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Humanity in the loop, with Monty Hamilton
53 Plays7 months ago
Human communication has arguably transformed more radically in the last twenty years than it did in the 100,000 years prior. The combined forces of the internet, digital technology, social media, AI, and rapidly changing social norms, have reshaped how we connect with each other.
To discuss the profound implications of these forces on organizations and wider society, host Will Kingston is joined by Monty Hamilton. Monty is one of Australia’s most successful and respected digital entrepreneurs, having co-founded uBank, Australia’s first digital bank, and Belong, Australia’s first pay as you go fixed broadband product.
He went on to join the PwC Partnership in Australia, before joining Telus, a Canadian National telecommunications company, first as its Chief Digital Officer and now as SVP and Global Telecomms Lead for Telus International.
Get in touch with Acquis Cortico-X here.
Follow Acquis Cortico-X on LinkedIn here.
Reach out to Monty: [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction to Aquas Cortico X and Communication Evolution
00:00:00
Speaker
Aquas Cortico X is an experience-led transformation business that partners with clients and technology companies to drive digital acceleration. We are experience activists passionate about elevating everyday human experiences through the belief that what's best for people is what's best for an organization. Reach out to us for a chat. A link is in the show notes. Now cue the jingle.
00:00:38
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Speaking from Experience from Aquas Cortico X. I'm Will Kingston. Human communication was initiated with the origin of speech around 100,000 BC. I'll leave it to smarter minds than mine to explain how we know that. From that point, progress for the most part has been slow. The first writing systems popped up in the late 5th millennium BC.
00:01:02
Speaker
Johannes Gutenberg accelerated things a tad with the printing press in 1440 AD. Alexander Bell gave us the telephone in 1876 with radio following in 1920 and commercial television in 1947. It's fair to say the speed of change has picked up a tad. In fact, the way we communicate has arguably transformed as radically in the last 20 years as it did in the 100,000-odd years prior.
00:01:32
Speaker
The combined forces of the internet, digital technology, social media, AI, and rapidly changing social norms have reshaped how we connect with each other.
Early Digital Communication Platforms with Monty Hamilton
00:01:43
Speaker
To help me understand the profound implications of these forces on organisations and wider society, I am delighted to be joined by Monty Hamilton. Monty is one of Australia's most successful and respected digital entrepreneurs, having co-founded UBank, Australia's first digital bank, and Belong, Australia's first pay-as-you-go fixed broadband product.
00:02:06
Speaker
He went on to join the PwC partnership in Australia before joining TELUS, a Canadian national telecommunications company, first as its chief digital officer, and now as SVP and global telecoms lead for TELUS International. Monty, welcome to Speaking from Experience. Thanks, Will. It's great to see you again. And thank you very much for your very kind introduction. It's a little bit scary when you look back over the chapters, but it's great to be with you today.
00:02:34
Speaker
Great to have you on. To start, I won't ask you to go back to the cavemen, but perhaps give me your reflections on how communication has evolved in more recent times.
00:02:46
Speaker
Well, I think it's a really fascinating acceleration. And, you know, it's always easy to look at history over through our own experiences. And, you know, some of this to me just dates back to my teenage years. So I'm 44 years old now, reasonably comfortable with that, although you give me the occasional job about my age. But I spent many hours throughout my teenage years in internet relay chat environments on bulletin board systems.
00:03:15
Speaker
And that's probably where I actually credit my speed of typing, learning, chatting to people in a often live chat or group chat environment. So I'm a big subscriber to the...
00:03:28
Speaker
to the belief that communication methods changed on the back of connectivity, not just through voice and as you described in our introduction here. But we really started to see technology and academic groups adopt different methods of communicating back as far as 1998 when you saw the bulletin board emerge into an internet relay chat environment.
00:03:54
Speaker
And then this spilled into the mainstream. Take yourself back to 2008 when Facebook chat or messages, or it's known today, 2009 WhatsApp was founded, and then more recently, services like Telegram back in 2013. Just to put that in perspective today, well, Facebook Messenger has 3 billion monthly active users.
00:04:17
Speaker
WhatsApp is now over 2 billion monthly active users and Telegram founded in 2013. So just over a decade, 750 million monthly active users. And I think Telegram has over 200 million daily active users.
Impact of Messaging Platforms on Communication
00:04:32
Speaker
So fair to say the swing has happened. It's happened as a result of a number of societal reasons, but I kind of live my life in a series of group chats, messages, both personally and professionally.
00:04:47
Speaker
It's taught me to value the human experiences I have, but I'm just so much more productive and maybe not the depth of connection, but certainly the frequency of connection I have with friends all over the world has been able to be maintained at an incredible quality level through messaging and asynchronous interactions.
00:05:09
Speaker
That's an interesting insight that a lot of the way that we communicate today is asynchronous. So we've gone from a position where you'd speak on the telephone and you get a response immediately to a world in which a lot of the time you do have asynchronous messaging where you will wait and get a response. How does that change the way that we communicate and potentially the way that businesses should be thinking about communication?
00:05:33
Speaker
It's a great question, and I think, well, it's actually a really exciting chapter for business, looking to finally deliver on some of the customer experience outcomes that technology has promised. So many of our interactions with organizations are built around the organization's model.
00:05:52
Speaker
They are a little bit lopsided in terms of the service model. Contact us during these times, contact us via this method. Sometimes you'll wait to speak to the right person, et cetera. So messaging is a step change in that it is not only allowing customers to interact with organizations when they want.
00:06:16
Speaker
It's allowing organizations to be far smarter around what types of interactions require a live response. So you mentioned in your intro, my time in the telecom sector, not all customer service queries in the telecom sector are invented the same. So if you and I go on a trip to Guatemala, I know you love it in that part of the world and we get off the plane together and your phone roaming service is not working, but you've got wifi at the airport and you message your provider, you need a response
00:06:45
Speaker
before you leave the airport. You want to stay connected and you need a response. So that's a scenario where you need a live interaction to resolve the query.
00:06:53
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But if you were messaging your provider about a duplicate billing charge from your bill last month or an occasional fault that happened that perhaps didn't require a live interaction, for you as a customer, you need to get that captioned and documented when it suits you, but you don't always need a live interaction or response. You need to have your request acknowledged. You need to know it's in capable hands. But this is a very, very powerful thing for organizations looking to deliver
00:07:23
Speaker
on customer expectations, set those expectations and use the advent of Gen AI and other tools to intelligently classify what requires a live response and what requires a response, perhaps over a two hour, four hour, or even five day horizon.
Enhancing Customer Interaction Through Communication Insights
00:07:40
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We will get to Gen AI because it is what everyone is talking about. But before we do,
00:07:46
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What I reflect on in that answer is that everything you've just said is premised on customer understanding. So you need to know that the customer needs to have an instant response if they're at that airport in Guatemala. You also need to be aware of those instances where they may not need as quick a response.
00:08:07
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What are some principles for how organizations should go about building that deeper understanding of customers and particularly around knowing what are those priority moments for them to have a speed of service and perhaps when you can take your foot off the pedal a bit? I like to look at this in two ways. Well, the human element and that is flattening the hierarchy between customer and brand or customer and organization.
00:08:33
Speaker
For most part, that is actually empowering the customer and greater power to the customer, access hours, extension of business hours, extension of contact methods. And then the other element is how wisely organizations are using data to better understand the types of interactions. Now you gave us a wonderful overview of how communication has evolved.
00:08:59
Speaker
During that period, we have seen exponential computing power. We've seen the cost of storage and the cost of processing data continue to follow Moore's law in terms of access, affordability and output. So for organizations using previously large or too large sets of data, cumbersome sets of data,
00:09:20
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We now have the opportunity at our disposal to process previously really challenging sets of data to actually decipher and deliver intelligent, actionable outcomes. For most companies, one of the most valuable sets of data that it isn't tapped into are call recordings. Now we've all sat on hold speaking to an organization. You hear that message saying, your call's important to us, please hold. And then the follow-up message, we record your call for quality and coaching purposes.
00:09:50
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What can you do to automatically leverage or to accelerate the leverage of that data to be a better informed organization, to use technology advancements to ensure you're providing more relevant services to your clients? Because every single call now, every single voice interaction can be broken down into a structured set of metadata. And within that, you're able to establish the reason or the intent behind the interaction.
00:10:18
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Sometimes a call will have 50 intents, starting with, what's the weather like in Boise, Idaho today? But somewhere in that call is the core intent, which is, I've got a problem with my roaming. I've just landed in Guatemala. Can you help me? Using technology to get to that intent and be smarter about how you prioritize and handle it, it's never been easier.
Balancing Digital and Human Interaction
00:10:42
Speaker
It's never been more possible than it is today, and this is going to lead to a significant step change in customer experience. With that, some productivity outcomes, but first and foremost, an experience uplift.
00:10:54
Speaker
I'm curious if this will be the case into the future. So by that, I mean will telephony and the call center, but particularly the phone element of the call center continue to be a relevant channel in a more digital and AI driven future? Well, the answer is unequivocally yes to that question. Firstly, it will, of course, amortize through generational preferences and generational communication trends, as you've alluded.
00:11:23
Speaker
The need will become more niche and for higher value, more important interactions. You know, there are very few people who start their day wanting to call their, their energy retailer or their telephone company or their bank. And typically what's driving that is failure demand. So we're seeing three really significant changes here. One is the type of communication method, which we've touched on. The second is smarter, more savvy product design.
00:11:52
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including the ability to repatriate learnings from why a product generates service demand into the actual core product design in the first place. But last but not least, whilst I absolutely love and subscribe to all of the wonderful technology and progress that we're seeing, I do still read a paper book and don't hold a Kindle. And I'm hanging on to this nostalgia and the emotionally rich interaction that we have when we speak.
00:12:21
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and connect with each other in real time. Now, you happen to be in New York, I happen to be in Melbourne for this conversation, but there's still an emotional connection that happens when we have this interaction in a live manner. And I don't think we're done with that just yet. I call it, and we, at Telus International, call it human and humanity in the loop.
00:12:40
Speaker
That being said, there is still a desire on the part of many, if not most companies at the moment for some form of digital channel shift in their servicing strategy.
Transitioning Customer Interactions to Digital Channels
00:12:50
Speaker
So basically that means finding a way to migrate more interactions, generally lower value, more ministry of interactions through to digital and unassisted channels like chatbots. This is a very common conversation that I'm having in the market at the moment.
00:13:05
Speaker
What are some general principles for a successful digital channel shift program and potentially what are some of the pitfalls? Yeah, I've pretty much spent the last two decades of my career doing that in some way, shape or form. And there's a few themes that whatever technology chapter or era, there's a few themes that are pretty constant throughout that. As humans, we don't love interacting with robots. We actually like our needs to be addressed proactively.
00:13:33
Speaker
So the extent to which you can use technology in a way that you proactively identify the service need or interaction in the first place is always the most powerful outcome. So if you can prevent the interaction in the first place, great. And we touched on that just before in terms of repatriating friction in product design and actually fixing that to solve fatty demand upfront. The second piece I think that stands out is when we do have those interactions,
00:14:03
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We want our problem solved more than we necessarily might think our stated objective is to speak to a real person. Time is, as consumers, our most precious commodity. So we want our situation or need to interact resolved as soon as possible. I don't think the right pathway to do that is say, here, come and chat to our AI bot or here, come and chat to our chat bot. I think the message to consumers from organizations in that space should be
00:14:33
Speaker
Okay. We've invested in capability or we've built this capability to help you resolve your issue better, faster and easier for you. So you can get on with the most important things in your day. So I think being honest about that interaction, if you are going to have a person to computer or person to bot interaction, you need to be transparent about it and also not try and just mimic a human to human relationship. Make it clear that there's a tool here capability here. Sure. It can have a personality or persona behind it, but make it clear it's a tool.
00:15:03
Speaker
design to actually aid the customer so they can focus on other things more important in their day. And last but not least, whatever percentage it is over time, maintaining that human in the loop presence is absolutely key. Humans are far more likely, people, us, you and I are far more likely to try something when we know support is on standby. I've done studies before by just including an 800 number on a website, so a customer
00:15:32
Speaker
knows that help is on standby if they need it, increases the conversion rate by two or three X through, in some cases, a pretty complex digital process, whether it's applying for a mortgage, purchasing a mobile phone online or other semi-complicated process. So knowing help is on standby is a big deal. It doesn't always mean that people will just default to picking up the phone.
00:15:55
Speaker
Tone in on the human dimension there. What skills do you think service advisors or call center agents, people are interacting with customers on a regular basis in this kind of new world of very different customer preferences and different communications channels. What are the skills that you would be training and getting those sorts of agents to be focusing on?
00:16:18
Speaker
I just absolutely love this. This is probably one area where I get most excited, Will, because we are moving from an era and I have 75,000 incredible colleagues of mine at TELUS International. And one of our biggest challenges is making sure that we are generationally relevant to our team members, to my colleagues. And we are moving from an era where we used to need to train a
00:16:48
Speaker
50% or 75% of product knowledge of our clients, insights, their product rules, their product strategy, their pricing strategy, customer service, novel, if you like, into the frontal lobe of our team members. And we're now actually, which of course is just not generationally relevant. If you think about the 33 countries that we operate in at TELUS International and the workforce that come into a customer service workforce,
00:17:17
Speaker
Yes, we're privileged to have incredible tenure, et cetera. But there are a lot of people who choose that job as a transient career path. And so learning and spending six or eight weeks in training, learning everything you need to know versus building an incredible toolset that allows you to find the information and using technology that can surface the right information and relevant information to you in the moment, that is not only generationally relevant, it's incredible.
00:17:46
Speaker
productivity accelerator. So when it comes to the skills, I'm looking for the soft skills. I'm looking for the ability to build an interaction in a chat session, to strike up some rapport with someone in a verbal interaction, but importantly, the ability to trust the tools and capability at your disposal rather than spend weeks end on end in textbooks or digital equivalent of textbooks, learning everything about a product or service that you might be going to support.
00:18:16
Speaker
One of the tools at the disposal of someone like that would be Gen AI. Let's turn there. What is it? And is the hype justified?
Exploring Gen AI and Its Business Potential
00:18:25
Speaker
Well, the hype is indeed justified like any technology cycle. The hype cycle will have some, some very different vectors and very different tangents. Some of them will materialize, others will not. What I'm most.
00:18:40
Speaker
excited about when it comes to Gen AIs that was seeing sentiment that was previously pretty negative when it came to AI, was seeing that neutralise and in some cases build advocacy. I think one of the most fundamental reasons and drivers behind that wheel is that people have been able to touch it and feel it and experience it for themselves. Whether that was your first time pushing a query into chat GPT using
00:19:06
Speaker
3.5 or if you're an early adopter, a different interaction. For many people now, if you're on an Android smartphone or you're on iOS and the assistant is right there to help you. And so experiences is
00:19:21
Speaker
taught us that perhaps that some of the headline grabbing media around the fear of AI advancements in Gen AI disruption to career paths and beyond maybe isn't quite as alarming as what some of the headlines might
00:19:37
Speaker
put in front of you. That's a big deal, the fact that people can give it a go. Using something yourself goes a long way to shaping your perspective on it. Just imagine having someone describe to you the smell of a coffee versus having a cup of coffee sitting in front of you. They're two very different experiences and they invoke
00:19:59
Speaker
different emotions and responses from us. So what is it? Well, I'm not going to give you a technical definition. I'm going to give you a pragmatic assessment. It's yet another very important technology advancement that allows us as humans, us as professionals, us as customers, a productivity accelerator, which will help us be more productive in our lives.
00:20:28
Speaker
There have been innumerable, innumerable technology chapters in this regard. Now we're sitting perhaps very early in this gen AI cycle, right? And we didn't predict back in 2007, 2008, just how powerful the smartphone would be. Now there are negative consequences of that and there are overwhelmingly positive.
00:20:50
Speaker
consequences of that. So we're going to see some speed bumps and some puts and takes on the journey here. But overwhelmingly, we're going to see access to knowledge and information broaden. The quality of that information will improve. And that is a very good thing, right? Go take yourself back to the step change from a bookshelf of Encyclopedia Britannica to being able to access Wikipedia. Now, no one's suggesting that everything in Wikipedia is accurate.
00:21:20
Speaker
Nor is it helpful to the end user's cause, but it's undeniable that the access to Wikipedia is greater and has had a
00:21:29
Speaker
fundamentally more powerful impact than a set of Encyclopedia Britannica on the bookshelf. And of course, as many bridging technologies in the middle, such as Microsoft, Dicata, CD-ROM, and other examples. So I'm reminding myself that the extremities here could be unsettling. They could take us to places that are going to be uncomfortable and require us to face ethical decisions. But so many of those things
00:21:59
Speaker
We're actually pretty good at a society navigating now. We're continuing to navigate the impact of the explosion and growth of social media. There are fundamental ethical questions, you know, whether it comes down to user generated content on these platforms, et cetera. But the world keeps spinning and I am an eternal optimist that overwhelmingly the impact of what we're seeing on Gen AI and AI advancements will be
00:22:27
Speaker
remarkably positive on so many levels, not just the way we interact with brands, but you can't even begin to scratch the surface of what this is going to mean to the health sector and in particular preventative health. I think a lot of business leaders would be listening to that. They would say, well, this is terribly exciting, but they may not understand, well,
00:22:51
Speaker
What do I do? Where do I start? What's the first step? If you're a CEO, if you're giving advice to a CEO who is interested in pushing forward the AI agenda in their business, what are you telling them? Well, first and foremost, experiment early and often and you can experiment and overcome some of the fears. So the number one fear that we're seeing from corporate adoption of Gen AI is data sovereignty, data protection.
00:23:17
Speaker
Right. And so I've heard this phrase a few times over the last six months. Do not credit me with this phrase, but you absolutely need to bring the model to your data. Find a partner if you don't have the talent within your organization, or if you do bring some additional firepower to help scale your talent so you can make sure you set up your experiments right from the outset. The second piece is graduate those experiments as quickly as you can. But like any new technology
00:23:47
Speaker
Use your core guardrails, right? To borrow the meta phrase or Facebook phrase, move fast and break things. We'll move fast, but don't break things here. Make sure you've got the regulatory guardrails. You'll have a chief data officer, you'll have a chief privacy officer, you'll have a chief information security officer. Bring those stakeholders in to enable you to accelerate, not to throttle or to crush your progress from the laboratory into the field.
00:24:16
Speaker
the sooner you can have those regulatory and governance guardrails in place, the sooner you can actually take your capability out of the lab and in front of your team members en masse, and then importantly, take your capability out directly to your customers in a B2C environment. There are 98 or 99% of what we're seeing at the moment, Will, it's not leaving the laboratory, and this is because of a risk averse stance. Now you can be risk averse,
00:24:46
Speaker
And you can have the requisite guardrails in place and mature solutions into your team member base inside your four walls and then very quickly into the wild. Partner up with someone who can help you do that and move the experiments from the lab as soon as you can possibly do so.
00:25:05
Speaker
I want to extend on that little nugget there around that moment where you take the experiment from the lab and you then try and scale it out to the broader team and say the organization. And there are a lot of people who would be in your organization who may be nervous about AI. They've heard the whole, the machines will take our jobs line. They've seen some of the controversies, you know, Google Gemini, they may be
00:25:31
Speaker
unsure of what it all means and may kind of be confused by the technology. How do you get your workforce more comfortable with the use and promulgation of AI and its applications?
Organizational Culture and Ethical AI Adoption
00:25:44
Speaker
Well, there's a couple of things to note on this, right? So firstly, let's not for a moment downplay that there are some very real ethical and other issues
00:25:55
Speaker
from the rapid AI adoption, acceleration, experiments and graduation into the world. Now, because they happen, and because some of those outcomes are deeply offensive, can't stop us
00:26:11
Speaker
continuing to experiment and continuing to make progress. We need to acknowledge them. We need the tuition value from those to be repatriated back in to and learn from those. Very, very few people are bad actors in this space now. That's a separate discussion, separate podcast in itself. But for the most part, what we're seeing at the moment is solutions in market that were built with a wholly positive intent for
00:26:39
Speaker
the end user, the end customer, the end B2V scenario, whatever usage context, they're being built for a positive outcome. And there will be missteps and there will be mistakes, and there will be, in some cases, serious issues that arise. I believe that this is a really good example, yet another technology era where the culture of the organizations will be highly correlated. That is a positive, open-minded, progressive culture
00:27:08
Speaker
a culture that encourages appropriate levels of risk and reward, appropriate levels of compliance. You'll see a higher correlation of organizations in market, not just the builders of these models, the actual enablers, whether that's big tech or close to it, but the actual adopters in Sam Establishing, she's
00:27:29
Speaker
You're going to see a high correlation where those cultures are known and favorable for early adoption of technology. You're going to see that flow into the market for organizations, grabbing the opportunity, harnessing the opportunity first. There's one other point I'll note around the hype cycle is that there's a lot of people in the media who will start their day who are looking for a headline-grabbing story around the bot that went wild.
00:27:55
Speaker
the one cent airfare, the free car that was given away. They make good stories. They're also remarkably good tuition value for those behind building these solutions in market. And yeah, there'll be missteps on the journey, but those missteps tend to be amplified at a rate perhaps far greater than the actual productivity and tuition value on the journey will.
00:28:17
Speaker
Social media also plays into this story.
Social Media as a Business Channel
00:28:21
Speaker
TikTok, for example, is the source of a lot of political debate at the moment. Like AI, there is threats and opportunities there. Kind of picture of how organizations should be thinking about the use of social media. Well, social media is a very, very important channel for all brands. Back in 2008, when we founded UBank here in Australia,
00:28:42
Speaker
You couldn't even create a Facebook business profile. So we used to create personal profiles called, you know, you bank, you bank and started interacting with customers. And that was important to us back 16 years ago because we wanted to be present in the communities and the spaces where our customers were. And today, you know, fast forward 16 years and yeah, there are whole businesses that exist in it that have been built purely on.
00:29:09
Speaker
a social footprint. It's a remarkable platform that comes with incredible upside that ought be harnessed cautiously, but very optimistically for brands. The one thing that I've always said is that there is no hiding on a public Facebook wall or in a public environment. The best and the worst of who you are as an organization will come out very, very quickly and very transparently.
00:29:38
Speaker
If you are an organization that hasn't necessarily built entirely customer centric products, yet your operating model today or historically has let you offer you some masking or shielding or distance from that, then social media is going to present a level of transparency that you need to be ready, willing and able to cope with. As it relates to the platforms and the providers, you know, I think they've done an incredibly, incredibly
00:30:04
Speaker
commendable job. Now, there'll be opinions that differ from mine in that to say, you know, there are very negative elements of social media and the like. We are moving conversations from point to point environments, from small closed loop interactions into large structured forums in digital
00:30:24
Speaker
And so in many ways, social media companies are having to deal with the responsibility of moderating and managing and providing a safe space for people of all ages to have conversations. Now, there are very few social environments
00:30:39
Speaker
where that happens, where members of a community don't actually regulate the community themselves. And so I'm intrigued by how that governance model evolves, but I do think as humans we need to appreciate that
00:30:55
Speaker
creating a safe space, a safe digital space for people to have conversations is just as important as creating a safe physical space to do so. And I think it's an incredibly tall order to do that. You know, what's a safe space to have a conversation face to face in Melbourne might be a very, very different situation in Mumbai and might be a very different situation in Michigan, right?
00:31:21
Speaker
And so geography, social media in some sense has no borders. So it's an unenviable task. I think that for the most part, platform providers are doing a more than credible job. I think they're choosing organizations to partner with to ensure that some of their biases implied or otherwise aren't actually steering decisions around the space. And I think they're navigating it.
00:31:47
Speaker
an incredibly complex environment of both ethical, geographical, religious, and just so many other social factors when it comes to achieving that goal. I didn't mention one particular item on your CV in my introduction.
Monty's Customer Experience Insights and Episode Conclusion
00:32:03
Speaker
I think it's the best part of your CV. One of your side ventures is that you own a hotel, own and operate a hotel in Indonesia.
00:32:12
Speaker
We, of course, can give it a plug to our millions of listeners if you're up to giving me a free week. My question is, what have you learned about customer experience from operating a hotel?
00:32:26
Speaker
Thanks for the plug for those tuning in. It's the Tamarin Resort, the Nusa Lembong, and it's in Bali. We'd love to host you, and importantly, we'd love to learn about the experience you have, because the whole pretense behind building the resort, and let's be very clear, this is a small boutique resort. I fear that you've overstated the scale of the property, Will, but the whole pretense behind it was twofold. For my whole career, I've built digital things.
00:32:56
Speaker
And as much as digital things can deliver powerful experiences, it's very hard to touch, feel and hold them. And so what's been important to me throughout my professional career is actually having a balance of building physical things in parallel. And so that's the first catalyst behind building the resort and creating a special place where myself, family and friends can go and experience. And of course, tens of thousands of people have now come through the property.
00:33:26
Speaker
The second and most important was putting to test some of the customer journeys and customer experiences that I've learned in my professional career. And it's amazing just in your own business travels or in the many clients I've had the privilege of working or businesses that I've had the privilege of building. How little cross pollination happens between industries and how much you can actually imprint on a hotel, for example, from software development.
00:33:55
Speaker
So each day in our hotel, we have a daily stand up. We actually do it twice because hotels typically are a 24 hour shift, but at our two core shifts start early in the morning and then in the afternoon. And so our team will have a daily stand up at any point in time, but we'll only have a maximum of 45 or 50 guests in the hotel. And so part of what we do is make sure every team member is aware of every guest.
00:34:20
Speaker
any particular dietary requirements if you work in food and beverage, any particular considerations for guests who are staying in-house? Is there a mobility challenge for a guest? Is there a young guest that's calm? Is there a repeat visitor to our property? And so briefing our team on those things. And part of the model is to actually really bring a human experience to our guests because making sure that in a world where we do
00:34:47
Speaker
live in asynchronous messages in a world where we are having email interactions in a world where we're connecting for a podcast discussion across the Pacific Ocean, that we can actually provide a special place for really powerful experiences and where you can switch off if you're privileged to be able to do so and really immerse yourself in the experience and culture.
00:35:08
Speaker
It's a lovely insight into how digital principles can actually be applied to a physical environment. And we're entering an age where increasingly those lines are so blurred as to be indistinguishable. Monty, we have left your details in the show notes. If anyone wants to speak to you about both, tell us, but I imagine more importantly about a great resort deal. Thank you very much for coming on Speaking from Experience. Thanks, Will. It's great to see you. Thank you for having me and thanks for tuning in, everyone. See you soon.
00:35:39
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Speaking from Experience. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, reach out to us for a chat. A link is in the show notes.