Inside the Contact Center Evolution: Insights from John Coulter of Five Star Call Centers

Join me, Tom Laird, and John Coulter from Five Star Call Centers, as we journey into a conversation on "Advice from a Call Center Geek."

🔍 Key Highlights:

𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰/𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸:
What does the horizon look like for contact centers in the next two years? We're discussing trends, challenges, and opportunities that await!

𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 & 𝗥𝗢𝗜:
Which technologies are set to revolutionize contact centers? We're exploring the tools that promise the highest utility and return on investment.

𝗢𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝗲/𝗡𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗪𝗮𝘃𝗲:
How is the nearshoring trend reshaping our industry? We analyze its impact on quality, costs, and overall strategy.

𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗼𝗿 𝗕𝘂𝘆 𝗖𝗫 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵:
The big debate! Should companies build their own CX tech or invest in market solutions? We weigh the pros and cons.

𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘃𝘀 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗕𝗣𝗢:
Unveiling the emerging 'Champion vs Champion' trend in BPO and its implications for the industry.


Don't miss out on these crucial insights that could redefine your business strategy and customer engagement approach. Listen, learn, and let's discuss! Your thoughts and experiences matter.

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

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:25

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 Laird.

Speaker 2: 1:00

Welcome back everybody to another episode of advice from a call center, the call center, contact center podcast, where we try to give you some actionable items to take back in your contact center improve the overall quality, improve the agent experience, hopefully improve your customer experience as well. My name is Tom Laird. I am the CEO here at Expedia Interaction Marketing with one of my great contact center friends, John Coulter. John, how are you doing, buddy?

Speaker 3: 1:26

Great Appreciate you taking some time for me this morning.

Speaker 2: 1:29

So John is basically that he's a VP at five star contact centers John please correct me if I'm wrong basically in charge of all the sales operations that you guys do at five star, and kind of the beginning of onboarding Is that kind of am I giving you enough credit or not, really.

Speaker 3: 1:48

Too much credit, probably right. No, I do everything from sales marketing, onboarding, and then I kind of run in the background of all of our clients. Just from a strategy, new implementation, technology side.

Speaker 2: 2:00

John and I just literally had a I don't know an hour long talk kind of on the state of not only the BPO space but, I think, the contact center space in general, near showing off-shoring technology, and just kind of said, hey, let's just, you know, let's hop on here this is kind of an impromptu podcast, but I think these really become the best and talk about some of those topics that we just discussed.

Speaker 2: 2:27

That was really helpful to me and hopefully to you too, but I think it maybe be some have some help for everybody. Let me start with something that you said that I thought was awesome, and then I know there's some other topics we want to get through here too. You talked about in the BPO and in the outsourcing world, that you see 2024 as kind of the year of the near shore and you said 2025 is the year of kind of AI and automation. Can you just I don't know just maybe talk, and let's talk and discuss that a little bit, because I thought that was it made total sense to me. Maybe you can just talk a little bit more on that.

Speaker 3: 3:02

Yes, you know, I think where we're headed is there's lots of cool tools out there, lots of great technology, adoption is starting to come around, but use and understanding how to use it is a whole nother level.

Speaker 3: 3:15

So I think the time it's going to take companies to start digesting, learning and augmenting that technology in the call center is going to take some time for them to learn and understand that. So that's one piece of it. The second piece is you know, as cost almost every one of our partners, most groups we talk with, 2024 is a big budget. You know, hey, can you reduce my customer service budget by 10%? I need to reduce my technical spend by 10%. So, as businesses are looking for reduction in costs, near shore has been a great play. You know, we have move migrated about three clients near shore in the last six months, really more of a blended rate. So they've got, you know, maybe tier one or offline support near shore and then they've got some of their more complex within the US. What's nice in that model is allows us to learn it, use our technology and then over the next 60, 90 days, we can start augmenting and or running analytics and then diving into, ultimately, the self help tools and some of the automation that companies are looking for.

Speaker 2: 4:25

John the other. I think cool and I think that that makes sense. You know, we see so many and we kind of talked about this too, right. We see so many companies that are purchasing technology and they say, hey, we have this technology but nobody knows how to use it, and I think so many newer tools are coming out now that you know, from a VPO standpoint, we have to almost become the experts, right, to kind of help customers with those tools. So that's a lead into my next question.

Speaker 2: 4:55

A lot of the tools that are out there that people are talking about. They're talking about auto summarization from an AI standpoint. We're talking about agent assist, right. We're talking about, like IVAs and LLM chatbots and kind of getting into this AI world. I have had strong opinions on a lot of this and it's really cool to talk to somebody else that is dealing with this stuff every single day, too. We talk about different use cases and I just did a couple videos on like what is a real ROI on some of this AI stuff Without me like poisoning your, your, your mind? Can you talk about again two of those main things that we, that everybody talks about now, which is agent assist and auto summary what are they good for? What are they not good for? Like, like it's not just like, hey, we got to have this stuff, but when is the proper use for both of those kind of things?

Speaker 3: 5:43

Yeah, agent assist is a interesting one. You know, I think in a chat and email standpoint a chat, for example I love the agent assist where it can pop specific phrases For the agent. So it's literally a copy, drag, verse, typing right. I think that makes great use case. I think that makes sense from a you know conversation, of voice standpoint. We haven't seen it really our why for our clients? Mainly because our agents are trained. They know our, you know our partners, our clients information. So that's really where we haven't seen a huge ROI On the agent assist.

Speaker 3: 6:21

But you know, the auto summarization has come a long way from an accuracy standpoint. So we do really like that. You know our clients that are on Salesforce or Zen desks. We're able to absorb those calls. Ultimately they note, you know, the key, key messages within the conversation. Agent can just scan it and submit it and it's done. That has definitely been a big, big win for us. We do a lot of technical support so you got a document. You know here all the troubleshooting steps we went through, but just having that tool Do that for the agent has been a huge time saver because then our agents not worried about typing, all they got to do is worry about, you know, solving the issue, and then the auto summarization takes care of that.

Speaker 2: 7:05

One of the things, too, that I think it will be becoming an industry, not just in the BPO space, but in the context center space overall. A topic that a lot of us are struggling with is do we build some of the stuff internally? Do we go purchase these, these tools? You know, you and I have had so many conversations at so many shows about Everything. Right now is so vendor led right. Everybody kind of jams this stuff down your throat like, hey, you got to have this, this is, but Really want that, or maybe I could do that ourselves, especially when you start to see all these companies just popping up doing this stuff. What are your thoughts on? You know, when you talk to a customer or if you want to do something right for a customer, like you, purchase that technology, can you build it in house? What are some of the thoughts that you guys have with that?

Speaker 3: 7:51

Yeah, you know a lot of. One of the things you said earlier that I always we always kind of remind ourselves is don't chase technology Right. It's always going to be changing, there's always going to be new companies and if you're always looking for the next greatest thing, you're just going to continuously Be looking for new technology to adapt and you're never going to be an expert. You're just going to know a little about a lot. So we've really challenged our team to really focus in on the technology we use and let's use it to its full extent.

Speaker 3: 8:18

Same thing when we onboard our clients, you know we look at their current tech stack. Can it do Virtually ask what are your five main things? What do you want to accomplish with your technology? And then we'll dissect whether that technology has that capability or not and if it doesn't, they could, you know, go on our technology and we can help them. Or, if they have it internally, we've got resources we can refer them to, or we've got a pretty good team that can help build that stuff internally. Really just depends on what their current use is and what they ultimately want to accomplish.

Speaker 2: 8:54

Here's a question and a conversation started to that there's no answer to. I mean, there's no like this is the answer. It's more of a discussion. We are not struggling but thinking through. I think that's probably the better way.

Speaker 2: 9:06

Of all of these different tools, and what AI tools really have the most bang for the buck from a client standpoint? What do clients really want? I mean, it's almost a lot of clients are like that, that eight year old child that says I want that and I want this and I want that when they because they saw the ads on TikTok, right, and it's kind of like the same concept. It's like, hey, we need this, we need this, we need this, but coming up with that, all right, guys, what's our main goal here? What's the plan? What are the five things that we want to accomplish?

Speaker 2: 9:37

And I think we're starting to see some of those things you know reoccurring like, like with some of the technologies. But what do you guys do as you're trying to learn right? Because, again, I think, as a BPO, we really do have to become more experts in certain pieces of the technology to help roadmap our customers or clients that maybe our internal, that don't really have that expertise in the CX space. What are some of the things that you guys are doing and kind of to learn, I guess, about what's real, what's not real.

Speaker 3: 10:06

Yeah, you know, what's nice in our world is we've got, you know, 45 clients and we're able to kind of see half of those clients we provide the technology for, half bring in their own technology. So it's kind of fun to be able to see what's working in one industry that applies to another industry. You know everyone's talking about analytics and AI and how does it? You know, help my business and that's like the new flashy term is AI, which I think there's great reporting. I think there's great use in that Internally for that information.

Speaker 3: 10:37

You know, ultimately, what we've seen the most of is, again, it comes back to how can you help reduce our expenses, right? So we've really focused on self-help options and identifying how to identify those. So really, tools that allow you to analyze your data is really what we've focused a lot of our efforts on. You know we take thousands of calls and emails and chats and a lot of social media out there, but what are people really saying? That can be automated or provide guidance versus getting to a live agent has really been our focus as we've researched technology.

Speaker 2: 11:16

I think more people need, there needs to be a more voice in the BPO space. I love BPO, right To your point. We're dealing with healthcare, retail tech, support. We're dealing with all these different channels of customer types which have nuance. On top of that, we're not just utilizing the our kind of core set technology stack. But you know, if a client has five, nine, they have UJET, they have Genesis, they have CX-1, they have all of the we're utilizing as well. So not only do we see different channels of customers, but then on top of, we see all of the technology, and I think that's another.

Speaker 2: 11:52

We probably don't talk about it enough as another huge use case or kind of value add for a really good BPO of like guys. We've seen that, we've done that. That doesn't work. I saw this with this customer, which is something pretty cool.

Speaker 2: 12:04

Speaking of that, going into this, which is a great lead in, I think, is you and I kind of talked about a different model that could happen for in the BPO space, especially here, as kind of technology is evolving, everybody's doing things a little bit differently. We always had this either you love it or hate it this champion, challenger type model right, where maybe somebody had 400 seats and the client wants to go give 50 seats or 100 seats to another one and see how they work and play them off each other, and I think there is value to that to a certain extent. But you brought up something really cool and, I think, something that we can evolve upon and, with all this new technology, something I think makes a little bit more sense, which is the champion versus champion type model. Talk a little bit about that, because I thought it was pretty fascinating and I think it makes a lot of sense and something that I know that you and I are gonna really kind of look into as well.

Speaker 3: 13:01

Ultimately, the end goal is to make the world a better place, right, as we wanna say, our clients' lives easier, where, if you're pitting two groups against each other, it's always going to be who's better, right, who's trying to win, who can win the most. The model we like is a champion champion model, so we have a few partners that do more of the champion challenger. We do have a couple that do the champion champion. What's great in that scenario is it's more collaborative. We're on one tech stack. We're able to analyze all data. All of our agents are stack ranked, intermingled, so you're able to see who's performing well, who's struggling, but ultimately share their best practices and learn from each other, versus trying to maybe figure out a way to cut a corner to make your results look better. Our job is to figure out how to provide a better customer experience and if you've got two BPO's working side by side, sharing what they're hearing, what they're seeing, what they're doing differently, what can we do to be better as a whole? There's a lot of advantages to that.

Speaker 2: 14:02

And I think we need to get to. I know, sam, I've talked to Sam Fuleta, who's another CEO of a BPO in Cleveland and trying to get and if anybody's listening to this too, in the BPO world to even get a. There's no real leadership. I don't want to say mentor groups, but I think some of this. With such changing technologies, there's so many of us that are friends in the space. Do we compete? Yeah, of course we do, but I think that there's enough business out there that if we can evolve and help each other, I think everybody wins, from our companies to the clients that we service for sure.

Speaker 2: 14:39

So, john, it's always a pleasure talking to you man. We always have a pretty good time at the different shows, but I think, bouncing stuff off you and kind of your CEO, troy, at the last show that we were at, I think both of us got a lot of stuff out of there. I got a lot of certain things from our contracts, from you guys and hopefully, from a technology standpoint, there were some things that went back and forth with us. So I appreciate you joining and we'll see what 2024 has in tail here, buddy.

Speaker 3: 15:13

Awesome. You and I will make some predictions and we'll do this again in a year. See who's more, who was spot on and who missed.

Speaker 2: 15:19

I like it. And then, hey, if anybody some of the shows that you're going to want you, can you throw those out? And then I know everybody can find you on LinkedIn and any kind of socials that you want to give out.

Speaker 3: 15:30

Yeah, enterprise Connect is a great one. I think it's March this year in Orlando. I think that's a great show from a technology. A lot of big enterprise-type software providers are there really showcasing what's 2024 for them and beyond Great show, always a fun time. We'll be at the Call and Contact Center Expo in June and then again in October in Nashville. And then AWS is a big one for us as well, with so many clients kind of migrating to that.

Speaker 2: 15:58

So over there, when is Call and Contact Center Expo? The first one is that Vegas, Las Vegas, yep.

Speaker 3: 16:05

And last year we did a cabana party. Maybe we'll do another one this year. Super fun, just to connect with people in a more relaxed environment.

Speaker 2: 16:13

Sounds good, buddy. Thanks for coming on. We'll talk again.

Speaker 3: 16:17

Awesome Thanks.

Speaker 2: 16:18

Tom, all right, john Bye.