Professor Mohamed Zaki is the Deputy Director of the Cambridge Service Alliance at the University of Cambridge. Mohamed is a high-profile academic with an extensive research portfolio in Service Management, and is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Service Management and he is a recipient of many international academic and industrial awards. He has also consulted and lectured for over 50 organisations.

Interview with Professor Mohamed Zaki, Academic Lead of the University of Cambridge Online's course on Customer Experience.

Mohamed is the course lead behind, Data-Driven Design for Customer Experience (CX), a short 8-week course from the University of Cambridge. The course will teach learners to design and manage seamless omnichannel customer experiences using a data-driven approach to improve customer experience and drive new revenue streams. Today Mohamed answers a series of questions around his research into the field and what he hopes learners will get out of his course.

What are your current research interests in customer experience?

My research interests lie in customer experience, with an emphasis on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to design and manage customer experience and create new data-driven business models. My other research interests include digital service transformation strategy.

What is your favourite/the most exciting/interesting part about customer experience?

I find it so exciting that we can apply AI capabilities to solve key challenges in improving customer experience. I can see established companies now starting to add CX as a key pillar in their digital strategy to be competitive and offer novel solutions to their customers and society.

How have the frameworks and methods developed by the Cambridge Service Alliance (and taught on the course) impacted the organisations that you’ve worked with?

Here are some examples:

1. We spun off a company from this research called Customer Experience Insights Ltd, which developed 360CX AI(Opens in a new window)– a decision-making platform to help B2B and B2C firms to use our AI models to better retain and engage with their customers across digital, physical and social channels.

2. I ran a workshop recently with the Mitsubishi Heavy Industry(Opens in a new window) (MHI) research and innovation centre. They will use the tools and frameworks from my research to help them develop a customer-centric strategy that can integrate physical, digital and social channels to create a seamless experience for MHI customers. Also, I am now helping them to use AI to better measure their customer experience.

3. I have received many emails from entrepreneurs globally informing me that they have used the data-driven business model (DDBM) framework as a tool to identify their business models.

Tell us something interesting about your research or any projects you have worked on customer experience

I previously worked with Manchester United on a project to help them to assess and predict customer engagement using AI from different social media platforms. Interestingly, I didn’t know much about football, and it was embarrassing when I showed some of the results and sometimes I forgot the player’s name or something. In some instances, I froze as I didn’t know what they were talking about. I decided to start following football so I could communicate well during the project. Since then, I have been into football and have followed the UK Premier and Champions leagues. This was a good outcome for both sides. I helped Manchester United explore AI and its potential to understand and predict engagement, they won a new fan, and I gained a new interest.

Who/what did you have in mind when conceiving this course?

I am passionate about this topic and I am excited that through this course I will have the opportunity disseminate to professionals some of the knowledge we have developed here in Cambridge. I hope they can use some of their learnings and insights in their world and significantly impact our society.

What do you hope learners will gain from this course?

I hope professionals will find the course valuable and insightful. They will also gain knowledge about customer experience design, measurement and the use of AI to create new business models. I hope professionals will use the tools and frameworks in the course in their current and future work. The tools can be used as assessment mechanisms to diagnose their current service and journey challenges and configure competitive and consistent data-driven services for the future.

Why do you think customer experience is an important area?

Customer experience is at the heart of the digital transformation strategy in any organisation. This is because customer expectations in B2B and B2C firms are ramped up as market entrants innovate to enhance their services. However, companies can also seek out opportunities that can be developed in this new experience economy. At the same time, the fear of new competition emerging from unexpected quarters is genuine.

We are already seeing many examples of firms competing in customer experience. For example, Disney is personalising its customer interactions or omnichannel retail. But for many established firms, this shift to becoming more customer experience-centric is challenging in the new digital era. Equally, they cannot opt-out.

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