Rethinking Contact Center Outsourcing (BPO) in the Age of AI

00:00Tom 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 selection, any type of AI implementation, and NICE Studio and. It's the same honest advice This is a advice from a call-center geek. All right, we're good, we're good. So I'm like the last talk here, basically. This reminds me, I was at Interactions, which is the CXone Nice User Conference. This was two years, right before COVID. And I had the last talk on the last day, right, before Jay Leno spoke, I'm like, no one's coming to this thing. They're going to the bar. They, they're gonna have a drink. And I remember they put me in a room, it was called Canary Three, the bird that goes and dies in the cave.

01:33So they had really high hopes for me. So guys, my name is Tom Laird, I want to make this rapid fire kind of high energy. I struggled with this presentation because I wanted to add so much. value of value to you guys. There's so many different use cases, I'm by far probably the smallest BPO in here. So I think the good thing about that is that you can kind of up with with bigger names larger logos and so hopefully there's something here that you guys can find some value in because I kind of just went rogue and went on my own thing. Prothel my friend I got nothing going on up here I don't have the. Dex not on here. Oh probably the oh it's on this oh that's it yes I Oh. I got you all right try to look at the thing okay I got you sorry sorry my So, just quickly on me, my name is Tom Laird.

02:37I'm the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing. We're about a 600, 700 BPO. We're all here in the States. We also have Expivia Digital, which I'm going to talk about here, which is kind of what we've been talking about today. And then we have our brand new company called OttoQA that, that's badass, excited about it. And I want to talk to you guys about it too, because it's things that you can do in your contact center. And again, if you take one thing from this, please, I have a podcast, it's called Advice from a call center geek,. What I want to do today is we are a huge nice customer, been with nice since being a startup in 2011, gone through the in contact to the nice in contact to the nice CX one to the nice like that whole iteration. And now at calling contact center expo, I did a video with proffle talking about Chrome OS which I knew nothing about.

03:30And I'm like, oh my gosh,. This is actually pretty cool. So we have gone down the road and started a full implementation in our BPO, going client by client with Chrome OS. I want to talk to you guys a little bit about that. What is good, just some little things to just look out for nothing was bad. I think Google probably yell at me. Rest me if I say anything bad. So I want to talk about some new BPO areas and then anything else that I thought of at the end. But basically, how can we use some of the technology to, to make more money, right, you guys have right now today, and kind of how we're doing that, and I think how maybe some of you can do it with even bigger budgets at a better scale. So again, real quickly, you guys saw the CXone stuff, we're pretty much experts on the platform.

04:14Started with four. Thank you for watching! So I have a lot of tools that they have from workforce management to analytics that I want to talk a little bit about today, and whether you have Five9 Genesys, whatever, how you can increase some ROI with that stuff as well, that we have done. But the focus here, and again, I rno, Andy just spoke, so I'm going to just talk quickly through this. The main thing for us of why we moved to Chrome OS number one was the security aspect. The Windows stuff scared me to death, having all of these third-party type security things and ways to remote into systems, having dedicated really IT staff just focused on all of this, then we go work from home and it became a pretty big headache. But the cost savings are just crazy and I'm gonna show you some real-world cost savings that we found with So just quickly, he just did a full 25-minute presentation on the security aspects.

05:21I think you guys can see that from a PCI standpoint, It's been absolutely amazing. Again, knowing where your agent is at all times, if they're supposed to be at home, but they're at Starbucks, like you can know, right now with all of that kind of of security aspect and also all that new technology. So again, we kind of talked a little bit about this already. So I'll go through that. The call center benefits, no more repurposing of machines, which was huge for us, right? Every single time a new client came, we wanted to have an agent move. We'd have to wipe that machine clean, reset it up, work through all client. And again, as you guys just talked to me, or a just talked about to I love having no agent can lie to me anymore about their internet being out. So that got that got through our slack really quick. And then this is what I think is most important for you guys. So, as I said earlier, we use sofos for of Irish protection,

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07:07[pricing remark omitted] So not only am I getting a cheaper Piece of equipment. I'm getting it brand new and I'm not having to do any type of repurposing, re-imaging and that has saved us a ton of money as well. The other thing though is I didn't want to to go out out and buy 800 new machines right in new Chromebook. So from that aspect, we use we use the Chrome OS flex and we basically put it on all of our machines as we're going now we're going client by client, right?

07:58So we started with our small little 10 seaters on up to more enterprise-type customers.

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09:01kind of have. The Chromebook As you guys know, you're going to need another monitor even with that, so you got to think

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09:31absolutely unbelievable. If we've had any type of integration questions, if we have a computer that did not work, I mean, probably his team literally got on a phone with.

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10:31they're happy. But again, just thinking that stuff through, right, the little things that a lot of your agents use and making sure that you find the alternative with the 10,000 different apps that that Chrome has. And again, the VDI in the VPN build build up, we some of our clients had some weird things from that access and in Profulness team, all of that has been, I guess, integrated with, and they've worked really hard to kind of do that. But if that's the only hiccups we've had so far, that's pretty darn good. Okay, now I want to get to kind of what I'm most excited about is, and hopefully I if you can fix that in your head and we're not contact centers anymore, things don't get as scary, right? Cause things can be scary when your like 25% of my business How do I fill this in? What do I do?

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11:50something that is just ROI for me, it adds no value value to my customer, and vice versa, if it's at least before. I would look at that in a siloed fashion for every single piece of software that we buy.. Now, the thought process that we talked about has changed. Love these big space that I put in there. But now, we're looking at technology as a whole. We understand that certain technologies may not have a full ROI today, and they may never have an ROI. Agent Assist, I struggle with, I really struggle with it, to find out how that really matters to me as a BPO and is making me more money. But it's an advantage for getting new business. To be honest, it's the cost of doing business when the RFPs that I am seeing that are coming out now. So if we can look at technology as a whole, because some technologies are gonna make us a lot of money, some technologies are not.

12:48But instead of just saying, this technology stinks because it doesn't make me any money, can we make that a net zero? Can we make it maybe a plus a little bit? I guess it'd be this way. And that's how we're. So I am planning on a 20% to 30% agent reduction.. That's baked into everything that I think about. And again, I think if you think that through, you can plan ahead or start to look at some other technologies that you have to fill in that gap from a have an analytic tool and yes it can give you keywords, it can give you sentiment, it can give you frustration. That's great, what else can it do? And when you think that through, and I'll talk about a couple use cases, you can add things, add value to a customer and you can add some ROI as well.

13:57So analytics, we're charging for. Virtual agents are here, right? From a from a generative AI standpoint, I'm not that scared about it, especially for new customers coming on. We're trying, trying to talk that through. Again, the other good thing is I don't need an agent. There's a good part to that too, especially for the newer type customers. Looking at reporting tools, charging for reporting tools to a certain extent if you're going to go deep into this thing. And then again, I do charge for auto summaries and agent assist. And again, this is a small teeny tiny BPO price. It's probably totally different than what you guys would do, but we have been able to sell that from the cost savings that a customer would get with the amount of headcount that we at least can RFPs or at least from a math standpoint can can lower.

14:48And again, as I talked about, Agent Assist is in the last three RFPs that we've found with our Expivia Digital platform. So. we now have started a professional services on demand. We only right now we're only experts on the nice platform. So I'm not doing Genesys, I'm not doing CX one, but there's enough nice work out there that we've become a SIP partner. So we set up and implement partners that are moving on to the platform. And then any type of work from, you know, you want to implement workforce management, you want to do IVRs, you want to do integrations to Salesforce, Zoho, Zendesk, any of that, you know, we can now do for you. And that's been a separate entity that has been a really big revenue generator. And it's growing very quickly as we go through career, the managed AI aspect of this, right, to talk to customers about where they want to be.

15:43They don't know what the hell they're doing more, just as much as some of us don't. Right. In fact, they know less. So they want that partner to be out there to be talking to them to say, hey, listen, you know, we can take this piece of the business. We can we can make this into some type of AI model for you. We can turn this into a self service. They don't know it. I think we give So, again, from the generative AI chatbots in the generative AI, that first touchpoint, we're utilizing partners right now, you know, the Omeleas, the Emilias, the PolyAI. That's kind of what we've done. If we have an RFP, we have a plan for that. We have the partners, partnership agreements already set up. So I think, you know, worst case scenario, I would do that, right? Just have those conversations from a BPO standpoint.

16:55you have somewhere to go, right? We talked about it earlier. NICE is like the big brother behind me, right? I don't have to actually have the technology on my business unit, but I have the technology. I mean if I can just go get it, right? So I So, I have a full podcast, whole deal, deal of how we splice it and how you can revenue generate on it. One of the biggest ways ways is we have. found that we can use analytics. When we have a customer that says hey Tom I know for an 80-30 SLA you need 56 agents but I my budget only will allow for less than that but I don't know how much would we do so we can go into analytics and we say okay let's flip this on it'll cost you one fee of five grand we'll turn it on we'll look for the next three months and we'll be able to see at what wait times of agents, and we'll test this out, does the sentiment turn negative?

18:00So then we can say, hey, forget an 80-30, you don't need that. Your customer base starts to turn negative at three minutes and two seconds. So really, you don't need that 55 agents or that 2,040 agents. We can lower that now because your customer base, we know we benchmarked it to be able to wait three minutes, which is only 35 agents. So one real cool way to use analytics. our customers see this off of analytics. So this is a way to earn business to prove to customers that you're speaking to their customers in the right way, that their word choice is proper, that they're doing the things that they need to do. and I can prove to my clients and my customers that we're handling their customers the right way. So not looking at the overall sentiment but breaking it down by the actual agent And I think that's a huge piece from a selling standpoint when we go into a deal to give a little bit more comfort, especially if somebody has not outsourced before.

19:11And, again, they get full access to this. This is interaction analytics from CXone. Whoa. So this one went a little rogue. So the other thing that we say is, and again, for if you're bigger, you're probably doing this already, is integrate and charge. So we want to integrate as much as we possibly can into any data source into any CRM, whether it's Salesforce, Zoho, Zendesk, a proprietary CRM. And once we do that, we say, hey, we have a couple of things we can offer you, right? We have a basic routing, which is just your basic routing. You know, your most available agent, your your auto attendant, we can do all that. But if we do our advanced routing, a we can route out data, right? we can say hey, this customer just called in yesterday, let's move her to the front of the line. Hey, this is a high-value customer, let's move them.

20:06We can do a ton of things of moving deck chairs kind of around the Titanic, probably a bad analogy, but moving them around to make sure that their most valuable customers get the attention that they need. We can throw it to the exact agent, right? So if they talked to Susie yesterday, if they call back in today, we can make sure that it goes back to Susie as well. So, if you can think that through, and a lot of this stuff we we were just doing for customers. But if you can show the value of this, if you can show the case of it, there, there's ROI in there that you can squeeze out from a percentage standpoint. And again, whether this is just you say, we're just gonna do this as a one-time fee, add on, I think it's a little bit difficult. We all know what number we customers are comfortable with. So we've been almost going to more that one time fee setup type thing, or monthly fee overall, instead of kind of by that agent or hiring that agent cost. That's the scariest thing for customer, right? That agent cost keeps going up, they get nervous. If they're paying for a tool, they're not as nervous. That's at least what we have done.

21:19So this is what I talked about earlier. Every platform has it. CXone calls it Workforce Intelligence. I mean, I've said it like 400 times. They don't talk about it enough, but it's such an awesome tool. But everybody has it. Genesys has it. Five9 has it. They have some type of tool that's like this. And basically in basically, you're guaranteeing service levels. So this is a value add. We call it our SLAI. That's the product that we have labeled this as. when it's on our platform right now, but again, customer has sales, service, password reset and packaging, right? We can guarantee a service level, basically using this with business rules and it's using AI to move agents in and out of skills without a human being doing it. So again, a tool that's on everybody's platform that maybe you use, maybe you don't, right? That now becomes a white, like the CXone guys are great, like they label everything, right?

22:16And that's everybody, right? everybody's labeling everything. And so I think we need to rethink how we market ourselves as well, to use some of these tools to make sure that maybe we can squeak out in our eye. Bye Troy, sorry you guys didn't like it, sorry. Sorry, maybe next time. Okay, and this is my new baby, and I think everyone can do this. It's taken us, and I am an open book here too guys, so if anybody wants to have a conversation with this, We have done the last about eight months of work of using ChatGPT to fully automate quality assurance scoring. I said QA, automate QA, but that's not true. It's the scoring of it. So we have a full platform that we offer our clients now that is outside of CXone. But we basically have a, we can take the actual recording, put it into the system, get the transcript.

23:18If we don't have it, we can pull it for our CX one through analytics, but you don't have to make this quick, get the transcript. We have the enterprise ChatGPT. We have done a ton of R&D on how to prompt properly when it comes to scoring of actual QA. So this is your customer's form that we're using. It's not some made up form. And again, all of you can do this, this did not, we've kind of done a lot of the work for you. And it will come back with the actual score calls. We found the best outputs are what are the best or the four things that the agent could improve upon. We ask it, why did it score it like it did? And there's like a three or four variable prompts that we have. [QA coverage remark omitted]

24:10By Chat, GPT, we have found it to be about 80% to 85% of the time. It has scored it better than our QA reps. There's a couple outliers of things that happen with the transcript that we're still kind of looking through. But this has been a huge a value add. We've given it to all of our clients. We have two of them now paying for it, and it's something that has been really safe. So we're creating a SaaS product with this as well for trying to get it for under like 50 C call centers that are using Excel spreadsheets. But again, you guys are way more technical. I guarantee everybody in here has more IT support than I do. You have more programmers than I do, maybe. We're very thin, and we've been able to figure this stuff out. So it's utilizing the technologies that you have now, squeezingzing them, thinking, being creative on how we can create some other products or tools with the stuff that we have now, and then using some of the technology that we have to create other products outside of our CCaaS world, because this is democratized things for everybody, and then creating another revenue stream, which is outside of Expivia, but is in our Expivia Digital, and now our OttoQA.

25:25So I don't care if I. going to do it themselves. So be the voice for them to be like, hey, I can help you, we can do this. And I think that will get you at least keep your business, because they're going to start looking and everybody thinks that this is easy to do. And it's just going to absolutely lower head count. And then this is my last my last two slides. And I talked about this, it's even so this is part of our Expivia Digital as well is during COVID, sitting at home, figuring out I'm going to be a new crypto billionaire. That was my plan. When that didn't work, we looked at, I was in Discord a lot and got in kind of the NFT space. And it was the wild, wild west. It was awful. It's still really bad, how people are stealing things, the type of language that's used. So I'm like, you know what? We do this, basically, right? But this is on the, the digital aspect. So with CX one, with their help, and with, with a lot of sweat from, from our guys, we created a, have a full integration from CX one into discord. So we have listening bots that are how it's actually on Azure, not AWS, listening bots. So if somebody says, Go F, F yourself, or I hate you, or I need a moderator, or whatever we want to do, or.

27:17say, we- we prompt someone, one of our agents at Expivia, and they respond, and they can go back and forth, they can do it privately, but the cool thing about this is we have been able to use all the tools of CXone, so from the main reporting aspects to full advanced analytics. So not only can we tell you what your sentiment and this is the cool part is if we do a chat, you say, Hi, Tom, and I say, Hey, what's going on? You say, Hey, this thinks that can I help you with this? And then we end it, right, right? Once that that contact gets cleared, it ends. That's when it goes into analytics. But with like slack or like discord, it's just a constant flow flow of talking. There's no end to it. So we found some ways to end with a virtual agent after after every single time somebody says something in one of our discords.

28:13So all of that then instantly goes into analytics. So, again, looking at sentiment scores on analytics, what your customers or the community is saying, some of these communities we have are 400,000 people. And looking at the individual community member, what they've said, who's positive, the customer card here that we can then build profiles, find out who the influencers are on Twitter. This person has your two million Twitter followers. Let's give them a different experience when they come into Discord, like, Hey, man, welcome back. Thank you. You know, give them that kind of customer experience that we all do as a BPO, right? For our kind of high level customers, doing that on the digital side as well. So from, again, wrapping this up, taking all the things that we have as tools, rethinking how we can rebrand them a little bit. how you can sell them for maybe not raising that-per-seat or that-per-agent-hour cost, giving some type of monthly fees for some of the things that you can offer, looking at different ways to use the technology that you have now with your technology stack and your team, and then also looking at some other ways and other communities that we can do customer service with.

29:30This has been kind of the way that we have seen, for us how things can be a little bit different but they don't have to be as scary as us just thinking we're going to lose agents and what do we do I mean we we can all say that but we all have to have a plan then to counteract that and to be honest if you if you think of not being a call center and being the technology partner for your for your customers it can actually be a lot of fun but you have to change the mindset I think of of where we're going as a BPO industry and kind of where a lot of you guys are going as companies so any questions no sure no so we have done it one is a retail We use them to start because they're QA. were relatively basic but and again there's not to again not selling anything but OttoQA.com we just have a landing page so I'm giving away everything on that so like we just did a full webinar and like on how we're prompting everything because it took a lot to figure that out and it's still not there perfect but I think it's it's pretty close to where we can do to a product for the smaller kind of guys as well.

31:05So between the two, did you see a higher success rate for one industry versus the other? We really didn't, it didn't really matter. I think the, the biggest thing is the transcripts, right? Number one, right? If your transcript is garbage, it's going, gonna be bad. I mean, that's, that's, that's pretty obvious. How you prompt different things. So we found there's different prompts. Like if you just say, did the agent say this? Yes, five points is different than on a scale of one to 10, did the agent do this, right? And so figuring that out, cause I'm like, if we do this, I don't. Nobody wants to change. You guys have been using your QA forms or your clients have for.V. last 15 years. You're not gonna go to them and be like, were changing your form like, they're not going to let you do that, right? So that was kind of the biggest, kind of the biggest deal of the prompting, but we didn't really find a big change in the customer types. Good. What's that? Oh, oh, in part, in bar, Bard is great as well. Google part is amazing. Sorry.

32:20Thank you.