Today, we got a rare chance to speak to Mr. Evan Tanuhardja, Head of Presales APAC at LivePerson. Evan is a seasoned technology leader with more than 10 years of experience in the AI and customer experience space. He heads up the Presales team for LivePerson, where he played an instrumental role in helping LivePerson's customers and prospects digitally transform their customer experience strategy through the use of AI.

To know more about his opinion on CX in the ASEAN region, read the full interview below:

1. To begin with, How is LivePerson handling customer experience challenges with the use of cloud and AI?

• Cloud-based technologies overcome physical limitations associated with traditional contact centres. Messaging agents can engage with customers wherever there is mobile phone connectivity.
• AI makes it possible to scale customer engagement to previously unseen levels. Instead of handling one telephone conversation or two chat conversations, Conversational AI makes it possible to have up to eight or sometimes ten simultaneous and meaningful interactions.
• AI makes it possible to convert multi-language conversations on-the-fly and auto-summarise them at the end of the conversation. Conversational Assist bots observe all conversations and provide helpful suggestions and take over part of the data collection, transaction or fulfilment.

2. CX is turning into the main focus and is becoming a competitive advantage in the market. How will the adoption of AI affect business?

• AI helps organisations become more effective in how conversations are conducted by freeing up resources to do the part of the job that (for now) only humans are good at: empathy.
• AI will affect the shape of the workforce; contact centre agents that know how to effectively resolve telephone enquiries will become conversational designers, chat bot builders and bot managers.
• AI will greatly improve the real-time analysis of customer sentiment and organisational performance. Automated sentiment detection on each and every conversation will free consumers from the dreaded CSAT and NPS surveys, while giving organisations a much more comprehensive understanding of how their customer base's customer experience

3. What are the five levers that drive customer experience?

• Human-centred Design
• Customer Journey Design and Implementation
• Employee Experience
• Automation Design and Implementation
• Scorecarding and dashboarding across the four dimensions listed above plus: efficiency, effectiveness, emotion and effort (the LP 4E framework)

4. How CX centers of excellence are becoming mandatory in all of our corporations?

• Digital-native organisations are driving up consumer expectations
• To meet the technical and organisation challenges this digital-first transformation demands, organisations must deploy multi-disciplinary teams that can solve them across of broad spectrum of competencies
• This is all the more important in intermediated businesses, like life-insurance brokerage, car dealerships, travel agencies and the like, that increasingly are sidelined by their erstwhile partners who are seeking a direct relationship with consumers.

5. Tell us about the session that you are going to host at the show and how you believe it will be instrumental in creating a comprehensive roadmap for those in attendance.

• In this session we will explore how transformative business in media, finance, telecommunications, hospitality and government have transformed themselves in the last 24 months
• We will share our roadmap that follows an agile "start small, think big, gro fast" pattern that: gets organisations started fast, provided the data insights to make informed decisions, scales through automation, improves customer satisfaction and NPS, and - most importantly - transforms the way your staff and end-users engage.

Thank you, Evan. It’s a pleasure to speak with you. We hope you enjoy your experience speaking at World CX Summit, ASEAN.