𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙍𝙤𝙤𝙢 𝙒𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙄𝙩 𝙃𝙖𝙥𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙙"
NICE's remarkable team flew Tom to New Jersey at the White Eagle Hall, to step into "The Room Where It Happened," their exclusive video series that casts a spotlight on the pulse and prospects of Customer Experience (CX). There, Tom's own audio narrative brought to life what we regard as one of our most compelling podcast episodes and one of our all time personal favorites!
In "The Room Where It Happened," our podcast dives into the transformative role of AI in contact centers, showcasing its capacity to streamline traditional roles and pave the way for innovative practices. Tom provides insight into the future of quality assurance and the unique opportunities AI presents for BPOs to differentiate themselves. The discussion culminates powerfully, drawing from Tom's tenure at Expivia, demonstrating how integrating AI with a focus on people can greatly enhance staff retention and customer relations, paralleling the influential outcomes crafted in history's most notable CX rooms.
If you are looking for USA outsourced customer service or sales support, we here at Expivia would really like to help you support your customers.
Please check us out at expiviausa.com, or email us at info@expivia.net!
Follow Tom: @tlaird_expivia
Join our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeek
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/
Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geek
Linkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/
Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube Channel
𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙍𝙤𝙤𝙢 𝙒𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙄𝙩 𝙃𝙖𝙥𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙙"
NICE's remarkable team flew Tom to New Jersey at the White Eagle Hall, to step into "The Room Where It Happened," their exclusive video series that casts a spotlight on the pulse and prospects of Customer Experience (CX). There, Tom's own audio narrative brought to life what we regard as one of our most compelling podcast episodes and one of our all time personal favorites!
In "The Room Where It Happened," our podcast dives into the transformative role of AI in contact centers, showcasing its capacity to streamline traditional roles and pave the way for innovative practices. Tom provides insight into the future of quality assurance and the unique opportunities AI presents for BPOs to differentiate themselves. The discussion culminates powerfully, drawing from Tom's tenure at Expivia, demonstrating how integrating AI with a focus on people can greatly enhance staff retention and customer relations, paralleling the influential outcomes crafted in history's most notable CX rooms.
If you are looking for USA outsourced customer service or sales support, we here at Expivia would really like to help you support your customers.
Please check us out at expiviausa.com, or email us at info@expivia.net!
Follow Tom: @tlaird_expivia
Join our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeek
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/
Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geek
Linkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/
Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube Channel
This is advice from a call center geek a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all, from call center operations, hiring, culture, technology and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host. He's the CEO of Expedia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, tom Lear.
Speaker 2:You know, being invited to be in the room where it happened is a real honor for me. I've been striving to be a leader in the space. You know I consider myself a leader. I try to help as many people as I possibly can learn about CX, learn about the contact center. You know never sell in any of my videos. So the honor to be able to come in here to be one of the exclusive customers I think is a little bit of a highlight and it's showing a lot of the things that we have been doing, you know, as a company, with the content that we've been posting, with the help, hopefully, that we've been doing with a lot of different customers and just people that are new in the space. This is kind of a little bit of a highlight and I think it's again it's some justification for a lot of the things that we've been doing. So it is a really big honor to be here.
Speaker 3:I wouldn't like that. That was good. Let's kind of get into the product aspect a little bit. Could you just walk me through the journey with NICE?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have a. The journey with NICE has been totally unique. A lot of people have migrated from a on-prem solution or a different C-Cast platform, but we started as a startup, which is kind of unique in the space. So I ran a 2000 seat BPO, a lot of financial services clients and that was great. Until you know, 2008, 2009, 2010 happened and the kind of the great recession turned into the great depression for us. So you know, some private equity guys came in, bought the company and then fired all of us about three months later.
Speaker 2:So you know, I had the opportunity to have all of these amazing people, from supervisors to IT professionals, to HR, to client support personnel, and you know we all had lunch and most of them bailed, said peace. But you know there was a core group of about four or five of us that said, if you build it, you know we will come. So I did and we went out. We got investors in 2010, 2011, expedia was born and we started with four agents. And so I have been through the whole in contact to nice, cx-1, to CX-1, to just nice, that whole kind of purchase in journey with NICE, you know, from a very small center to, you know now in that 7, 800 seat range, using a wide variety of their tools. So it is. It's a unique way that we've grown up with each other, I think, as contact center technology providers and as us as a PPO, so it is a little bit different.
Speaker 3:I want to double click on the part where you talked about you know your journey going through the recession and basically having to reinvent yourself. Like you know, cx, this space is constantly changing, like you always have to pivot, and I feel like your personal experience, like you get that more than anyone else.
Speaker 2:So I think, when you look early on as the cloud has migrated, right, so really we can talk about late 2000s, but really in the 2010, 2011, 2012, when it really came on board, it was the absolute perfect timing for us. We were an on-prem, a bias, which before which was hundreds of thousands of dollars, to be able to come into a cloud solution that we could scale. With that we could start extremely small. With that I had big brother behind me, that any tool that a customer or a client would want, I can say that I have because I do might not be on my BU, but I can say that we have. It was absolutely the way that we scaled and grew our business.
Speaker 2:We could have never afford it if we started in 1999 with the amount of revenue that that would have cost or the amount of just manpower and IT power that it would need. I mean, even with my BPO a 700, 800 CPPO I have three IT people. That's it. They're experts on the platform. We don't need a heavy-handed IT force of doing a lot of different types of programming. So you know, from that standpoint, we have all the technology, but I don't need all the manpower to handle it as well.
Speaker 3:Last night you geeked out a lot over analytics and sentiment analysis and you know how that's been able to transform your business and your client's business Geek out for me again. Yeah, talk about why those aspects are so important.
Speaker 2:Speech. Analytics has been the number one revenue generator for us. I think part of it is because it looks cool when you demo it, right. That's the kind of the utilitarian kind of piece of it. But it goes deeper into a lot of the things that we want to do as a company. Nice talks about. You know, we can do sentiment analysis and we can look at trending keywords and phrases.
Speaker 2:Well, we've taken things to a whole different level of kind of siloing analytics, using creative thoughts that you know we can talk about. I don't know, should I talk about it here? I'd probably blow that. So with analytics, you know, some of the things that we have done is, instead of again just looking at keywords, trending keywords, sentiment, we have looked at things like if a customer comes to us and says hey, tom, I need an 80, 30 SLA, but I can't afford you know, the amount of staffing of 35 agents, what can you do for us? We can flip on analytics and we can start to take and look at calls and do a test of how long it takes for us to answer until sentiment drops Right.
Speaker 2:So using sentiment analysis to actually staff appropriately to make sure that CSAT and NPS don't drop, but still not kind of maintaining that 80, 30 SLA that everybody talks about as kind of that world class standard. That's been a huge, huge impact. We incent our associates and pay our associates off of sentiment. So I can tell my clients 100% we are treating your customers the right way, we're using the right words, the phrases that we're using, the tone that we're using is proper because they see these reports every single day on the tone and the sentiment of our agents.
Speaker 2:So utilizing analytics, I think, has been again a whirlwind of opportunity for us from a revenue standpoint, but also the amount of value that we've been able to add to customers, to get insights, you know, beyond the, you know just the trending keywords, has been really cool. One other thing, too, is we have a lot of clients now that they have been. We have a retail toy company that when they launch a new product, they will put in a specific 1-800 number into the product. This is hey, if you have any problems, call this number. So we can track that skill and we can tell them things like hey, you know, 35% of your customers over the last two months use the phrase too expensive when it came to this product that they just purchased. So to be able to give those type of marketing insights beyond just again trending keywords, sentiment scores, has been a huge revenue generator for us but again a huge value add for a lot of our clients.
Speaker 3:What have their reactions been like? Like your clients, seeing these insights that you're generating, Analytics demo is unbelievably well right it's.
Speaker 2:It's if you understand the platform and you understand where you can go with it. It's by far been the number one biggest generator of business for us, just on that tool, let alone the added value ads that we're getting from a revenue standpoint. So you know when, when you can wow a customer and it wowing customers is hard right, with the technology that's out there today, you really have to do some special things to to make sure that you're doing something different. And because we become so good at the analytic piece, we're able to do that with a lot of different customers and a lot of different customer bases, which has been really, really cool.
Speaker 3:And obviously with analytics, for AI, data is king there. Talk about how important CX data is, especially right now in this moment with analytics and AI, but we're taking off.
Speaker 2:So I think big data has been talked about forever, right. Since the early 20s everybody's been talking about you know this big data. We have all of this information. I think really it's only been the last three or four years that we've been able to really utilize that data with the tools that we have now. So if you look at everything from workforce management the kind of the AI infusing of that to look at the data of calls and how they come in, to take that to different levels when it comes to staffing, looking at all of the customer information that is coming in, you know what customers are saying, what that stuff really we could we said we could really do that, but now we can do it at a level that we can drill it down to certain times a day by certain customer bases, by certain demographics, to really make really wise decision for clients.
Speaker 2:So we've become not just a customer service kind of company in a BPO contact center, but you know, the marketing companies, the marketing departments in these companies love us as well, right, because they're getting insights that they've never even thought about. You can talk about doing you know when calls come in and having agents kind of give me maybe some analytic data but now, or some kind of just easy quick data that they think they're hearing. But now we have actual eyes reports that are showing what is actually happening with customers, which has been amazing and again, it's something that has been really fun to see over the last couple of years.
Speaker 3:And you really are able to personalize every experience with what you're doing now with analytics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's the whole part of CX today. It's not a one size fit all. So we have different demographic, we have different customer bases, we have different customer types. You know, using data in a CRM to be able to route specifically to different agent sets to make sure that we can see if a customer who called in yesterday they're calling again today. Maybe we have to move them to the front of the line based on some type of data. So I think that all that stuff really kind of comes into play with how we do CX now and how we have to kind of quote, unquote, how we're wowing different customer bases based on what they want, whether it's a quick hey, get me off the phone as quick as you can, or if I need to just kind of be with you for a while and I need to talk you through things. You know, understanding those skill sets is really what it's kind of differentiating different companies as well.
Speaker 3:We can't have this conversation without talking about AI, obviously. What are your thoughts on AI, and specifically AI for CX, like how are you exploring that?
Speaker 2:This is the biggest opportunity for creativity in the contact center and the BPO space, because nobody knows what they're doing and I think it's been very interesting to the companies that are thinking this through from not only a revenue generator, but how do we add the customer experience to it? Because customers don't care about AI, they care about the end experience. Vendors care about AI. They like to talk about AI I in the middleman, that in the user of AI for my customers but there's a lot of thought that's going into this. Everybody wants to talk about the first touch point AI chatbot, taking the agent away. I'm more excited about the funnel. How do we get once we get past that? Yeah, I'm planning on about a 25% reduction in my agents and that's fine. I'm going to have these virtual agents. But when you get down into the funnel and you look at agent assist, right, you look at advanced analytics, advanced routing, being able to prompt agents with the information instantly when a customer has a question. Those are the things that really excite me. If we can kind of you know mold that this kind of AI supervisor on top of the agent, right, and give them that helpful voice that's always there and that's coming really at a speed that I could not recognize.
Speaker 2:The other thing, too, is QA quality assurance is being totally overrun by AI. That's an area that is the low hanging fruit right to use a some type of large language model like a chat, gpt or one of those models to do all of your QA. Right to do your scoring of calls, to not have to have a person score but use that person out of coach. So I think roles are changing and evolving. That's something that we don't talk about enough in the contact center. Industry is supervising the process of turning more into analysts. Qa people are more into analysts and coaches. So there's a it's not just a technology overhaul, it's how we operate. That needs to totally change as well. And again, this is one of the reasons I think I am successful today, because we're willing to do that when a lot of companies aren't. Does it make you nervous?
Speaker 3:How fast AI is progression right now. I mean, obviously, as a CEO of your business like you've got to keep up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, the fun thing is and again I'm just talking here, so I don't know what you guys can use it up, but literally so, talking to a bunch of BPO's last week, very large logos there's a mass confusion over, especially in my niche of CX in the BPO space, of how do we utilize AI. Larger BPO's are just afraid of the ROI being being dissipated with with virtual agents, right, because they've done that, that same model over and over and over. For me, I think this is awesome. This has been.
Speaker 2:It's one of the few times in really the industry that I can remember that I have a chance to differentiate totally based on the technology that I utilize, because I think we are more creative than the larger BPO's. So for me to have all of these tools and again, a lot of this stuff is vendor led right now they're saying, hey, use this tool for this. I don't care about any of that stuff, I just want the tool and then let me figure out how to utilize it differently for my customers, differently for how we're using it in the industry. And again, this is a super cool time for us because this is a. This is a time in the next two to three years that we can really differentiate and be better than a lot of these much slower moving companies that are still kind of confused on what's going on.
Speaker 3:What's your business going to look like in two to three years, before you're doing AI right now?
Speaker 2:I mean it's funny how everybody uses the term. Every BPO, if you look now, is AI infused, right? I still don't know what that means. I mean I guess we're AI infused. We use workforce management from nice, we use analytics from nice. All of those tools are AI infused. But I think there will be a head count reduction AndRA.
Speaker 2:The best thing that I can say with how things are changing is we are we no longer call ourselves a contact center. I think saying that we just have agents that answer calls is totally wrong. We now have to become customer experience providers for our clients. So we are technology partners. That does the contact center.
Speaker 2:If you utilize and you think that through it's not as scary, if you realize, yeah, we need to infuse AI, we need to use these tools like Agent Assist, we need to use analytics. We're planning on this drop off, but you know what? I'm going to backfill it with a lot of these other type of tools becoming more of a professional services company. So that's one of the things that we're doing as well is IVRs and integrations and looking at the technology aspect. So I don't think you can sit and just kind of have the same model that we've always had, especially in the BPO space. You need to be a CX technology partner that does the contact center and a lot of the tools that are available. Now it's there. It's just you have the forethought and the creativity to move yourself down that line.
Speaker 3:And as we talk about AI, I want to make sure that we also talk about clarification too, because you have to have both really to succeed nowadays. And you even knew that when I was reading your case study. You chose CX1 because it is a cloud platform, so talk about the importance of the cloud.
Speaker 2:I don't know how you could survive today with an on-prem solution Like there's. I can't fathom it. I don't know why there hasn't been. We think that this thing is really migrated and everybody has it, but the vast majority are still on-prem, which blows my mind, you know. The ease of use of tools, I think, is in the quickness that I can.
Speaker 2:I don't see slap something on but integrate a new tool from the nice suite. It's pretty cool, right. So it keeps me at the cutting edge. I don't have to buy another server, I don't have to have another IT person that's going to try to program some things. Everything in the cloud is kind of like a grocery store, right. You're just like hey, I want that, let's put that in, let's do this, let's do that. So again, I would say as well the uptime for me. I can't be down, right, if I am down, clients don't care that it's, that it's a provider's fault, they care that I bought that provider and I'm down. So, being having a cloud solution now, we're never down. Is there any wood that I can knock on? But I think that's been a huge piece of this too. The security aspect, really, the uptime, and then the ease of being able to put tools onto our platform that our customers need and that we can utilize from an ROI standpoint. I don't know how you would do it any other way.
Speaker 3:Since we're talking about CX-1, obviously we have to talk about the CX-1 Discord integration first of its kind. How did you even think about that? You know the NFT world. I feel like it's such a mystery to walk me through all of that.
Speaker 2:So in 2020, during COVID, everybody was home. My first plan was to become a crypto billionaire. As I was sitting at home when that did not work, we said you know, I'm in Discord all the time right now, looking at this NFT space, looking at this crypto space. My kids are on Discord because they're on Roblox, they're on Fortnite and it's the Wild Wild West. I mean the amount of language that's used there, the amount of people just fishing schemes and stealing things from inside the Discord.
Speaker 2:We said, well, this is ripe for someone to kind of come in here and kind of overhaul how the moderation is done. So that's how we started. Our company is called Expedia Digital. Now Expedia Digital has now done the first and I think right now is still the only full integration from CX-1 into Discord. So we started with moderation. So if somebody we have listening bots that are housed on Azure so if somebody says, hey, go F yourself, or you're an idiot or I need a moderator, I need help any of these words that we're utilizing, it will prompt a moderator on CX-1. So we don't have to be looking in all of these different Discord that we're moderating.
Speaker 2:And we said, ok, that's cool, but can we do more and we said we have full analytics. Can we do analytics inside Discord? And that's different, right? Because if you and I have a conversation and a chat, so you say, hey, I have a problem, I say here's your solution and we're good. What happens? And is that transcript after we close, that case goes into analytics and we can kind of see what happened on that. Well, discord is different. It's just an unending stream of consciousness of people talking. So we figured out a way of using virtual agents to close cases after every time somebody talks.
Speaker 2:So now we have full analytics on customers' Discord. So everything from trending keywords to sentiment scores, looking at the server overall, each channel and even to each specific community member. We're using the customer cards. We said, hey, there's customer cards here. It's like a mini CRM, even though I know you guys don't like us to use that, but it is.
Speaker 2:So we can now build customer profiles. We can say, hey, this person has 2 million TikTok followers or Twitter followers, so this is an influencer. Let's give them a different experience and pop or moderator when they come into the Discord. So, building community profiles, understanding who the jerks are in your Discord, understanding who the great people are that we want to promote All of this kind of evolved over, this kind of 2020, 2021, 22, those years, and you know, this thing has evolved now to go beyond the NFT space, which I thought we would initially utilize it for, but now brands are coming into the space, right From the Budweiser to Starbucks, to all of these Gucci. All these brands are now have discords and we want to be one of the companies that are there to help them be able to moderate and also give them insights into what their customers are saying in these discords as well.
Speaker 3:What does innovation mean to you?
Speaker 2:So I think it's. Innovation to me is looking at a problem or a solution differently. So many of us have seen the same solution or the same problem for years and years and years and you know some of us say, hey, is there a better way? And you know, again, that could relate to anything. But looking at even how CX is done, the innovation that is compared to, you know, 1999, when I was starting right, looking at having no computers, having just daisy chains that would come and the calls would just go around around this big circle and people would have to just answer them as you went right, seeing those type of problems and how things have changed and how quickly it's changed. I mean we went from not having computers in 1999 in our contact center and our first contact center to now using AI, 20 years later.
Speaker 2:So looking at these problems and how quickly things have changed and evolved, I think is an interesting kind of topic. But also, I think you know, innovation overall in so many aspects of where we are. This is one of the best times to be alive. I mean things are happening so very fast, maybe good and bad, but I think overall, you know, the creativity is what I keep going back to. It's the thing that I think allows us to innovate. It's the thing that allows those people to really survive or thrive in kind of these type environments when things are moving so fast.
Speaker 3:Since you have been in this space for so long, you really understand it. Looking back, what would you say has been the most exciting innovation so far?
Speaker 2:for CX. I mean, I don't have to look back that far to see the best innovation for CX. I mean, look back six months, eight months. You know we've all been kind of trudging down this technology line where things were very just kind of put in place right, you know you have.
Speaker 2:You know we went on the channel, right, we went to. That was you know the big thing. We went to social, right, we have to have a digital presence and kind of it all kind of made sense. And then, you know, this AI thing has just blown up, maybe over the last year, and everything that we've done in the last 10 years is totally different over the last six months. Whether we're talking about workforce management, qa, whether we're talking about analytics, nothing is the same. And I think that's been the biggest change is, looking at the last, you know, this kind of AI revolution, how companies are starting to utilize it, is totally different than even the last 10 to 15 years. The speed at which things have changed has just been amazing to me and it's really baffled me and blown my mind at the same time.
Speaker 3:If I looked at your Google search history right now, thinking about AI and CX, like what do you do with your experience?
Speaker 2:Hopefully you don't do that, but you know, I think that when I'm looking, I'm looking at some more advanced things because I'm trying to figure out what's next. And again, that's kind of how I think we've grown is we've never been okay, let's wait until this kind of really matures. We've made mistakes with that, but I think that's been the DNA of the company. So, and again, not to get like weird on some weird technologies, but when you have an Apple and you have a Google and you have a Facebook and a meta, all looking at this virtual reality space, this metaverse, that has kind of dropped off. I think there's something there now with the AI piece.
Speaker 2:So you know we're I'm researching and looking at the, the VR, the augmented reality, those types of things, how they deal with CX. Those are some of the things. Again, I have to have tools that nobody else has to compete with larger VPO's and we've done a lot of research and thinking kind of some of those things through. But also utilizing AI in different ways, right, creating our own products. We're doing that with with on the QA side, how do we utilize the technology of today to enhance our customers' value prop with us but also increase our ROI at the same time. So there's lots of different ways that to crack this nut and we're just trying to figure out what are the coolest ways and, I think, the best ways from from the customer side and from our side as well.
Speaker 3:What's your pine sky moon shot wish for you know, a solution for CX.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I want how. I want how in the future, like I want. I want to be able to go and you're starting to see this now, especially with analytics where I can ask questions or be prompted to ask certain questions to get the answers. I don't want to analyze anymore, right, ai is great at analyzing. I want to be able to go in there and be like hey, hey, what were my service levels yesterday on these five products or these five skills? What were the lowest C sat agents and can you create some learning modules for these guys by 10 o'clock so that that doesn't happen again today?
Speaker 2:Those types of things I think are coming the lack of using humans to analyze, using AI to analyze, finding and asking questions. You know, that's the stuff that really excites me and allows us to the amount of manpower it takes to be a supervisor to look at service levels, to look at how many calls are in queue, looking at your agent sentiment scores. You're doing all of these different things. I don't want to do that and I think the technology will be able to do that eventually and we can utilize our supervisors and our kind of our manpower for different, cooler things than just kind of looking and being the kind of the person that's saying hey, don't do that or hey, good job.
Speaker 3:I'm going to ask everyone this question. Cx is boring. Prove me wrong.
Speaker 2:CX is not boring and I think there's so many ways that we can look at this. We have turned into a full technology play and we are CX is leading and if you look at any industry, when it comes to AI implementation, when it comes to how we're using tools like analytics, nobody else is really. You know, I talked to a lot of some M&A guys, people who are looking at you know, investing into new technologies, and a lot of it is in the. Even in the manufacturing space. It's all very analytic driven. There's only so much you could do.
Speaker 2:There's some robotics, but when you talk about CX dealing with with customers right, dealing with the kind of the pipeline of every single business and being able to infuse the amount of technology and how fast it's coming, it's the coolest space to be in, especially, again, if you are creative, if you have a thought to say, hey, can we do that differently? That's the stuff that really excites me. And again, if you're just saying, hey, we're a call center, we have agents, they answer calls, yeah, that's boring, right, and you're not going to be around very long, if that's really all that you're doing now, but to understand that again, being a real technology partner now, especially for a BPO, is a really exciting space to be in and, I think, something that is changing and evolving how customer experience in CX is looked at by a lot of the industry or outside of the industry.
Speaker 3:Really, I feel like everyone here can say like you're one of the most excited people ever heard talking about CX and like even looking in your eyes like you, just you can tell that you really care about this. You know what keeps you going every day. What's your purpose here?
Speaker 2:I think I love CX because this is all I've done, like I literally grown up with this thing and I think when you see it From where it came from, it's like a little like a little child right in the in the late 90s that you kind of dealt with and Everything was kind of wonky and hard to deal with.
Speaker 2:And then as you became a supervisor, right as you took calls, as you were on the floor and you saw if you, how you could help somebody and how that changed them, and then you, they became the supervisor and then you moved up like this, this evolution I think that I took the people aspect has been always been a really cool piece of it.
Speaker 2:Like I didn't never want to be the back dude in the it area, like programming, I wanted to be on the floor on the high fiverr, on the raw, raw guy, and I think that that kind of carries over to just how I live my life and in the excitement that I have again with. I love being creative. I've no views creative like 400 times but the the amount of Cool things that I think I do with my company that the people there have bought into and they have become kind of they've, they Utilize kind of the same energies that I think I have has been something that has made us a lot different in the space, and and I think that's what really excites me as well as is the buying from a team member and and having this kind of Get this thing get a little go viral right when it comes to kind of the energy and the creativity that I think we have that kind of keeps me fired up.
Speaker 3:I think we've gotten all the needed, but I do want to give you this chance, and you're sitting in the room where it happened. What else have we not discussed that you have to talk about?
Speaker 2:I Not to go back to something that I said, but I don't know if I stated it well enough.
Speaker 2:So If I have to say something in the kind of in the room where it happened, and I want to kind of speak to to all the BPO's out there, you know, so many of the BPO's are struggling right now to to understand what's happening in the space, to understand they're scared, right, they're scared that that AI is going to totally decimate their business.
Speaker 2:And you know, I just want to say you don't have to be scared, but you have to change the model right. Becoming a, a CX technology partner that does contact center, I think is the key for that, for really the future of that industry and the companies and the organizations that do that and do it quickly and do it well, they're the ones that are going to survive. And if you think that, you know You're just going to have an agent, a call center agent, in a seat bill and by the hour You're in big trouble. But all the tools are there, right, everything is necessary for the change, but it's just, it's really, it's an industry-wide issue that I think needs to come to a head, or a lot of people are going to be hurting pretty bad.
Speaker 4:Yep, the revenue. I get your CEO and you're responsible for the revenue, but I don't. I don't buy it. I Think you kill beyond the revenue and and I want to hear what we say they're gonna door close. Right. Revenue doesn't come in you. You're laying people off. I don't think you're in this just for the revenue. I think there's something else underlying and if you were breaking even, I think you'd stay where you are.
Speaker 2:No, I love, I love the people. I really do love the people. I love, you know, having to be able to say that our turnover is. It's insane the amount of agents that we've had since the beginning, since that first year, that have been with us for 10 to 12 years, that the supervisor are you know, our average 10 years, about seven to eight years. That everyone in HR, everyone in client services, all of our IT guys have been there at least seven to eight years and I think they're again.
Speaker 2:Everybody talks about culture and they talk about lunches that you may have or I don't know. I think it's it's more the what you allow people to do, how you treat people, and I don't know. I think that there is something with that with me that I love that people aspect. Breaking even is totally fine for me in my BPL as long as I can continue to kind of give you know a life earning wage, that we can continue to innovate and do really cool things. It that's kind of what gets me up in the morning again. I want to make money like everybody else, but it's not the only thing for sure.
Speaker 4:So I know this scenario and having a film crew here Resources towards your own business. So I'd like to ask you, just take 30, 60 seconds and think about this answer. We're going to provide this footage to you if you want to use this down the road, if there's something you want to say about why Expedia. You know why your business, what's important to you. You know that you can then hand over to your marketing team to use. You know this is a good chance to grab this while we've got a film crew here.
Speaker 2:So Expedia is a different company. You know, we, we we're not just a, a BPO, we're not just a contact center. We really want to be kind of your future roadmap partner. Nobody knows what's going on with AI, especially internal contact centers, and and we're learning as we go and we're trying to be the experts to kind of guide and and I think that's what makes us a little bit different. Right, I'm totally fine with it, with the company coming to me and saying, hey, here's a hundred seat Program we have, but over the next five years and we need you to work that down, so it's down to ten agents because we want to go the AI route.
Speaker 2:I'm all about that when I think most a lot of different contact centers are not Right. So we're looking to partner with companies that want to utilize technology, that don't just want to kind of do it the old way, and I think that scares a lot of companies. So it's it's a, it's kind of the. The factor that I think again makes us a little bit different, not just because we're we're better, our service levels are great, we have white gloves, service right, but I think that People need a partner now. People need someone to help them as, as we go down this this crazy Technology road, to be there for them, to help them with their customers and that's something that we are trying to really do and become one of the main players in the space when it comes to CX and changing our model to become more of a technology partner than just a contact center.
Speaker 4:So fine. We talked in. Currently a lot amongst our own team. The answer that you give in front of a camera are the answer that you give when presenting to a set of customers. Changes in the following way when I ask you to talk about the importance of technology in CX, when you're grilling out at barbecue and somebody says why does technology and CX matter, that answer changes from the Compensary answer. What do you say to your neighbor? What do you say to your neighbor who says I don't understand technology and CX. Why does it matter? I?
Speaker 2:Think technology in the space is what everything is now Like. If I'm talking to my friend, we're talking about why technology matters. The evolution of what we can do now is amazing To be able to be quicker, to be able to be better, to be able to utilize some of the tools to give insights I think analytics blows people away when you give them examples of things that customers say and to be able to change entire business models based on what customers say, based on analytic data, based on the trending keywords, phrases or certain things that we're searching for. You know, more CEOs call me from our clients that I've never heard of before, who I never deal with, saying thank you, because we have been able to shift even the color of a toy to something that was more palatable to the customer base. So that's just one example of why technology is so important. Now, again, it's the right technologies. Right.
Speaker 2:Not everything has been great, not everything has added to a better customer experience, and I think if you look at customers, not everybody cares right. So you could have a Gen X or somebody who's you know 25 or under. They could care less about anything that you have to say about your. Thank you for calling all of that stuff. They just want their answer. They probably want it digitally and they want to get off the phone, right, but a different customer base.
Speaker 2:You know we're dealing with an insurance company Maybe it's life insurance, maybe there are older people, that we have to have those different types of conversations, and I think you can utilize technology from a routing standpoint, from an analytic standpoint, to make different customer bases and make those experiences totally different and make it easier than we could just do with kind of using a reps brain right To kind of hear and listen and make those changes. So I think it's how we quote unquote wow different customer bases. Every customer base is different on how we wow, but with technology it gives us the insights to make better decisions when it comes to answering questions and having a little bit better experience for our customers. Last, question.
Speaker 4:You have a daughter that you're pretty damn proud of. She's going to watch this video. This is your time to talk to her about why this to be so amazing.
Speaker 2:Well, vondon, I am one of the greatest call center geeks of all time. I am one of the best basketball coaches. As you know, I have done so much for my family. I'm a huge family man and you know that as well. I think that everything that we have been able to do, from putting the pool in you know you love the pool. You don't fight as much with your brother with it, which is one of the other reasons that we did that. But I think you know you know you love me when I go live on TikTok. You know you love it when I go live on YouTube and LinkedIn. You love watching my videos. So, again, from the bottom of my heart, thank you and you're welcome. Hey, you know before. Can I say one more thing? Can I record one more thing? I think one of the things that is how we have changed buying technology, I think is kind of a cool thing and it's been a big shift. I think it could be helpful, if that's okay.
Speaker 4:So, tom, one of the things that I've discussed at dinner last night is how the business has changed from buying technology. Can you just spend a minute or two talking a little bit about that?
Speaker 2:We've totally changed the thought process of how we buy CX technology and really technology as a whole. Before this is kind of how we used to do. It is we would look at everything siloed. Every single tool was its own tool and that tool had to answer two questions. Number one is there an ROI for Expedia? And number two did it add massive value to our customer? And if one of those were off, we didn't buy it. So again, I'm gonna make a lot of money but it's not gonna add value to my customer. I'm not doing that. Hey, this is gonna be widely awesome for a customer and before, if there was no ROI, we would not do that and we realized you can't do that anymore.
Speaker 2:So the change has been now we don't silo our technology, we have to look at technology as a whole. We understand that for a lot of contact centers, especially in the BPO space, agent Assist does not really enhance revenue. But I will tell you that the last three or four RFPs that we have seen, agent Assist is something that is kind of the cost of doing business moving forward. So we try to now look at things as overall. So here's the ROI, here's some of the tools that don't make money, but if we can utilize some things from analytics and in charge maybe for some other type of tools. We're trying to get this thing to kind of a net zero. So we understand that there are some tools out there that may not be ROI positive at the beginning, but the technology is needed in the industry, it's needed for customers, it's gonna get us more business and it can be a little bit of a lost leader, but when you look at the technology as a whole, I think that's the big shift that a lot of BPO's need to make and a lot of contact centers need to make to be able to utilize technology and purchase technology with a different mindset.
Speaker 2:Do I have a dance move? I mean I guess I could what's that? Not mow the grass, but that's kind of my. I mean you got the lawn mower right, you got that. You got the. I mean this is what turned the butter. I think that's thank you guys.