[CX Industry Voices] Interview with Declan Ivory

What differentiates an excellent CX from a good one? The person behind it.

By publishing our Top 100 CX Influencers in Europe, we’re highlighting those who are redefining customer experience, sharing bold ideas, and driving real change.

To go further, we launch CX Industry Voices—a series of exclusive interviews that dive into their journeys, their take on future trends, and how they bring a human touch to customer relationships.

In this article, meet Declan Ivory, VP Customer Support at Intercom. With an engineering background, Declan’s path to customer experience wasn’t planned—it evolved naturally as he realized that business success hinges on outstanding customer service. Now at Intercom, he drives AI-first customer service solutions, bringing the voice of the customer to the heart of innovation.

We spoke with Declan about his journey into the world of customer service, the perception that AI is “de-humanizing” CX, and why he sees AI as a powerful force for transformation.

Discover his vision.

Getting into 'customer experience / customer service' was in many ways something that just happened as opposed to it being a particular career choice.

Having completed an engineering degree, I went to work for a large IT provider as a Systems Engineer, supporting a range of different customers.

It became very clear to me that ultimately my success, and the success of any business that I worked for, is entirely dependent on 'customers' and the experience that they have with you as a business. This has meant that I have been 'customer obsessed' from the very earliest days of my career, always striving to go above and beyond for customers wherever I can.

I then tended to gravitate to customer facing roles whenever I had the opportunity, and certainly over the last 25 yrs+ my time has almost exclusively been customer experience / customer service focused.

Nearly 1/2 the time was spent working for a large Telco, where I ran support functions for an ISP initially, and then took over support for the Telco's 'Enterprise and Government' business. This gave me the full gambit of support from consumer market, all the way to supporting some of the largest global enterprises.

My journey after that was very much focused on working for large scale, high growth tech companies, helping to build and scale world class support operations e.g. AWS, Tableau Software, and Google Cloud.

Through this phase the combination of supporting innovative technologies, developing industry leading support capabilities, and building and scaling high performing teams, meant there was never a dull moment and always a challenge to be addressed.

Over this time I became really interested in the potential for AI/ML to change how customer service is delivered and therefore when the opportunity came up to work for Intercom, a company committed to developing industry leading AI first customer service solutions, it was a very easy decision to take.

Running 'customer support' for a company that builds a customer service solution is a really cool role to have - I am literally the voice of the customer at Intercom as we walk in the shoes of our customers every single day.

Customer Experience is core to Intercom's strategy of building the best AI Agent solution for customer engagement and the most complete AI-first 'customer service' platform. When you have 'customer service' as the core use case for your product or solution it's impossible not to focus on 'customer experience' as you design, build, and ship new functionality. This has even led to Intercom building a new and innovative 'north star' metric for businesses called the 'AI Customer Experience' (AI CX) score. CX is top of mind in everything that we do at Intercom - not only is CX integrated into our strategy - it's effectively our strategy.

For me personally, customer experience is the most important thing that there is any business and it's the motivation for me to come to work everyday. I love meeting and engaging with customers to learn first hand how we can better serve them. And ultimately I love applying innovative technologies to help transform customer experience.

We are operating in an increasingly digital world and some people feel that this can 'de-humanise' the customer experience.

I look at it a lot differently.

In a world where digital engagement will almost exclusively be via an AI Agent, the ability of that agent technology to provide a natural, engaging, and comprehensive experience directly challenges the concept of it 'de-humanising' the experience - the recent advances in generative AI fundamentally change the digital experience. And of course the 'real' humans are not going away BUT they are now being empowered to 'super humanise' the experience for customers when an AI agent cant' assist a customer.

With work that is more complex, nuanced, and requiring deep empathy, as the typical work coming through to humans, the skills required are also changing - humans need deep troubleshooting and problem solving skills, they need to be subject matter experts in whatever product or service they are supporting, they need communication and engagement skills that drive extreme empathetic experiences, and they need to be 'consultative' with their customers to not only address the immediate problem or question that the customer has, but to always think how can they add value for this customer beyond the current issue they have.

In an overall sense the combination of an 'intelligent' AI agent and empowered humans is making the overall experience more 'humanised' not less so.

The biggest trend is AI without a doubt.

The transformational opportunity that AI presents for customer experience is literally unprecedented. There are 2 key trends that I see as a result of this:

1. We will quickly move to where almost all (maybe even all) initial customer engagement will be via an AI Agent.

This will cover almost all aspects of a customer journey, not just customer service. This will enable businesses to rethink customer journeys, but also rethink how they organise around the customer. Too often we expose our internal structures to our customers e.g. a customer needs to know when they should engage their account manager vs customer success manager vs billing support ops vs technical support. Going forward a customer will deal with an 'engagement' AI agent, and if the AI agent cannot address the issue then it will work out which human, with the right skills, should be involved to assist the customer.

2. AI driven insights will transform how anyone involved with customer experience works.

The ability for AI to extract insights and value out of all of the customer interactions that a business has is just insane. These insights can radically change the customer experience. It opens up opportunities for more personalised, contextual, and proactive engagement with customers based on the AI driven insights you have from all of the precious contacts you have had with that customer and all of the other context you know about that customer. This can be used to trigger proactive outreach to customers knowing that you can 'add value' for that customer through the outreach, or it could simply be using the insights to enrich both the AI Agent and the human engagement when customers reach out. These insights empower people to think and work differently and will drive more autonomy for anyone engaged with customers to provide a higher value experience.

One piece of advice - use AI to improve customer experience BUT with two caveats:

1. Have a very clear business problem or opportunity that you are trying to address with AI - it's not AI for AI sake, which is a trap that it is easy to fall into.
2. Understand the customer experience as you design and deploy an AI solution - be very intentional about designing the customer journey and understanding the steps you ask a customer to go through.

This has always been important but it's even more critical in an AI first world.

Ensure you can measure the customer experience. AI is actually your friend here - you don't have to solely rely on measures like CSAT, NPS, CES, … - now you can have AI generate a customer experience score. Here are Intercom we have just launched a new AI CX score as part for a new AI Insights suite that we have launched.