Gritty innovation, and scaling CX with data and AI

Featuring Lauren Inman-Semerau

VP of Customer Experience at PACT

How PACT plans to deliver great experience with smaller teams

When Lauren Inman-Semerau joined PACT as VP of Customer Experience, she inherited an 11-person team managing 13,000 conversations monthly with disconnected systems and no engineering support. Instead of accepting the false choice between efficiency and personalization, Lauren chose both. In this episode, she shares her tips for proving AI ROI, bringing teams along on the AI journey, and using data to drive creative experimentation.

13,000 conversations. 11 people. Zero engineering support. Lauren Inman-Semerau, VP of CX at PACT, reveals how she's preparing to increase growth without increasing headcount, and why traditional CX metrics are already obsolete. Watch the full breakdown.

Lauren doesn't accept the trade-off between efficiency and personalization. She watched the early ChatGPT rush, when companies wanted AI to eliminate the human touch, and she says the two go together. At PACT she oversees everything after checkout, including fulfillment, supply chain, returns and exchanges, and the resale program, and she runs a lean team. Her approach starts with letting AI take the conversations that don't need a personal touch.

"How do you take the things that don't have to be personalized away and have your AI do that so that the radically personalized things can be done by humans? And I think even that is shifting now."

Lauren Inman-Semerau

VP of Customer Experience, PACT

Lauren always names her AI, and at PACT it's Willow, "your partner in wellness," a name PACT's brand president picked. At the time of recording, PACT was still setting up Gladly. Lauren used to refuse to let AI answer sizing questions, and now she's setting Willow up to handle them, along with questions about restocks and new releases.

She says the executive conversation about AI has flipped in the past year. Many of her peers now have C-suites asking about AI before they understand it, so the job is helping them filter out the noise. Lauren grounds it in strategy: what you want to accomplish, how the tools get you there, and what ROI looks like in three months, six months, a year, or longer.

With a new team, Lauren didn't have the trust she'd built over years at Rothy's, and on day one her team looked her up and found out she was "the AI lead." So she asked one team member to help build Willow by testing it with real customer conversations. About 90% of the answers were good, and within a day of testing, that team member told Lauren it would make the easy stuff go away so the team could spend more time with customers who need real help.

"And so that unlock is, I think, key. And having people help you by being transparent is the unlock."

Lauren Inman-Semerau

VP of Customer Experience, PACT

Lauren expects some standard metrics, like average conversation time and SLAs, to matter less once AI is available around the clock. She's watching first contact resolution to see whether the AI resolves conversations or customers bounce back, and she expects revenue generation, like saving the sale on returns and exchanges, to become a major measure for CX. She also sets up AI on purpose to hold the line on rules like final sale. Customers who push for an exception reach a human, who can make it and earn the good CSAT.

Before CX, Lauren was a nanny in Malibu, a job she says taught her to handle a hundred other jobs at once, from charity events to soccer practice. She may also have appeared in the background of a very early Keeping Up with the Kardashians episode.