 From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center here in Sunnyvale, California. They had a really cool thing today. It was a customer experience day, brought a bunch of Comcast executives and a bunch of thought leaders in the customer experience space. We're excited to come down and sit in and talk to some of the guests and really excited about our next guest because he's an anthropologist. He's Brian Solis, digital analyst, author, analyst, anthropologist, futurist. Brian, you got it all going on. Thanks for taking a few minutes of your day. Of course, and this is a really great conversation, so I'll be here. Absolutely. So first off, just kind of impressions of the conversation earlier today, talking about customer experience. The expectation, consumerization of IT is something we talk a lot about where people's expectations of the way this stuff is supposed to work change all the time and what was magical and almost impossible like talking on a cell phone in your car. You know, suddenly becomes expected in the norm. So how do you think of this as you look at kind of these big sweeping changes that we're going through? Well, today's conversation, I think, has been sort of a spotlight on what's most important, which is innovation, not for the sake of innovation, but innovation for the sake of pushing the customer experience forward, changing customer behaviors in a way that's going to create a new standard for experiences. And that way, you become the leader in engagement. Everybody else has to catch up to you. And what was so important is that we're here in a company with all the love that wasn't the best in customer experience several years ago, and now they're sort of one of the pioneers in what customer experience needs to be from a technological standpoint, a customer service standpoint, and an overall experience standpoint. Right. I want to jump into the voice capability specifically because I don't think there's really enough accolades as to what Comcast has achieved with the voice remote. I think if you don't have it, you don't know it's there. And the ability to migrate across hundreds or thousands of channels, multiple services to find the show that you want with just the ask of your voice is amazing. What's even more amazing is trying to teach people to actually navigate that way. So changing people's behavior in the way they interact with devices is not a simple thing. So it's come up and it's an expression shared in many UI and UX circles, which is the best interface is no interface. And in many ways voice was the next frontier. That's a frontier that was pioneered, I think at a mass level by Amazon and Alexa, Apple and Siri, Google and OK Google. We're really starting to see that voice as a UI is much more natural. What makes it so complex is all of the backend. I think Comcast has done a really nice job in the simplistic linguistic engagement of saying the name of a TV show or a genre of shows or movies. And then the backend to be reimagined in order to bring you something that's not just this long list of stuff that is much more intuitive and helps you get to what they call time to joy much faster. That's game changing, right? But that isn't just something that Comcast looked for example to just Alexa or anything specifically it looked and also especially not to other cable companies. They looked to the best in class experiences in every area to pick those parts and build something all together and you know that becomes a new standard. And I think voice, one of the things that you and I were talking about Jeff earlier was kids, right? There was a time where they would walk up to a screen and they still do to some regard, where they want to do this. But I have a three year old at home who has a toy remote control and I had a record video from afar of just watching her talking to her toy remote. Mickey Mouse Club, Mickey Mouse Club and just sitting there with all the patients in the world nothing was happening but expecting that something was going to happen and it's just a new standard. The other thing though is that we're not done, right? We now live in an era of AI, machine learning, automation. So personalization now is really going to start to build upon voice experiences where it's just simply turning on the TV is going to give you instant options of all of the things you're most likely going to want to watch all on one nav. Right, it's just, we say that and yet we still have QWERTY keyboards, right? Which we're specifically designed to slow people down and yet now we're not using ARM typewriters anymore and we still have QWERTY keyboards. So changing people's behavior is not easy and it's interesting to see kind of these generational shifts based on the devices in which they grew up using kind of define the way in which they expect everything else to work. But it's, I still get the email maybe or even they talked about here at Comcast where instead of just saying in C2A football it knows I like to watch Stanford football, it suggests maybe you should just say Stanford football. So there's still kind of a lot of education, surprising amount of education that has to happen. Yes and no. If you think about the conversation, I often talk about it in terms of iteration and innovation. Iteration is doing the same things better, innovation is creating new value. And if you look at the evolution of the remote control I mean just go back 50 years it has gotten progressively worse over time. In fact, on average today's remote control has 70 buttons on it, right? And if you think about iteration in that regard we've completely started to fail in the user interface. I don't know that anybody has mastered their relationship with the remote control except for some geeks. So I think if anything voice is going to change the game for the better. Yeah, I was in the business for a long time and now we know it killed the VCR right? It was the flashing 12. Nobody could ever get the flashing 12. And for all the young people look it up on the internet you'll figure out what a VCR in a flashing 12 is. So you talk about something called generation C. What is generation C? Why should we be paying attention? Oh look I think voice is a good example of generation C. So anybody who use, you mentioned QWERTY, right? I don't know that I've actually even used QWERTY in a sentence in a really long time but I'm old enough to, I trained on a manual typewriter back in the day. So it doesn't mean that I don't get it. It means that my behaviors and my expectations as a human being have changed because of my relationship, my personal relationship. So for example in consumerization of technology and IT my personal relationship has changed with technology. And so what I had found in my research over the years especially when it comes to customer experience if you study a customer journey and you look at demographics of these personas that we've created you can see specifically that people who live a mobile first lifestyle regardless of age will make decisions the same way. They're increasingly impatient, they're demanding, they're self-centered. I call them accidental narcissists. They want time, convenience are really important. They want personalization. Their standards are much different than the personas that we've developed in the past. And so I gave it a name which was Generation C because it wasn't one or C stood for connected. It wasn't one bound by age or traditional demographics, education, income. It was defined by shared interests behaviors and shared outcomes. And it was a game changer for all things. If you're going to point innovation or customer experience or whatever it is and you're going to aim at that growing customer segment then they're going to have a different set of needs than your traditional customer. But it's just so bizarre again how quickly the novel becomes expected baseline and how the great search algorithm that we get out of Google which is based on lots and lots and lots and lots of data and a bunch of smart people and a whole bunch of hardware and software. Suddenly now we expect that same search result if we're searching on, I don't know, some pixel random retailer or some other random website when in fact that is special but we have this crazy sliding scale of what's expected and how can companies kind of stay out in front of that at least Chase close behind because it's a very different world in how fast the expectations change. I'm sorry, I totally spaced out because my attention span went away. I'm just kidding, I'm kidding. But that's the- I didn't get to the attention economy question yet. It's, you're competing at a much different level today and I think that's what's so disruptive for companies is that they're still thinking that momentum and progress and experience and performance and success. I always say success is the worst teacher when it comes to innovation because you're basing your decisions on the future based on things that you did in the past. So what do companies need to get is that the customer is changing. I'll give you an example. I think in many ways, companies compete against Uber, right? Because Uber has changed the game for what it takes to get a service brought to you and to give it to you and take you to where you need to go where time and convenience are big factors of that. So for example, one of the things I studied was how long is too long to wait for an Uber before you open lift in certain markets? And the reason that I wanted to do that was I wanted to show you that the number went down every single year. Now, for example, Uber will advertise in Sydney that the average pickup time is three minutes and 39 seconds because it knows it and it's a competitive advantage over everybody else because it's important because once that experience happens to you and you get something your way fast, you're not going to suddenly realize when you're at the department of motor vehicles that, well, I understand that this isn't Uber and therefore I shouldn't expect to have things done in a much more efficient personal manner. You take that mindset subconsciously to everything you do. So while it's a threat, it's also an opportunity but you got to break that executive mindset to say, how can we take best in class experiences across the board and how can we apply it to what we do? Yeah. Now you had an interesting concept in the conversation earlier today where there was a question about ROI and you threw it back as ROE, return on experience. So how should people start to adjust their thinking? Because the thing on return on investment implies almost a very small kind of direct impact kind of one-to-one benefit. Where really return on experience implies a much broader kind of accidental benefits, benefits across a lot of parameters that you may or may not necessarily be measuring. It's a very much better way to measure your investment. Look, it's almost impossible to get away from the ROI conversation. It's important, executives have to make decisions based on what they know the outcomes are going to be. A lot of this is you don't know what you don't know and so if you can tie some types of rudimentary metrics that are going to show progress and also return, it helps, but at the same time, I always say what happens in the ROI equation if I equals ignorance? What's the return of ignorance? What's the return of not doing something? And so what I tried to demonstrate in a book I wrote about experience design, which was called X, it was let's break it down to what we're actually trying to do. The word experience actually means an emotional reaction to a moment. And so for example, in a high sales pitch situation like a dealership for an automobile, that's not a good experience. If you have to call customer service, you've probably not had a good experience and all of those things are emotional. So if you can design for emotional outcomes where people are going to feel great in the moment and feel great afterwards, that is a metric that you can have a before and after state. The likelihood of attaching that emotion to things like loyalty, customer lifetime value, growth, then you can get to your ROI in a different way but you have to first do it with intention. Yeah, Brian, fascinating conversation, we could go all day but unfortunately we're going to have to leave it there but thanks for joining today and thanks for spending a few minutes with us. Thank you, thank you, it was a pleasure. Absolutely, he's Brian, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at the Comcast Innovation Center in Sunnyvale. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.