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!
What Technology does a World Class 2024 Contact Center Have?
Did you ever ask yourself what the high-end contact centers are doing differently? In this ACGpodcast, we dive deep into the cutting-edge technologies that set elite customer service operations apart from the rest.
This is how we are developing our strategic plan for Expivia.
From AI-powered chatbots to advanced analytics, we explore the tools and strategies that are revolutionizing the way top companies interact with their customers. Whether you're a business owner looking to upgrade your customer service or a tech enthusiast curious about the future of communication, this podcast offers invaluable insights into the world of high-tech contact centers.
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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 Leard.
Speaker 2:What's up everybody. Welcome back 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 you can improve your customer experience as well. What's up everybody.
Speaker 2:As you hopefully know by now, my name is Tom Laird. I'm the CEO here at Xpevia, interaction, marketing and also Auto QA. It's good to be back and talk with everybody. We've been pretty busy with both companies and want to talk a little bit again and do this in kind of an AMA format. We're live on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn and here on TikTok as well. So again, if you guys have any questions as I'm kind of rolling through this please do not hesitate to ask.
Speaker 2:The things I want to talk through today are very relevant in where we are as an industry and I think, as we've been thinking through, we meaning here at Xpevia, we are a contact center outsourcer thinking about our strategic plan, thinking about where things are moving, how do we need to change. I want to present some of those to you today and talking to all my friends in the industry and looking at what AI tools people are utilizing, kind of coming up with 10 kind of core things that I see as must-haves for a AI-powered contact center, for you know, kind of the new definition of what a high-end contact center is with all the technology that we have out today. You know, kind of just to start this, it's funny we did a blog post back in 2018, where we talked about the 10 things that a contact center outsourcer has to have right, and at that time, it was things speaking of like omni-channel and looking at the proper size and culture. And again, I'm not saying those things are wrong and they're totally outdated, but there's so many more things that I think you need to look at from a contact center standpoint, if you want to be known as kind of that AI powered or next generation of contact center. And again, I'm not saying anybody should be having this today, but I think this is the roadmap that you need to look at and this is from our strategic plan. These are the things that we are implementing. Either now, either have the things that we are implementing. Either now either have implemented this year, are implementing or plan on implementing in the next 12 to 18 months to try to get to that point in mid-2025. These are all the things that we have, so let me start with maybe some of the more of the more normal ones, right? But again, we've been thinking about this strategic plan for a really long time and this is what I believe. In my opinion, that high-end context under the future meaning 2024 and beyond, for the next couple of years, is going to need to look like and if you don't, that's a good reason to outsource. I think our outsourcing in the BPO world has totally been flipped on its head. You've heard me talk about this before, but we used to be just a place where you could get agents, really highly skilled agents. It had a lot of technology on the back end, but our core purpose was to provide agents and hold on.
Speaker 2:I'm going to answer some questions as they come in too. I will stop everything here we have. There's a TikTok question what do I think about Amazon Connect? I will tell you that I think Amazon has put its toe in the CCaaS space. I don't think they've gone all in. If Amazon wants to take over, amazon's going to.
Speaker 2:They are a stripped down tool that really has a core kind of ACD part, but you have to strap on everything from reporting to any type of analytics, workforce management, all the other ancillary tools you need to slap on it. I don't want to say it's a Twilio, because Twilio, that's how Twilio was built. My opinion on it is it's not as robust as a nice CX1, as a 5.9, as a Genesis, but there's still amazing use cases for it, especially if you have a team that can really integrate, a team that can, you know, pull a lot of different data sources into it. So again, it's not that it's a bad platform, it's just what are you looking for. So, again, it's not that it's a bad platform, it's just what are you looking for. And for everybody, I don't think that it's kind of there. Yeah, some of those are native to AWS, but they are not world-class. Their reporting mechanism is not good, their WFM, like any of those type of tools, they're not even close to world-class anything that they have strapped on. So what I've seen from customers is you get the aws kind of core. You're very disappointed, you're frustrated because you have to integrate with a lot of things that they say are native and you're going out and you're getting other tools from a variant or from any of those other kind of third-party providers. So again, we can have that conversation. But, uh, again, again, keep the questions coming. We'll, we'll keep answering as we're going.
Speaker 2:But, as I was kind of saying, the BPO space has been flipped on its head. We used to be just providing agents, really skilled agents, and had a nice technology background as well. Well, now it's become we need to be the technology partner for customers that also can provide the skilled agents. But the technology pieces come first and I think you're starting to see that even in internal contact centers where people are looking at what tools should we purchase first? How do we get on this AI bandwagon? And again, I've done a lot of different podcasts on that. But today I want to kind of present our strategic plan at Expedia. I want to kind of present our strategic plan at Expedia, what we are working on now, what I think will be the definition of kind of that AI power world-class contact center from a technology standpoint, and and be excited to kind of show, share some of this with you.
Speaker 2:So again, number one is, you know, looking at advanced technology and these digital solutions, right, looking at AI, and again, this isn't rocket science here right, developing and thinking about what tools can we develop in-house? Right, we've developed an auto QA platform. We can do auto summarization right, develop these tools that are much cheaper. Right To develop in-house if you have the skill and the technology for it to be able to integrate with different sources. But then also thinking through and having the expertise to say, okay, what tools do we need to go out there with? Right, how do we bring an agent assist to our contact center? Right? Does the agent assist platform now is that the best? Right? And then you know, looking at the self-service chatbots, looking at you know LLMs and thinking, you know, do we need to be internal with them? Right, with our AI and our LLM? Can we use external LLMs? Right? Those kind of things, I think, are what we are starting to really discuss here.
Speaker 2:What we have kind of come to the realization is we are trying to build everything that we possibly can. So we have our auto QA platform, we've built that out. We have auto summarization we have built that out. We have purchased and are using a third party for agent assist. We have multiple vendors right now for any type of AI self-service, depending on what the need is, depending on how complex it is. So I think that's kind of where we see us is trying what can we build out for ourself? And then what level do we have to go out and kind of purchase?
Speaker 2:Number two is looking at data analytics and customer insights. This comes with having us be an expert and having your context and being an expert in integrations right, being able to pull data not just from your CCaaS but looking at your any SQL database with maybe your sales data, looking at your CRM, being able to tie all of this together right. And then being able to do real-time, cutting-edge analytics to predict capabilities, to give insights. You know us being an outsourcer, I don't want to just, you know, say hey, here's the sentiment of calls and here's some trending keywords. We want to give actionable items back to our customers from a marketing standpoint, from the things that we are hearing on calls right.
Speaker 2:And I think you know the development of the contact center beyond just a place that answers and solves problems for customers but becomes that analytic tool. We've been talking about that for a long time. But some of these tools now, from an AI standpoint, are actually doing what we've always wanted to. Even our auto QA platform, I think, can do a lot with answering questions, because all we're doing, right, we're asking questions of data and I think you have to have a data analytics tool for customer insights to really understand and then, as things get better, it will be more predictive, right. And what we're doing when a customer does call in, we're pulling from lots of different data sources, doing analytics as that call's coming in to give them the best experience possible. So it's just, you know, kind of taking what we've done with the IVR and kind of putting it on steroids and then really understanding all the aspects of kind of what's happening with that call, with that customer.
Speaker 2:Now number three, I think we've done a pretty good job with but it is kind of the remote work, excellence, right. Looking at more gamification, you know, developing our online training we have to do a little bit better with that right and on how we educate our work from home agents. How do we maintain that strong company culture, right, do we do more baseball games or hockey games or do we do those type of things? I think you know that's been the biggest thing I said today. For the first time in my whatever 20 or 30 years career, I probably know less than half of the agents here at Xpevia now, because over the last three years we've all been work from home. I may go talk in their training class, but we have failed, I think, a little bit with that from a cultural standpoint of trying to keep people together and kind of keep what we used to be able to do here right when it was, you know, what we used to be able to do here right when it was so much fun when you'd have 300 people in a contact center room and you could high five, you could play games and you're doing kind of some silly things. I think that stuff has gone away and we need to get back to that. I think that's why it's on our strategic plan to do a much better job with employee engagement and kind of culture building from that standpoint.
Speaker 2:Number four is advanced cybersecurity. I mean, everybody knows, everybody's heard by now the whole CrowdStrike issue. They're saying Delta's lost $500 million just from that outage and us being not a large contact center. You know there's, there's a lot of of I don't know I. It's almost like I, I in my head I get, I get more scared or more nervous because people think like a smaller contact center may be the low-hanging fruit. So you know we have. We've really gone overboard, like during the crowd strike deal, we weren't down at all.
Speaker 2:Right, our infosec team does a really good job making sure again we are this close to SOC 2 compliance. But we're fully PCI, getting penetration testing, making sure that everything you can possibly do, even from an insurance standpoint what are your policies on all that? We used to have a clean desk policy. When you came into the office there was no cell phones I know people hated that but even no pens and paper. Everything we did we had to give the agents things because we work with a lot of financial services customers, I think really looking at more compliance things, which are super painful.
Speaker 2:But now that we have auto qa, we're getting into the ai space. You know what does that look like? What? What are the certifications that ai is going to need? I think those are some of the things that we're kind of talking through now and kind of you know, part of our strategic roadmap to try to be a leader in that um and and even have a voice right into kind of how that that works. So I think that's important.
Speaker 2:And again, number five kind of goes with number one. But looking at integration of AI integration of who do we really want to use and who do you want to use as the company that is going to be your AI assistant company that is going to help you with all of your integrations. Like, I think this is the main thing that people don't realize and I've talked about it is, if you want to be AI-centric, right, you need multiple things. Number one you need mass integrations, right. Integrations into multiple levels of everything that you have, whether that be your CCaaS, like we kind of talked about your CRM, any other data source, right? That's number one. Number two is what no one has is their KMS, right? So you know, we want to be that leader and I think all of you who want to be an AI-powered customer support center need to start thinking about your KMS.
Speaker 2:You need to make sure that not only do you have one, which most people don't right. Number one, that you have one. Number two, that it's up to date. And number three, you have a mechanism for keeping it up to date, flushing out old data, because if you don't, you know AI is kind of right now, for how we have to have it set up is a pipe dream. You're just going to have improper information given to customers. Right, it goes way beyond having an FAQ section. We could do FAQs for a really long time. We're talking about a real AI bot that can give extreme answers to questions, and only the top 1% of companies right now are able to do that. So, yeah, with right we want to be the kind of the one-stop shop that we can do all your integrations for you, start to build your KMS out for you and then be able to fully integrate and to become an have your program be an AI-powered program, but in an AI-powered contact center.
Speaker 2:If a BPO is telling you right now that they can integrate and they can do AI on your stuff, if a BPO is telling you right now that they can integrate and they can do AI on your stuff, ask them those questions, because there's a lot of things that has to happen before you can just turn on that AI chatbot and have a takeover call. That's why, when you hear things from my AI chatbot is greatai, right, all those companies that are just popping up, you know you got to ask those questions because all they're doing is taking faqs, giving you something really basic that you could have done on your own, but make sure again that that you're thinking through how do we build this integration, how do we build this, our kms, out, and then how do we take that next step and what partner are we going to utilize right to really do kind of ai with us? You know, I think the other number, number six here is is modern workforce management and you know we're using kind of the iex, we're using the cx1, but we want to take that to the next level even before that, with smart routing, with workforce intelligence and integrating that stuff a little bit more. I think that's really important for us. There was a company that heard me speak at Interactions, asked to have some time with me today to talk about workforce intelligence and that's what CX1 calls it. But everybody has it right AWS, genesis and Five9, they all have some type of workforce intelligence where, as calls come in, agents can be moved based on business rules, whether it be service level calls in queue without a human being kind of doing that, and then having that then tie into your workforce management, which can be done right, and having all these business rules. So you almost like get to a point in the next. For us, we want to get to the point in the next 12 to 18 months where we have basically a virtual mission control or virtual supervisor, not from a QA standpoint but from a operational standpoint of keeping service levels right. So AI is coming to do that. It's just now the integration of these new technologies that are kind of standalone right now to put them together to come up with some AI enhancing service level, queue enhancing, routing kind of technologies.
Speaker 2:And I think you know with that goes. You know, the customer journey optimization right, that's something that we need to get more into. We've been doing it for customers for about the last year, but really taking what customers had and then kind of showing them you know where. Not only you know where some weak points are in their service cycle, but also what could be. You know, looking at what could be automated right, there's so many things that you can do with a journey optimization looking at feedback, continuous feedback, looking at you know where can we optimize, how can we change routing, where can we do self-service. There's so many things with that and I think, again, your BPO needs to be the leader in that if you're using an outsourcer, but even internally, these are things that you can start to do on your own to start to optimize that don't cost a ton of money. There's some tools that are out there that aren't crazy, but I think it makes a huge difference, especially when you kind of have it on as part of your roadmap for what you want to do.
Speaker 2:Number nine is for a BPO. Being agile is huge. We always say we have to be a part of the effort, which for us is flexibility, and so we want to do things, even one of the main things that we've done, I think, from a that's kind of knocked two birds off with one stone, from a flexibility standpoint and also from a security standpoint. And well, there's some other ease of use, I guess things too is has we've been moving? We moved from microsoft windows to chrome os as our, as our operating system and most of our ages now, and what we're buying now are either those Google oh my gosh, I'm going right into it like the Google Books, or the boxes, and that's what we're giving our agents.
Speaker 2:Cool thing is, if you're using Windows, if an agent goes to another program, if they do something else, you have to bring that computer in. You have to wipe it clean, take out all the data, put the operating system back on and then kind of do every single time you're re-imaging these computers, but with Chrome OS you don't, it's crazy, right. So they just keep it. You can wipe it clean. The other thing is you can even tell. Sometimes we have agents that will say, hey, my internet's out. Well, with Chrome OS you can actually see what their internet is, so they can't lie to you. Any type of updates or any type of things that you want to put on their screen, you can instantly do.
Speaker 2:It's just been a really cool aspect of being able to be quick, not having to have a lot of IT resources that are going to do some of those things. So again, I think that that's another thing that we want to get really good at. Right is to turn our whole operations kind of from that Windows aspect to Chrome OS and then look at how can we be quicker with our training, how can we be quicker with some of the things that we need to do to get agents up to speed quicker? How do we use agent assist better in our training? How do we use some of these auto QA tools? Right, and kind of trying to put all these pieces together to make us as quick and agile and strong as we possibly can.
Speaker 2:You know, number nine is something that I wouldn't have had on here ever but I've kind of got more and more around to. It is just sustainability and kind of the social responsibility you know. Looking at, again, I think, looking at what we're purchasing right, is there anything that we can do to help, you know, with that? Looking at our diversity practices, with management trying to get engaged more in the community, I think those things are things that when we have, since we have a bigger workforce, we've done a poor job with and we want to make sure that we're doing a better job as we kind of move forward. I think that that's important and I think it does make a difference on the type of people and the culture that you have in your organization. So, again, that's something I think to look at and something to kind of think through as well.
Speaker 2:And again, we want to stay innovative. You know we want to be always looking for what's new. I want to be a voice for you guys to say you can listen to, to hear what is happening next power things, what is real, what is not real, how can we implement some of these, these tools, and I think that you know that helps us from a marketing standpoint, to be honest, and hopefully it helps you guys, you know, learn about what's going on. You have kind of that one stop shop. I really appreciate so many of you guys that have reached out and said, tom, we've learned this. Or you know this has really helped us. Or you know I was a. I get so many of the. I was a call center agent who became a supervisor, who's now running the call center and I've listened to you the whole way up and you've helped me. Like that's awesome.
Speaker 2:And again, I think that's the stuff that kind of keeps this, keeps this, the podcast, and keeps the energy here of over almost 250 episodes now, you know, really rolling. So again, that's kind of you know where we are at right. You know, looking at advanced technologies, looking at these digital solutions, trying to figure out what we want to implement and what we don't, really becoming a source of data analytics and having a ton of customer insights, really looking at our remote workforce from a cultural standpoint, improving that. Trying to get again everybody on Windows Chrome OS I think that's been an easier to get again everybody on Windows. You know, chrome OS, I think that's been an easier use. But again, from a cultural standpoint, how do we get better with that? Enhancing cybersecurity, which you could? That'll never be done, right? You can never say, hey, we're secure, it is. What is the next thing that we can do to become more secure? What is the next certification, right? So, again, we want to have our SOC 2 done by the end of this year. We want to have as many things in place as we're looking, talking about the AI security. You know what are the things that are going to come out with that.
Speaker 2:Trying to be kind of a leader in that Modern workforce management that's confusing, but it's probably the easiest thing to understand at the same time, right, but it's probably the easiest thing to understand at the same time, right? So, taking all of these different things that we have, from integrations to how we route calls, to routing calls off of data, to using workforce intelligence, to using algorithms to see when calls are getting out of queue, and then having that kind of one source to kind of take all of that information and then make smart decisions, right? We're trying to build some of that here on our own to take all of these information and then make smart decisions, right. We're trying to build some of that here on our own, to take all of these different tools that we have and have that balancing act. So we have kind of that AI mission control center. I think that that's really important from where we are from a construction standpoint. You're looking at customer journey optimization, trying to be as agile and fast as we can, getting better with training of agents. Think that's the stuff that we want to do in the next 12 to 18 months.
Speaker 2:The sustainability and social responsibility, I think is something again that we've not thought about in the past and things that we need to start to look at with how do we help the community?
Speaker 2:How do we have more diversity within our management team? Is there any eco-friendly practices we can do with with how we just discard some of our computers or how our equipment, like I don't know, like even the little things I think can help a lot. And then again having that, that innovation of culture and in a, in a native innovative culture I can't speak today I think it's's trying to again be that voice for you guys and for us about what's coming next, so that we can kind of always stay ahead of the curve. So again, thank you guys for listening. If there's any other questions, you guys can DM me on kind of any of the sources that you guys are listening on. Also, if any of you guys are looking to outsource, if there is any rfps, we would love to be a part of that. Um, you know, tiktok guys, I see you guys have there's been more questions here, so I'll stay on for a couple more minutes with you guys. But everybody else, I appreciate it and I'll talk to you right next week, all right? So
