The Future of CX, Quantum Computing, & 5G

Ryan Purvis  0:00  
Hello, and welcome to the digital workspace works podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines, the problems they face and how they solve them. The years they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took, they will help you to get to the scripts for the digital workspace inner workings.

How's this? How are you?

Heather Bicknell  0:36  
Good. I'm How are you?

Ryan Purvis  0:39  
Yeah, not too bad. Thanks, I got a different angle on us today.

Heather Bicknell  0:43  
Yeah, I am already using my laptop as a second screen, but I don't really have room for it on my current desk. But with my once I get my new standing desks set up, they won't be so odd. Right now I kind of have to shuffle it off to the side and hope it doesn't fall off the desk.

Ryan Purvis  1:04  
When when are you expecting your new selling desk.

Heather Bicknell  1:08  
So I got I've gotten most of the pieces delivered this week. So requires a little bit of assembly. So doing that this weekend, but super excited to start experiencing that.

Ryan Purvis  1:21  
Yeah, I remember my foray into the standing desk guide to bullet twice. Because the instructions were the ones that did the one that I bought, everything came with a one one pack, and the thing is very heavy. So I took it apart downstairs took it out the box downstairs and it carried up piece by piece upstairs. And somewhere in that process, I got the pieces backwards. So I put it all together and then realize the tabletop was backwards. So I had to take it, you know, and it's heavy. So you're lifted up, you're tilted over again in the right position. And they know that areas are upside down or back for friends, I had to take a tip over again and start again. And I'd also ordered holders to put the screens on two screens. And I there was no really place to put those on the on the table. Yeah, to drill your own holes. So I had to I had to measure that old out and turn it to the edge. I mean, it was you know, I supposed to be a half an hour job took me two hours, I think at the end.

Heather Bicknell  2:20  
So yeah, lots of fun practically built the the thing yourself at that point, if you're drilling holes.

Ryan Purvis  2:26  
Yeah, so you think they'd have but I suppose there's no real standard for that kind of stuff. So

Heather Bicknell  2:33  
yeah, mine came with it comes with this like board for you to stand on. I don't know how, if I'll end up really using that that much, but excited to see. Like, the Balance Board. I

Ryan Purvis  2:45  
used to have a balance board. I don't have one with me now. But I missed the Balance Board. Do you do it? You use it? It's actually quite a lot of fun.

Heather Bicknell  2:53  
Yeah, yeah, I think it'd be I think I just don't tired of sitting in the same position all the time. So I know by standing I'm naturally going to be fidgeting and you know, you can't just your legs will get tired. So excited. Yeah, switch it up.

Ryan Purvis  3:10  
Have you got carpets or no hardwood? That you need to get a match? standard?

Heather Bicknell  3:17  
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ryan Purvis  3:19  
Yeah, no, I fasted for a week without one of those. And I had to get to them because your feet get sore.

Heather Bicknell  3:23  
Yeah. That, you know, finally finally renovating the home office after nearly a year of work from home. But that's, that's how it goes. I'm really slow to make purchases, and especially big ones like that. I think I was holding out to see if this was truly, you know, a permanent thing for a while. And then you know, now very clearly it is.

Ryan Purvis  3:50  
Well, yeah, I mean, you guys have a lot of stones as well. So it makes sense to you to have a good setup at home.

Heather Bicknell  3:57  
Yeah, it's hard to get outside for activities. So anything I can do inside to move a little bit more I need to do right now.

Ryan Purvis  4:06  
Good stuff. Good stuff. Exciting. So it's all exciting. I just wanted to get my links up that I sent you. Did you have a chance to read them at all or not?

Heather Bicknell  4:19  
I did I skim through. Like I like I like I messaged. I am not not too. Definitely not an expert in quantum computing, or 5g. So but I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are.

Ryan Purvis  4:36  
Well, I just thought they were interesting. So maybe thought of 5g. So the reason why these were interesting for me, is you know, I've been in South Africa and the spot that I'm sitting in is on the edge of a 5g zone. So I'm very keen to get it once it expands to where I'm where I'm working every day and Why'd was interesting is I started reading up on on there, what's the differences, obviously, this is just a next generation of, of radio frequency communications. And I was looking at some of the use cases, and one of the biggest drivers behind 5g besides value propositions rather, besides obviously, you could have a higher rate of connectivity or bandwidth is lower latency. And this becomes really interesting when you think about, you know, supply chain, and internet of thing, or sensor type use cases where, you know, you could now in the manufacturing world or, or just even self driving cars, you need that low latency in order to control things, or capture data centrally. So I think it's gonna be quite interesting. I mean, it's, it's something that it's a natural progression for us, because I think trying to lay cable everywhere, in order to deliver the throughput. Hello, it's not a realistic thing to achieve. But having something like this 5g radio frequency, or really be game changing, and with us all working distributed, for the most part we're in we're in open spaces are known here, and if in effect, you you'd have issues with radio signals, but in all these houses, you know, you don't need to know cable to all these houses, you can all just be on the same spectrum. I think it's gonna be quite fascinating, and quite a big boon when it comes out.

Heather Bicknell  6:32  
What is the 5g timeline? Like?

Unknown Speaker  6:37  
Anything? It's

Heather Bicknell  6:38  
really going to be? Yeah, good to be here.

Ryan Purvis  6:40  
I think I think various countries looking into that level, or rolling it out already. And is obviously the company's telecommunication companies inside that are rolling out things. I think what slowed it down is obviously COVID to an extent. So you might have, you know, we probably would have seen it already. I mean, I know, UK, I think would had sort of said end of last year, you'd have 5g in the major metropolitan areas. And in South Africa has got a you know, that that tells me it's that it's been pretty close to being rolled out. Because you know, that's, that's a it's usually a lag of sort of four to six months. So I don't know in anytime now, we should have it all rolled out and everyone can use it. But I think it's been slowed down by COVID. So let's say into this year, how in the next two years, at least, but that's pretty short term anyway. But then

Heather Bicknell  7:41  
for a certain to a certain extent, you need devices that can i capable of using it, right?

Ryan Purvis  7:48  
Yeah, so So here, we've got to provide a cold rain, and they actually rent to a I mean, it's just another wireless unit that you plug it in to the wall and capture the signal so most most new phones and new tablets and that will have 5g chips already. So I think I think the iPhone 12 does already and the Samsung equivalent has already so you know it's not that big switch over for you as a consumer providers, you got to you know, a newish device which probably is not the challenge a lot of the consumer side the challenges on the infrastructure side getting all the towers upgraded to to push out the 5g signal and handle the contention ratios that they need to handle.

Heather Bicknell  8:38  
Well yeah, looking forward to seeing what that's like certainly been aware of all of the all of the hype and some of the conspiracy theories in the rear yard backlash So yeah, that's that's really it. That's really been where 5g is coming. My under my radar is just the strangeness there.

Ryan Purvis  9:03  
Yeah, I don't know how people can can have what's what's the thing I always see a LinkedIn just because they come out at the same time does causalities not the same as coincidence is something really

Heather Bicknell  9:13  
fun and yeah, causation. Yeah, I think you know, I think, you know, new technology is often very scary. So I guess it's not surprising from, you know, anything that gets talked about is this is going to change the way we live. You know, change is scary in and of itself. And then technology for a lot of people is like, you know, it's it's tiny little chips and binary and just things that like, you know, it's just, you can't unless you have a certain amount of literacy, you just can't. It's hard to really understand what it all means. So

Ryan Purvis  9:52  
yeah, well, I mean, any anything you don't say in technology for some people like magic. And I say that and says this too. It's the Dark Arts people don't understand. So they think it's bad. That's not to say that we don't know what the damage is to ourselves. payday loans is a long term studies that say that this stuff's actually safe or not. That'll Only time will tell. Yeah, the other one that I sent you three, so that the second one is quantum computing. What I liked about that article was was they did like a chart with me to get the chart up at all. They sort of had six stages. So it was bystanders, beginners, learners, professionals and legends. And that is sort of adoption ratio. They said the adoption ratio was 2.9, out of five. And I think what was interesting for me is that they were talking about organizations started to hire quantum data scientists. Which I thought was a pretty cool title for for job.

Unknown Speaker  11:01  
Yeah.

Heather Bicknell  11:04  
Basically, like, it's, yeah, sounds like, you know, rocket scientists, the same sort of just like, very high tech kind of title.

Ryan Purvis  11:15  
Yeah. And I mean, the the interesting thing for me is that the, they're talking a lot about pharma doing adoption and building systems, which are, I was quite surprised considering, while it was a surprise, it didn't, I didn't think about it, then I realize like, Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Because they want to do things that are at a molecular level. And you need to be able to process data at a higher volume than you've been able to. So yeah, this is just an interesting article, I think we have to go into too much depth. I mean, they didn't, it was just that there's been a huge uptick. If you look at another graph there, which is the the private equity investment, how it's gone from, in 2015, is kind of just starting to go up. And then 2016 is like this rapid increase, you know, number of number of QC co startups founded has gone over 50. And the volume of investment, or if private equity investment, you know, sort of $50 million but rapidly invested, which shows us this breakthroughs coming.

Heather Bicknell  12:25  
Microsoft, there's some Microsoft quantum computing thing that they had announced and then had to sort of take back a bit set some Does that ring a bell?

Ryan Purvis  12:38  
I think they announced a toolkit. And then they had they sent out a big one actually was about two weeks ago. And then it was an error.

Heather Bicknell  12:49  
Yeah, that was recent, I guess. Yeah,

Ryan Purvis  12:51  
I'm just, I'm just reading it. Now. They said they had a 2018 paper, they said they found evidence of an elusive theorize particle. And then they did further investigation in this election addresses an era. But that's I think that's a sign should be, you know, you should be able to make unless you make a claim. But you can put something out in the news to be battle tested. And then if it doesn't pass through the battle testing, that's it's really it's free. revoked. Yeah, so if you had any other thoughts on that one,

Heather Bicknell  13:24  
you know, not not particularly, I guess my understanding of quantum computing is just really, for the most part, like, you know, it's very rudimentary, like computing in 3d, like very, very strong computers. And, you know, computation beyond our wildest dreams, basically, is my understanding. So it is interesting to see sort of more talk of that being applied. And I guess, I'd be interested to really know more about use cases for, for that kind of a thing.

Ryan Purvis  14:01  
The only one that really resonated to me was the the molecular level analysis work they were doing, which would put you in that, especially now would make a lot of sense to us. Yeah. But But beyond that, I mean, I read a book on quantum computing years ago. And I'll be honest, not much of it really resonated or made sense to me. I read it to finish it, but not to, to be able to use it. I think, I'd like to do some actual courses on it in the future, but I need someone else I needed that to be developed. You know, I'm sort of once it's hit the hit the hump. That's what I want to get to know about a thought but it's on the rise up.

Heather Bicknell  14:43  
Yeah. Yeah, maybe maybe in a few more years, but sounds like it's getting there. So yeah, I mean, do you want to talk about the third third article?

Ryan Purvis  14:59  
Yes. So the third one was the future of cx or customer experience. And I thought this was really cool. So, a couple things that I want to pull out of it sort of are my notes. So one was that one was the use of surveys and how powered lowly or low the response rates were just surveys, you know, sort of less than 7%, which, but you know, survey can really be a good way to capture information. But what they're saying is that this is not the way to do it, which, you know, we've known for years. And there's a big drive here for Well, what they talk about is that the is the full flows, which was limited, they're reactive, they're ambiguous, and they unfocused, which, you know, if you think about all the bad servers, you could ask to fill in, I mean, how many times you actually fill them in? Unless they only ask you like, one question that you might just do even to what I liked about what they talked about is how telemetry was being used to help you with your experience. Now, obviously, there's a level of privacy that has to be considered. But that collecting data about what the customers doing what's, what pages they go to, when they leave the site, what do they What do they spend time on hotspots on a page, that kind of stuff. And we thought about doing a web application. And when they got to into sort of predictive customer insights is, is building that big data lake where you consuming all the information, and you just basically dumping it all in one place. And then you can continue working through that, in order to build that matrix and pause and journeys and that kind of stuff, which is some of the stuff we did backwards, I knew when I was in financial services for internal systems, those solutions for debt appealing was to build a big data repository that you're using as a way to solve use cases. So they go through that at a good level, they took about a customer level data lake, which is in this case, customer financial and operational data, but it'll depend on what your use cases are. And then using scoring, and an action inside engine scoring, you know, very, very useful just to keep it simple. But the action insight engine, that's where you want to make decisions quickly. Now, a friend of mines runs a business called singular decisions. And that's what they're doing. In fact, I think we should get him on to have a chat around subscriber management. So you're on you're on a subscription to, you know, like YouTube TV or something like that. Google TV or YouTube TV, I can't remember the US. Because Google TV.

Unknown Speaker  17:29  
Yeah, no, no,

Ryan Purvis  17:30  
yeah, whoever it is to go to you got Hulu got Netflix you've got. And what they're doing is they're collecting the data. And they're providing based on their experience of doing this for 20 years, they're giving you the triggers, in order to keep your customer consuming, so you don't leave. But you might get a better deal. So instead of and we used to do this with with one of the providers in the UK, whenever your contract was about when you sign a contract, and you want to get out you phone them and they give you a better deal. So let's say was you're paying 100 pounds a month, you get locked down to 60. And then when that they'll do that for like six months, and then when that coming to the end, you find them again, is still gonna leave and then they give it they give you another discount, it still stays at about 60 minutes 59 you just keep it at that low rate the whole way through. So you always feel like you're you're benefiting Meanwhile, you're still paying, still paying them a spread, keeping this this this amount of people consuming the whole time. So this, this sort of Article made me think specifically around what singular decisions is doing. Because that's what what it's about is using data to make good decisions. And then the last thing that which is a really nice thing at the end of the document is how to turn your data into insight and action. Because that's, that's sort of one of the challenges you have with data is everyone wants a dashboard. But the dashboards almost too late. You want you don't just want to see your data, you actually want to see what's been done with your data. And that should be what's visualized on your dashboard. So yeah, nice, nice document, there's about four steps to actual insights while their transformation of data and deep satisfaction, and yeah, we'll put the links and they'll be able to read, but I thought was really cool.

Heather Bicknell  19:15  
Yeah, this one, I think it's the most accessible of the topics. So definitely was able to ponder this one a bit more. And it's also more of a white paper. So there's just more more to read on it a little bit, a little bit less theoretical and more something that I think people are moving towards today. But I thought you know, the insights around it was kind of funny, they they open talking about how you know, surveys will still very useful because this report is based on a survey aren't good. Which I think you know, there's probably something to be said for well designed surveys and a significant sample size, but I think the overall sentiment is, you know, finding other ways that you can use data about how your customers are interacting. I mean, I think, you know, something that doesn't get touched on with the the drawbacks of surveys is, is also just, you know, if your customers are just getting a survey from you, they're getting a survey from, you know, many other companies that they're interacting with. And I think at a certain point, people you know, they just, they saw you to live their lives and do their jobs and can't, you know, a lot of surveys take some time to respond to so being able to, you know, make decisions based on their passive activity is very appealing. And I have some experience with a little bit of this kind of technology to see sort of predictive behavior based off of online and web activity. And it is, it is, it is interesting. So I'd be curious what sort of vendors are filling the space today, that's something that they don't quite get to or for, it's mostly sort of, like, like you were doing internal teams building these models themselves based on the data that they have?

Ryan Purvis  21:26  
Yeah, I think it's, it's sort of the gap where you're gonna have a system integrator filling the gap. So you'll have you'll have products that exists with all the tools you can use. Can when we did it, we used Informatica with sequel that backend to begin with, and then we looked at Green plum for the big data stuff. Nowadays, you could probably put all the stuff together using you know, something is hosted in Azure or AWS using cafta or spark to transmit the data in and put into an event sequence and store the data in a data lake. So you can build a, you know, 10 different ways, I think that's the issue, I think that the real issue is, how do you you got to have some IP or some contextual knowledge that helps you turn that data into something useful. So the example of singular decisions is they are they've been in the subscription business for TV for 20 years. So they know how to keep a customer you know, happy and and subscribe to the service. But I'm going to turn it into analytics that you make decisions with, and instead of having a human on the, you know, get involved all the time, there should be only there for the exceptions. So for example, My my, you know, my thing with with the TV provider, when it comes to the fifth month, and I'm about to phone them, I should just get a message on my phone saying, Hey, Ryan, we're going to keep you on at your same price. In fact, we've thrown into extra movies a box office for you, I don't have to get it out of the phone. Because that wastes my time and data save me time and then the brand loyalty will go through the roof because they just know, I know they know that they've taken care of my my interest, and I'm gonna do it anyway. And and they've kept me as a loyal customer for forever. Now, they might be as tolerated, still canceled, but for different reasons. But you saved your economics on that a good? Yeah, I

Heather Bicknell  23:21  
think it's interesting. I think a lot of these use cases are sort of b2c, but there are definitely b2b applications as well. And I think just the move to subscriptions for everything has made focus on cx so much more. I think it last few last few years, it seems like there's been a much more active CES cx motion. People are recognizing the sort of the value to that more, and, you know, being able to quantify it and effect that journey more than we have in the past. But I think a lot of it does come down to more and more subscription models, you need to you need to keep people around. So you need to focus on their experience more.

Ryan Purvis  24:09  
Well, exactly. And that's, that's what we should be getting into technology is this ability to make us use our brains for the right things, not not just for, you know, did work for a better term. Super, super ended up there. And then Yeah, I think so. Super. Thank you for listening today's episode. Hey, the big news app producer, editor. Thank you, Heather. for your hard work for this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DW w podcast. The shownotes and transcripts will be available on the website WWW dot digital workspace that works. Please also visit our website www dot digital workspace that works and subscribe to our newsletter and lastly If you found this episode useful, please share with your friends or colleagues

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