What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Data-Driven CX: Balancing Technology and Humanity in Customer Care
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
The world of customer experience has evolved dramatically in recent years, and few understand this transformation better than Joel Sylvester of Five Star Call Centers. In this fascinating conversation, Joel takes us through the reinvention of customer care, showing how today's most successful organizations are blending cutting-edge technology with authentic human connection.
Having pioneered work-from-home call center programs back in 1999 and helped establish some of the first offshore operations in the Philippines, Joel brings a uniquely informed perspective on how AI, data intelligence, and digital agents are reshaping what's possible in customer service.
The discussion reveals how AI has revolutionized every aspect of customer experience – from recruitment and training to real-time agent assistance and quality monitoring. Joel explains why the term "chatbot" is obsolete, preferring "digital agent" to describe the sophisticated AI tools now handling after-hours inquiries, seasonal spikes, and routine questions. These digital team members free human agents to focus on complex, emotionally-charged interactions where their empathy and judgment add irreplaceable value.
Perhaps most compelling is Joel's insight into data's critical role in driving exceptional customer experiences. "If you don't trust your data, now's the time to start putting things into place to trust your data," he advises, emphasizing that clean, structured information forms the foundation for everything from AI performance to business decision-making. Organizations that harness their interaction data can now identify consumer preferences, predict needs, and even develop new products based on customer conversations.
For companies just beginning their CX transformation journey, Joel offers practical guidance: audit your data systems, establish clear AI usage policies (including strong "always" and "never" guidelines), and start with low-risk, high-return applications. His enthusiasm for the possibilities is infectious, particularly when describing how these technologies are transforming healthcare customer service – helping sick patients and concerned family members get the answers and care they desperately need.
Ready to discover how the right blend of technology and humanity can transform your customer experience? This episode delivers actionable insights for service leaders looking to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive landscape.
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Hey everybody, fascinating chat today, as we talk about reinventing customer care and customer service, with a real innovator, one of my favorites in the industry, joel Sylvester, five Star Call Centers. How are you?
Speaker 2:Great Evan, Great to talk to you today.
Speaker 1:Great to catch up. I have so many questions Before that maybe introduce yourself really interesting background in the industry and, for those who aren't familiar with Five Star Call Centers, tell us about the mission and the vision.
Speaker 2:Brand centers all over the world. You know, starting from a technology standpoint, I have been on everything from Avaya to Nice to Genesis to Five9 and everything in between. I actually was part of the team that started the first work at home groups back in 1990 and 1999. Looked a lot different than work at home groups. Look today. 1999 looked a lot different than work at home groups. Look today. I was also a part of a team that started some of the first offshore call centers in the Philippines in the late 90s and early 2000s. And you know, actually, with what I'm seeing today in the industry and the things that we're doing from a technology standpoint, from a work at home standpoint, there's a lot of similarities. You know, a lot of differences and a lot of things that we'll get into, but but a lot of similarities as well. So I'm one of the owners at five star call centers.
Speaker 2:Now we are really a trusted provider of all things CX. So everything from recruiting and hiring and training to technology, to AI, to data structure and things like that. So the world has really changed. We're a business process outsourcer, a BPO, which not that long ago was really providing, you know, mostly the human capital piece of it. But now we are really seeing the opportunity to really drive from soup to nuts in the contact center.
Speaker 2:And what's interesting too is and we'll get into this, evan but the data that is needed to really run world-class customer care today is really being recognized and we are starting to see different departments outside just your normal customer service. You know, for a while the only departments that usually cared about your contact center were your complaints department and your finance group. Right, you know how can you do it as cheap as possible and limit the number of complaints. But now we're really seeing that marketing groups and voice of the customer group and branding groups and product groups, if they're using the data that's gathered within the contact center and within all interactions, your ability to really use that data to your competitive advantage is in a place that it has never been in the past. It's kind of exciting.
Speaker 1:Very exciting and we're going to talk humans and the human touch and human capital in a moment. But let's start with the big picture around technology. It's sort of changing everything, but it's changing the way companies handle customer experience dramatically. What are you seeing and what is the big picture from your point of view?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, it's amazing and in fact, I don't know how I did this job 25 years ago without the technology that exists today. You know, in our world we really see it starting at the very beginning, utilizing AI for recruiting is absolutely a game changer. Utilizing AI for recruiting is absolutely a game changer what you can identify to make sure that your managers are talking to the right people, and it's just so much more efficient. So if someone applies and they're not a fit for the job, it used to take hours which was dollars to determine that it wasn't a fit for them. That wasn't great for the team member, it wasn't great for the organization. Now, with the information that can be put into an application, you can identify if they're a good fit or not. At Five Star, actually, the first step that you get if you apply is to do an interview with an avatar in either a language, in technology, your experience whether you're telling the truth or not, your confidence level based on your voice and your ums and your ands and based on your eyes.
Speaker 2:And again, it just saves all that time and energy and an interview can be done with somebody at seven o'clock at night or at six o'clock on a Saturday. In the old days, which the old days were five or six years ago, evan you would have to find a time for a person to come in and interview or do a phone interview, and every company wants agents and team members, to be honest, to have that good moral character. But the first thing we used to ask was that they lie to their current employer and tell them they have a dentist or they have a doctor or whatever. So the interviewing process and all of the data that's gathered in the interview process, evan, can then be used to see if someone is hired, how do they do on that job and what particular things made them good or made them a good fit, and then you can get more successful as you go. Training is the exact same thing.
Speaker 2:From a team member engagement standpoint, the agent assists to be able to feed people the answers to questions. It's the 80-20 rule, right 80% of the knowledge will handle, or 20% of the knowledge, will handle 80% of the questions. What about the other one-offs that can now be handled through agents assist? And what we're seeing is companies that are really getting the best ROI out of AI are those that really have strong data policies in place. They have to trust their data. So we're spending a lot of time on those conversations. If you don't trust your data, now's the time to start putting things into place to trust your data.
Speaker 2:And then agent assist which agent assist is really? An agent that is talking to customers is being fed based on the conversation, based on questions are being asked, are being fed those answers? It's not customer facing yet it's agent facing. So the agent still has the ability to digest that. Maybe throw the BS flag, say I'm not going to tell the customer that because that doesn't sound right or whatever.
Speaker 2:But that's a valuable process because you can turn on some AI or some generative AI and really start to hone your LLM by using all, every one of those agents interactions. So if you have agents interaction, whether it's voice or whether it's chat or whether it's social or whether it's email, every one of those can start to really get a confidence level in your AI. The highest ROI for our partners is when they start to use that and learn from it, with an agent being kind of that buffer and that safety net. Then the next best time to use it is after hours, holidays, christmas, and when you see seasonal spikes times that usually frustrate customers because they had a hold for a super long time, you know. To go back, evan, to the start of our conversation, it's very similar to when we started using offshore and nearshore resources that we were using.
Speaker 2:You know, places like the Philippines and places like South America and Jamaica and Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic to kind of supplement some of those things and at first US customers and US team members really kind of looked at that as a threat, looked at it as something that was never going to be as good and wasn't going to be part of the team. But after time the value really kicked in the cost savings, the fact that you could utilize these for some after hours. You know in the Philippines they're 14 hours different. You know we don't need someone to work at 2 am. They can sleep at 2 am. We don't need someone to work every Christmas day. We don't need someone to work on Thanksgiving.
Speaker 2:We're really starting to see we call them digital agents. Evan, you'll never hear me say chatbot. That word is dead. I want to take it behind the barn and shoot it. Chatbot to me is really something that was implemented before we had the true generative AI and was probably more frustrated customers than anything. But we are seeing team members and customers are really starting to see the new generational AI as part of the team and as part of a valuable part of the customer experience that the answers can be quicker, they can be after hours, they can be more accurate. They're not for everything. You know we use the term ice. I think you and I have talked about that. If it's complex and emotional, we try to stay away from the AI piece of it. Today it gets better every single day, but we really try to work with customers to make sure that they're using it for the right things. That truly is a value to the team and is a value to their consumers.
Speaker 1:Well, it's amazing and for companies just thinking about getting started on this CX automation and AI journey, what's the right way to approach it from your experience?
Speaker 2:Yeah, call me because I can keep you from making probably 25 steps backward. But the first thing to do is to really look at your own internal systems and data. To do is to really look at your own internal systems and data One of the keynotes I do I have everybody stand up and I have them sit down if they're 100% confident in their data. I usually get to about 30% to 40% confident before a good chunk of my audience is sitting down, and that's a problem, right? You cannot. You know, the technology is only as good as what you're putting in the data is the gasoline, and if you put 40 octane into a sports car, it's not going to run very well. So really start to look at your data systems, Look at your systems and make sure that your systems have the API feeds. You know that, ideally, you're looking at that. This takes a while, Evan. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. If you did plant a tree 20 years ago, the best time is today. So don't get caught up on the fact that your data and your systems are not maybe where they need to be to utilize all the resources, but start today. Technical debt is a thing. The airlines have them, the banks have them, the government has them. It's not something to be ashamed of if you're not there today, but if you're not now taking the steps to get your data in the right place, that's it. So that's the number one thing. Look at your data and your systems.
Speaker 2:Secondly, I really encourage people to come up with policies and procedures around how they're going to use AI. I like to use the word always and never. We will always use it for this. After hours agent assist and seasonal spikes are good always. We will never use it for this. We will never use it for emotional type responses. We will never use it for complex decision making.
Speaker 2:Things that I recommend against are things like underwriting or benefit, you know, benefit coverage, things like that, and some of those immediate type things. If someone's in an airport trying to get home and they have to decide to go to gate B or C, boy, we are still seeing that human interaction being, you know, important from that. So start with your data, then your systems, then start to look at your policies and procedures and then put it into place. You know, put it into place somewhere where it's going to have a low risk, high return. Again, the agent assist is great, the after hours is great, the holidays and then some seasonal spikes. So those are really the three things data and systems, building your guidelines. You're always in your nevers and then just getting started.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. You mentioned the role of data a few times and it a, you know, challenging topic, often troublesome topic getting good data, clean data in one place. Um any best practices there for making an automated service feel more, like you said, more personal, more helpful through data? Uh, not all data scientists and uh contact center businesses yeah, you know, um, it's it.
Speaker 2:Honestly, it's just getting started, you know, looking at your fields and looking what you have, um, and really digging in into that piece of it.
Speaker 2:So it it's. It's as easy as a whiteboard session where you get, where you get all your shareholders and stakeholders involved and you just start going through Feel, do we feel good about this name? Do we feel like we have the right names, phone numbers, addresses, products purchased, preferences? I've done literally dozens of these, evan, and almost without question, you end up figuring out that a good chunk of your data 80% is probably good, 20% is not good. Then you have to make the decision. What are we going to do with that? Are we comfortable leaving those data sources that we don't feel comfortable with out of the decision-making process? If we are great, what are the risks of doing that? Or what do we need to do and set timelines and goals of? Okay, we want to get these data fields to where we're comfortable with them. What are we going to do to start doing that? Are we going to work with a data provider? Are we just going to start to verify this information on every interaction? Um, you know those types of things. And then my favorite aha is when people start saying imagine if we knew this, what decisions we could make. And there are fields that don't even exist today, that should have. But again, there's no shame, we're all living in a new world. Time to put that data field in there and start to populate it. And you can start to populate it. And you can start to populate it through interactions. You can start to populate it through asking your customers. This question's one-off until you get to where you're comfortable with that. And I will tell you, some of the most exciting conversations now is don't just think about in the old days when you did QA. We'd be lucky to do two to three to five percent QA. It was very random. Now, every single interaction between speech analytics, between you know data sourcing, you can get every single conversation turned into a transcript and every single conversation where that data can update your fields, in every single conversation where that data can update your fields. So be looking at that and understanding if you're there today.
Speaker 2:A lot of times people have softwares like a Genesis or like a Nice or like a 5.9. Where that exists and it's there, you just have to turn it on and start flowing it into the right place. So start looking at how can we start to fill those data fields. And don't overlook your everyday interactions there's thousands and thousands and thousands of those going on and start utilizing those to make that happen. You know, we're working with some of our partners that are maybe further along the evolutionary curve where we can go to their marketing and their branding team and say everybody that bought from you said this it's pretty powerful, right, because that should be what's in your branding and your marketing, right? And vice versa, people that didn't buy from you said this.
Speaker 2:And we've had customers that have developed a new product based on the data fields that were created and multiple non-buyers saying oh, you don't have this. I wish you had this. In the old days, you had to come up again. The old days was five or six years ago. You had to come up with a product and hope people bought it, or you had to survey your team members. You had to survey your customers and hope that you were getting the right people. But now you can literally take 100% of your interactions and if you're going to roll out a new product, you at least know. Hey, we had a certain portion of our customers that were asking for this. Let's start by trying to sell it to them and then let's put it out in the market and you can lower that learning curve and you can increase your propensity to win when bringing out new products and new branding.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Let's talk about the human side. You're known for hiring and screening really great people, lots of people in the US. How do you find the balance between all this great tech and automation and that human touch? I mean, how do you train for empathy and nurture empathy in your employees? What's been some of the secret sauce there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know probably for the first time in my 25 year career, evan I truly believe that staffing is not an issue. I believe hiring enough quality people that are that have the propensity to succeed and the skill the skill set to succeed is higher than any time in my career. I think I spent the first 25 years of my career saying how are we going to get enough people? And right now that is not the case, and there's a few things that are helping with this. Now that is not the case and there's a few things that are helping with this One. The easy interactions, the seasonal interactions, the overnight interactions can be handled with digital agents. So that's great that that takes that piece out. You know everybody says they're understaffed right now. Well, if you're understaffed by 20 percent, then start using digital agents for 20 percent of your work and your staff.
Speaker 2:Just like that you know generationally. If you look at the US, you know we're having less children. Those children are entering the workforce a little bit later, so this is going to continue to. We're going to continue to have less humans, but boy do we have great technology that can handle some of those. Supplementing the human interaction with technology is amazing. If it's utilizing US-based agents, giving them things like agent assist to answer those one-off questions is great, something we've never had in the past. Being able to utilize 100% QA to identify when things are going wrong before it becomes a big issue is huge. And then utilizing near shore and offshore resources. We are way more efficient with those than we've ever been in the past because of the technology that exists, making sure they're getting the right calls and it goes to the right place. So, from a technology standpoint, you are able to pick the right person way better than ever. Because of the technology that exists, you're able to train them the right way.
Speaker 2:A majority of our training is self-paced, you know, and one person you know you might learn really quickly, evan, and you might be able to get through a training class in you know, five or six days.
Speaker 2:I might be a little slower, it might take me two weeks. In the old days, again five or six years ago, everybody went through the same training course and you would get bored and frustrated because you were ready to go and I would be anxious because I wasn't ready to go. Now you can customize that and through score you know, through testing and scoring, you can tell Evan's ready to go, joel's ready to go, and really make that a better experience. From that end of it the fact that real-time speech analytics exists I can tell Evan if you're on a call right now and maybe you're getting swore at right. It happens, it stinks, but in my industry it happens. In the old days you'd get frustrated, you'd maybe quit, maybe you have a bad attitude Now your supervisor can find out that that's going on real time and can take you out of the phone queue call.
Speaker 2:You hop on a phone call, say, hey man, I know that was a tough call, I know it stinks, you know we can talk about the Red Sox or we can talk about whatever else and you're ready to go on your day. In the old days that didn't happen. It didn't happen until you called frustrated, or until you quit, or until you got on the next call and gave the next customer what for and that customer then, you know, complained. So all of those things, I don't know how we did it 10, 15, 20, 25 years ago. So all of those things, I don't know how we did it 10, 15, 20, 25 years ago. So all of those things go into it. I will tell you, work at home is not for every industry, I believe that but for this industry, evan, it is an absolute game changer.
Speaker 2:And for Five Star kind of specifically, our bread and butter are some of the small towns, the rural type communities where you know people. Can, you know, live in a smaller community where they can afford a home, where maybe they have access. They live close to family members from a daycare standpoint. And if you have a team member that is able to work at home as a extension of their life, the reason not to work at home is because you don't want to put on pants in the morning, right. The reason to work at home is because it's an extension of your life. Commuting in cost of living, daycare, potentially, you know, a disability that limits your ability to, you know, get into a traditional office setting are, all you know, great situations. So if the foundation is a person who is really able to provide world-class customer care as an extension of their life, that is great.
Speaker 2:Humans, in my opinion, in my experience, haven't want to help. They want to be helpful. It sometimes gets us in trouble. As a matter of fact, it's the reason why good Samaritan laws exist. So if you have team members that are able to work at home as an extension of their lives. They want to help people, and then you can give them all of this great technology.
Speaker 2:You can make sure that, from a recruiting and a training standpoint, they are a fit for their position. And then you can give them the agent assist tools to make sure that they have the right answers. And then you can monitor their calls and if things are going sideways, you can help them immediately and help them, maybe talk them out of a bad situation immediately. And then you can give them maybe a few more nights and weekends off because of digital agents, a few more holidays off During those seasonal spikes. You can take some of the stress away. Man, I mean, if I could talk to 20-year-old Joel Sylvester, I would be like just keep your nose to the grindstone, keep doing the hard stuff, because things are going to be a lot, lot better. You can't even imagine how much better you're going to be able to serve customers based on the technology, and how much better you're going to be able to serve customers based on the technology, and how much better you're going to be able to serve your team members.
Speaker 2:You're going to be able to put your team members in the right position, give them the right training, give them the right tools. So it's an exciting time, Evan. There's no question.
Speaker 1:It is, and I love your enthusiasm, as always. You have so many great clients and partners. I'm hesitant to ask you to pick a favorite child, but any anecdotes or examples where you're making a big impact with one of your clients?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, health care right now, evan, is absolutely huge. I mean everybody, you know, everyone has had a good health care story and a bad health care story, and the efficiency that we're able to bring in is absolutely world class. When I started this 25 years ago in financial services and retail, it never really occurred to me that we'd be able to help patients in the way that we are. I mean, what is a more human thing than being sick or having a sick parent or having a sick child and needing answers and needing resources? And the amount of health care that we're able to do whether it's helping people get telemedicine so they don't have to go to a doctor while they're sick, you know, to get what they need, or so they can get the pharmaceutical, the prescriptions that they need it is amazing.
Speaker 2:And in fact, my team members to Evan, they really love those types, they love all their interactions. But I have team members that when they move, maybe from a healthcare client to a retail client, they just they feel like they were really able to be doing great things for people. And when you help someone who's sick or has a sick kid and help them get the answers they need or help to make sure that their insurance is going to cover or help them get the prescription they need. That's pretty cool, I mean. That is at the end of your shift, you can go do whatever things you love to do and know that you truly made a difference and all of our partners we love, but that healthcare definitely has a special place in your heart. But what I will tell you is a lot of the lessons that we learned from retail and from financial services 20 years ago weren't necessarily accepted in health care until now, and I think the pandemic did part of that.
Speaker 2:I I remember during 2020, I had a healthcare partner that, um, that never allowed work at home, and, uh, was was against it and and in February, he had denied me to have some people work at home. And then, in March of 2020, um, he was my biggest advocate and and he said, you know, it's a it's it's it's more risky to not have patients get the answers that they need, especially during a global pandemic, and I think that that pandemic really, you know terrible times for a lot of people, but I think it did shine a light on some things that can be done more efficiently. Again, as we look at population centers and generationally, there might not be enough workers in Chicago or in Minneapolis or in Boston, but, boy, you go 100 miles away outside of Boston, you go 100 miles outside of Chicago, or you go 100 miles outside of New York or Dallas, and there are amazing team members there that are just not going to make the commute Right, but they can work the hours they can, with the technology, really make sure that it is a secure, safe way to help customers. The other thing, too, specifically in our industry, you see these spikes in volumes. In the old days, you had to ask someone to, you know, get in their car, get on the subway and come in and by the time they got there the spike was over.
Speaker 2:Now, with people working at home, they can work for an hour or 45 minutes or, you know, an hour and a half and help that seasonal spike take care. They feel good about it. I've heard multiple stories where people are able to teach the next generation that work ethic that they can literally say hey, dad has to go into his home office and work because people need me right now. Work on your homework, play a video game, go play baseball, do whatever, I'll be done in an hour, I'll be done in an hour and a half. And families are seeing that that is a way to help patients or customers in this case and still be able to kind of have it all, have that true work-life balance. That just wasn't possible before. We had some of the technology and some of the work-at-home options that we have today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's amazing, and yet we're just getting started, it seems. I mean, I had a call with Google last week and I was represented as a 3D virtual avatar on screen Again, not the metaverse, but a 3D me interacting so I could sit down and just without the camera on. So much tech. What are you most excited about tech? Wise people, wise industry, wise over the rest of this year and beyond.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, my standing joke is my 3d me has hair. So, like I, really like that, the 3d version of me, my marketing managers giving it hair and this real stiff chin and these broad shoulders and whatever. So I am kind of excited about that. The biggest thing I am the most excited about is the 24-7 monitoring and customer interaction and agent interaction, because you can truly that speech. Analytics is allowing you to identify problems before you even know that they're problems and you know, anyone who's been in this industry for a long time has had emergency type calls and sometimes the agents does the right thing, sometimes they don't, and right now that technology is starting to be able to pick up on some of that and be able to help with a lot of things you know. The other thing is is some of the translation services that take place are really getting exciting, you know, to be able to then be rolled out in real world, real life situations like an actual hospital or law enforcement. So that is high level. What I think is really cool is we are right now the petri dish to be able to test some of these and because we have tens of thousands of interactions per day, some of these interactions are things that we're going to be able to test, and the technology will get better that will then be able to be rolled out.
Speaker 2:You know real world education. You think about some of the things that can be done from an educational standpoint. You know, maybe in a more rural community, where they're not able to take some of the classes that they've been able to be exposed to in the past, able to take some of the classes that they've been able to be exposed to in the past. You know physics two, you know, I think, of some of the physics classes that were taken in a small community in the past were maybe, you know, not as strong as you could get elsewhere.
Speaker 2:So I all of that, I think, is where the exciting piece of it is coming in. Next, I will tell you too, as I talk to my customers, my partners, that really, once you start realizing how important the data is and start refining it and start paying attention to it and treating it with value, the ability to make good decisions is just going to get better. And when those good decisions might be eventually underwriting or claims or whatever. We're not there today, but the more you know about a person, the better and the ability to really customize those interactions based on everything that you know about them gets really exciting, really fast.
Speaker 1:Wow, so exciting, really intriguing opportunity. We met at industry events off and on. Where are you headed next over the next month or into the fall?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'll be at Call Center Week in Las Vegas. If you're going to be there, we'd love to connect. That's always a great opportunity to see what's, you know, the latest and the greatest as far as that goes. Then I attend the Amazon event. I attend the Genesis event in September in Nashville. I attend the Amazon event in December in Las Vegas. So those are the three that are on my radar right now from that event and I might see one or more too, but that's a pretty good overview right there to be able to really get deep into the contact center world with CCW or customer contact world with CCW, and then really get deep into the CCASA genesis. And then you know Amazon Connect is, you know, only like five years old, which in this industry is really relatively new. Maybe it's seven years old now, but starting to really try to see how everyone has their new spin on things and new ideas and best of the best type of technology.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for joining us. Really, as always, I learned so much from you and everyone. Reach out to Joel on on LinkedIn in particular, and follow him. He's really fun to talk to over a beer as well. So you gotta, you gotta meet Joel of five-star. Thanks, Joel, Thanks for joining.
Speaker 2:Thanks, evan, appreciate it.
Speaker 1:And thanks everyone for listening, watching and sharing. As always, take care.