Advice from a Call Center Geek!
Advice from a Call Center Geek is a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center and contact center. Tom Laird, CEO of 600+ seat award-winning BPO, Expivia Interaction Marketing and Ai auto QA startup OttoQa, ICMI Top 25 Contact Center thought leader discusses topics such as call center operations, hiring, culture, technology, and training while having fun doing it!
Advice from a Call Center Geek!
Adapting to the Future of Contact Center Outsourcing- Lessons Learned for All
The contact center industry is evolving, and with that evolution, contact centers of all types are starting to learn valuable lessons.
In this episode, we'll dive into how the BPO landscape is changing, what these changes mean for customers, and the latest AI tools you should be asking for in your outsourcing RFPs.
Don’t let the title fool you, this episode is essential for anyone running a contact center.
Tom Laird’s 100% USA-based, AI-powered contact center. As the only outsourcing partner on the NICE CXone Customer Executive Council, Expivia is redefining what it means to be a CX tech partner. Learn more at expiviausa.com.
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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 Xpevia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, tom Laird.
Speaker 2:Welcome back everybody to another episode of Advice from a Call Center Geek the call center, contact center podcast. We try to give you some actionable items. 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'm the CEO of Xpeve Interaction Marketing, also of Auto QA. I hope everybody's having a good summer. I just kind of took my first family vacation, which is pretty bad since my daughter's 11 and my son's 9. Went to the Keys for a little bit to see my sister. They have a little house there, which is awesome, but I did a lot of thinking when I was there.
Speaker 2:When you're just kind of laying around, I think that this is something we have to start to get across as an industry, meaning as a BPO, as an outsourcer. We need to start talking through some of the changes that are evolving and some of the things that I think you need to start looking for in a contact center outsourcer of today compared to even what you would do a year or two or three or four years ago. Things have really evolved. Things have really changed. A lot of organizations from the contact center side are struggling to keep up with that, struggling to figure out what they need to provide to customers. I think customers are confused on what they should be asking now too, right? So, you know, wanted to take a couple minutes and again we're here. I'm live on Facebook, live on LinkedIn, live on Twitter. If you have any questions, you know, please, please, let me know. We can kind of get a discussion going as well.
Speaker 2:But I wanted to kind of talk through some of these things that maybe a lot of the outsourcers are not talking about, because there's a little bit of preparation into kind of what the next steps are in this kind of new world of AI and what we should be kind of looking for. So I wanted to kind of give a case study, I guess, of Xpevia, of our contact center and how we're looking to evolve certain aspects of what we offer customers. What we see is some of the needs of customers that they're not sure about how to take the next steps. So we want to kind of be that group or one of the organizations that can help organizations or different companies that are looking to outsource take that next step down a technology path, down an AI path where maybe they don't have the resources or not really sure what to do next. There's a lot of really cool outsourcers out there right now that are really embracing this technology and, you know, I don't think we talk about it enough, and I think the smaller contact centers like my contact center right, we are the ones that are that can move really quickly on this stuff. So, you know, I think that's probably why you don't hear as much from the big guys, right, because's a huge kind of pool and kind of ebb and flow that they need to do to move the Titanic, so to speak, right A couple inches where I think some of these smaller quote unquote, under 1,000, under 2,000 seat BPOs we can sprint and kind of get things going really quickly.
Speaker 2:But I think I want to start there. That's the biggest thing is. Number one is we are planning in the next three years for about a 20 to 30% reduction in overall outsourcing and contact center headcount, not just due to kind of that first touch chatbot that's going to handle everything. I think that there's a piece of that touch chat bot that's going to, you know, handle everything. I think that there's a piece of that. But I think there are added efficiencies that we're starting to see within AI tools that you know they're talked about, but now we're actually starting to see them realized and we're starting to even be able to kind of create some of the tools you know internally at a smaller dollar amount that I think we can really kind of make as a huge benefit to customers. So you know, it's one thing when you hear a sales guy, a technology sales guy say, hey, your NPS is going to go up 20% and your average handle time is going to be dropped by 33%, like all that stuff at the beginning was all BS. But now we're starting to really see, as we dig into tools, start to utilize them in different ways, that there are some real kind of cost savings that we can find for customers, and I think even a lot of things are going to change.
Speaker 2:So the number one thing that I think that we have seen is you know, we are no longer call ourselves really an outsourcer or BPO, right, we are. We're a technology company, right, a CX technology partner that specializes in outsourcing, or before it was, you know, we're a contact center outsourcer that was really good at technology, right. So we've totally flipped kind of that whole thing on its head and and just talk about now being about that ai or cx technology part. And again, guys, remember, this stuff is a year old at max, right. So when you hear everybody talk about ai powered, this and we're fully AI and I'm not saying that that's total BS, but remember we're all kind of working through this and I think some of us are just a little bit of ahead of the game but when you hear about fully AI powered or just AI, just be careful with that.
Speaker 2:I think we do say AI powered. I think I use that AI power because there's a lot of tools now that we didn't have before that we're now utilizing because of AI. And those are the things that I want to kind of talk about here today too, of how they can benefit you. And then, when you're doing an RFP for an outsourcer, what are some of the things that you should be asking for now that I think can benefit you? And then, when you're doing an RFP for an outsourcer, what are some of the things that you should be asking for now that I think can give you good, great cost savings and also raise your NPS or CSAT or whatever those metrics are and we'll talk about that here in a second as well. Actually, let's start there.
Speaker 2:One of the main things that I have found with AI is that you can't just kind of throw it against the wall and hope. You have to use it strategically to answer specific questions or to solve specific problems that you have. Now, I'm not saying it can't do all of these, but if you really pinpoint and say, hey, you know, we want to raise our customer experience right, our CSAT, our NPS, we want to raise those scores right, then there's tools for that. Hey, we need to lower our handle time right, there's tools for that. Hey, we want to make the actual agent experience better. It's so confusing now, how do we utilize AI to make that agent experience better, which then we believe, will translate to both of those things right, higher CSAT, higher NPS, and also looking at a kind of a lower handling time or lower amount of time that a customer has to be on the call.
Speaker 2:We'd like to lower costs, we'd like to shift away from the contact center into more of a technology model right, and again, there's times and places for that, and I think that all that stuff is good. But that's how we need to start. The process is what problems do we want to solve, and maybe it's all of them right. Maybe we want lower costs and we want higher CSAT scores and we want the agents that do take calls to have the best experience ever, which is amazing. But don't think that one tool is going to do that, because number one it's not, and we need to be roadmapping this out to a specific kind of endpoint that you have and then move on to something else and then kind of create this kind of AI-powered customer experience.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I'm seeing is a lot of the CCaaS guys are coming out with tools still pretty expensive. I think that we're starting to look at building right and I think you're starting to see that even in the smaller BPOs looking to build out specific tools right at a lower cost point, using LLMs or using whatever internal AI maybe that we can kind of get our hands on or start to play around with, but for the most part, utilizing the LLMs and those large language models from whether it be ChatGPT, whether it be Sonnet, whether it be Lama, any of those and trying to again solve problems with that. And I think, again, that's where the whole becoming a technology partner first that specializes in outsourcing really, really makes a difference. You know, I think you guys know I mean, if anybody's been following me at all you guys know how we've fully developed, you know, auto QA, right. So we are fully automating all scoring of quality forms for our customers internally.
Speaker 2:So for most of our customers, again, we're not a huge BPO, right? So our average customer is probably 20 to 30 to 40 seats, right. We have some that are five to 10 seats, some that are in that 80 to 100, right, but those are few and far between. Most of them are in that kind of mid area and because of that, the amount of volume that we're taking, we can score 100% of our calls for our customers. So you know, that's a huge change and a huge shift to not have to charge, have a huge value add, actually save us money, right, but provide a bigger value for customers than if we were.
Speaker 2:You know, using a QMA platform from a CCaaS provider, that we're doing. You know, three calls per agent per week per our SOW, right. So again, that's an unbelievable use case that we're starting to build out and then starting to build things on top of that, right, so you get a full coaching model, right, to have agents be able to redo calls that maybe they made mistakes on, they made an error with. Calls that maybe they made mistakes on, they made an error with, but literally calling the same customer that they just talked to, but us sending out that transcript to AI using an AI voice and having basically an AI avatar of the customer be able to react to a different outcome that the agent is now going to give them after we've kind of coached. I think that those are some of the really cool experiences that you can build out on your own, or that an outsourcer is building out on our own to provide value to customers and either keep the same cost lower cost but add a higher level of value. Those are the tools that I think are winning today.
Speaker 2:Right, you know it's still. If you go out on your own and you have, you know whether it's CX1, 5.9, genesis, any of the you know main players if you go out to an Omelia, an Amelia, any of those AI, poly, ai providers, it's crazy expensive. Still, right, your ROI won't be there for a while and I think a lot of that is set up in the setup. Set up in the setup. Right, the setups are so crazy expensive. The usage model is there, which is cool, right, but it is still really expensive and high. You know they're rounding up the crazy numbers.
Speaker 2:So I think that's where an outsourcer can kind of come into play, right, to say, hey, listen, we already have this stuff built out. We have to do a small build out for you, right? So instead of maybe paying 50 grand, it's going to be five grand, right, because we kind of have everything done. We kind of understand the process, building out your model from a self-service standpoint that can bring you ROI much quicker. Because, especially if we're starting to build things on our own but still maybe utilizing some of those tools in conjunction with each other, it's still going to be less than I believe what you would start to pay if you had to start from scratch and go out on your own.
Speaker 2:And if there's a BPO that's charging you crazy, crazy setup fees, I think that you need to run away from that. I was never a believer in setup fees. I know a lot of BPOs do that to cover their training costs, right, and cover that upfront cost that they have, but they're still billing for training. So again, for me it was let's charge at cost for setup, maybe a 10% overage. But let's get this thing up as quickly as we can and let's start adding value with customers and with the technology. So let's talk about what you should be asking then from an RFP standpoint, right. So, if you're building out an RFP, and what should BPOs, what should contact centers have today? Right, that should be almost like skills-based routing was right. Or omni-channel right. There's still contact centers that are selling omni-channel, like, if you don't have omni-channel now, like, what are you doing? Right?
Speaker 2:So I think that the core and I always like to start from the agent experience out, and I think, again, that's where a lot of mistakes get made we start at the customer level and then work our way in right. I would start with looking at things like the customer or your BPO should have agent assist, especially if you have a complex type of program. Maybe you're a retailer with a ton of different SKUs right. You have so many different products that an agent it's just really hard for them and normally they'd have to look up things up in a KMS or, you know, go to a SharePoint, right? If that's your core business and you have a very complex set of things that agents have to learn, then agent assist is like a godsend, right, and that's something that you should be looking for in your RFPs or have a kind of a mandatory section, right. I think agent assist is turning that way where it's no longer like the cool thing to have but it's turning into something for a lot of different customers of the must-have. I think that you know that's something that has been again. I hate the phrase low-hanging fruit I use it so much, I need another phrase for that but we've seen agent assist do a lot right. So I think that's one of the things that you should think about. If you have an RFP, if you're looking for an outsourcer, do they have this technology? How do they apply it for the use cases that we would have, you know?
Speaker 2:The second really easy thing is auto summarization, right, which you know being able to take the call, summarize it in a way that makes sense for you, you know, put those notes in there into the auto summarization right To kind of tell it what you want of how the outcome of calls happen. Then be able to put that into your CRM Again. What is the use case for that right? That use case could be for anything, right. Number one if you have issues with quality of memoing and notes in your CRM from your agents. This is a good you know tool to have if that's really important to you guys. But I think more importantly, if you have long after call works right. If you have long wrap times, if the agent has to do two to three to four minutes of work when that call is over, obviously we could do some RPA if there's a lot of things they need to do. But if they're just memoing, making sure that the account is documented properly, then auto summarization is the no brainer of no brainers. Documented properly, then auto summarization is the no brainer of no brainers.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of the CCAS guys. I mean they're charging like seven, eight, nine cents per interaction, which I think is really high for that, just for the amount of tokens that you're using with the LLMs it should be cheaper. I also think that if you don't know what tool, if you have the technology in your contact center to build something out, auto summarization is crazy easy to do. I mean you can kind of almost figure out the prompt right away for it, depending on what you want right, and to be able to put it to a quick integration into your CRM is a pretty light lift. So you know, that's something that, again, for us, like we don't even really charge for that because it's really such a small offering and small cost for us that you know we are charging literally a penny of a penny of a penny of a penny of a penny for that, where some of these guys are really gouging that price because they think it's such cool technology and it's really probably the most basic AI technology that there is for the contact center. So I would ask and make sure that you're getting a good price on that.
Speaker 2:I think you know, looking at some of the advanced routing, right, looking at you know CX1, you guys know I'm a CX1 guy they have a tool that has been really really now powered now by AI, which is WFI, which is workforce intelligence. If you're using Five Knot, genesis, dialpad, all these companies have a tool like this where basically you're looking and has the ability to, instead of a human being, moving people in and out of skills, but having now AI powered, kind of a brain, move agents in and out of skills based on business rules of handle time or service level. That's a really cool use case that you can utilize. Now, again, I tell every time I go to talk at an interaction which is a CX1 event, I say, guys, make sure that you're utilizing this. It doesn't cost anything and it's an AI powered tool. That I think is really cool.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I think people don't talk about are these legacy tools right? Ask about the BPO's workforce management. Is there WFM? How good is their reporting aspect? How good is their reporting aspect? How good is their forecasting? What type of AI technologies does that have embedded in it? That's one of the huge things that nobody talks about that I've seen.
Speaker 2:One of the biggest changes with is WFM and how smart that that tool is now getting from a forecasting standpoint, from an intraday forecast, and being able to make really these split decisions that can then tie into WFI or to move agents in and out. So you're almost having like a robot-controlled contact center and that's kind of what we've gotten to right that kind of our WFI almost talking to our workforce management and being able to move agents kind of in and out of skills fluently. You know, based on the forecast that's coming, based on what's happening in the IVR, if we're getting a little bit of a rush or we're getting crushed during a certain time of day that we didn't expect. Right, to make those split second decisions. That, again, I think, would be harder for you if you don't know what you're doing on a real core CCaaS platform. And again, another kind of value add of an outsourcer and something to look at when you're doing your RFP we can then talk about. You know those, the chatbots? Because I think that talk about you know those, the chatbots, because I think that you know I would be remiss to not talk about them, right, they're, they're an important aspect of what is coming. It depends on how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole with that.
Speaker 2:You know the number one thing that I would say if you, if you're doing an RFP for a contact center outsourcer, I would not say, hey, do you have self-service AI, chatbots, virtual assistants, whatever you want to call them? Do you have that? Because that's what I hear. Do you guys have that technology? Well, yeah, everybody kind of has the technology, but are you ready to utilize it to its fullest extent? But are you ready to utilize it to its fullest extent? Right, meaning right?
Speaker 2:What integrations? Do you understand that you're going to have to have as many things integrated as possible to make it work, whether that be your CMS, whether that be your KMS, whether that be any type of data sets that you have. You know you're obviously your CCaaS platform. Having all of these things kind of tied together is the number one aspect. The number two thing is how is your KMS? I would ask in the RFP can you help me build out the KMS? What resources do you have available to help organizations that don't have a KMS, or maybe have one that's old, that has bad data? Or how do you keep your KMS? How will you help us keep our KMS up to date and how will you integrate it into our IVAs or into our chatbots?
Speaker 2:Those are the things that people, again, we're not understanding. We're not being an outsourcer, being a CCaaS provider. We're not talking about those enough of the kind of the steps and again, guys, I've done multiple podcasts on that Go check it out on what you need to do to really become fully AI powered what are the steps that you need to do, maybe this year, to kind of get to that level so that next year you can start to buy technology? I think that that's something that's pretty important and something that I think you need to kind of really start to think through before you just have an outsourcer say, hey, we want you to do full self-service, we want you to do all this stuff, and the outsourcer says, okay, that's fine, and then they don't really realize it either because they're just saying yes to everything. You have to be really careful with who you're talking to, what questions they're going to ask you, making sure that you understand everything, that you need to kind of meet that standard that they can give you. I can give you that, but we need to work through and talk through what you need to do to get to that spot. I think that's the important thing.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I like to ask and I would ask in an RFP is what other tools have you looked? Rfp is is have you kind of what other tools have you? Have you looked at your the legacy tools and have you kind of advanced them? Like, do you have advanced analytics that have some type of AI power in them, meaning not just looking at trending keywords and that, but? But they're integrated into your supervisor, right? So it can tell. Talk through real-time sentiment, right? So if sentiment starts to go down on an agent boom, supervisor gets notified Supervisor can get on that line, like those are some of the things that every BPO should start to be having now. Right, those aren't like the cool check this out. No, they're kind of the 2024 2024 must haves in the contact center and I think you know that's. That's really important.
Speaker 2:The other thing I would start to talk to in my, my RFP is is how good are they with integrations? Again, we talked about the KMS, but the integration piece, I think goes beyond just the AI. Right, obviously you need it for AI, but can you do it for cool, just regular things? I still think one of the coolest things we do has nothing to do with AI. But when you can route off of data, like I don't know why, for me that's always just so cool, right? So when a call comes in to go look at different fields in Salesforce and, depending on what that field says, send it to maybe a self-service, send it to a specific agent, send it to a group of agents, to have this kind of really cool routing aspect when you're integrating data sources with telephony, I still think is crazy, crazy cool. Sources with telephony, I still think is crazy, crazy cool. And because we always were good at that and we always probably because I liked it and I would always recommend it.
Speaker 2:You know, we always got to have a little bit of a step up, of getting customers to be able to kind of move down that AI road, because integrations are kind of secondary to us. I know a lot of BPOs as well, but they're just so easy to do and again, once you get that done, there's so much stuff that you can do as well. Let's see, just trying to think if I missed anything here, checking out some I think that's the other thing is this is this is good. I'm glad I went through my notes here. I think every single outsourcer should have quarterly technology reviews. So that's kind of what we do now. Granted, we're talking weekly, but to really have a have an hour, have an hour and a half long meeting where we kind of develop their AI roadmap. You know we can demo any kind of technology that's maybe we're utilizing for other customers that's just coming out, show new use cases.
Speaker 2:Technology is moving so quickly that you can't wait really year to year to do this and it needs to be a quarterly at least. Hey, this stuff's coming out. Hey, check this out. I think that this would be a good use case for you. So make sure in your RFP that you're talking through that. How often are they going to help you kind of roadmap and get to where you need to be from a technology standpoint so that, depending on what you want to do, you can always kind of stay ahead of the game. I think that's really important as well.
Speaker 2:I think as well, guys, if you're not using you know, even the desktop version within your organization, you know, even if it's one-off stuff like start to utilize, that there's so much that you can do internally that you don't even need an outsourcer for anymore. You know, to be perfectly honest, with some of the technology and some of the information, right, your KMS, you know, using a personal GPT. That could be something really cool, especially for smaller contact centers, that you can do. You know. I still think that our auto QA platform is just it's so crazy inexpensive that, no matter what size you are from a five-seater if you're a five-seat, ten-seat contact center you can pay $700 to us and have 500 QA forms scored a month, which is probably almost could be close to 100% of all your probably not 100%, but it's a huge percentage of calls that you're getting for much less cost than it would take one person to score. So again, we've seen those huge savings in there. I know transcripts the cost of that is just plummeting right now.
Speaker 2:I'm excited for ChatGPT 5. I think that we'll start to see some real audio. You know I get a lot of questions on sentiment and we're still utilizing prompting and transcripts for sentiment just like kind of analytics. But until we get real audio where we can start to talk about sarcasm, we can start to really notice changes and raises and lowering voices. I think that's the big next step.
Speaker 2:So yeah, guys, that's kind of what I wanted to kind of talk through today. If there's any questions or anything, please DM me. I would love to talk with you. If anybody's looking to outsource, even if you want to go nearshore offshore, xpebe is fully onshore. We don't have an offshore presence but I have a lot of connections, you know, near shore, offshore, if that's where you want to go. If you just want to kind of talk about your AI plan, I'd love to kind of talk that through. If you're looking to outsource anything from your contact center here in the States, you know you'd be pretty surprised and happy with a lot of the answers that you got, so appreciate it and I will talk to everybody next week.
