What Business Leaders Need to Know about AI

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Dive into the fascinating world of Contact Center AI solutions secrets! Learn how AI is reshaping customer interactions and sales processes, and why staying ahead of the curve is essential for businesses. Don't miss out on uncovering the latest trends in AI technology - hit subscribe for more updates!

Chapters

• 0:00 How to Play the Long Game with AI
• 1:19 Where to Get Started with Your AI
• 3:43 Please, Bring in the Marketing People!
• 6:49 AI and CX calls for different IT skills
• 10:17 Building AI into your CX Plan
• 15:50 Top level Wisdom for Adopting AI

Transcript

0:05

Video killed the radio star, but not overnight. And so quite literally, I think that this is something that is more iterative and will happen. But I think it's an intelligent conversation to have with an organization as to fundamentally, this is going to be a journey. It is definitely not an event and there's an importance and maybe an opportunity cost to sitting on the sideline. Would you agree? I do agree. I think this is transformational technology for all industries. I think there's still some industries that have yet to adopt digital channels, for example, and I'm sitting here wondering how they plan to bring in the next generation of customer when you, you couldn't get a millennial or a gen Z to pick up the phone and call you if their life depended on it. Right? Like, they haven't even crossed that threshold, which was 10 years ago now, in terms of disruptive breakthrough, if not longer. And so to now move into AI, I think hopefully this is a wake up call for a few to get up and start learning and to start getting engaged and take a few steps, learn, get better, take a few more, but waiting to see how it's going to shake out. You'll be. Five years behind the competition completely. So one of the things that, you know, we see all the time is like some of the traditional modules that are inside of the contact center space are being infused and embodied with AI. One of those areas would be quality management, but then there's also a new set of tools out there that are working to cross that boundary of improving assistance. Essentially agent assist to whoever that customer facing person is. Do you think that that's like one of the really good starting points inside of a business, maybe indirectly improving contact center experience by creating a better experience with the agent? Yeah, without question. And I think regardless of how much you also look to AI for self service, I don't think for most industries, we're going to go away from some humans being involved, at least not for the next, I want to say years, who knows, maybe it's months, but hopefully it's, it's years, if not decades, I think that there's always going to be high turnover contact center agents it's a thankless job, it's something that even on your best companies, you're going to have 20, 30, 40 percent within a year turnover. That's right. How do we help them ramp quickly? How do we help them become competent quickly? And how do we help them handle difficult conversations when through no fault of their own? A call goes off the rails. How do we keep them on track? How do we serve up dynamic information so that we can them? Try to have the best resolution to those calls in the moment. And I think that has an impact both on the customer side, which is why most people implemented implemented, but also on the agent side from an agent, job satisfaction and happiness standpoint, having some of those tools remove some of the burden that they have on their own currently. And then I think, as you were alluding to in your question, it's also a really safe step into AI. It's a lot of the same technology that you're using for the self service with natural language understanding. Now some large language models have gotten into the mix with this too. But you still have that human person in between the AI and the customer. So if the AI was to come back with something funky, You do have that discernment before the agent just regurgitates that to the customer. So it's a bit of a guardrail for those companies that are thinking, Oh, we're, we're nervous. Well, great. Like here's, here's a great first step. And once this goes well, okay, let's talk about how else we can apply the technology. One of the things that I see commonly is around contact center. There's probably a functional skew towards customer service versus sales, although customer service may have some sales functions that they need to perform, but ultimately, what I'm seeing missing inside of the equation in terms of input into the AI componentry that we typically have to try and pull in is marketing leadership. Do you think that's a miss? Yeah. Interesting. I haven't, I haven't thought about that as much as it comes when it comes to AI. I think one in our standards field right now, we are seeing marketing and customer care have to work together like never before, especially as you think about the self service journey through digital, through your web, through digital channels. That's been something we've been working on now for several years. And I don't think on the contact center side, there is used to working with marketing as they are with sales, a little bit of politics as to who controls what within the org now. But I, I do think that just generally speaking, the better you do upstream, which is usually marketing's world and providing information and self service. Knowledge management website guidance, and even like the chat experience with AI has a huge impact downstream on the types of calls and messages that are coming into the contact center. Personally, as a customer, if, if I've spent 30 minutes trying to find information on your site, and I haven't my phone call, when I have to pick up the phone, ultimately to call you, I'm not as good of a mood, right? I'm impatient. I'm frustrated. And I ended up taking it out on the agent. Apologies to any agents that have had to deal with me in the past. I know there are many but that's a whole different call versus, somebody calling in to say, Hey, I found this information on your side. I just had one or two follow up questions, goes drastically different for that agent and their time, which then again, has all the impact that we just discussed around agent health and turnover and so on. So the companies that step back and see the big picture about how all these puzzle pieces fit together, I think do the best. And then the last point on that, your question about sales in general we're seeing a huge turn up. And AI for sales, I think both self service and also assisted agent service, like with this agent assist stuff is really, really growing quickly measuring things like compliance best practices. We've got some really slick technology where you can go back and mine all of your calls using GPT technology and say, tell me the times where this worked or where this didn't work, or what were the best responses to this objection that we got, and you can. Query your entire base of calls and call data to find those insights. I mean, what a, what a great benefit, right? As a sales leader, it's trying to find time to shadow calls or listen to call recordings can be. unattainable some weeks, you know, given my calendar. And so giving you those tools to cut right to the heart of it is, is something that I think is one of the better pieces of tech so far. Where do you see in that process of going through that discovery where the it leadership is involved and where do you see their role most generally? The fun IT question. So it's, it's all of the things, we're working with a customer right now where this is heavily IT led. I think with AI, that might be more prevalent than prior because they're the technical folks in the room. So I think they have a grasp on how some of this works compared to some of the business units that we work with. Not always the most fun conversations as they like to dig into the technical weeds versus the technical. Solving business outcomes, but, as a seller, if you can blend both of those great, if you can identify the key objectives of each team or party, I think that's start bringing those together. And if you can be that conduit, even as the vendor. I think that you end up securing a customer for a long period of time. I think that IT relationship is very, very important. Ultimately with inside of the industry, I think there are some fundamental changes that have really been born in the need to safeguard the business. Security. Yeah. Compliance. There's a lot of things that from an infrastructural perspective make perfect sense for why they think the way they do and work the way they do. But it's really not fast actin' tenactin and it doesn't really like drive business results. So the customer facing people that need resources and change within the next 90 days, certainly within side of the operating period can't be waiting for such a long period of time. So I think that there's a new level of alignment for IT that needs to happen toe loosen up and move fast while still being, concerned with risk at the same time working with marketing people and people in the support side of the business to figure out like, well, what is this customer experience going to be across the business? Because if there's a disconnect between the brand. And what is being purported out in marketing to what they experience in sales and certainly what they experienced in the adoption side of the business. That's a very confusing experience for the customer and one that can completely undo any relationship that's been built up front. Yeah. And Frank, I think, one of the reasons I enjoy working with you, I think you have that perspective. I think you're good at getting the buy in from the various components of a company and helping them understand what the big picture is and defining that for them. I think IT, especially with AI, to take it back to what we were talking about initially, some of those barriers to entry, if you want a lot out of your AI, especially if things like conversational AI and agent assist, you're probably plugging into multiple systems, whether that's a CRM like an electronic medical records system could be an ERP, Yeah sharePoint knowledge management. Absolutely. So usually it has some sort of role in that process. And if they're not involved early to start mapping that out and helping you understand those technical requirements. That could add tons of time to your implementation timeline. So just a good heads up. If you're a business leader exploring what this might look like and saw a clever demo about how AI will save your life reach out to your it partners and ask them what's required to, to make some of this happen and get them involved early. So For contact center leaders, when you're looking at, strategies to affect change, maybe over a, a 12 month to 36 month period, where do you see that contact center leaders should be looking at right now, especially when it comes to AI, where should they be focusing their efforts and how should they be thinking about the changes in consumer behavior and the changes in the marketplace, whether, they're Delivering a product at a store level or in an e commerce level. We have so much brick and mortar as well as click and mortar opportunities for sales, and expectations from the customers across channels, which you've already mentioned are vastly underutilized to begin with... so where should people be looking? Yeah, really, really good question. I think it's, it's twofold. So most contact centers are still, still fairly phone dependent, right? If not phone prevalent. And I think, Understanding the reasons people are calling you is most important. Now, for some of you, that may sound basic, you'd be surprised. I'm really understanding the reason for people's calls and then what's driving those calls. Like what's the reason behind that? Why, why couldn't they get this information via a Google search or a website visit?, why couldn't they get this through some knowledge article that we had? what was the driving force behind the call? I think is the, the real secret, not just the what, but the why. That's huge from there. We can really start to articulate how the AI can fill its role in solving some of those problems, whether that be on the digital side of the house or within the IVR, like Frank, frankly, and excuse the pun there. That wasn't intended. Second piece that I was going to say is If you think about, especially if you're selling a product or service, if you think about your website, like your storefront, right? And you think, how do I have this great customer experience? Well, if I walk into a brick and mortar and I'm perusing, I'm going to have a salesperson or a customer service person reach out and say, Hey, you know, how can we help you today? What are you looking for? Okay. Well, that equates to a proactive chat with a bot, right? I've, I've been on this page for five seconds. Let me ask you, Hey, what's going on? How can we help you solve this? I see you're looking at these products. How do we serve up contextual information about those products to help make a buying decision in that moment to increase conversion? And again, that's where we get into this marketing customer care sales. Effort that's now diverted. It's now merging into one, similarly, when somebody calls into the IVR, if I have to sit there and listen to 10 options before I find the one that I'm looking for. I mean, you just wasted time in my day that I'll never get back. I'm an unhappy customer. I'm less likely to buy something. Retention goes down upsell, cross sell opportunities go down immediately. So if you're still thinking you're getting by. It's very hard to quantify the people that will either not be your customer much longer or never become a customer because you put them through that experience. So really be thoughtful about it. of the things that comes up and I see it a lot in the financial services area is just plain authentication of that. If you look at a standard online banking solution now, it could be anything from a chase or a Wells Fargo. You can move money between accounts, you can pay people on accounts, You can do wires and all these things. But what we're finding is whether we're talking about an american express a charge, it can get called as potentially Fraudulent, you almost have a 75 percent chance It will be bucketed into concerns about fraudulent use, which, what does it do? It initiates another call back into the process. And what do they want to do? Well, they want to authenticate you because maybe there's some level of insufficiency in the process that you used to even gain access to their online portal that doesn't authenticate you enough that gives them comfort that they're going to flag you utilizing their portal that's where that came from. And so now you have to go through this process. Do you see AI as being something that is going to step in and support this process much more quickly in terms of authentication? I think it's industry dependent for sure. I know FinServ has really been one of the primary movers on that front. So things like voice biometrics is great, or you can instantly authenticate somebody just from them saying, hi, my name is, and then you're off to the races. Unfortunately for us, when technology takes a step forward, if you think about Apple face recognition to unlock your phone or to pay for something? That's the speed that we expect now as a civilization. And if you're putting me through a one or two minute long authentication process, maybe through no fault of your own, like I'm already impatient. Like we just don't have the attention span that we used to have and subtle things like using your iPhone in that capacity impact how we're trying to interact with your brand or, or company. So you really need to be mindful of that because if you're just plugging along, thinking everything is okay. It's not like it's definitely not So let's think about maybe just a summary statement you would like to make just fundamentally speaking to our audience with respect to adoption of AI challenges, blockers, mind frames, organization. What is it that you would want to be able to speak in terms of wisdom? You're seeing exactly what the challenges are that companies are experiencing. Don't lose sight of the customer. Don't lose sight of the customer experience. Filter everything through that lens. That will always be my top suggestion for this world, right? Technology is great. It's easy to get excited, but just keep it through that lens. How are we improving that customer experience that leads to long term business success first and foremost. I think second of all, get involved, get engaged, subscribe. There's newsletters, there's podcasts like this one, start to really understand this technology. Doesn't matter how old you are. Doesn't matter what your role or capacity is understanding. It will allow you personally to succeed. And then also then impart your company to succeed. So don't sit on the sideline, understand what's going on. Take some steps. Start small and then grow from there, but, but don't wait. The time for waiting is, is behind us. Your background being in social and marketing and things of that nature, you're very much used to the concept of essentially AB testing experimentation. And would you say that that's kind of a mindset that people should have towards AI. Get in the game, start the process, start to experiment, start to get feedback, survey people. You really don't know what people are going to think or do until you put a proposition in front of them. Yeah. I think maybe you either said this earlier in the conversation that this is a, this is going to be a journey, not an event. I think that was, I'm just going to quote you again, but a hundred percent agree with that sentiment. Like this is, Here to stay. This is the new normal. It will continue to evolve at a crazy pace. So starting now just allows you to try to keep up with everything. And once you've set something up and once you've installed the first version, just know that that's what that is. It's the first version and there's going to be 10 versions behind it and continue to grow, continue to ask your customers and teams, how things are working. Companies that have that mindset, one, they're easy to work with, right? Because that's what we're preaching anyway. And then two, it tends to be that continuous improvement virtuous cycle that we're looking for. So that to me, that's what separates some of the winners and maybe not so, not so lucky on losers or whatever you want to call them. And then on top of that, I think really vetting your partners is great, but we're also seeing some analysis paralysis too. Yes. And so just be careful, because if you're taking six months to evaluate something and start to implement, the industry has already jumped. Like we're already past the conversations that we had when we started. Which is, which is crazy. And this goes back to like the beginning of social media for me, where Facebook, Twitter, they were coming out with new features every week. And if you were sitting there trying to make a decision based on the criteria that you had six months ago, like you, I don't know. Like, do those features even exist anymore? I'm unclear. So don't let that be you, make decisions, be thorough, but be fast enough to where it's not burning your organization at the same time, get on the train. That's right. Eric Smith, you're an industry icon. Thanks for being on the show. Thanks Frank. Always a pleasure to chat with you. Thanks for having me.