This podcast is based on the presentation I delivered in Miami at the "CX Under the Sun Event" to more than 100 CX professionals who are just beginning their journey with CX AI transformation.
During the presentation, I share my views on what is considered "real" regarding AI in the current market, what to be cautious about, and how to initiate AI integration within your organizations.
You won't find any unnecessary content or theoretical discussions here. It's all about the essential tools you should start exploring now and the reasons these tools need further development, regardless of what you might hear from AI technology providers.
DM me on Linkedin if you would like the deck from this talk!
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 podcast is based on the presentation I delivered in Miami at the "CX Under the Sun Event" to more than 100 CX professionals who are just beginning their journey with CX AI transformation.
During the presentation, I share my views on what is considered "real" regarding AI in the current market, what to be cautious about, and how to initiate AI integration within your organizations.
You won't find any unnecessary content or theoretical discussions here. It's all about the essential tools you should start exploring now and the reasons these tools need further development, regardless of what you might hear from AI technology providers.
DM me on Linkedin if you would like the deck from this talk!
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
So this was a struggle for me to get down here. I live in Erie, pennsylvania. It's about 18 degrees with we did get rid of our snow, but we normally have about two feet of snow right now. So when Morgan sent me the email, hey, will you come speak? I'm like I don't know Miami in February, but made it down here, so it's good to see everybody. I want to talk today about the real meal deal. Like nobody raised their hand when you guys had any kind of like AI plan. Like I want to literally give you a plan on where to start.
Speaker 1:I think that there's so much that goes into this right, and I think Liz just she hit on so many good notes about what AI is and now we're going to get into the weeds on how the heck you employed in your actual contact center. So this is my flex page right here. So you know who the heck I am. So I'm Tom Laird. I have a BPO. Expedia is about six 700 seat USA BPO work with lots of different from financial services to healthcare to retail. We also have an AI customer experience startup called Auto QA, o2to, where we're fully automating QA in the contact center, and I'll talk a little bit more about that. But again, I think, out of all of this, please follow the podcast. It's like 200 episodes. It's unbelievable stuff. I'm very proud of it. And then I think for this being a nice customer event or having people that may be coming on to nice. I am one of the members I think there's only two BPO's on the executive advisory council for nice. So all the new technology that's coming out, we get to play with it a little bit. We get to talk if it stinks or not. So I want to kind of talk a little bit with that stuff today with you guys too. And this is just quickly on Expedia, like I have every tool. So at the end of this, if you guys have any questions on some of the things that we're going to talk about, be it workforce intelligence, workforce management for non-BPO, for BPO, for an internal contact center, all the tools that we have and I put here too, I am enlightened interested right, we've been going deep into the enlightened AI tool. We have a ton of third party AI tools that we're utilizing now and I want to talk a little bit about that stuff too.
Speaker 1:So again, this is kind of a what is real, what I believe this is my opinion. This is one of the awesome things. Here too, nice said, hey, come talk to him. As a customer, I'm like absolutely, and never say, hey, talk about this, hey, make sure you bring this product into our thing. I sent my deck to Morgan and she never even said anything. I don't even know if it's good or not. So this is all my opinion on stuff. As a customer, as somebody who uses the technology, this is kind of a from a technology call center guy to technology call center people. So I only have I think Liz went her full a lot of time. My deck's like 27 minutes. So if Morgan, please she's not going to yell at me please, if you guys have any questions as we go, especially about any of the AI technology, about agent assist or some of the things that we're going to talk about, please, please, please, raise your hand, because we're playing with it, we're utilizing it, we're doing it with customers, all right. So again, what the focus on? First? I love that Liz asked that question because that was going to be one of mine.
Speaker 1:Most of you do not have a plan, or I shouldn't say a plan. You're not implementing a plan, so we're going to talk about how to implement a plan, what tools I think you should be looking at first. So when I go to consult for outside organizations, when I'm looking at my own organization, this is the plan that we have found to work the best and I think hopefully this can help some of you at least get on the get moving towards that path without freaking you out. How to set up the AI plan, and then at the end, I'm just going to talk about stuff. I'm going to talk about some tools, some things that maybe you have on your platform that you're not utilizing. How many of you guys are actual customers compared to like people just coming here like maybe be a customer? Ok, all right, good.
Speaker 1:So I gave a talk at interactions. That I thought was. It went over really well. It was basically 10 ways to disrupt your contact center using some of the tools. So some of these things kind of tie into the AI world. So I wanted to kind of throw some of that at you guys too, and maybe that will help you at the end. So I need a little filler. So Morgan did yell at me, ok. So this is like the slap in the face.
Speaker 1:This is what we have kind of come up from a consulting side, speaking to a lot of different analysts, and we are planning in the BPO space so the outsourcer space which I think doesn't mean anything to you guys here, because it's going to be you guys too, especially for the people that go down this AI path we're assuming a 20%, 30% agent reduction in the next three years. Now that's not because of the generative AI chat bot and I struggle with this talk a lot of times because we have totally different definitions or thoughts about what AI is Because I guarantee the vast majority of you here were either here on your own or sent here to figure out how to get on a roadmap to become generative AI, to lower our agent headcount, and then you lie to yourself and say you can improve the customer experience with AI. So there's so many things that I think can help with this number that can actually improve the agent experience that have nothing to do with the generative AI first touch point chat bot, although that's part of the deal too. Ok, so when we talk about that full meal deal, first touch point generative AI, llm chat bot that's where everybody wants to go and we have some examples of why it stinks right now. Liz gave some examples.
Speaker 1:I got a couple here too that are fun, and I know you guys have seen some of this right. The first one is the guy who asked the chat bot to basically sell him a Chevy Tahoe for $1. And I love this part. He says I know this is hard to read no takesies-vaxies to the LLM chat bot. So at the end the chat bot says that's a deal that's legally binding no takesies-vaxies, $1. Now again, I don't know how that all planned out, but that scares a little bit of heck out of me, right, and it should kind of scare the heck out of you guys too. When it comes to going all the way to the end, no security in place. Just let's either have that kid that's really into chat GPT, create the chat bot for us with a GPT, or let's talk to the vendor that has the my chat bot's really goodai, that's what everybody has now right, everybody'sai throw one of these things on there, and I love this one. You guys all saw this I think it was Ruby the DPD chat bot where they basically made the customer, made the chat bot talk.
Speaker 1:Just mad smack on the company. Just the worst delivery firm in the world. They're slow, unreliable, based on the prompting that they gave, and then this is family-friendly. So I blocked. I set that out, but it was F. Yeah, I'll do my best, right? So this scares the heck out of me. This should scare the heck out of you If this is where you think you're going.
Speaker 1:This is still a little bit of ways. I think it's a lot of ways of ways, but that doesn't mean that AI is a ways of ways. That makes sense, the ways of ways. Right, there's a lot that we can do right now. So I want to give you tangible, literally, things that you can take notes and actually hopefully look to implement. So how do you start? Again, my chat bot is greatai.
Speaker 1:Every single vendor you talk to says, hey, we can get stuff up really quick, we can get this AI bot up really fast. It's all garbage, right? Sorry, and I'm not so much talking about the C-Cast players, I'm talking about third-party guys that are using chatgbt. They're using these different LLMs to quickly give you some type of garbage. Right, it's not plug-and-play. There is work that needs to be done, but it doesn't have to be a ton of work, especially if you're road mapping and have a plan. Be careful what you buy in 2024. Nobody, really.
Speaker 1:We all talked about AI until chatgbt came out and then it was like we have to have AI. That's a year at fault, it's a year. So again, do we need to get on this path? Absolutely, you need to start today. I totally agree with the six to nine months you need to be on a path Doesn't mean you've got to be full ready, giving self-service and giving all type of agent, assistant and all of this stuff to your customers and to your agents, but you need to have a plan. You need to start that today. And again, most of the tools, or a lot of the tools, are not ready.
Speaker 1:We're going to talk about what's real, what's not real and demos lie. I don't know if you guys know that I am the best, my dream job, right? Because when I go consult for a company, they'll be like, hey, will you come on this demo with us? We're doing this with self-serviceai company. I'm like, yes, I will go on that demo with you and we'll see this demo and it's the greatest thing ever, right? And then I'm like, all right, I'm either going to be like a level 12 pissed off customer, right? Let's see how it reacts to that. They all stink, right, or I'm just going to try to trick it. It's going to work to a certain extent. So don't fall for demos I don't think most people do anymore but especially when you're talking third party guys right Outside of the CCAST, which they've taken a slow, methodical pace to this, where I've just seen so many people who've made mistakes who then come to me like hey, will you come fix us?
Speaker 1:I'm like no dude, I can't fix that. That's terrible. You got to get that off because there's no helping it. All right, I think this is important, especially when no one raised their hand that they're on a path. This is what you need to do today. If I can open this, okay, you guys see this too. I did this deck myself and I was really proud of my animations. Look at that Pretty good.
Speaker 1:So think about integrations today. I think that's the number one thing, other than the next thing that I'm going to talk about. So all of your data, whether that be. Let's take a credit union, for example. They have their core. Let's make sure our core is integrated. They probably do, because they're probably doing some type of self-service online banking. Let's take their customer-facing data and a Salesforce, zoho, whatever they're using. Let's integrate that into the telephony. Let's get every single data source, at least from the customer experience side. I totally agree with Liz. This needs to be a company-wide deal. But when we're talking just about CX, let's make sure that in 2024, you guys start the path. If you have your integration stink into your C-Cas, into your telephony platform. That's a huge piece of this.
Speaker 1:The other thing I don't have on here is we don't have voice yet for really for AI. When you're talking about chat, gbt, when you're talking about those type of tools, transcripts can be difficult. Now CX1, they just came out with a way that you can get transcripts. But think that through as well. Are you going to use that platform? How are you going to get transcripts to start to use some of this information or this AI world?
Speaker 1:The next thing that no one talks about and I'm going to start a business with this is how to robust KMS or knowledge management system. You have to have something to train data with. Again, this goes back to the. This is not plug and play. Having a bunch of huge data source, that's great. But when you're looking at agent assist, when you're looking at how can AI help from a self-service model? It needs to know all your stuff. It needs to know your tools. It needs to know how you service customers. It needs to know codes that you use, everything that an agent would need to service that customer. You need to have in a set of data Hopefully it's a KMS or something that you don't have a bunch of Excel spreadsheets that you guys are just plugging in Stuff to start in 2024 if you have no plan. Get your KMS in order, get as much of that data as you possibly can. Integrate everything you possibly can with your telephony. I think this is important Understand what outcomes are real and match your needs.
Speaker 1:Again, I don't want to talk about theory. I want to talk about real deal stuff. But when you talk, if you have a CEO or a C level group, what is their actual goal? Is it different than your goal? Is your goal to say, hey, I want to increase my customer experience, my NPS, my CSAT, my sentiment scores? Is their goal to say, hey, I want to lower head count? There's huge, huge dynamics at work here, with different areas of the organization, huge different tools that match what those do. So coming up with almost a company-wide thought process of what are the outcomes. Are we looking to increase our customer experience? We need NPS to be different. We need to rise that. But I also need to lower my head count by X. You have to come up with a company-wide understanding what you need, which will then incorporate your roadmap of what tools you go after first. But when you have different disconnects, then they want one tool, you get another tool, they get the tool.
Speaker 1:You hate it, you don't use it. It's a disaster, and I see that all the time. Think through security, new security, new privacy issues. What data are you going to give any type of LLM that you're going to use? Are you masking that data? Is it HIPAA compliant? New security thoughts, new policies, procedures I think is something that we're not talking about either. Things going so fast that we're skipping these details and these details will come and bite you. And again, this is something I see a lot, with companies that are kind of going full forward into this without actually thinking this thing through. Again. Look, I mean, think about the Chevy dealer, right? No security? No, nothing. And that's a crazy, extreme example. I get more concerned about giving an LLM customer data with account information, like what is the deal with that? How do we figure that out? What is the policy for that? No-transcript?
Speaker 1:How do you queue AI? I don't think about that. You have a chatbot that you're utilizing. Do you queue it like normal, like? These are questions I ask myself. It's part of one of the reasons that we're starting up like our little AI queue platform. But think about that in your organization. How do you know if it's quote, unquote, hallucinating you, just assuming that it's right because it's AI, I wouldn't Right. Another thing to think about you know you're queueing AI and again I see this a lot. People have mistakes with that, but then they end up hiring like three or four people to queue a what they're doing because they're doing so many chatbot sessions that it almost like defeats the purpose of the whole thing. So again, don't get caught with you know not thinking things totally through God I just and I keep hearing the demo thing Don't take demos at face value Like, just sticks with me If you have no plan whatsoever and you are just starting, I think this is a great roadmap, right?
Speaker 1:This is exactly how we kind of thought, the thought process that we did before we went out and we bought software and came up with a plan, integrated all the stuff that we could possibly integrated and prepared for this. I believe that if you just did this this year, you're in a really good spot because the technology that's coming is coming. It's really, it's almost cooler, it's about to happen. We're going to talk about that too, some cool stuff that's happening, maybe the next two years. So you're you're falling behind if you don't do this, if you just sit on your hands but just start down the road. All right, now let's say you did this, or let's say that you're in a spot where, hey, we want to purchase some stuff, like, we want to really do this thing. What should you purchase? And again, this is my opinion only. This is what I believe is real today.
Speaker 1:This is what I would start with, and I wish I had better animations for it, but I don't. So the first place that I would start with is your legacy tools that you have right now and start to think those through Again. We're assuming that you have kind of that KMS and everything's in place. Workforce management who knows what workforce intelligence is on CX1. Who uses workforce intelligence on CX1? All of you guys? All right, we're going to talk about that either. It's the most underutilized, I think. Ai tool now, in the whole suite, and the CX1 people do a terrible job talking about it, like I'm the biggest advocate for that thing. So, workforce management, workforce intelligence, analytics, rpa, advanced routing all these things that you can do now right, that are part of your platform, that you can use in different ways. Right, I would start there.
Speaker 1:I would either start to look at some of these tools, especially in analytics. If you don't have it right, come on, guys, let's grow up, let's get some analytics Right. I think that those type of tools get you thinking down the right path. Okay, so we're cool with that. What are some of the? Now?
Speaker 1:The tools that are newer, that I believe are the most mature, that I would say hey, I think that that could help you, depending on your use case not everybody. Depending on your use case is is agent assist, right? Co-pilot, real time analytics, supervisor assist? Those type of back end agent tools are pretty darn mature and they can add a lot of value. Where can they add a lot of value? If you have a?
Speaker 1:Obviously, the more complex your contact center is, the more that these tools are going to help, right, if you have a quick two minute and 30 call and half of your calls are password reset, that's an extreme example. But you get what I'm saying. I wouldn't get any of that Right. I wouldn't do that. That's not most of us. Most of us have complex situations of how skills are set up, how the calls come in. Agents we we're agents are asking a ton of questions and slacker and teams all the time and we can now automate that depending on if you have your back end and you have your KMS and you have all that stuff built out. Well, right, agent assist is amazing. Right For us being in a BPO, right, I do not have and I'm looking at this the, the CX one and the enlightenment and the copilot, and that we use a third party, um agent assist.
Speaker 1:I will tell you in every single RFP that I have seen in the last 18 months, agent assist is not something that cuss cuss company. Let me start out in. Companies are asking for their demanding it, so that means agent assist is becoming very mainstream. It's something to look at. It's not that difficult to employ, as long as you kind of have some of your back end stuff in order. This is the question I always get on that as well, depending on your use case, like I have seen, a 15 to 32nd 32nd is is is aggressive, um, lowering of average handle time. If you have a really good and say you have a five to seven minute call, um, I think you can lower it by about that much, which is again if you have a hundred agents. If you have 10,000 agents, if you have 500 agents, it's a big difference and you had nothing to do with with generative chat bots. You just lowered it by helping your agents doing that, which also could lower head Okay.
Speaker 1:So I thought this was just totally ingenious. Right, I got my green. That's the good stuff. This is like, well, it's coming, and that's like, oh God, right, um. So then we talk, I call them the GPT tools, right, I don't know if that's that's not really the official name for them, but that's kind of what I call Right. So auto summary that should be in the green. That's why I kind of have the first.
Speaker 1:I think auto summarization is great, especially if you have longer after call work. If you don't have long after call work, then I think it's a waste of money, but if you have, you know, two minutes of memoing and then you got to fill out forms and you your after call work or your wrap time is, you know, over a minute. That's crazy then, especially you know times in the amount of agents that you have, when it can instantly summarize what you have thrown in your Salesforce, throw it in your CRM. Amazing tool, super mature, ready to go. All right, I'm going to talk about auto QA, because there's a lot of BS with auto QA.
Speaker 1:I think we are and again I'm not, I'm not here, I'm not pubbing my what we're doing but we have a company and we're trying to basically use chat, gpt to fully automate the, the forms. Right, I don't want any proprietary scoring, I want this form that if I know an agent has an 89 on it, I know what an 89 is and I want that same exact form. And you know there's a lot of auto QA that's coming out and basically they're giving you a proprietary scoring. They're basically giving you a sentiment scoring. What's going on here, man Like my, and I think that there's two zero four, one. You never heard that and I think you need to be careful with with the auto QA stuff what it can do today, now, in a, in a year.
Speaker 1:If somebody tells you, hey, right now, if you have 10,000 calls a day and we can auto score all of your calls, 100% of your calls, they're lying to you. They're absolutely lying to you. That's not true, right, I haven't seen it. Maybe you guys can prove me wrong on that. But if they're using some type of of LLM or chat GPT model, you know the fastest that we've seen the API is is about a minute and a half to two minutes per call. Right, for each scoring that we can queue, we can do a bunch of them, but be careful when you hear those type of things, cause ask what that score really means. Now I can do sentiment scores right On our analytics, 100% of my calls, that's great. But it's not scoring calls, right, be careful with that.
Speaker 1:Something that you're I have started to see more is is education and role playing with kind of these GPT models. So you know, having a having an agent go through a library, a ticked off customer, a happy customer, a customer that's, that's maybe older, somebody wants to get off the phone quick, like all these different scenarios. The reason you're seeing it be not fully deployed is because it's mostly just chat right now. Right, because voice isn't totally there yet and we're very expensive there, but you're going to see that too. So that's like a tool that don't worry about that now, but next year, when there's voice, that thing's going to fly, okay. And then, quickly, we have the, the, the chat box, and again I have these last Right. So I'm going to ruin my next like three slides, but that's all right.
Speaker 1:I believe in more of an agent centric roadmap Agent. First, get everybody used to it. Let's lower as much handle time as we can. Now we can still do this because but again, going back to that credit union who has their core is integrated, their customer facing data is integrated. They have full online banking. There's securities that maybe they have biometrics already. Why am I going to spend so much money to redo my whole thing for a chat? What am I getting out of it? I don't see it yet Now. Granted, in two years from now, the amount of data that it's going to be able to utilize is crazy. But again, I don't think it makes sense today. God, I hope the nice people are not looking at me like want to kill me. I don't think it's good enough today, or to the right move today, to scrap your self-service If you think you have a good self-service model when you have all these other tools that are super mature, when this one's not mature at all and who knows what way that's going to go.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about the fun stuff now. Here's the stuff that's coming that I see that I've been talking to, whether it be the nice people, whether it be consultants, whether it be a lot of the technology companies. I am a VPO. I have to have the best technology VPO has to. If you're coming to me to outsource your stuff, I can't have like, hey, here's an agent, would you have this, this? No, I don't have any of that, I have to. So I'm always trying to see what's real, what's next? I think this is some of the stuff that I am most excited about. I don't know that slide. I apologize, I didn't know. Nice couldn't buck up for bigger TVs Just to have to Kidding.
Speaker 1:Real-time language support is coming. I think it comes this year. If you guys have no a company, well, I probably shouldn't say company, but there's a couple of companies that have been working on this. I'm excited because we lose a lot of business to Western Europe. Do you have any French speaking? I don't have any French speaking in your Pennsylvania, but to be able to have this, this is coming so full voice, so that you can speak different hundreds of languages and act like you're having the same conversation when you're actually speaking a different language.
Speaker 1:Predictive analytics, that's kind of a I think that's obvious being able to look at all the different types of data that we have on a customer and instantly, instead of just having agent assist, be able to say, on this call, the customer saying this, so to say this, to be able to do that before the calling happens. Right, so to look at their social media accounts. So look at what the last purchases were, look at the notes and the memos that they did in CRM, come up with a profile for this customer and, boom, that agent has that information. I think you're about to see the evolution of the dashboard go away and you're about to see that, and I believe in the demo and what's going to be shown here.
Speaker 1:Third, with the enlightened actions, I don't. I'm tired of dashboard. I don't want to look at data, I want you to just tell me the data, but I don't want to have to just go every day and find out. Sort by our average handle time, janie was. I just want to say things like hey, what were the highest average handle time of the? You know the longest handle time of the top 10 reps? Boom, that's there. Hey, how many can you give me a sample of calls that for when customers use the phrase too expensive yesterday? Boom there. So having kind of that prompting mentality translate into the data that we want, that's coming. That's almost here now, but it's going to be coming even more as we go, as we look at using our head to kind of tell it what we want, I'm ticked off that voice isn't here yet. Like, come on, I think this will. That will be a turning point.
Speaker 1:We talk about tone, we talk about sentiment with analytics, but 99% of that is what the customer said, not how they said it, right. The next step is we get to real time sentiment, real time tone. When that customer is yelling, we really know that they're yelling because we're using voice and we're not using transcripts for any of the analytics. And every time I see IOT, I don't know, I just think of like idiot of today, but that's not what that stands for. But you're starting to see devices talk to themselves. My refrigerator's light bulb goes out, I have I set up some parameters where it can reach out to a bot at Honeywell or GE or whoever makes refrigerators now and say, hey, send me that so I don't even need to deal with that. That stuff is pretty pretty much coming as well. And then we all talk about video avatars as we're getting more and more to the LLM and moving towards that model. Hit me All right. So again to work.
Speaker 1:So I think you started the agent level. I think you start with the tools that you have now. I think you start with the legacy tools that are the most mature. If you want to actually buy AI tools, you start working at the chat, gpt type things to eliminate time, if that's what your deal is. If you're looking for CX and an improvement to that, I think you're looking more an agent assistant, those type of tools, and I think you work to the customer level, meaning that first touch point chat bot that is not there yet but is coming. So I believe the roadmap should be to spend your money with the mature tools today and wait for the other stuff to come into the airport. So that's my slide with that Kind of said about 12 times, but again, starting at the bottom and kind of working your way up to the scary LLL chat bot Does any questions?
Speaker 1:Just rambling on here? No, really that good, awesome, ok. So, to reiterate, before I get into some of the cool tools and how to utilize them, if you're just starting out which seems like a lot of you guys are now build out your KMS, focus on your integrations, start to use the legacy AI tools and use them differently, and I'm going to show you how to use them differently. And it's awesome. Let's talk about that. Analytics is the greatest tool that you guys all stink at. We hear from, and again from nice, from CX1, here's your dashboard, here's the trending keywords, here's frustration, here's sentiment, and then we stop. Well, I can't do that because I'm trying to get as much out of this thing as I possibly can to not to charge customers more, but yeah, to charge customers more, because I'm offering a different set of values, stuff that you can do in your contact center. Right now.
Speaker 1:When your CEO says you we need generative AI chatbots to lower our headcount, you're going to say, hey, boss, I got something else that will do the same thing. If that's what you really want to do, we can do it with the tools we have now. One of the things that we do is use analytics for staffing in our BPO. So I have a customer, I do all the math and I say, hey, listen, to get an 80-30, which I still don't know why. 80-30 is like the thing. But anyway, to get an 80-30, you need a 100 headcount. I'm like whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't have the budget for that.
Speaker 1:I say, okay, what we can do is we can turn on analytics, we can stagger to do a test the amount of time that we answer the calls and we can actually mark and see where beginning sentiment of customer gets ticked off. So I can go to a customer and I can say, hey, listen, you don't need 100 head for an 80-30. We have found that your customers, I had no negative sentiment at the beginning of a call when they wait three minutes and four seconds. So that means we only need 62 head. No one's going to be any different. We're not going to have a drop in NPS, we're not going to have a drop in CSAT. That's where we can be Again using the tools in different ways that you have now. That is still again.
Speaker 1:I know this is kind of going off the radar, but I think it's important when you're road mapping, if people want to see I need to see some type of lowering of headcount, like that's what AI does right, and you can say, okay, listen, we're going to road map, we're going to be smart with this, but there's other things I can do to kind of hold the walls off so that you can do the thing right. That's one thing that I love. We use analytics as well. I incent my rep and again, maybe this isn't important for what we're talking about here, but again, remember, my last thing was anything I want to talk about, and I think that this is so cool we're actually paying and incenting our reps off of positive sentiment.
Speaker 1:So so many of you and me, we go to have our agents and there's a cross-sell, there's an upsell, there's some type of sales component, and we commission the heck out of those guys. Right, those high sales guys. We love them, right? Rightfully so. But there's also agents that are doing an unbelievable job on maybe, the service skill, not the sales skill. How do we reward them? You can reward them with sentiment, right? Again, for me, being a BPO, I could show customers that my agents are talking to their customer, right? Their tone is correct. Same thing for you guys, right? You can actually look to incent and the culture aspect of that is totally crazy how that totally builds a different type of culture in your organization when they know they're getting paid off of being nice. And now we have a way to actually show it other than they QA'd my call. I was nice on that. I swear to God, I was nice on that call. Right Now that you can take kind of all that away.
Speaker 1:And now I'm going to talk about workforce intelligence, the most underutilized tool in the whole CX1 suite. This is where one of the things that I would start with as an AI tool and all of you have it. You don't need to pay any more for it. If it's not on your CX1, go tell your team. Go tell somebody like, hey, this needs to be on there and they'll put it on. Workforce intelligence at its core, at its kind of babyish, is where it can send you an email or send anybody an email if service level drops or handle time goes. That's the basics, like baby part of it.
Speaker 1:The cool part, and how it's getting better and better and better, is AI is being infused into the engine so that we're moving agents in and out of skills based on preset service levels. That's another awesome use case. So I can guarantee service level for a customer that has a sales, let's say, a password reset I don't know why I keep saying that but sales password reset, regular customer service and, let's say, a shipping issue and they want their sales to be at 90-10, right, and they don't really care about anything else. I can guarantee that as calls come into the IVR, it sees it and it will move people in and out of skills so that you aren't doing that constantly, all day long. Moving Awesome tool. Other way to use it is for newer agents. Let's say you have 10 agents and you just put 10 more on the phones and you can set a threshold of handle time. So if these new agents go above seven minutes with their handle time, it'll automatically lower their preference, so it's not hammering your service level. Again, another way to think about headcount to think about lowering headcount as you're working down this AI roadmap without costing yourself any money at all.
Speaker 1:No one uses this to the point. Nobody talks about it. It is absolutely unbelievable. It is awesome and there's so much you can do with it. Go play with it, ok. So that's if you were again, if you had no idea about what you're doing. Hopefully that's enough to get you at least started. If you are ready to do it, if you're ready to go down, you're ready to start to buy technology. Look for the most mature tools first. If you're looking for a chatbot, please be totally aware of the LLM right now, unless you're going to put some serious restraint on it. Work through that thing and that will be a process for you. But I think that's a roadmap that is tangible, especially when no one raised their hand. It's something that won't cost you a billion dollars, depending on where you are in your roadmap.
Speaker 1:I think the thing is I was skeptical about all this stuff because I was scared to death of it. I mean, I'm an outsourcer, so when it first comes it's like water in your face, like your model of agents sitting in a seat. It's never going back. It has to change. When we methodically thought through this, the biggest change that I think I made was I used to buy technology and it had to have two things massive ROI for my customer and an improved customer experience. I'm sorry, an improved customer experience for my customer and an ROI for me. Those were the two things Right, right. I found out that that model doesn't work anymore, especially when I started to see customers want tools Like agent assist. For me, I have to have it. It's a cost of doing business now, but it's something that for an internal contact center, if you do it right, it will lower your handle time. It will raise your CX because customers have information if you're doing it properly.
Speaker 1:I think we were so methodical with it that, honestly, I'm a pretty good voice on what stinks more than what's good. But the rage of the third party chatbot company it infuriates me. You go to CCW, you go to ICMI and we went from no chatbot companies in 2019 to 80 percent of every single booth was my chatbot's great AIAI. I think that there's a lot of people that have fallen for it. They've had a poor experience with it. They don't trust it and it's like the dot-com bubble. I think we're close to that from a CX AI standpoint, where a lot of these guys are going to go away or there's going to be consolidation in this space. That's why I never tell anybody to look at a full self-service model yet Now again, you talked to me in five years that could be totally different. But if somebody's just starting, just be very wary of that. I really think and again they've not told me say this the CX-1 and NICE has been extremely methodical. They have not raced to this. They're pretty much the only CCAS player with their own attached AI model, five, nine, genesis, all those guys you got to slap stuff on. You can still slap stuff on if you want it from a CX-1, standpoint, but the tools that they're coming in is what I am most excited with because it's fully going to be fully integrated with all my stuff. So again, that's a long way around.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I answered your question, but that's kind of what scared me, or the things that I would definitely be careful of. Yes, yeah, so you talked about five years, not just in the videos. Five years ago you were just in the face of it, you were just in the middle of it in the radio and it was sad and low. But what were the eight to nine years? How are you going to optimize that? How do you plan to improve that?
Speaker 1:So for us, we had to change. I changed my whole thought process right and again I think I was telling Morgan or I forget who I was. I was telling somebody I gave a talk. That was basically this talk, but it was for a group of people here that were all VPO owners or they're all call center outsourcers, and you should see some scared people in that group, right, because no one understands how to change their business model. So for us I'm totally fine now and I have accepted that.
Speaker 1:I want a customer to say, hey, I have 100 seats, but I need to get that down to 45 seats. And I'm now at the point where I'm like, yes, let's do that, let's do it through agent led tools, let's do it with self service, let's do it with some type of of maybe some type of hybrid generator bot to take away some of the easy stuff. There's tools that the CX-1 platform has now where I can basically load data in and they can say, hey, these are the calls that you need to. You know, turn into self service. So I think the mentality changes the biggest thing for me, and understanding that the tools that I'm gonna buy in the future, they're gonna lower my head count, my whole, my whole experience as being an owner is gonna change. But I think that's the most value for a lot of these guys and for our customers is is, again, to be able to. I won't.
Speaker 1:I don't like the companies that say, hey, just I wanna move all this to self service. I'm like, guys, it's gonna be awful, it's gonna be a disaster, right, but if there's a plan to say, hey, let's, let's do this from the agent level, let's take away some of this easy stuff. And again, that's not rocket science. We've been doing that forever, but now we have cooler tools to do it with. And I think that's the, that's the biggest difference. Yes, the RFPs. Yeah, like you don't have it, go beat it, like you're not getting any more business.
Speaker 1:And that's when I said this needs to change. And I said, and I would like to be first, like first to do things. And I made a lot of mistakes doing that. But I think in this world it's been right and again, to have auto summarization for a client that has and we're not a huge BPO on six, seven hundred seats, like I'm not 10,000 seats, so a big client for us is maybe 40, 50 seats. But if they have, we say, hey, you know, we have these 50 seats and our after call work is normally eight minutes, like I'm like yeah, let's go Right, cause I can provide instant value, instant savings right there. So I think, once I got more into it and the other thing is, most of I don't want to say you guys, but most customers that come to us have no clue about what they're doing at all Right, so if I can be that kind of that guiding force, if you can be the guiding force in your companies, I think there's a lot of value to that, if you can come up with a really good plan for it and be a little bit ahead of the curve Cause, again, we're so early. I think that you know there's a lot of things that you can do really cool in your companies. If you kind of just think some of that through and if you have a leadership group, that I'll kind of let you have a say as well. And obviously, if you guys are here, hopefully they do. Yes, thank you, appreciate you. My question for you is I have been paying for $500 an hour consulting from you to generate these ideas and also speak a little bit about what you're doing with kind of getting your next fee break with influences to make sure that lasts Influencers from just kind of in general, like in the space.
Speaker 1:We had no money when we started Again. Maybe this is where I started early. We had no money when we started. I ran an 1800 seat BPL, mostly in financial services. 2008, 2009, 2010 came the Great Recession, turned into the Great Depression. Everybody got basically PE, private equity came in, bought the company, everybody got let go. So we said, what do we do? So I started like if you saw that slide, I started with four agents in 2011. And we had no money for marketing, no money to do SEO. It was like 50 bucks a click for customer service outsourcing in 2011. God knows what it is now.
Speaker 1:So we said and I would love to see more of you guys do this we try to create as much content as we possibly could in the CX and the customer service space, as humanly possible to help as many people as possible. And so I don't have any sales people in my company. There's not one sales person like I guess it's just me and all we do is create as much content for somebody who's just starting out as and we've seen that that call center agent become the supervisor, become the call center manager, become the head of procurement, who then comes to me because we've helped them out. So I think, again, I would love for you guys to just again advice from a call center podcast. Make sure you follow me on LinkedIn. I'd like to talk to you guys more on that. I'd love to see some of the things that you guys are doing.
Speaker 1:But when it comes to, like, the consulting side, I think that these things are more important. Most of the consultants I've seen how many of you guys go on LinkedIn and you see, like AI expert, Like dude, like you put that on there like three months ago, right, nobody is an expert. I think we're all learning this. Every single person from a lot of the AI companies like, hey, tom, I just got to love your podcast. Like, well, dude, I'm supposed to come to you for help. So, again, I think it's so early to talk to the CX-1, to talk to TAM, to talk to the really see the real technology, like what they have is real technology. But, again, you're not going on a buying spree. You're going to find out what's good for your organization, what can actually help, the things that you need help with, and that's the tools that I think that you go out with.
Speaker 1:But again from the consulting side. It's tough out there. This is just so new and everybody's use case is so different that you know depending on what buddy they have at. You know my call center, dot AI, that they're kind of pushing on you, I think, is kind of the way that I've seen things go here lately. Sorry, wrap it up there. No, literally perfect timing, perfect, I mean, I'm glad. All right, you guys. Thank you guys. Thank you.