Contact Center & AI Advisor To Fortune 500 Companies | Craig Tobin

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #248 we welcomed Craig Tobin, Chief Executive Officer at Ascent Business Partners based in Bonita Springs, FL. 

Craig Tobin helps Fortune 1000 clients optimize their contact centers with AI, technology, and BPO solutions. 

With over 35 years of executive leadership experience in various industries, Craig has developed core competencies in contact center solutions, technology consulting, BPO advisory services, and AI advisory. 

He is passionate about delivering innovative solutions that drive customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention, while optimizing costs. Craig's mission is to create value for his clients and partners, and to have fun while doing it.

In this episode, Craig and Adrian chat through the Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback. Plus share some of the ideas that Craig and his team at Ascent Business Partners think through on a daily basis to build world class customer experiences.

CXC is a proud strategic partner with Ascent Business Partners. Reach out to us today if your company needs outside support with your customer contact & support strategy. 

**Episode #248 Highlight Reel:**

1. Building, managing and leading contact centers over the last 35+ years
2. Leveraging AI to optimize your customer experiences with customer support
3. Finding the right tools & systems as your contact center scales 
4. Starting with the problems before considering the potential solutions
5. How AI will change the future of customer contact & customer experience

Click here to learn more about Craig Tobin

Click here to learn more about Ascent Business Partners

Huge thanks to Craig for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & customer success space into the future.

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Are you looking to learn more about the world of Customer Experience, Customer Success & Revenue Operations?

Click here to grab a copy of my book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon or the CXC website.

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Transcript

CXChronicles Podcast #248 with Craig Tobin Full Episode.mp4

Speaker 1 (00:00:05) - All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of CX Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Adrian Breda Chisana. Super excited for today's show, guys. We have a different type of show. I have a good friend of mine and one of our key strategic partners here at CX Chronicles, Mr. Craig Tobin. Craig, say hello to CX Nation, my friend. 

Speaker 2 (00:00:23) - Hey, everybody. Great to meet you all virtually. 

Speaker 1 (00:00:26) - Absolutely. So, guys, Craig has a super duper cool story. He's got just years and years and years of knowledge, full candor. Craig and I met at Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas, and it was funny. We actually met through our friend at Sonus, Craig, right? At Sonus AI. And I had the pleasure of having Shroff on the podcast, and he finishes the podcast, and he goes, Adrian, do you have a couple minutes? I was like, yeah. He's like, there's someone you have to meet. And Mr. Craig Tobin walked in, and Craig and I have been talking ever since. 

Speaker 1 (00:00:56) - So, Craig, I'm pumped to have you on the show, man. Thank you so much, and I'm pumped for you to share your story today. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:01) - Excellent, excellent. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:02) - So, I look forward to kind of sharing the journey that Ascent, I took the role back in April of last year, and the number one goal is for us at Ascent is to really help executives through this maze of AI. So, just a little bit of my background is, you know, I spent over half my career building and running contact centers, started the BPO industry almost 35 years ago when I worked for GE, when we started moving businesses to, you know, most recently, I started a call center consulting company, Aventus Solutions Group, which we sold to Tech Mahindra a little close to three years ago. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:44) - And during this process, it was becoming very real that everything that I had learned over the last 30 plus years was changing at a pace that would make your head spin. But at the same time, it was creating a lot of confusion in the marketplace. And so, Every executive I talked to, there's five things they talk about. Number one, Craig, "I need to cut costs." Number two, Craig, "I need to increase sales." Number three, I need to increase my employee satisfaction. Number four, I need to improve my client satisfaction. 

Speaker 2 (00:02:20) - By the way, those four goals have not changed in 30 years. 

Speaker 1 (00:02:24) - They've been around beginning of time, man. 

Speaker 2 (00:02:26) - Yeah. But the fifth one they say is if I can just go a day without somebody talking about AI, it's a good day. 

Speaker 1 (00:02:34) - Look, it's become a buzzword and it's become a conversational point that we can't get rid of and we can't get around. But it's going to be, and you and I talked about this a lot, man, it will be a game changer. And the first four points that you just called out that all these executives have asked for for the 30 years of your career, it's going to be able to help with those different buckets in different types of ways. Craig, before you go further, I want to ask, what drew you to the space, man? 

Speaker 1 (00:02:58) - When you got into even thinking about working in support or thinking about helping companies think about how they're going to manage their customer relations, what was the draw for you, man? What made you want to do this type of work over anything else that was presented to you at that time in life or at that time in your career? 

Speaker 2 (00:03:14) - Yeah, no, you have to have a little bit of a loose screw if you love running projects and operations. 

Speaker 1 (00:03:19) - Yeah, you do. 

Speaker 3 (00:03:21) - You do. 

Speaker 2 (00:03:21) - But I kind of fell into it. I came out of college and was working for GE and got an opportunity early in my career where GE was looking to move businesses, their own businesses, offshore to save some cost. It was actually the start of the BPO industry. And I, early on in my career, after being an engineer and coming off their manufacturing management program, ended up getting a job where I'm running a large customer service operations. And I was passionate about it. I thought it was really neat to... 

Speaker 2 (00:03:58) - And back then, everything we did to improve things, by the way, was Six Sigma, Black Belt type programs. And I just found it a lot of fun when you took a customer who wasn't happy and made them happy. How to turn around a customer. You know, I quickly just fell in love with this industry. And it's one of those things that either you love it or you don't. There's no rule, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:04:22) - Totally agree. 

Speaker 2 (00:04:23) - You're passionate about it. So, you know, I spent almost 17 years building and running contact centers. And it's not easy.

Speaker 2 (00:04:33) - It's a grind, it is hard, it's a lot of hard work, and, but it's one of those things that there's a lot of satisfaction when you do it well. 

Speaker 1 (00:04:42) - I completely agree, man. I just, before you move ahead, I just think that like, it's a space and a place in every business that's absolutely critical. For so, so, so many years, everybody, most executive teams and most leaders looked at it, you know, as an expense and as a place where you just needed to trim or make it as lean as possible. It's really only been a little bit more recently that people, the right types of executive teams are thinking about it as, wait a minute, this could also be, it could be a revenue center too, if you do it right. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:08) - If you think about customer experience, customer success, and customer support as modern selling, where you're thinking about upsell, cross-sell, retention, retain all the fricking revenue that people have had to bring in from the years past, that's a game changer. I think the last part is this, though. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:22) - It's the people, man, because Craig, you've worked with, I thought I worked with a lot of customer-facing teams and the guys and the gals and the men and the women are literally on phone calls, on chat, on emails, on support every fricking day of the week talking with customers. One of my favorite parts is I got a little bit deeper into the business. It was cool to keep learning more about business. It was cool to keep learning about how to do all those other things you said, but I loved working with the people that were taking care of the customers. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:47) - And I started to realize how critical they were. And then I really had fun taking the people that were some of the best and the brightest and the sharpest and trying to figure out how to help them manage up to the executive team or give them the tools or give them the way to tell the story so that they had a voice, right? And they took all this awesome stuff that they were hearing every single day, they can bring it right into the executive room, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:06:09) - They can drop it on the table and people still have to make the decisions they have, but that became one of my favorite parts of it too, man. 

Speaker 2 (00:06:14) - Yeah, yeah, no, and it's like I said, having rolled up my sleeves and spent time on the phones and you gain a real appreciation of what it's like to be a customer service professional. 

Speaker 1 (00:06:26) - Absolutely. 

Speaker 2 (00:06:26) - Not a job, but this is what the fascinating part about what Ascent's doing and I think AI in the industry is that everybody's thinking AI is here to just eliminate the jobs. And let's be real, I mean, with AI, there are certain tasks and stuff that are going to be eliminated, the tools. But ultimately the other biggest benefit of AI is making the life easier for these agents to help solve customer problems in an efficient manner. 

Speaker 2 (00:06:57) - So that if you're a customer and whether you want to be on the phone, whether you want to do an email, whether you want to be a chat, whatever, you're calling in, you just want to get your problem solved efficiently, right? You don't want to be transferred to nine different people. You don't want to go through the IVRs and all these crazy things. You just want your problem solved, right? And so where I'm seeing AI is having such an immense enhancement is around the customer satisfaction part of this. 

Speaker 2 (00:07:25) - You know, yes, again, I don't want to underestimate the efficiency gains. There's going to be lots of- 100%. But you're also going to have tremendous amount of customer satisfaction as we are now making almost like all of your customer service agents, when you're running operations, you have a bell curve, right? And you always ran that operation and said, how do I move the middle of the curve to the right? Well, with AI, I can start getting everybody performing at a much more efficient manner. 

Speaker 2 (00:07:54) - And I think that's as exciting part about, you know, the implementation of AI in this industry, as well as the efficiency play. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:02) - 100%. And then Craig, I was literally just telling you yesterday when we were catching up, you know, the event that I was just at in London last week for Intercom Pioneer 2024, you know, they use an incredible example. They use an incredible example about AI. What you just said about, it's not all about eliminating job. It's absolutely about efficiency and it's absolutely about working smarter, but Des Traynor, who is the chief strategic officer at Intercom said something brilliant. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:25) - And I mean, it's an easy way for our listeners to think about it, but when the spreadsheet came along, literally when the spreadsheet came along, everybody thought it was gonna be this big disrupt, like Lotus one, two, three, and even pre Excel, which we're all into, people were saying the exact same types of this is gonna put bookkeepers out of business, is gonna put accountants out of business. And guess what happened? 

Speaker 1 (00:08:45) - There was a really interesting graph and I might even, Craig, I'm gonna put this in our show notes for this episode, but it also gave rise to a whole plethora of brand new industries, analysts, all sorts of different types of analysts were born, all sorts of different types of FPNA professionals that otherwise would never have gotten into that type of financial work, got into that type of work because they had a tool that allowed them to do the things quickly, efficiently, and a little bit more easily. 

Speaker 1 (00:09:12) - And it was funny because that one resonated with me around just like you're right, everyone's thinking that everyone's gonna lose their job. And then there's another thought here. I left there thinking pretty clear, and I was joking with you yesterday, but this is gonna be like a lot of other game-changing solutions. 

Speaker 1 (00:09:26) - Just like anything else in life, there's gonna be 20% of every profession or every different industry or every different segment that embraces the shit out of this stuff, understands exactly which parts of their business or which parts of their customer journey, which parts of their user journey, they can leverage AI, they can get rid of the mundane stuff or the repetitive stuff, or the things that AI just does wicked faster than a human. 

Speaker 1 (00:09:48) - And then those 20% of those people, they're gonna be able to do more with less and they're gonna be able to leverage some of the stuff and they're gonna have more time for customers, more time for partners, more time for their executive team, more time for all of these other things that today, like if you're not doing some of the stuff, there's a lot of busy time that can be removed from a business.

Speaker 3 (00:10:08) - Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:10:08) - No, I equate it to the internet. When the internet first came out, everybody was freaking out and it's going to eliminate all this and that. And next thing I know, we start doing tens of billions of dollars a day of e-commerce, you know, and now there's a company called Amazon that's created how many jobs? 

Speaker 1 (00:10:28) - Yeah, dude. 

Speaker 2 (00:10:28) - A whole e-commerce. So with AI, I don't think any of us have a crystal ball about all the new opportunities that are going to be created with AI, but I think it's going to be higher value work and it's going to be more customer centric type work. 

Speaker 1 (00:10:42) - Totally agree. Totally agree. Craig, I'd love to jump into the first pillar team. Number one, let's talk about Accent Business Partners. I know, I know, I know a lot about it and I know that, you know, we're super pumped about the partnership that we have with Accent here at CXC, but I'd love for you to kind of share with our listeners who you are, what you're doing, some of the problems that you're out there solving for all these incredible companies and then some of the partners that you work with. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:05) - Yep. So today's actually a great day. We just launched our new website. So, but let me give you a little bit of the background of Ascent Business Partners. We became, the company was really formed around helping, if you look at a lot of the great companies and great AI companies that are out there, you may have a PhD from Stanford who's developed this great product, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:11:29) - But biggest challenge in all of these early stage companies to become the next Facebook or Amazon is their go-to market, is getting exposure to the right executives that their product can help serve them. So, you know, when we, when Ascent was formed about 18 months ago, there was a significant investment of building out a technology agnostic, very, very important approach to solving business problems within the contact center. So instead of looking at companies, the number one goal is, do you have a hiring and recruiting challenge, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:12:07) - What if I could bring AI to that? What if you had an onboarding and training? What if you really had self, you know, self-help, the true customer service? 90% of the bots that are out there on these websites are terrible. I mean, they're just, they're horrible. They just, they don't help you solve any problem, right? To real-time agent assist, whether it's helping them with a sales call, a customer service, like I think of it as Waze, right? I get in my car, I'm going to Orlando today. I don't know exactly where I'm going, but I'll put it in Waze. 

Speaker 2 (00:12:38) - It's going to get me there the most efficient way, right? So how do we put those types of tools to workforce management, essential in a contact center, quality, right? We no longer need surveys out there. We no longer need to have a one to 35 ratio and having people listen to calls. How about 100% of the calls being recorded, and then I use AI coaching of which the agents love that. It's no longer a bad call. It's like, okay, these are all my calls. Now I can use coaching, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:13:10) - So reporting analytics, I could go through every, there's so many things, cybersecurity, right? Especially all the remote workforce. So we built out this extensive network with several partners that are there. That was the first kind of goal of having the right network. So when we go to executives, we can solve it. The other thing was stop charging consulting fees. Like, I mean, I lived off a company that was charging a lot of consulting fees. We'd come in and we'd do roadmaps, but we've been doing this 30, 35 years. 

Speaker 2 (00:13:42) - If I get the right executives in the room for 30 to 60 minutes and understand their top two or three pain points, we don't have to go through a three month consulting project. We will get them some quick wins, right? And go through that process. So we're not charging any consulting fees, which folks, it's making it a lot easier to engage with executives, right? Because a lot of these companies are on tight budgets and consulting becomes a discretionary expense, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:14:12) - So then once you work with them, the other key thing was in order to come into the Ascent network, we have partners who are willing to prove out their model.

Speaker 2 (00:14:21) - So we have set a KPI target of a minimum of two to two and a half X in-year ROI with these tools. So we will put them in your environment and you, the customer, get to decide with your people, your data and your environment. By the way, the third one, your environment- is really important because I can put a software in five companies and it works unbelievable for four but one because of systems whatever. So you're the CFO and you're the COO. You're looking at this saying, wait a second. You've spent millions of dollars vetting out a network for me. 

Speaker 2 (00:15:00) - You didn't charge me any consultant. You then bring tools to me and I get to try them in a control group in my environment with my people, and then I, the customer, decide at the end: am I getting this ROI? I spent a hundred million in operations. I put 10% of my workforce in there and my data says I'm saving 8%. That's $8 million. The software is $1.5 million. Okay, well, there's your return on investment. We've taken the mystery out of it. We've taken all the risk out of it. 

Speaker 2 (00:15:33) - Now I tell a lot of executives: here's the thing: there is a new AI company every hour, right, and an AI company last quarter was doing this. Now they're doing this. Now they're doing this, and it's very confusing to executives because there's 38 companies calling themselves conversational AI. Where do you go in that environment? So we've tried to streamline this so that within 90 days of our initial conversation, we're at the end of some POCs and clients are really getting progress. 

Speaker 2 (00:16:04) - So in 2024, we've had several clients that wanted to dip their toe in in a risk-free environment. But now it's. You know they've got their foot on the pedal. They're going full spurt because they're reinvesting all those savings into the next project. But the beautiful part about this model is that you don't need budget. You need people in order to do these POCs. You do need to have resources, but you're not spending consulting dollars and you're getting to try before you buy with 95% of our solutions that we have in the network. 

Speaker 2 (00:16:36) - So it's a business model that is, it's hard to argue against, but I do tell executives. So, just because there's 30 companies that are claiming to do the same thing right now, do you really care? If I find you, you have a business problem. I find your product, you put it in your environment, you test it, you do a POC, it works for you and you sign a two-year commitment for the client. Do you care if there's five other companies out there that claim they do it? You really don't, because this one's working for you. 

Speaker 2 (00:17:05) - So we've gone through a strong vetting process with our partners. We're tight with MIT Labs, stanford Labs, Y Combinator. We work closely with Caria Venture Partners. We work with the Indian Beltway so we get to do shark tanks on a regular basis where we're getting executives that are going to come in and present their companies and I would tell you maybe one out of 10 become part of the Ascent Network because they have to have a differentiated solution. They got to agree to the ease of doing business, letting customers. 

Speaker 2 (00:17:39) - They got to put the skin in the game, because these companies are putting 100% of the skin in the game because you're deciding at the end of the POC if you're going to move forward. You have an outcome contract. So it's a good business model and the growth over the last four or five months has been phenomenal. I mean the number of companies and so three major constituents: large enterprise clients to mid-size. Our ideal customer profile has at least 150, 200 seats in the contact center. 

Speaker 2 (00:18:11) - Some of these solutions can go down to 100 seats, but that's really the ideal customer profile for enterprise clients. We work closely with private equity because obviously PE firms are very interested to optimizing their portfolio companies, and we're having a lot of success working with the BPO industry as well. So those are our three major constituents that we're supporting on a daily basis. 

Speaker 1 (00:18:35) - I love it so. Number one: Greg, thank you so much for walking us through that. Number two: even since CXE has partnered with us, we've learned so much from you and your team and many people that think that they know a lot about team building, business building, entrepreneurialism, even contact center, even getting into some of the stuff where me and you met, we were with supposedly 4,000 SMEs and contacts on our land. There's a ton of things that they don't know about some of this stuff. 

Speaker 1 (00:19:04) - Because, number one, as you start to talk about some of these bigger businesses, mid-market enterprises- up number 

Speaker 1 (00:19:10) - Cost of change is difficult. Number two: many of the people that are running contacts that are BPL today, if they are not part of the camp that me and you are in, where AI is gonna be fantastic for all of us and it's gonna change the right types of things in the right types of places. If you know how to leverage it, if you know how to use it, it only does better for customer experience and agent experience, and those are the biggest two camps they gotta focus on to keep their executive teams happy. 

Speaker 1 (00:19:33) - But the last part is just it's this notion of, and I think one of the reasons why you and I got along so damn well from day one is like there's gotta be a better way to do business and we're in 2024, about to move into 2025.. 

Speaker 1 (00:19:46) - Let's take a typical SaaS example: a software company that's gonna try to sell whatever the hell their, whatever their willy-willy or gadget is, but the same way that y'all have positioned yourself with the SEM, very similar to CXC. We're like: you know a space intimately, you know a user type intimately or an ICP intimately, but then you've already been in the space for so long that you've already mapped and essentially rated and stack-ranked all of the different potential solutions, but then zoom the camera back a bit. 

Speaker 1 (00:20:15) - You can also take different cuts of those potential best case scenario or best potential solutions across different cuts. Craig, that is a frickin' number one. That's a beautiful business model because it saves time, it saves money, it saves energy. 

Speaker 1 (00:20:30) - The other big thing- and I know you've talked about this with me before, but like I constantly have customers at CXC saying, when we do some of our partner-led work, like to keep three or four or five big-selling companies or teams off of your back, when you're the guy or the gal that's running an RFI or an RFP inside of your business- and frankly, let's call it what it is, man- and I know you're teaching me a lot about this from some of the stuff we're working on together- but like that's frickin' hard man, because number one, then you're subject to you're in another person's pipeline, so you're gonna get, you know, you're gonna literally get missiles dropped on you every damn day. 

Speaker 1 (00:21:05) - But a lot of the guys and gals that we work with that are doing these things. It's oftentimes another ask. They're usually a project manager, maybe they're someone working in IT, maybe they're a contact center or a support leader or executive, maybe they're somebody that's on sales ops and they're the ones that you know because the CRO needs help. 

Speaker 1 (00:21:21) - So they put the sales ops manager in charge and, hey, you figure out how the hell we're gonna have our 250 inside sales reps smiling and dialing every damn day and you figure out what are the things we should know to be smarter. That stuff's hard. So, like when you start to have a cent come in and they're already taking some of those slices out for you and then, frankly, just easier to work with, super knowledgeable and you're not paying anything until you're helping to figure out which partner's gonna make the most sense. 

Speaker 1 (00:21:46) - That's really pretty awesome, man. Last thing I wanna say before we jump into tools, because you have so much to talk about tools, your comment about AI- every damn day different thing. We're in a weird period right now where many companies that were- whether they were or they were not- AI-focused- many companies that were not AI-focused- are putting these thin wrappers on their business to try to make one last-ditch effort of whatever the hell they're, whatever they're trying to prove. And then, in terms of spaces, it's funny. 

Speaker 1 (00:22:11) - I think we're just starting to see an interesting cut of all people that don't know a lot about AI yet, or people that are still trying to educate. Guys, there's so many different cuts. If you're thinking about AI apps, there's entertainment apps that are focused on AI productivity, there's learning development, there's customer experience, there's developer-based. 

Speaker 1 (00:22:27) - If you're thinking about industry, there's creative, there's defense, there's health, and then my point is there is so many things kind of finding their little pockets of focus or of niche area and what Craig said, guys, because there's so many popping up so soon, and just like what you said about the internet, well, like the coming of the internet, there's gonna be maybe 20% or 10% of these things that are actually gonna find product markets, that they're gonna find the ICPs that they actually serve and deliver to, and those are gonna be the companies that really kind of emerge as the leaders of the AI. So just a couple of tidbits. 

Speaker 1 (00:23:00) - I love some of the ideas that you kicked out there. 

Speaker 2 (00:23:02) - Yeah, no, I think it'd be fascinating if we had a crystal ball and we could look out two years. I mean to see what this is gonna look like, because, again, I'm doing this full-time and I am amazed at the progress, but also it's creating more confusion, because everybody's playing in everyone's sandbox. You've got Microsoft. You've got the Googles and all those guys right that are playing at the enterprise level. 

Speaker 2 (00:23:27) - Then you've got all the cloud ACD partners- whether it's Nice, Genesis, Five9, they're all wanting to bring this digital stuff as part of their platform. Then you've got all the independent solutions that are out there right that are probably more robust, and then I do believe AI will continue to verticalize. 

Speaker 2 (00:23:45) - So we have several companies who all they do is healthcare, right, all they do is financial services right, and I think over time we're going to see more and more deeper verticalization of these AI into these type of solutions, and I think that it's just going to be fascinating because, again, we're tracking over close to 40 companies and, quarter over quarter, their product development is. 

Speaker 2 (00:24:09) - These are not one or two year roadmaps and, by the way, the reason they all in some of the confusion is they're all using the same tools, whether it's OpenAI, Gemini, ChatGPT, they're all using the same tools. So the cost of entry into the AI market is significantly different than what it used to be to bring a product to market, and that's why you're getting a lot of the confusion of: okay, there's 45 companies saying they do this or 20 companies saying they do this. 

Speaker 2 (00:24:36) - So to me, ultimately, we've tried to build out a few companies in each kind of business problem that can solve it. Do we have everyone that's out there that's doing it? No, but again I get back to the fact- is, if we've got a good solutions and you get to look at two or three and you like one and it works in your time, all right, you're off to the races and you're signing one and two year contracts. 

Speaker 2 (00:25:01) - Right, you're not locking in for three, four years because of the change of pace with the AI. And I'm just going to add, man, even some of the customers that you and I- in a sentence CC- have worked with together, there's something about having a third party voice. 

Speaker 1 (00:25:20) - That's also a speed where it helps with the credibility piece and it helps with just understanding. There's a different level of trust or transparency or credibility, and not just because someone like you has been in this business forever or not just because someone like me has been working in CX for 17 years. 

Speaker 1 (00:25:39) - It's this idea of if people know what type of you, know the problems, then you know the cuts of what type of business, what type of use case, what type of vertical, what type of size, what type of budget, all those other downstream type of variables that are extremely important to the CEO, the CFO. Most importantly, you can literally start to literally just apply the handful of solutions you already know will be the optimal one. 

Speaker 1 (00:26:00) - So it's like: and then you're not getting it from directly from the business, you're getting it from somebody that's actually used all the tools, tools agnostic, has friends that have built some of these tools, built some of these solutions. I think that's a game changer. Craig, for the sake of time, I want to. We're already talking about tools, but I want to. I kind of want to jump. 

Speaker 1 (00:26:16) - I'm going to do a dual side of here, just because I know you a little bit, like I'd love for you to spend a couple of minutes talking about, kind of all these different businesses you've worked with, all these different customers you've worked with over the years. I'd love for you to kind of spend a few minutes talking about some things that you've learned about as you talk about solutions and you talk about problems all the time before you get to solutions. That's one of the things I love about you. 

Speaker 1 (00:26:37) - I'd like to kind of understand some of the ways that you've kind of learned have been the easiest way that, before you even get into talking about what, what should fall into a tech stack for a customer, for a client, some of the things that you've learned about how to kind of think about, how to learn about problems, that then equal short list of tools, and then I'm going to give you- I'm going to give you a different one, cause I I'll throw processing into the mix here too, so that you can kind of blend tools and process, cause I know I kind of know that you've kind of got a bit of a magic way for kind of figuring this out, but I'd love for you to spend some time kind of just talking about for our listeners how you do the problem part of your magic and the problem part of your game with understanding, where you can even potentially bring a customer or bring a client before you get to the tool. 

Speaker 2 (00:27:15) - Yeah, no, so I think it all starts out with honestly just having an executive conversation, having the right stakeholders in the room. We've learned to do this virtually. We can do it in person and really what we try to do is get in, just understand the business, because you're talking to a telecom company and you know Verizon runs different than AT&T, that runs different than you know. You know all these different companies. So you got to learn their business. You know from an executive level and then really identify. 

Speaker 2 (00:27:46) - You know and we try to tackle no more than one or two pain points right, we don't want to boil the ocean because we typically try to get some quick wins right- and so once we understand really what their objectives are? Right, what are the? What are the top one or two objectives over the next? You know two quarters that they, if they could solve or make significant improvement. Some of this could be all cost related. Some are. We've got some clients who had to move work to India for cost savings- right, they didn't have a choice. 

Speaker 2 (00:28:18) - Their budgets were cut. Well, all of a sudden they got a big CSAT hit. Well, now I'm bringing Sonos right. I bring a tool that does accent neutralization to the table. So now, all of a sudden, you can call into India and talk to someone in tech support and for the first time, you really are having a much better conversation. You can understand the language barriers. I'm a horrible customer for, like a client like Sonos, because I've spent years in India. 

Speaker 2 (00:28:44) - But I've talked to a lot of people and we went through this even when our company was acquired recently. Right, my previous company, we got to have lots of communications with India and some of our employees, honestly, were struggling to understand on a team's call what the individual was saying because the accents were pretty thick. 

Speaker 1 (00:29:02) - Right, where you get someone like me that talks a million miles an hour because I've been in New York city for all those years. Well, you slow down, so it's hard. 

Speaker 2 (00:29:10) - It's different ways of even how someone speaks right, but what was interesting is that that's a customer who's just really was focused on CSAT- improving customer experience, or their employee experience too, their internal help desk. 

Speaker 2 (00:29:23) - to cost cutting. So once we understand the business problems, then we come back and it's nice being objective. I've always had, and this was the key mantra of Ascent was is being technology agnostic. And I love the fact that I can then go back to a client saying, you're having trouble with training, right? Here's two or three companies, I'd like to let them show you your product. And it's really funny, I can show those three companies to five companies. I'm like, one phone, one phone. I'm like, great, let's now prove it out to you. 

Speaker 2 (00:29:55) - So I think it all starts with the business problem, having the right stakeholders there that'll go through that. But I will tell you this true story. We had a customer who wasn't ready for AI, right? Fundamentally, they had a pretty big problem with knowledge management, which was really the root cause of their problem. So we did a pay it forward at Ascent. We kind of introduced and said, we can help you, but you got to fix this problem first. By the way, here's one or two companies you need to talk to. We introduced them to them. 

Speaker 2 (00:30:28) - My understanding, and I've talked to them, they're doing a contract with one of the companies, but now we help them. It had nothing to do with Ascent, but we helped them solve a problem. And I know they'll come back to us once they get that problem solved, because they'll be in a better position. Because AI, there's a foundation. And the biggest problem I saw with AI over the last two years is everybody raced to the penthouse. Everybody wanted to have the shiny new penny and the new AI. Totally. 

Speaker 2 (00:30:53) - Foundational infrastructure and things that have to be in place if you really want AI to work. That's why how many times has your listeners gone to a website and did a chat and just got utterly frustrated? 

Speaker 1 (00:31:07) - Absolutely. 

Speaker 2 (00:31:07) - I mean, that doesn't even answer your question. You type it in, it answers something else, or it takes you down a path that gets lost. And then you go talk to somebody in customer service because you're frustrated and they have no idea. Your interaction with the website. 

Speaker 3 (00:31:20) - Yep. 

Speaker 2 (00:31:21) - So you're starting all over again. Those are the problems we can solve. That should not be with today's technology and the capabilities. You do not have to have that experience for your customers. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:32) - Well, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. Everything you said is spot on. And then you mentioned Sonos. I remember vividly when we had Troth on in Vegas. And it was something that he said that I remember. I'm trying, in the episode, it was interesting because he's one of the first executives that ever said this. I'm not gonna lie to you. And it's for a good reason. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:54) - You know, Troth said that another big part of the motivation too, with some of the accent normalization, I think, and guys, I'll put it in the show notes, but when Troth was on CXC, he said that it was some, a big part of the motivation was for all of the offshore agents who just get beat up, abused, verbal bullshit from people that are struggling. Because again, you show up to that, you're already frustrated about some support issue. 

Speaker 1 (00:32:24) - But he was really honest about that being one of the big motivating factors to build something that could actually help companies with the EX, with the employee experience. And then on top of it, what you just said makes me think, if that was one of his starting points when Troth wanted to start getting Sonos going and really wanted to start kind of building an incredible team to do that, it makes me think we're just gonna keep finding other use cases and applications. 

Speaker 1 (00:32:48) - By the way, sorry, it was a CX Chronicles episode 233, breaking barriers one conversation at a time for listeners. Check out Troth, learn more about Sonos AI. It's an awesome company that's doing incredible things. But basically what you just said there, you said internal team meetings. I don't remember Troth talking about that, but I've worked in global businesses, the global clients where you're different acts. Greg, I just told you yesterday, I was telling you all about London and Dublin and some of the folks I was meeting with. 

Speaker 1 (00:33:12) - Even there, man, like number one, literally people call me out all the time for talking too fast. And I'm like, sorry, I got a lot to say, number one. And number two, I lived in New York. And number three, I got some energy. So you better, you know, that's what it is. But internal meetings, think about it. It makes me wonder then, when you start to break things down and getting into process a bit, maybe part of why half the team doesn't understand what the hell's going on is because of literally something as simple as accent normalization. 

Speaker 1 (00:33:36) - So then how are you able to leave a meeting with the right type of focus, CTAs and calls to action, whether you're a marketer, whether you're a salesperson, whether you're an operator, if you don't fucking understand what the person's saying. So, but to your point about AI and kind of what we're getting into here, guys, this is just going to keep, there's going to be more and more and more applications and usages, but it's going to be smart, open-minded, awesome individuals that are going to be the people that actually figure this stuff out. 

Speaker 1 (00:33:59) - And then really kind of help navigate the space for where it's all going to go for these organizations. Craig, I know we're coming up on time, but before I want to jump into the fourth and final minute, because you've got some awesome, awesome ideas on feedback. You spent a couple minutes, man, over your career. You've worked with all these companies.

Speaker 1 (00:34:13) - I'd love maybe one or two golden nuggets of wisdom for Mr. Tobin on things that you've seen that are fricking brilliant with companies leveraging customer feedback and then ways that you've seen companies do a brilliant job of leveraging their employee feedback. 

Speaker 2 (00:34:25) - Yeah, so I think today in today's age, I think there's a lot of emphasis is being put on the employee feedback, right? You know, attrition is a challenge, right? Even it's probably becoming a little less as the labor markets, I think the labor market's pretty tough today, right? There are big companies that are, that slowly are laying off lots of people, right? And going through the different process. So I think we're, you know, I've seen the companies that really, that do a really good job is that you take the org chart. 

Speaker 2 (00:34:58) - And when I was the CEO at Oxford, right? I used to tell people I am the least, you know, important person in the organization, right? I took the organization, I flipped it up and I said, the employees who are talking to our customers every day, our member services, you know, people talking to our providers, they're the most important. So we need to put an emphasis on the frontline staff. They're the firing staff and how do we make them motivated to make their jobs easier? That to me is one of the best practices I've seen for great companies, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:35:30) - I love it. 

Speaker 2 (00:35:30) - There's certain companies out there that do customer service and don't forget, like I said, as an executive in a company, you've got to, every once in a while, roll up your sleeves and get on the phones and listen. 

Speaker 1 (00:35:43) - Listen to your customer, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:35:44) - Then you'll see these systems you have for these employees is like, you know, today, customer service professionals, I call them mini CIOs. Like five different systems going all over, like it's not an easy job. 

Speaker 1 (00:35:58) - Not an easy job at all. 

Speaker 2 (00:36:00) - So the companies that are really putting an emphasis on making life easier and more, you know, better for their frontline staff, that's always been a best practice. It's always one that has been kind of my mantra in any company I've ever been with, is spend a lot of time with the front end employees, listen to them. They have good feedback, right, to go through that process. Customer feedback is kind of different now, right? I mean, we used to send out surveys and, you know, people would argue with surveys. These people fill them out. 

Speaker 2 (00:36:30) - They're either happy or they're not happy, right? Now, with the technology, I can actually get the voice of the customer for 100% of my customers. I can drill down to pain points that are quickly identifying, right, in the organization. So that to me is really where the technology, going from a small sampling, which we argued was statistically valid, to now getting 100% of the feedback from the customers, right, and what's going on. That allows you to be much more productive in looking at where are your processes broken down in the company? 

Speaker 2 (00:37:10) - What can you do to improve those processes? You know, diagnostic tools. One of our partners, and I talked about, you know, AI going vertical. We have a partner called Authentics, right? I'm near and dear to healthcare. Healthcare system's got lots of opportunity to improve. But they basically took the Six Sigma DMAIC process and they brought it into an AI tool that'll look at every interaction and it'll tell you where your pain points are. We used to have data scientists doing all this work. 

Speaker 2 (00:37:41) - Now I have data scientists looking at the summaries and all the data, and they're getting to the solutions quicker, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:37:47) - So real quick for our listeners, DMAIC, Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. 

Speaker 2 (00:37:53) - Right, yeah, it's a GE term, so I apologize, but- No, but you're spot on, brother. 

Speaker 1 (00:37:58) - And to your point earlier, when you were talking about some of the things that humans used to do slowly and, or, sorry, another way of saying it, you'd have to have highly compensated people because some of the stuff was complex at the time, and then you had to do all this crunching, then you had to normalize. Now you let it happen live, and then you're not dicking around with waiting for the end of the month report. You're getting the end of the day report. You've got 250 inside salespeople or 250 call reps. 

Speaker 1 (00:38:23) - You get the end of the day report on defining, measuring, analyzing, improving, controlling. Guess what tomorrow morning's meeting's all about? 

Speaker 2 (00:38:30) - We're going to training and- Well, and think about it. Like, here's a challenge in our industry every day. Anyone who runs a contact center, right? You got to hire 20 people, right? So what do you do? You hire 25 people, right? 

Speaker 3 (00:38:43) - Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:38:43) - 20 people show up for training. 

Speaker 3 (00:38:45) - Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:38:45) - The training, if it's two or three weeks, maybe 16, 15 people? 

Speaker 1 (00:38:49) - Maybe.

Speaker 2 (00:38:51) - at the end of 60 days, which is a big benchmark, if you can get customer service reps to the 60, 75 day, they're gonna probably stay longer, but you're probably down to 10 people. Who wants to run a business like that, that that's your process? 

Speaker 2 (00:39:06) - What if I could use AI and look at those, follow every life cycle of every employee, which nobody does today, so you're not eliminating, and start looking at the profiles of the people that are successful at the end of that 60, 90 days, refocusing your front-end recruiting, using AI to go through the 5,000 resumes you got and say, hey, these profiles here work, and bring that so that the next class, instead of having 10, you have 11, and you have 12, and you have 15, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:39:41) - That, think about all the waste, the impact of customer sat, attrition impacts customer sat. Think about the strain it puts on the trainers. Think about the strain it puts on the recruiters constantly doing it. This is another great use of AI, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:39:56) - That's- 100%. 

Speaker 2 (00:39:57) - It's one of many, but these are the things that are making a material impact on, A, it reduces your costs, because attrition's expensive, right? It increases your customer sat, because turnover, people have a 30, 60 day learning curve, and you start to get better at that. The win-win, right? And it improves the employee satisfaction, because you're hiring employees that are more likely to be successful, because an employee doesn't start a job hoping he or she is going to quit in 60 or 90 days, right? 

Speaker 3 (00:40:27) - No. 

Speaker 2 (00:40:27) - They let themselves select out, because they realize this job wasn't right for them. 

Speaker 3 (00:40:31) - Yep. 

Speaker 1 (00:40:32) - And I'm sorry to be that guy, but I'm going to keep beating this drum until as long as I possibly can, or as long as I'm in this world, but people that expect world-class customer experience, that don't invest a fricking nickel into their employee experiences and their employee journeys, that's just fucking crazy, man. Unless you're selling a commodity. Yeah, if you're selling a commodity, totally fine. Go ahead and do it. You're selling gas, do it. You're selling toilet paper, go ahead and do it. 

Speaker 1 (00:40:56) - You're selling telephone, like some of this, sure, fine, but like, you're building something in a space that you want to be dynamite, and you want to literally take over a space, or you want to disrupt something, you better get ready to focus on how you're going to build your employee experience journey right along that world-class customer experience journey, because it's the only way, brother. 

Speaker 1 (00:41:12) - You got to have these people that are dying to show up to work, ready to just go fucking run through a wall for your customers to make them have an incredible experience. Craig, this has been absolutely fantastic. Before I let you go, brother, where can people find you? Where can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more about you and Ascent Business Partners, my friend? 

Speaker 2 (00:41:27) - Yeah, so Ascent Business Partners, we just launched our new website. I can send you the information. 

Speaker 1 (00:41:33) - You can- We'll put it in the show notes too, Craig. 

Speaker 2 (00:41:35) - Yeah, you can put it in there, but you can do contact us. We love to talk to you, you know, through this journey. At the end of the day, we're here to help. This is a complex, ever-changing, fragmented industry, and we're just trying to bring some sense, reason, but what we're really doing is time to outcome. That is our number one objective, is time to outcome, right? Because a lot of companies used to go through this, then they'd write an RFP, and they'd go through this whole process, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:42:04) - And by the time they're writing the RFP, we're already in POCs with clients, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:42:10) - Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:42:11) - If you're an executive, you know, and you're running these operations, you know, you're accountable for your results, right? For your company. So we're super excited about this. You know, we do this full-time, and it's a challenge for all of us to continue to stay up on what's coming in. But, you know, with our strong research arm, we're getting to see a lot of stuff. And we are, I will be honest with you, very selective in finding the right companies to come in the network, because it's our reputation if we're bringing solutions to you that they work. 

Speaker 2 (00:42:43) - And we're very confident with the network we've built, and it's just a lot of fun, because it's an ever-ending learning experience. Every day, we're learning more, and I'm just fascinated as, even if I could fast forward a year from now, what is this environment going to look like? And it's going to look different. That I can promise. 

Speaker 1 (00:43:03) - Yeah, man, I agree. Craig, it's been a pleasure having you on the show, man. Super appreciative of not only our partnership between the Senate and CEC, but the friendship that we're building. I learned so much from you, and guys, I can attest that the stuff that Craig and his partner and I are doing is incredible. So, Mr. Tobin, thank you so much for joining the CX Chronicles podcast. It's been our pleasure having you on the show, my friend. 

Speaker 2 (00:43:24) - Thanks. Take care, everybody. Have a great day.