Inside Expivia Digital and the State of Contact Center Technology

00:00Hi, guys. Tom Laird here. You've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now, it's time for me to help you with your challenges. As your contact center technology advisor through our new company Expivia Digital, I can help you with things like CCaaS, any type of AI. Implementation and nice studio and integration services. It's the same honest advice you hear on the geek applied specifically to your operation- visit ExpiviaDigital.com to get started. That's ExpiviaDigital.com. Welcome back everybody to another episode of Advice from a call center geek. The call center contact center podcast where we try to give you some action items, take back your contact center, improve the overall quality, improve the agent experience, hopefully. Hopefully improve your customer experience. I'm fired up for today, guys. It's been too long since I've talked to you guys on the podcast. I know so many of you guys still have been downloading things. I've been super crazy live on TikTok, crazy on LinkedIn, but been so busy trying to do some things that the podcast has kind of taken a back seat. So this is my goal here as we wind down, I guess, Uh, I guess starting the fourth quarter right here in October This will be back to its weekly place. I think uh It's a really important Tool for everybody out there and I and I know that i've kind of been slacking here on on what we've been doing with this So having said that I'm gonna kind of do a soft announcement here I have a bunch of videos doing a bunch of things for kind of our launch on Monday of kind of our third, I don't want to say third business, but something we've been doing for a really long time kind of under the, I don't know, kind of very quietly, I guess you could say is so many of you guys on the podcast have come to me and said, Tom, we need help. We're an on-prem. We need to move to a CCaaS platform, Tom, we need help.

[Gap 02:01–02:29: no reliable transcription]

02:29bvadigital.com. It's a fully rebranded site for contact center technology consulting and also specifically helping nice customers get the most out of their platform. That's one of the biggest, I, I guess, down falls. I say down falls of nice, but one of the struggles with nice is it's a very complex pro platform. So people a lot of times don't understand how to integrate. They They don't know how to use Studio to its full extent. To use professional services is extremely expensive. When you're using all these kind of managed service partners, it's crazy expensive. So we wanna come in, help the, again, the smaller contact center, again, with Nice, maybe that's under a thousand seats, right? But those 40-seaters, those 20-seaters, those 10-seaters, we wanna help you on a very low price point figure out how to get the most out of your platform. If you need a full managed service partner to kind of manage your whole nice suite, we'll do that.

03:30If you just say, hey, Tom, I got a quick 15 second question on this, we want to be able to do that for you and do that at no cost. So we want to be a real partner with a lot of the smaller contact centers that are kind of being left out or don't know where to turn or don't have the budget for the full meal deal, right, to use the platform. Secondly, we want to be a very strong consulting technology partner for everybody out there. As you guys know, I talk about it all the time. We've done even our own CCaaS ratings, our top 19. We ranked the top 19 CCaaS platforms into different categories that I think actually help. Again, none of those platforms are bad, but they're all specific for certain use cases. Smaller context centers need this, enterprise need this, outbound centers need this.

04:26Do you need workforce management? Do you need analytics? Do not. We. want to be that partner to help you kind of go through this technology transition that we're seeing. You know, as it relates to AI and analytics and workforce management. I don't know if there's anybody, maybe there's other people out there, I'm sure there are, but there's not many more people who have seen as many demos as I have who's played with the technology. And again, I have a BPO. I'm actually using a lot of this technology, especially on the nice side, but not just on the nice side in our actual contact centers. So again, there's more on this, but I think I'd love to just have a conversation with anybody out there that is thinking about, we need a new platform, we need new technology, we don't know where to go, we don't know where to start, or we have this tool, we're not utilizing it.

05:15We wanna try to help you and do it at a price point that is not like these enterprise giant managed services partners that, you know, come in with, you know, high minimums and hourly rates that are insane. Try to do it a little bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a talk. And we'll see if this works out for us. But, uh, you know, things I think are evolving this way. Let me, tell a kind of my overall view of kind of the market right now, what I'm seeing. And first on the, in the BPO space, right? There's, There's a lot of movement. I think people are starting to think through and they kept kind of dry powder, right? They kept their money in their pocket waiting to see what we was going to happen with AI. And I think we're still looking to see what's going on with AI.

06:04But a couple, or we've seen more and more of looking of contact center professionals that have internal centers or want to outsource looking more onshore, on-prem. I've seen that, like I haven't seen probably the last five years since COVID, right? So there's been a swing back from the work from home, back to on-prem, especially for health care financial services, but it's very high technology. Every single RFP that I'm seeing, again, Agent Assist, Auto, Auto RQA, auto summarization, they're just, they're like the must-haves. They're not like, hey, we have this. It's not even a different here anymore. You can't even play, you know, without these type of tools. You know, voice cancellation is absolutely huge now, right? Looking at real-time translation, right? Looking. At tools like Crisp, right? What they can do with translation, what they can do with even the voice modulations that we've had multiple conversations on.

06:58All of that technology is alive, it is mature, right? Relatively mature for the market. And I think it's something that we're starting to really see kind of evolve. As it relates to AI, I'm still not seeing head counts go down, right? We're starting to see more internal tools like we have been talking about and we've said that to everyone, right? You know, we need to start with the agent experience first, which then will make the customer experience better, will save money in the long run with shorter handle times in higher CSAT and NPS, and then we'll move to kind of that first chatbot. I had my first experience with the Taco Bell AI yesterday, and I guess it's my buddies, my friends at Omelee that are doing that. Overall, it was a pretty good experience. Here's the problem, the problem wasn't with the technology. The problem was we are starting or we're using the same IVR mindset that we're doing with AI. So we're trying, trying to push all in every I'm just hoping for like percentage bounces and things.

08:03Like, for example, you know, I was asked, do I have my customer code for like bonus points, which I don't want to talk about that, believe it or not. I mean, you can look at me, you think I'd go to talk about a lot, but so I didn't have that. They repeated everything in the order, I hate that, right? So again, and then repeated everything, didn't hear, I mean, that's fine because humans don't hear, asked a couple times, I had to give a couple times of what we really wanted. Then at the end, was your order correct? It was correct. But then we went into, do you want a French, I forgot to talk about French fries, but do you want the Mexi-fry-s, and like, no. Oh, hey, would you like to round this up for this? And then some type of Halloween thing that they had.

08:54So again, this is what we did with the IVR, right? use it, and just be like, hey, can we throw that on the IVR? Can we throw that on? And again, you're probably seeing upticks of percentage of revenues, which I guess is good. But again, is it great for the customer experience? No, but again, where's that line? So I think. We have to be careful with some of that as well, of making sure that we're treating AI in a new way. And we talked about this with QA. There's no reason to be asking the same questions that we asked humans to answer in quality assurance that we're going to ask AI. But we still do that because we don't understand it yet. And no matter how much I push back on it, people are like, no, this is what we've been doing for 15 years. I'm comfortable with it. I know that an 82 is an 82 and I want that.

09:42So there's some change in thought that needs to happen in the CX space. Just remember, or AI is not an IBR, and let's not treat it like it, even though that's all we've been used to. So I think that's why we're kind of going back those models. Again, from a technology space, things are evolving quickly and it's just cool tools. Our auto QA is insane. So many of the other platforms, their auto QA is really good, right. It's almost turning into full analytics with auto QA, right? So KMS, KMSs are getting better. This was the missing link. The knowledge management, and I'm seeing multiple platforms that are coming out that can help you get your knowledge and sort it out so that you can move to AI, so that you can use these things like agent assist. Really really cool. I think that's been, again, I've been kind of shouting from the rooftops.

10:41We need to have some type of digital transformation as it comes to infrastructure for AI. I'm starting to see it, right? So the platforms people have been listening, seeing that there's a need for that. And again, talk to me. I'd love to talk to you about some of the platforms that I've seen really, really, really cool. And then again, you have, like we've talked about the auto QA, auto summarization is like the easiest thing the world to do people still I'm doing it and then agent assist agent assist is getting better agent assist isn't for everyone. But if you have longer handle times you have very complex situations or you have multiple things across a lot. So there needs needs to be multiple with agent assist in my opinion. So so we'll see kind of with that. But the other thing is there's still a lot of you that are not in the cloud. Right. So that's another thing I would love to be able to If you have an on-prem, you're moving to the cloud a because some of these platforms, Cisco's coming, Zoom is coming.

11:46You know, you have the leaders, the CXone, now it's just nice, nice in power. You have Genesys in Five9. You have all of these guys that are starting to get really AI forward platforms. And some of these kind of up and comers are really starting to come hard. Right, AWS, who I've not been a fan of is starting to come, right? So again, there's, there's a, a lot that's changing.. It's ever changing. It's changing every five to six months. And that's one of the things I'm going to try to either, you know, I'm going to be very honest on these podcasts and kind of give you my opinion on all this stuff so that you can use it. But then if you kind of want to get deeper, you know, I can, I can, you know, have a, have a little breakdown session with you as well.

12:27So real short episode today, more of a soft announcement, got a state of the union of where I think things are at. We'll get this back rolling next week. I have a couple of conferences that I'll be heading to too, as well as in the fourth quarter here that I'm excited to kind of talk to you guys about, was just at an amazing Outsource Consultants BPO Summit. And it was basically a technology summit where I got to present on auto QA and then a lot of other technology partners presenting about 70 to 80 BPOs. So, you know, learned a lot there, hopefully that I can bring to everybody as well. So again, thanks for bearing with me. I promise I'll get back on the normal kind of rotation of once a week. But appreciate y'all and guys please, follow me on LinkedIn. And if you're on TikTok, my following on is blowing up and I'm going live all the time on TikTok.

13:18So again, at call center underscore geek there, and then you guys know me on LinkedIn. Thanks guys, appreciate you.