn't like the Cherry Coke. I'm sure some people don't like the Cherry Coke and maybe there's always cherry Coke leftover. And instead of throwing it out, it's just, it's there ready to be produced. So it drives less waste.

And as you know, 38% of the food that we produce is wasted. And 30% of the apparel worldwide. Worldwide. What if you could produce the food on demand? What if you didn't pick the tomato until someone walked into the store and wanted the tomato? It wouldn't go bad the next day or you didn't produce the shirt that no one's gonna buy, but you wait until. And so there are both social and economic drivers of driving us towards proximity. When you're using Salesforce

to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is not an option. At Salesforce, they get it. They've made their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, available to help you with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of your journey. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. I just have to share this stat. I worked in the food waste space in my last role at Too Good to Go. And I just want to say that 10% of greenhouse gas emissions come from food waste, from the whole system, but the inefficiencies in that system, because when you pick a tomato in Mexico and then you have to ship it to Idaho, that's a long time.

And that, you know, not all the tomatoes get put on the shelves and then not all the tomatoes get picked up off the shelves. And then the tomatoes go to people's homes because in America, especially we go shopping, you know, once a week, once every two weeks, those things sit in the fridge forever and then they go bad and we throw them out. And if we can create more proximity with our food system, we can really solve that problem. So I'm seeing all the benefits here. Lauren, you've hit on a really, it's a profound point. If we could stay on food for a minute, because we all like food, right? So in the book, we talk a bit about cultured meat. Now, cultured meats are not really ready for prime time. They can do them. I've

actually tried some cultured meat at Aleph Farms in Tel Aviv, and it was good, but it's very expensive to produce. But that cost of production is dropping dramatically and quickly. So we don't know if it's two years from now or 10 years from now. This will become a real thing. What does this mean? Well, cultured meat is not a meat substitute. It's actual meat fibers, actual muscle tissue that is grown in a lab situation with no living animals involved at all. So you eliminate all the ethical issues.

You eliminate most of the environmental impact. There's no methane emission. The water requirements for cultured meat are something like 99% lower than the way we raise meat today. So talk about sustainability impact. And the really exciting thing from a proximity perspective is I'm sitting in a bedroom in my home right now, that's what this studio is. And you could conceivably create a cultured meat production facility right here. You need to get some permits from the city of Ridgewood, New Jersey. But my point is a company can create these instantiations of meat production in an urban area in a small footprint and serve only what meat products are desired, needed in that local proximity, as opposed to buying thousands of acres, raising cattle, sending them to slaughterhouses. And it's extraordinary. There's no comparison in terms of supply chain and sustainability between these two models. And it's coming. It's coming in a big way. Wow. I'm just thinking like, how long does it take to

create like a steak or chicken nuggets or whatever? Well, it doesn't take a really long, it takes a lot less time than the 18 months it takes to raise a cow. But absolutely. So your cycle time is a lot better. Now, the big issues right now are not so much the tissue, but the texture, the feel, the tension on the teeth. But, you know, look, we'll figure it out. I don't know if it's a year or 10 years, but it'll be figured out. Oh, and by the way, Aleph Farms in Israel, they're working with some of the celebrity chefs in Tel Aviv to define their own special type of beef or type of meat. That each of those celebrity chefs will have the ownership of that special configuration of meat. And then once they get ultimately to market, they'll be the only ones allowed to use that specific kind of meat. So talk about customization.

Totally. So it's like it's customization, it's speed, it's environmental impact. It's wag you, you. Wag you, you all over the world. Oh, my God. I can't wait for that. So good. Wow.

So, I mean, this is, this is happening in so many different ways. And I love that you found this through line. It's something I've, I think about it, but I haven't really like underscored it in the way that you have. I'm so curious. Kaihan, you have something to say. I want to let you say it. One thing I think that's for, for, for, for customer experience people, I think to expand their scope is we've done some research and show that companies that are really outperforming their peers to get today, they approach the customer not as a single entity, but increasingly with compliments. So if you think about the experience of your customer, who's buying your, I don't know,

who's serving your coffee at home, right? They use your coffee, but they also use the alarm clock that tells them to wake up and they use the coffee maker, then they get milk, right? But their experience of coffee is a combination of experiences that are provided by multiple people, right? Now, as all those things start becoming more digital, your customer becomes a digital customer. We know what time they went to bed and what time they woke up because of their Apple watch, what time their alarm went off because the coffee maker goes on, where did they buy the coffee from? And we can start seeing the overall experience. And what that opens up is and requires, I think, of customer experience professionals is to start thinking about the full experience you are delivering to your customer as opposed to your small piece in that overall experience.

That leads to ecosystems. That leads to partnerships. That leads to APIs. It really changes the scope, expands the scope of what it means to be a customer service, customer experience professional. Oh, completely. I mean, how can we boost the experience of the core product that we have? How can we bring people into the ecosystem or the vision that we have for how they're actually going to experience this thing? Yeah. And go down to their job to be done and you are helping them get one part of their job done,

but you can start be elevating up to the overall job to be done. Kaihan, to Lauren's original question about this seems to clarify things, you're really good at saying how this clarifies things. So walk us through that. When things change, what stops us from acting on them is usually putting the pieces together. Probably a lot of your listeners are familiar with lean or agile or scrum approaches, right? Those come from a framework called Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act, the OODA loop, which is developed by a former military pilot and trainer called John Boyd. He would say, what prevents a fighter pilot from making sense of reality and reacting quickly is they see, they observe the environment, but they consider it as different pieces. So he would do this exercise and say,

take elements, take the handlebars from a bicycle, take the skis from a ski scene and take the treads off a tank. We think of them as three different things, but when we put them together, if you can see the snowmobile that that makes, suddenly you know what the next thing is. You're on the snowmobile, you're riding off in the sunset the next thing is. You're on the snowmobile, you're riding off in the sunset while other people are trying to figure out what's going on. So if we take AI, blockchain, 3D printing, digital products, geopolitical uncertainty, digitization, APIs, we take all of that, what I find is that proximity is the snowmobile. Suddenly, they don't look like individual things.

They look at one thing, and it allows strategists to then take the next action. Yeah. And I'll give you an example, Lauren, about how this becomes predictive as well. We can predict where things are going to go. Remember that proximity is based on the notion that digital allows us to compress capabilities in smaller and smaller packages. So we know we're going to see more and more of that. And then it's going to be distributed all over the place. So the book manuscript was done in like January. All done, locked and loaded, ready to go.

And we talk about large language models. Not a shocker. Everybody's talking about LLMs. We also talk about small language models. And this is not a generally known thing, but people have been working on those for a while. The idea of a small language model is compressing the large language model capabilities. You lose some of the clarity of the large language model, but for certain purposes, it's actually a lot more effective, right? So small language model for lots of different applications. So you know that's where it's going. What did Apple announce just recently?

They announced that they were going to develop and implement efficient language models in their devices. So Apple announced that they were going to roll out efficient language models, ELMs, across all their devices. Now, what is the difference between a small language model and an efficient language model? Well, that was exactly my question. Very good. Very good question. Well, absolutely nothing. Apple just likes to come up with their own name for stuff. Okay, so that's what it is. But the point is, you could see the large language model that run on huge servers in Iceland and way out in the cloud somewhere. And by the way, you access it anywhere, so you don't care where it's located.

But Apple says correctly, you know what, let's compress that capability and get it onto the smartphone. So there are certain things that they'll be able to do, even if they're disconnected from the network. And that's where it's going. We can predict this stuff. It's going in that direction. Wow. Talk about proximity. Just building it right into your device, which is actually kind of counter to what we've been doing the past couple of decades where we went from downloading something onto your desktop so that you can use it. Everything's been in the cloud. Now it's kind of coming full circle. It's a dance between the cloud and edge, the cloud and edge. And by the way, they both provide

proximity because proximity is not about where the numbers are being crunched at all. It's always about the value, the locus of value. Where is the value demanded and where is it provided, created and provided? So I don't care that it's on a server somewhere in the cloud. It's proximate because it's serving Lauren exactly where and when she needs it. Yeah, if I could build on that a little bit, the distributed computing overlaid with distributed energy, overlaid with distributed blockchain, which allows us to then produce energy closer to where it's needed, make payments between people who are producing it to power distributed computing, these distributed models then layer on top of each other, and they open up exponentially,

far more rapidly than they have been, the possibility of delivering proximity. And the key to distributed agriculture is distributed power. Having sustainable, economical, reliable power distributed all over the place is the key to distributed agriculture. And then when you have proximate agriculture, you solve food deserts. You provide high quality food, produce, et cetera, to wherever and whenever people need them. So these all nest, they all relate to each other. Yeah. I think I just want to underscore what you said because it kind of clicked for me is, where and when we need it.

And really thinking about the whole picture, where and when we need it. It's not just, I need these pants today, right now. It's also like, where are the pants being made? And do I get a say in that? And can it happen quickly? Or do I want them customized? I'm going to wait. Exactly.

Exactly. So it's taking it another step. Yeah. I mean, you probably have seen this, but Levi Strauss has been able to laser finish jeans for some time now, and they were doing it in their future stores before COVID that shut it down. I don't know what the status of it is right now, but it's proven it works. They take the standard pant. And as a consumer, you could go in and say, I want a rip here and stonewashed look there. And I want a picture of my kids on my butt. OK, so they throw it in the laser machine. 90 seconds later, you've got a demand planning team is at your company. You're not going to figure out how many pictures of Rob Walcott's kids on his butt to stack for a year from now.

That's entirely impossible. At least two. Yeah, at least two pairs. Totally. So the thing that I'm thinking about here is the real, the barrier to proximity. To me, it sounds like it's technology. It's having the tech that enables us to produce things where and when we need it. And how is that changing? And am I right there? That is like, if you take every product and you divide it between digital and physical, yeah, there is a physical component that has been difficult

to economically deliver approximately, but technologies are enabling it to be done increasingly so. Yeah, I mean, technology is, to an extent, a constraint, but look how fast it's moving and it's changing. I mean, generative AI is just one example

of how quickly this stuff is moving. So I think given that, and I think we all agree it's going to continue to move, right? So I think given that, the real constraint is our imagination. The real constraint is our ability to think about the models within which our companies currently operate, the ecosystems within which we operate, and standing back from and doing the stuff that Kai Han talks about when he talks about outthinking the competition. How do you stand back from the standard model and envision how it can transform? Because everybody can look at a new technology and say, what can this allow us to do better that we

already do? And that's great, but that's not enough. The big question is, what can this allow us to do better that we already do? And that's great, but that's not enough. The big question is, what can this do that we could never have done before? And that's where breakthroughs come from. Let's take Salesforce, right? Salesforce for years was talking about not software, not software, because it was trying to convince people that it's possible to do something without having it downloaded and run on your machine or in your... But once we introduced or someone came up with the term cloud, suddenly there was a metaphorical vessel that allowed us to adopt a different way of thinking. And then suddenly that opened the floodgates, right? So I think that there is a constraint of technology, but we are just scratching the surface. If all technological advances stop now, we still are just realizing a small portion of what is already currently possible because of the old mindset.

And by the way, Lauren, don't we sound smart? Metaphysical vessel or metaphorical vessel. I mean, that sounds really darn smart, doesn't it? I love it. Do you have any recommendations for our listeners and how to like pull back and think differently? Because it can be so hard when we have the way that we are working and we, you know, we have an idea of this is how the world works and this is how our product works and this is what our company does. But how do we actually like pull back and actually think about all these possibilities that maybe we can't even imagine yet? How can people get into that headspace? Well, I have one and then, and Kaihan's been thinking a lot about this, actually facilitated a number of workshops with companies to think through proximity strategy. But where we always like to start is with the customer. And by the way, you have to think about the customer's customer as well, depending on where you are in the world.

But start with the customer and ask yourself that. We all think we know what the customer wants, but we also should recognize that that changes over time. Their expectations are rising every day because of all the things we're talking about. So start with that customer and say, really challenge yourself to discover what might that customer want if they could have anything at all? What would that customer want if they could have anything, anywhere, anytime? And don't let reality get in the way when you have this initial exploratory conversation. We'll reintroduce reality later.

Don't worry about that. This is an exercise. What would that customer want related to you if they could have anything, anywhere, anytime? And that's where this thinking starts. Yeah. And I think dreaming big. Dreaming big. It's easier to dream big when you get people to just zoom out.

Zoom out 10 years from now and create many instances of time between now and then. And then it kind of liberates people from their constraints and then say envision what we call P equals zero. And customer experience professionals will know how to envision the emergence of the need, that moment where the need emerges, and then just say, what would it look like if the need was identified and the value was created? The banana was grown in 30 seconds right there in the kitchen. It was mashed and turned into whatever and delivered, right? Everything that's a gap between now and then is an opportunity to innovate.

You look at what technologies are existing that could address those barriers. And from that, you could kind of triangulate on a few opportunities. The good news is it doesn't take much. You don't have to get there. You invested in Domino's Pizza 15 years ago. You'd have more money now than if you had invested in Google, a pizza company. All they did was give people the experience of getting the pizza earlier. You could see it being made or you know it was being made, know it's being quality checked. And so that allowed them to generate more value than Google's investment in technologies, you know, on a- At least over that period. Over that period of time. Fun fact, I had no idea, Dauphinos.

But a small step, right? A small step. You know, customers want it fast, right? So even a small advantage can give you huge value. So you don't have to solve all of it. And by the way, Lauren, in the appendix of the book, we have a proximity strategy workbook and you could, I mean, you don't even need us there really. You could take this workbook and go through the questions and fill on the blanks and discover what proximity means in your environment. So there are lots of tools to figure this out. But now you know where the future is going to go. It's going to start to produce and provide ever closer to the moment of demand.

And the people who are able to do it best are the ones that are going to win. Completely. So one, workbook. Thank you for including that in the book. That's so, so helpful. And then two, I think it's really important for everyone to think about having someone facilitate these conversations because it can be really difficult to pull out on your own. that normal way of thinking and being for a minute and really like enter into a new world of what is possible. And it's a brain exercise and it's not easy. And so it, having someone guide you through that is incredibly helpful. So it's great to know Kaihan that you're supporting

companies in doing that thinking. Well, actually, Lauren, not only is Kaihan supporting companies to do that, and I do as well, Kaihan is building a whole cadre of coaches and facilitators to become trained to use this methodology. And I'm excited to see that take off because as an author, as a professor, as a researcher, as a human, I guess, when you see what you're doing having a modest impact in the world, it's a really nice thing. I think this is a big impact, just saying, because this is, I mean, we are in the middle or I want to say on the cusp in the beginning stages of really massive change because of the impact of AI and the speed at which things are changing. We are all of a sudden, like, you know, let's say we have been in a horse-drawn carriage and now we're in a race car and we jumped from, you know, the slow way to like the really, really fast way. And it's time to buckle up. It's happening really quickly. I have just a curious question for you. I'm really curious to know, how did you come about this topic? What inspired you to write this book? I can tell you the exact moment when this started. I didn't say, oh, I'm going to write a book, but

the moment when the journey started. I was at a tech conference in 2014. I honestly don't remember which one, but you probably go to a lot of tech conferences. After a while, they all sort of blend together, right? And there was this period for maybe a decade around that time. Mercifully, people don't do this anymore. But there was a period for about a decade where every speaker at tech conferences would have two obligatory slides. One was Moore's law, you know, that slide that had the diagonal that goes up to the right and it's about, it's doubling. And they would stand up there and say, you know, every 18 months, and they're talking to a tech audience. And I'm thinking, do you really have to tell us that again? I mean, you know, it's a

profound, important concept. But after the 74th time, I got it. Okay. And then the next slide this guy had, again, I'm not going to name any names. The next slide this guy had was, and by the year 2030, a trillion devices will be connected. And you're thinking, okay, I think we know that. So I was stewing inside myself and trying to be polite, not letting on how annoyed I was. And I thought, you know, all this digital stuff is going to change the world. There must be some common underlying dynamic or characteristic of digital that if we could discern it, could give us foresight as to where the world's going. And so that was the genesis of this question, what is fundamentally different about digital? And that led quickly to, oh, what's different is, compared to the industrial age,

is you can take these capabilities and smish them down into really small packages and distribute them all over the place. And that eventually became proximity. Well, thank you for all those Moore's Laws slides. They actually got you to come up with a really great idea. 74 of them, Rob. 74 Moore's Laws slides. Sometimes the best ideas come out of frustration. Yes, yes, true, true. So I have two last questions for you and I'm going to ask them to both of you and I'm going to change one of them.

So typically I always ask, what is a recent experience that you've had with a brand that left you really impressed in the context of customer experiences? But I want to ask something a little bit different. What's a recent experience that you've had with a company that has gotten proximity really well, that delivered something to you with that concept of proximity really present? I moved down to Miami a year and a half ago and we had an organization, a company that was our moving company. And when I needed to get a mirror hung or something unpacked, I would call someone who would call someone who would call someone. And then two days later,

someone would come and then they would check whether they had approval to do this, whatever. And it was just so frustrating. And so I opened up TaskRabbit and that afternoon someone came and before long, we were just doing everything on TaskRabbit. We just sent a bill, right? That is, I think, a good example of proximity to talent. Yeah, I love that. I love that. So for me, and we actually talk about this in the book, December 2022, I was in Dubai and I was meeting with technology leadership at Emirates Airlines and telling them about proximity. And one of the execs said, you know what, everything we're investing in is to drive proximity. And I didn't know that, but now I have a word for it.

So I'm feeling pretty good about this. And at the same time, I also visited Bustanica, the largest vertical farm and operation anywhere in the world. And, you know, the lettuce and all. And when I got on that flight the next morning on Emirates and had that salad, and I knew exactly where it came from the night before that I felt something because it felt like I was experiencing the future in that salad. Tasting the future.

Tasting the future in the salad. So I aspire for everyone in the world to taste the future in their salad. I'm a big vertical farming fan. I think it's something, I mean, we should not have food deserts. It doesn't make sense. But you know, once you have distributed, renewable, sustainable power, we'll have food grown all over the place. That's the key. Yeah, completely. Amazing. So one last question for you both. What is one piece of advice that you think every customer experience leader should hear? I'd say never let yourself assume you actually know what the customer wants. Even if you're hitting on all cylinders, always challenge yourself to believe that you can do better, that you can find more and that your customers' desires change. I posted about this on LinkedIn. Were you like looking at my LinkedIn the other day, Rob?

No. Literally, you were like on, we're on the same page here. You're absolutely right. We assume way too much. Yeah. We can't assume. We need to ask. We need to find out what is it that they actually want. And I think it's actually important going back to the facilitating piece. And as we think about workshops and we dream about what is it that our customers want, I facilitate a lot of customer journey mapping workshops. And we can go through that process, but then we need to go and validate our assumptions. And not only ask them, you're right, the consumer journey mapping, ethnographic research, also become the customer to the

extent you can actually become the customer. And we'll discover things that they can't even tell you because they don't know it's a problem or they don't know that they have this desire because they didn't even know it was possible. Kaihan, how about you? Yeah, I guess I would go back to something I mentioned before is when you do that customer journey map, remember you were just like one thread in their journey. There's something they came to before. There's something they went to after. There are other things they're accessing and really think about the complete journey and avoid myopically focusing on your strand on that journey. I think that's such great advice. Well, thank you so much for coming on this show. I've learned so much. I'm sure our listeners have as well.

Where can folks find you to learn more about your book, your book and your work? Certainly proximitybook.net, proximitybook.net. And then I'm also at kaihan.net. And proximitybook.net. Did we already say that? And I am always on LinkedIn. I'm always available on LinkedIn. If you reach out to me,

mention that we met through experts of experience and then I'll have context. Awesome. Well, thank you both so much. I hope you have a beautiful day. You too. Thank you. Thanks, Lauren. You are a business leader with vision.

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