Combining Humans & Machines To Deliver Incredible Customer Experiences | Tim Houlne

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #255, we welcomed Tim Houlne, CEO at Humach based in Frisco, TX. 

Humach combines the strengths of both humans and machines to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Since first opening their doors in 1988, Humach has been at the forefront of customer experience (CX) innovation, delivering world-class call center solutions that have transformed CX for hundreds of clients worldwide.

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

**Episode #255 Highlight Reel:**

1. How Humach has been leveraging AI in contact centers for the past decade
2. Leveraging custom language models to build effective AI-powered solutions 
3. Y-Combinator launched 90 digital voice companies in the last 18 months
4. Baking employee feedback into the culture of your business to drive innovation
5. Building and enriching relationships with your customers as you grow

Click here to learn more about Tim Houlne

Click here to learn more about Humach

Huge thanks to Tim for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience, customer contact & customer support 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.

Transcript

The CXChronicles Podcast #255 - with Tim Houlne, CEO at Humache

Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CXChronicles podcast. Super excited for today's show, guys. We have an awesome customer-focused business leader with us, Tim Houlne, Chief Executive Officer at Humache. Tim, say hello to the CX Nation, my friend. 

Speaker 2 (00:00:21) - Hello, Adrian. Good to speak with you here this afternoon. 

Speaker 1 (00:00:24) - 100%. So, Tim, number one, super pumped to get you on CXCP. We've had some awesome conversations leading up to today, and I'm pumped, man. So, guys, Tim has just got such an interesting background and such an interesting set of stepping stones that really kind of brought him into the position that he's in today, building an incredible company like Humache. But, Tim, I'm going to let you do the talking, my friend. Why don't you spend a few minutes, start today's episode like we start all these episodes. 

Speaker 1 (00:00:50) - Just give the listeners a sense for, man, how did you get into this whole wonderful world of customer experience and customer communications and working with all these incredible humans across the earth that are dealing with customer conversations and customer touch points every single day? Sure. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:04) - Sure. Yeah. So, I actually started in banking and finance, thought I was going to be a banker going through school, got out of school and went to work for a cellular company in its infancy stage, worked my way up, and pretty soon I was responsible for 40 people in the back room that did customer service and sales. But at that time, you didn't even call it a call center. That's what it was. And so, did that for a while. And then I was one of the two officers that started GE Tech Team, which is what moved me to Dallas. 

Speaker 1 (00:01:35) - Nice. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:35) - So, went to work for West Corporation, GE Tech Team. We built large call centers for Gateway 3, Conhealer Packard, all the GE warranty management business and kind of saw where the market was headed and became CEO of Working Solutions, which at that time was the original pioneer of the work-at-home model. So back in 2000. So, preached the benefits of working from home for almost 20 years, and companies were a little lukewarm about it until COVID hit, the entire globe worked from home in 30 days. 

Speaker 2 (00:02:06) - But about 10 years ago, I actually saw the market looking at AI and automation, like this is really going to impact CX, and created a company called Humache, Human Plus Machine, to focus on AI and automation very specific to CX. But go back 10 years ago, Adrian, nobody knew what concepts like human in the loop or human plus machine, or even generative AI until OpenAI came out in October of 22. And then the floodgates opened. 

Speaker 2 (00:02:34) - So now it's the Wild West, everybody's doing AI. Everybody has access to AI. Every company has pivoted to AI. And it's been quite a ride, quite a ride, really. 

Speaker 1 (00:02:44) - I love it. Well, Tim, number one, me and you were just joking about this before we jumped into today's chat. But like, number one, AI has absolutely changed and disrupted the world in such a rapid period of time. Everybody is hearing about seeing all these different examples or being asked to start levering some of the things that AI can do, not just in business, but like in our personal lives as well. 

Speaker 1 (00:03:07) - But I know that it's also this thing that like so many things that come so quickly and so fast, there's still a lot of folks that don't know anything about what it's going to do in terms of disrupting, not just the workplace, but technology as a whole, right? So I think you picked a super, super interesting space and place to really kind of start building a business. Now, Tim, I'd love to kind of, let's talk about the team. I'd love for you to spend a few minutes kind of talking about the first CX pillar of team. 

Speaker 1 (00:03:36) - Now you've worked at all these incredible companies, you've built several businesses and teams from the ground up. You mentioned GE, you mentioned the working solutions. And now Humache. Spend a few minutes, number one, kind of talking about the team that you've built at Humache. But I'd also love for someone like you, man, you've been at all of these incredible companies and you've worked with some ridiculous businesses across the world, serving them as one of your customers. 

Speaker 1 (00:04:00) - I'd love to just kind of hear you talk for a few minutes about sort of the ways that you think about team or some of the things that have really kind of worked extremely well for you over your career when it comes to team building, team leadership, team management. 

Speaker 2 (00:04:13) - Yep. So the, really the, the teams are backbone of Humache, right? So it started, we acquired a company, Advanced Datacom, when I was at working solutions called Advanced Datacom and ran that company for a while. So when we spun the assets out of working solutions group, that became kind of our CX contact center company that, that we had. So the goal was what's going to happen to the contact center when AI, the impact of AI gets here. 

Speaker 2 (00:04:41) - And we anticipated that you're going to have to start to upskill those workers, right? Level two, level three, which is kind of where we came up with an AI certification program for our agents, where we can upskill them. And it was funny when I introduced the program two years ago, the team's like, well, if we teach everybody AI, they're just going to leave. And they're like, yes, they can leave. But if we treat them well enough to stay, Richard Branson's quote, right? Then they'll stay here. 

Speaker 2 (00:05:06) - So we've now trademarked our AI certification program for the agents. We call them AI whispers. 

Speaker 3 (00:05:14) - Oh, nice. 

Speaker 2 (00:05:14) - And they're the ones that now can tune the machine, right? So we looked at who's tuning the machine today. It's data scientists and programmers and developers. Who could tune a machine better specific to a company's product or service than somebody who's got four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks training on that product or service? Then you put them through an AI certification program. They're going to be able to look at the intents, editorial review, ethical review, prompt engineering, conversational design. That's really the key for AI, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:05:45) - Narrow conversational design. And so that's how we've kind of upskilled our team to date. But really the culture we have here is led by my COO. I'd like to take credit, but I'll give it to Kelly. She's the COO and she really is, you know, she's the backbone of that culture that we have with the team. But we do focus a lot on upskilling our workforce, right? Education programs, those types of things to keep everybody engaged. 

Speaker 1 (00:06:15) - Tim, I love it. There was a report I saw just a few weeks back from Forbes talking about how it was over 70% of the American workforce doesn't even understand how to talk about or think about how AI might impact their given job. And you and I kind of smirk about that. But the reality is we know it's true. So what you guys have done is taken a wildly different path. You're taking a path of absolutely not. 

Speaker 1 (00:06:40) - We build an army of people and we build a group of folks that understands what AI is, how it's going to be able to change the game, how it's going to be able to ease their game. I think guys, you know, for our listeners, when you think about specifically in Tim's world of transforming contact centers or transforming customer communication service entities that are managing just massive scale, you got to think about there's three things. There's agent experience, number one, because Tim, you and I, I know you're the same as me, man. 

Speaker 1 (00:07:08) - Like there is no talk about world-class CX unless you've got world-class employee experiences. People that show up to work ready to run through a wall, take care of your customers, go the extra mile. Those are going to be the folks or the agents and you start thinking about an agent experience who can build these incredible customer experiences for your people. 

Speaker 1 (00:07:27) - And then lastly, you know, Tim, and you started to kind of dip your toes with this, but like there's also this whole notion of things are going to change in terms of how we can think about contact center operations and how we optimize some of the things that would always drive many of us crazy. Like for example, long wait times or hold times or not being able to even translation or linguistics normalization if we're talking to folks that maybe aren't speaking our first tongue. 

Speaker 1 (00:07:52) - Like, yes, this is some of the stuff that's happening overnight in Tim's land. And Tim, I just think it's so cool that you guys are kind of front and center with this with Humache. You're literally helping companies think about how they can really kind of be a part of this whole disruption that's about to happen across the world. 

Speaker 3 (00:08:08) - Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:08:08) - Let me add a point on that because really what started was if you go back, right, 10 years, reduced customer effort. That's all you heard about. And we jumped in with what about reduced employee effort, right? Because if you reduce employee effort, you're going to improve CX. And so bringing those tools to our employees now, which is the same with AI, we have internal use cases for AI that are strictly for the employees. How do you make it easier? How do you make it more simple for them to navigate? Remember some of the old screens? 

Speaker 2 (00:08:38) - We had a client that had nine different platforms and 27 different screens for the employee to navigate. And we did a time and motion study and we said, you know what, we can cut out almost three minutes of every single call if you let us wrap this into one centralized portal. And they're like, yep, we're going to do that and that'll be done in two and a half years. And we're like, no, you need to do that now, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:09:03) - Oh my God. Because every one of us knows, Tim, what you're talking about, where you sit down on the front line, you start to, you grab your coffee, get ready to bang out a bunch of calls, learn from the pot around you, understand what people are going through. A couple of things, very common to see a million different tabs open. 

Speaker 1 (00:09:17) - Number one, you got a million different tabs and all these different solutions, but the number two, there's not necessarily a super clean, easy way for those agents to rapidly be able to grab answers or if there's specific things that maybe they don't know when they're on a customer call that they need to tap someone. This is stuff that's been going on forever. Guys, come on. We're in 2025 now. We're in a time and a place where there should be, every one of us should be working a little bit smarter, not harder. So I love that. 

Speaker 1 (00:09:44) - Tim, you just started to kind of, you're starting to lead us into tools here, man. Well, let's jump into the second six pillars. So number one, I know that there's a bunch of incredible tools and solutions that you and your team at Humosh provide to your customers. But I also know that you've been able to see countless tools over the years. You've seen the evolution of some of the software. 

Speaker 1 (00:10:04) - You've seen the evolution and the maturation of which of these key solutions kind of took the hold as the primary wrangler for things that every contact center's got. I'd love to hear you kind of just drill into tools and spend a couple minutes kind of talking about some of the things that you've seen along your journey. 

Speaker 2 (00:10:21) - Yeah, I'll give you probably the most impactful tool that came out for us.

Speaker 2 (00:10:27) - About two years ago. So when OpenAI came out, right, they had OpenAI. Everybody started using it. Companies or employees started running their emails through right, but it was a large language model open to the public, training, the public language model that everybody had access to. So think about it, that's where you had, if you remember, people's like: hey, I just found my competitor's pricing in OpenAI because they need the model. 

Speaker 2 (00:10:51) - So what we did is we created a custom language model where we would ingest FAQs, knowledge base, training, curriculum, recorded calls and then allow only access to that model was really important because now you can actually ask the custom language model any question and you know that that's not getting out to train any large language model in the public domain. 

Speaker 1 (00:11:18) - You know it's funny when you say it like that too. There's this other piece, too, about, just like the, where we are right now in this entire journey and in this entire part of the phase of what's happening across the world with AI. It's still what you just said makes me think, Tim. Humans are still absolutely a part of this process. Right now, humans are going to be the guys and gals that understand. Think about some of those prompts. They think about how to even analyze or leverage or assess what some of these language models are seeing. 

Speaker 1 (00:11:49) - They're also gonna be the same people that can call bullshit- pardon my French, but call bullshit- when there's certain responses that come back where it's like wait a minute, that ain't right. 

Speaker 1 (00:11:56) - And as good as this stuff is getting right, as tight as it's getting, there's still gonna be hallucinations, there's still gonna be slight errors, there's still gonna be differentials where the technology just interprets it the wrong way and humans need to be there to not only continue to be seeing what's coming out of it, but there's another piece Feeding the optimization or feeding the way that you're gonna continue to hone or sharpen what some of these models or some of these outputs can really kind of provide us. 

Speaker 1 (00:12:24) - That's a huge part of the human involvement, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:12:26) - Yeah, absolutely. I'll give you a great example. We build custom language models for our customers, right? I mentioned we ingest all that content and we had a customer come back and said: well, the machine's wrong, it's giving wrong information, and we went directly back to the content. Your content is wrong, but it took a human to go figure that out. So go back to Humache. I think most people hated the name when I came up with that 10 years ago, but now it makes sense: humans plus machines, human in the loop. 

Speaker 2 (00:12:53) - You have to have that human in order to fully utilize AI. AI, absolutely 100%. 

Speaker 1 (00:12:59) - And one quick thing: what you just mentioned about the content piece, guys, I've brought this up on several of our last few episodes when we get into some of these pieces and some of these conversations around AI. But, like guys, you gotta remember what Tim just said there, which is like it doesn't matter what solutions you're using. It doesn't matter what type of use case you're applying some of these different AI or machine learning types of solutions towards. There's still this huge piece of the content that's going to be fed to. 

Speaker 1 (00:13:27) - These models will equal your output. And, Tim, you know I just I have conversations with even really, really, really smart people that I don't know always understand that and I think when you think about someone like me- like when you first met me, Tim and you were, who's this Adrian guy with CXC and why I'm so constantly, just on the top of my own, talking about content, content, content, guys, for our founders and for some of our listeners today that are building tomorrow's companies, this content can do way more than just marketing to sales, Tim. 

Speaker 1 (00:13:56) - Right, this content leads to also building out playbooks or eventual language bases that you can feed to the right type of technology to be able to then lever against things that otherwise would have been taking us more salespeople or more marketing people or more marketing dollars or generally more outreach, or, on the opposite side, it's all the other stuff. 

Speaker 1 (00:14:15) - So, like, I love this idea and this notion of people kind of slowing down and thinking about how content and what their content strategy fits into this world, both in terms of, like, intentional content, opportunistic content, and then AI-fueled content. So I love that you called that out, Tim. 

Speaker 2 (00:14:30) - Yeah, so, regardless of where you are on your AI journey, I always go back to: knowledge is king, right. So clean your data. Right, your data is going to support your AI strategy, whatever that strategy is. Again, for both internal and external use cases. 

Speaker 1 (00:14:46) - Yep, I could not agree more. I could not agree more, tim. Before we jump off tools, has there been any like? Is there a short list of tools or technology that you've kind of brought with you in your playbook through all these different businesses that you've been a part of, or that as you've built Humache? Was there any? Was there a short list of technologies or tools that you really did lean upon to build the business and to grow the business and to keep track of all the things that are happening on the day-to-day within the business. 

Speaker 2 (00:15:11) - Yeah, I would say really what drove our product strategy was our internal resources asking for these tools. So specific tools, agent assist, dynamic scripting, sentiment analysis. So it really, we grew our product roadmap out of the requests from our people running contact centers. And again, we go back 35 plus years running contact centers. Those people have been in the same roles for 10, 15, 20 years. They know what tools they need. They know what tools they want, and that really drove our product strategy and our product roadmap. 

Speaker 2 (00:15:44) - And so creating those tools first, I think led to some of the success we've had with companies because we built these tools internally, but they actually work externally as well. 

Speaker 1 (00:15:55) - I love it. Almost like the eat your own dog food type of effect. You start to build things that you and your people and your team understands how to lever, how to apply to different problems, how to maybe extend or again, to leverage some of the other tools that you're using on a day-to-day basis, it becomes pretty damn easy to go to a potential customer or a new customer and show them how utilization works or show them why adoption equals a certain yield. 

Speaker 1 (00:16:19) - This is what so many software companies I think struggle with, Tim, is they'll build stuff that maybe they don't actually know exactly how it applies to the market. They might have some form of a product like that, but they don't know how it applies to the market. And then they wonder years later why they're struggling with sales or they're struggling with product adoption, product utilization. 

Speaker 2 (00:16:36) - I love those ideas. I think that's why companies and actually individuals have become kind of a deer in the headlight because again, every tech, every technology company and their tech stack has access to AI. Some of those technology companies, to your point, they may never have set a foot in a contact center, but they came up with this product and they have a demo and so people are looking at these demos, hey, can this solve our problem? 

Speaker 2 (00:17:02) - But really if you bring these tools that internal people have used and leveraged, bring those tools internally, you usually get more success with it. I think that's our advantage is having that 35 years running contact centers and the people who have run those contact centers asking for the tools that they need to do their work. 

Speaker 1 (00:17:22) - Nothing, I couldn't agree with you more, nothing beats having a SME perspective, right? When you're a subject matter expert in a space, a niche, an industry or vertical, you already know what those people are going through every single day. You already know what the customer is dealing with on the other line. You already understand all the technical infrastructure and just the general requirements around how to keep it all together. And then you master some of the, just the general evolution or maturation of all those things. 

Speaker 1 (00:17:46) - It's going to be a game changer for folks that have never stepped foot in that arena and they don't know anything about it. It's going to be incredibly helpful to have a partner like Kimosh that can actually walk you through that. 

Speaker 2 (00:17:57) - Well, you said one thing, you said it was easy. I wish it was easy. I think it's challenging now because the market is too crowded. There's too many choices. There's too many options. And if you look to CY Combinator, you're familiar with them out of Silicon Valley. They've launched 90 digital voice companies in the last 18 months. Think about that. That's one, 90 digital voice companies. How many of those actually have contact center experience? Or they're looking at it like we don't need a contact, forget the contact center. 

Speaker 2 (00:18:25) - We're going to solve everything with a digital voice and we're going to do it at a hundred percent. Well, you're not going to get to a hundred percent, probably ever. But you can get- I agree with that. But is that five years? Is that 10 years? It's going to take some time to get the automation containment rate up to near a hundred percent. 

Speaker 1 (00:18:44) - I couldn't agree more. What you just said makes me think about a few months ago, Tim, I was in London at the Intercom Pioneer event where they were going through their version of a Fin 2, their big AI bot that's transforming all the support space. What you just said is super interesting. One of their co-founders, Des Traynor, was up on the stage and he shows this slide of like, I'm not kidding, like a thousand of these small AI logos on one slide. 

Speaker 1 (00:19:12) - And he basically says something along the lines of, all right, so today we're in the world of anything that can possibly put a thin wrapper of AI around it, here they all are right now. And then he did the second slide where he showed the majority of them fade away into just a handful of remaining logos, the biggest ones in the world, some of the biggest players that will inevitably either gobble these things up or put them to sleep, right, for lack of a better term. 

Speaker 1 (00:19:36) - And it's interesting, guys, Tim's spot on where it's like, that's very normal when some of these major disruptive times in business and in markets occur where like, you're going to have a bunch of people that kind of come to the front and position themselves as an AI expert or as an AI leader and AI player. But oftentimes, there's really only a handful of players that really are going to be able to live and or are delivering what is most valuable to their users, which is what in effect keeps them going and keeps the sustainability alive. 

Speaker 1 (00:20:05) - Tim, I'd love to jump into the third CX pillar of process. And I know I always joke about this. I know it might not be the sexiest of the pillars, but I would love to hear from someone like you who has had to manage some massive call centers and you've worked with some of the biggest companies on planet earth, helping them with their customer comps. Spend a few minutes talking about how you sort of, kind of, as you went through your career, did your playbook get bigger? 

Speaker 1 (00:20:28) - Did you keep bringing the same type of a playbook from company to company to company? Did you keep just learning every month, every day, every week, every month, every quarter, and then the playbook just kept expanding in more of like a living format? I'd love to kind of hear how you think about process as it relates to this whole world.

Speaker 2 (00:20:44) - Yeah, so you mentioned GE that I work for, and that's when I realized that I didn't want to work at the time for the largest company in the world, right? GE wasn't, and I think you get caught up because there's so much bureaucracy. It was hard to get stuff done, but we look at workflows, right? So, and especially with AI, you can start now to automate these workflows, right? Now we're getting into digital agents that can actually create workflows. So as you look at workflow optimization, it has to absolutely include AI, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:21:19) - That's part of the future of this. And so when you look at CX, right? Everybody's like CX, yep, for customer service, you can use AI, but what about what's next? What about automating tasks, right? Manual tasks that are accessible, front office, back office, whatever that is. So you see this digital agent kind of expanding into a digital worker. And we actually have a company that's created a digital workforce on our platform. So that they came to us and they said, hey, we have 40 employees and we do this amount of revenue. 

Speaker 2 (00:21:51) - We want to quadruple the revenue and I want the same 40 employees and I want a whole workforce of AI agents. And so we created specific skills for those agents, right? They actually named them with AI in the middle of the name. You know, this is a legal AI expert. This is a marketing AI expert. This one is a operations AI expert, right? And created those. And so what's interesting is I've had to pivot through the years on, you know, is it, you know, use some big company mindset, use some small company mindset. 

Speaker 2 (00:22:25) - But one thing I'll say is you have to be fluid in this space because if you're not, if you don't have the ability to adapt improvise, adapt and overcome, that's my only model for my kids. They could rattle that right off. But it really is, it's improvise, adapt and overcome because you have to continue to reposition yourself in this marketplace. 

Speaker 1 (00:22:46) - I couldn't agree more and you're right. Every decade, there's going to be some new thing, right? Every decade, there's going to, or maybe a few things every decade that is going to ruffle a bunch of feathers, get a bunch of people hot and bothered. It's going to get the right people cranked up and motivated to start building in a certain direction, right? The old picks and shovels type of example. Has there been like one or two things that you've seen at all the businesses that you've been a part of building or serving over the years? 

Speaker 1 (00:23:13) - Is there like maybe like one or two things that you've seen that have kind of blown you away around how either your customers or your team leveraged process to be able to manage some of that change? Like meaning, was there a specific process? Was there a specific type of meeting? Was there some type of process management tool? I'd love to kind of hear like a little bit more just around sort of like some of the things that have kind of blown you away on the process side with all the businesses that you've been able to touch over your career. 

Speaker 2 (00:23:43) - I'll go just to one, it's feedback, right? I mean, you used to look at, you do surveys for customer feedback or you get an employee surveys for internal process and tool feedback. And so the feedback from a process perspective is like, how do you knock away, how do you eliminate unneeded processes within an organization, right? Back to largest corporation, there was too many processes, right? There's too many gates to go through to get stuff done. How do you eliminate that? You eliminate it by finding out what it is. 

Speaker 2 (00:24:13) - What's the issue at hand and how do you get that? You get that by feedback, right? So internal feedback as well as external feedback. I'd say it would probably be number one in my book. 

Speaker 1 (00:24:24) - I love it. And then you literally teed us up for our fourth and final pillar of feedback. I'm going to break this into two camps though, because I want to pick your brain on the first part of feedback. And you just started to allude to it. It was like frontline employee feedback or understanding what people want. It's funny, because like even at CXC, Tim, we'll work with some customers where they're all about the process. They want to load up on the playbooks and load up on all the different plays. 

Speaker 1 (00:24:46) - And they want to know exactly who's on offense, who's on defense, who's playing. And that's cool, that's fine. And then we work with other customers where kill process by all means necessary, because it either stifles creativity, stifles your ability to just focus on selling, stifles your ability to continue finding where the market really wants things. So you just keep plowing forward, because the market's always going to have the truth. But let's start with this first part, because you kind of jumped in there with employee feedback. 

Speaker 1 (00:25:13) - Over the years, what were some of the ways that you would really kind of force either your management team or your extended leadership team to be delivering back to you regular cuts and regular examples and regular views of, let's start with the employee feedback side, things that the employees were seeing, feeling, hearing, that you knew, A, you knew you needed to know about as the executive, and then B, you were able to lever to your point. 

Speaker 1 (00:25:36) - You were able to lever, you were able to pitch and pivot quickly because you were seeing or hearing or they were validating things for you on the employee experience. Just take like a minute or two on like things that you've kind of seen on the employee experience side over the years. 

Speaker 2 (00:25:50) - Or feedback, something with feedback. The biggest we touched on earlier is really culture, right? You have to have the culture where feedback.

Speaker 2 (00:25:59) - is not only kind of requested from the leadership team, which you get a lot of people that are like, oh yeah, we get our feedback. Do you follow up on that feedback, right? You collect the feedback, do you act upon that feedback, right? And so I think regular check-ins, right? You could look at just different, what's a, I'm trying to think of a point here from a feedback perspective where, you know, where that feedback is shared. 

Speaker 1 (00:26:29) - So- Yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:26:30) - So like 360 reviews or like open- 360 reviews, you know, weekly meetings, but you have to have the alignment, right? Of why I'm requesting this feedback because we're actually going to make some changes and deliver that to the organization. So it's going to be better because if you collect that feedback and you do nothing, nobody starts to give you feedback. You don't get anything. 

Speaker 1 (00:26:52) - Yeah, people start to get quiet pretty quickly. 

Speaker 2 (00:26:55) - So I think it really starts with the culture, right? The culture component of that. 

Speaker 1 (00:26:59) - I love that. And I love that you bring up the 360s. I remember, Tim, I remember my first 360 back many, many years ago, man. And it was the first time I'd ever seen it and I was running a team and I thought I was, you know, like a man of the people, as they say. I thought I was leading the charge for everybody. Customer received, get my first 360. Most of it was positive, but it was the first time I ever got some of this super helpful, constructive, pointed, candid feedback. 

Speaker 1 (00:27:25) - And at that stage of my career, I don't know if I was ready for that or not, but it helped to start to pull some puzzle pieces over to the side that I knew, shit, this is what people are saying. I got to work on this. It's going to help make you a better player on the field, frankly. 

Speaker 2 (00:27:39) - And I think the transparency of that too, where I could come to you, Adrian, and tell you, this is the good, this is the bad, this is what, here's an opportunity of what you should work on. And, you know, that first slap in the face, you're like, wow. And you're like, hey, this actually works better, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:27:53) - It works better. 

Speaker 3 (00:27:54) - It works better. 

Speaker 2 (00:27:54) - When people are transparent about what's working and what's not working. And it's, you know, then you eliminate some of the, I think the complacency within an organization, right? So you get people that sit there and, hey, I do my job, I do this, and I don't need any feedback. Everybody needs feedback. Every, you know, everybody needs improvement. Totally agree. 

Speaker 1 (00:28:12) - Tim, let's jump to the customer side. So we just talked about a bunch of ideas around the employee and the team side. What have been some ways that you've always really, really pushed or forced or mandated over all the companies that you've built around things that absolutely have to happen on the customer feedback side? Or, to your point, what the hell's the point of collecting if you don't do something about it? What are some of the things that you've always mandated that you need to have on the customer feedback side? 

Speaker 1 (00:28:36) - And then what are some of the things you've always driven your teams to do as it relates to acting upon that feedback and closing the loop? 

Speaker 2 (00:28:44) - You know, I'd say the big ones, QBRs, right? Quarterly business reviews. And it's funny, some, we have a customer that hates, like, having, you know, quarterly business reviews. Oh, yeah, we don't need it. Everything's on time. Like, no, we do need it. 

Speaker 1 (00:28:57) - There's a lot of them out there, Tim. 

Speaker 2 (00:28:59) - Yeah, we need to know what's working, what's not. What are your pain points still? We need to understand your pain points still so that we can help. And I think quarterly business reviews are required. And I think it gets hard, too. Some teams are, oh, we're so busy right now. Let's skip this one. You can't skip it, right? You have to have that. You have to get the feedback. You have to, you know, some could be surveys, some could be meetings. You know, you need to get that feedback so that you can continue to improve upon that customer, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:29:26) - And it's not just our customer because our customers have customers. So we need to focus on both of those. What are your customer pain points still? What are your pain points internally? Is there anything we can do to help within your organization to kind of, you know, streamline what some of your pain points or issues are internally? 

Speaker 1 (00:29:43) - I absolutely love that you just said that because guys, you need to hit pause and go back to what Tim just said, because this is brilliant as far as this. So many people, they'll do the work, they'll schedule the QBR, they'll do the presentation, they'll do the pretty slide deck, they'll do the whole rigamarole, they'll invite the executive sponsors. 

Speaker 1 (00:30:02) - And then what Tim just said, they're not thinking about how they can become their customer strategic partner where they're literally helping their customer solve customer problems or even better, helping their customers make money and increase customer satisfaction. You could do those things, guys. I don't care what your business is, what you're offering, what your willy or your where is, that's the type of shit that people wanna do business with. 

Speaker 1 (00:30:26) - And those are the types of companies that are gonna really typically end up killing you with the retention, their ability to upsell, cross sell, their ability to get leads or new opportunities from their existing customers, not even net new out there in the world. That's the hard shit. Like, let's get some of this information for the people that we're already working with if we're trying to get to that strategic partner, that top level, because that's the ultimate, man. 

Speaker 2 (00:30:47) - I love that. And that's sticky. It's sticky, right? If you get to that point, that's sticky. That's a strategic partner that you want for life. And that's really what we try to create is how do we get this partner for life, right? And you get there by doing what you just said, especially on the revenue side, right? Because revenue impact is a lot bigger than I'm gonna save you some money from your contacts that I have.

Speaker 2 (00:31:10) - Right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna save you some cost. Well, that's not really gonna help me get to the billion-dollar number. Right, how do I get to the billion-dollar number? It's not by cutting 20% out of my contact center. 

Speaker 3 (00:31:20) - You know, tip, tip. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:24) - I can't tell you how many conversations I have around. You know, okay, we want to convert our CS, our CSM team, to really be move away from the farmer role, move more into the hunter role. Okay, cool, yeah, we want to. We're gonna put up, sell and cross sell goals. We're gonna put a revenue number on all the CSM's- awesome. Let's look at what have we been doing for the last year, two years, five years- oh, wait a minute. We don't talk to our customers. None of our CSM's have relationship with their POC's and their customer portfolio. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:49) - No one has touched these people in six months, twelve. How are you going to just, yeah, we're not an upsell, a strategy switch on, when nobody's got relationships with humans that are gonna be the people that are literally the keys to being able to get that? And then what do you got to do? 

Speaker 1 (00:32:05) - It's the strategic partnership goal that Tim's talking about here, where it's like you got to literally start building to that place, to where you can ever ask for some of that stuff, or to get into a position where it makes a ton of sense when that conversation comes up or when that QBR comes up and somebody's asking for what additional product, services or general support you can provide. So I love it. Oh, this has been absolutely fantastic. 

Speaker 1 (00:32:25) - Before we start to wrap the show, number one, where any, I know that you've got a new book and I want to make sure that you have a minute to kind of call the. You've got several books, but can you spend a minute shouting out to the CX nation your new book and give us us for for what it's about and some of the things that you were trying to wrangle into the end of the new book? 

Speaker 2 (00:32:45) - Yeah, so new book, the intelligent workforce: how humans plus machines will co-create a better future, published by Forbes, came out in october and has done really well and really it's. It's not CX specific, because AI is not CX, right. Really, what I tried to create was a almost like a textbook where people could, you know, pick that up and read a couple chapters and understand more, and so so people who don't understand AI, if they, if they read this book, they're gonna understand AI, at least to the point. It was in October, I think. You know. 

Speaker 2 (00:33:18) - Once it's published, it's outdated in the AI space, but it will give you a great general understanding on how you can use AI, not only for your business, but for your personal life as well, and so that's really what I tried to create and it's done pretty well. Kind of got a little shot up in Times Square, if you saw that dude, that was awesome. 

Speaker 1 (00:33:38) - You sent me that. That's fantastic, yeah, but, Tim, one last thing is this: the two men you did a brilliant job of textbook or not. Like it's what you started this whole conversation about today, which is how humans and machines are going to create, co-create together, guys, and like the reality is- and one of the things that I love about Tim's message, just in general- the things that you guys are doing too much- all of your other books that you've done in the past, but like guys, that's what it really is. 

Speaker 1 (00:34:04) - It's gonna be a handful of really smart humans that understand how to lever, how to, how to learn, how to understand, how to apply and then rinse, wash, repeat. Those are gonna be the people that are gonna be in a really damn good spot in the next 10 years and beyond. 

Speaker 2 (00:34:20) - My favorite quote with that, my favorite quote- it's not mine, I wish it was, but a. You know AI is not gonna take your job, but somebody who knows how to use AI is gonna take your. 

Speaker 1 (00:34:29) - It's so true, man. It's so true, I think it's, and then I joke. I joke like if I feel like it's gonna end up being like everything else in the world: math. It's gonna be like a Pareto. There's gonna be 20% of people that understand all of the different ways that you can lever, you can you. You can expedite velocity, you can do more with less with all of these variant AI solutions or ML solutions. 

Speaker 1 (00:34:51) - Those 20%, they're probably gonna be the people that in certain camps and in certain groups, in certain professional spaces, they- that 20%- is gonna live and they're gonna do really, really well and they're gonna be able to take on the entire workload of other workspaces or industries or niche spats that used to require a hundred percent of that of those people to do it. 

Speaker 1 (00:35:07) - Tim, where can people get in touch with not just you, but where can people get in touch with your team at Humache if they want to learn more about the things that you guys are doing today. 

Speaker 2 (00:35:18) - Yep, go to the website, Humachecom. You can always send me an email. I respond emails, reach out on LinkedIn and you know I appreciate the time. Adrian, this has been fun. 

Speaker 1 (00:35:30) - This is awesome, man number one. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. And then, guys, I will put everything in the show. Notes is always around Tim's book and then the things that are happening at Humache. But, Tim, it's been an absolute pleasure. Brother, thank you so much for coming on the CX Chronicles podcast and sharing your story with all us today. 

Speaker 2 (00:35:44) - Thanks, Adrian, have a great day.