The CX Leader Podcast: "The Revolutionized Contact Center": Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

The CX Leader Podcast: "The Revolutionized Contact Center": this wav audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Steve:
Imagine in your mind a contact center. What do you see? A large room with people constantly on the phone, right? Well, it's time to imagine something better.

Bruce:
This isn't Star Wars, you know, futuristic view of the world today. Companies are able to assign a sentiment score to every single interaction on every call. And so that just opens up an entirely new set of activities and capabilities that you can never do in the past.

Steve:
Let's look at new ways of getting the best possible value out of your contact center on this episode of The CX Leader podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast and thank you for listening. It's never been a better time to be a CX leader and this podcast explores the topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of your customer experience and help your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. As a pro, you are familiar probably with the basic concepts of a contact center. Many of you started your careers on that path. For many companies, it's the front line of their customer experience, and the past couple of decades have seen the channels in which customers can interact with your company explode beyond the simple phone call: email, live chat, social media. But are we not recognizing the true value and potential of the contact center? Well, my guest on this episode thinks so, and he's here to tell us what we're missing out on. I'm very excited to welcome back our friend and a real thought leader who I have known for a long time. So it's always a pleasure to have him on the show. And that is none other than the almost famous Bruce Temkin, head of the Qualtrics XM Institute and a regular guest on the show. Bruce, welcome back. Thanks for being on the show this week.

Bruce:
Thanks for having me. And I love that almost famous. I don't know if I'd rather not be famous or be fully famous, but it's always great to be with the real famous Steve Walker.

Steve:
Ahh, no. No. This is your fourth time you've been on the show. I'm grateful for that. And just in case, a few of the people who are listening, maybe you're new to the profession or or don't know, give us just a little bit of your background and why we've had you on the show so often.

Bruce:
Well, I have no idea why you keep having me on the show. That's a mystery to me. But for my background, I lead the Qualtrics XM Institute. So we are a group of XM experts who our mission in the world is to build a thriving global community of experienced management professionals include customer experience, employee experience, product experience, product experience. So a thriving global community of those professionals who are both inspired and empowered to radically improve human experiences. So we publish a bunch of thought leadership. We have a community, we do training and certification. And what I do every day and what my team does every day is wake up and try and understand how we can help those experienced management professionals do their jobs better and more effectively.

Steve:
Yeah, we'll make sure that we plug it here at the end, but you're very easy to find on the internet. And for our listeners that have not visited the XM Institute website, you need to do it and you need to mark it as a favorite, because if you're in this profession, I can't think of any place where you're going to get better content, tools and opportunities to connect with other professionals. So the impetus for this conversation was a blog you wrote, and I know you've been out on the road show, but just talk a little bit about this untapped potential of the contact center and how it sparked your interest as a leading thinker in this area. Why has it taken this long?

Bruce:
Yeah, so there are two parts to that, right? One one is like just being on the road show was was was amazing. So we were out. Qualtrics has a product called XM Discover, which is based off of the Claridge acquisition we did and so put aside. So we were out talking about that. And when I go on the road, I just talk about trends and I was talking about research we had done on customer journeys that happen to show that when we look at what journeys customers have that drive loyalty, the customer care journey is by far the most important across. It was the most important in 11 of 22 industries we looked at. So I was out doing my thing, which is talking about the research we've done, talking about where the world is heading. And we had our our Discover product leader Fabrice Martin and also Sid Banerjee who is the was the co-founder and founder of Clarabridge now is a strategy, head of strategy and strategy at Qualtrics on the road with me and I got the opportunity to talk to a whole bunch of companies that are actually using the product. So they're actually using what amounts to be a conversational analytics product in their contact centers. And I, it was amazing for me just to once again be talking to XM professionals in person face to face. But hearing the snippet of what they're already doing with the tech really sort of raised my awareness about just how important it is for people to be focusing on the contact center now. And it's not it wasn't like a new thing, Steve, it was like, if you go back and you look at what I've written, you go back a decade and I've been talking about the contact center. Yeah. So, so it was like, it was like this interesting thing. So I'm seeing people doing today elements of what I've been recommending for over a decade. But now I see that the tech is making those things much more capable. You know, like the practices I've been talking about for a while, it was really hard to do. Now it's getting easier to do. And so if I step back and think, I've always thought that the most important interactions that companies have with their customers are often, often in the contact center. And we have historically not taking advantage of them from two perspectives. One, we haven't viewed those interactions as the front end of a loyalty relationship, right? We thought of them more as costs and transactions. That's one thing. And the second thing is that we haven't extracted insights in them in a fast enough, more sort of disciplined way. And we can talk about that a little bit as you go. But so it just it triggered to me that the combination of conversational analytics where you can literally get insights from every single interaction. And when you start to do that, the profound change it has out of what amounts to be oftentimes your most critical customer interaction. So put those two things together. And it sparked a lot of thoughts for me about what the future of contact centers really holds.

Steve:
Yeah, I was thinking about a little bit in our prep and I'll just kind of give a simple example and then you can riff on it a little more. But instead of like, so imagine you've called into a call center and we were on hold and they say, Hey, would you be willing to do a survey at the end of the thing? Press one, you say one, and then you go through your your call and then you might or might not participate in the survey. In fact, a lot of them are clunky, so it's not really even a smooth transition. But what you're talking about with XM Discover is you would actually just take the text from that actual call. You'd put it through the artificial intelligence, the machine learning that XM Discover has. And you could come up with this sort of a similar metric for whether that call was excellent. Very good, good, fair or poor, right?

Bruce:
Absolutely. So like the way we handle sort of customer feedback today is just like you talked about or there's a follow up survey, right, where there's a small sample of customers telling us what they think about those interactions. And that drives all of the other mechanisms around our customer experience activities we can today like this isn't this isn't Star Wars or futuristic view of the world. Today, companies are able to assign a sentiment score to every single interaction so you can have the equivalent of whether you think the customer was happy or sad on every call. And so that just opens up an entirely new set of activities and capabilities and responses that you can do that you can never do in the past when you just dealing with a sampling of customer feedback.

Steve:
So just because it was in your article and I'm a data guy, but just give us a little framework for how much data we're talking about relative to survey data.

Bruce:
Yeah. So it was interesting while I was on the road for Breeze was doing a lot of presentations about the data that they're ingesting into the platform into the what was the Clarabridge platform is now is XM Discover. So we go back to January 2018, January 2018, their top data that they were ingesting with social data. So they were in 2018, they did about 2.6 million records of social data. All right. They were doing 1.8 million records of speech and survey data was about the same, 1.7 million. So let's fast forward to the end of last year. Speech is now the number one data that they ingest and they ingest 1.2 billion records of speech. So from January. 2018 to January 2021, its speech grew from 1.6 million to 1.2 billion. Right.

Steve:
That's that's that's like 75 X in three years.

Bruce:
Yeah. An amazing growth. Right. Right. It's like unbelievable. Now everything else grew, too. Right. If we just think about survey, survey grew from 1.7 million to 94 million. But now the platform is by far ingesting speech as its number one source of data. And when you do that right, that's we're now talking about ingesting the actual interaction, not just the feedback of interactions. Right. And and if you just think about like if you think about just that one shift from social being the number one input to contact centers, what contact centers give you and I've talked about this historically, right? Once you if you can tie insights to a customer record, then you can do analysis on things like who are those customers? How valuable are those customers? What are those customers own? What else have those customers done? What is the customer journey look like? Right, the insights. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. The operational data and that combination of the operational data you can now tie to the actual experience data opens up entirely new opportunities for analytics that aren't possible in like social data alone.

Steve:
Are you planning on attending the Forrester North America conference in Nashville? Well, Walker will be there. Come by our booth and mention that you're a listener of the podcast and you might get a gift. That's the Forrester CX North America conference from June 7th through the 9th in Nashville, Tennessee. We hope to see you there.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast this week is our old friend Bruce Temkin, who really is one of the brightest CX thought leaders out there. So in my my notes here, I have an acronym that I'm not real familiar with called NLP. Can you unpack that for our audience a little bit? Because, I mean, I kind of know what it is, but I think it's powerful.

Bruce:
So yeah, so that's natural language processing. And so once you take in like speech, right, let's say you you are able to transcribe interaction that an agent has with the customer. First of all, you want to be able to pull those apart, right? So one of the things that the XM discover does is it has recordings in stereo, right? Because we want to separate out the agent, speak from the customer speech. Right. Because we want to analyze both of those. Right. At the end of the day, we can get emotion and sentiment from the agent and understand what the agent's doing simultaneously to understand how the customer interactions going from the customer standpoint. And so natural language processing lets us look at that discussion, look at that conversation that a customer is having in an employee's having and be able to dissect it and analyze it. And so we have to be able to take those those pieces of conversations, those structures of words and phrases and break them down into topics and sentiment. And that's what natural language processing is about. How do we break up those conversations into pieces that we can then analyze?

Steve:
Yeah. And so I'll give another kind of simple example that I was thinking about. One of the key metrics we might use for evaluating call center interactions would be was, was the call resolved, was the issue resolved? And so we asked them, that was your issue resolved. But in this case, we could actually, I think, parse the interaction because sometimes the agent would say it was resolved, but the customer might call back in, which means it wasn't resolved. But in this way we could actually do that, right? You could do it. And then you could probably track whether that person actually had to call back in for a second time. So, again, it's so powerful. And I think for the traditional kind of market research based, CX Pro, they've really got to get a handle on this because this is going to just be so powerful and a big change in the way that we can provide value to our companies.

Bruce:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think to me, there are a couple of strands of change. One is what it does for the CX professional, right? We're going to have a flow of insight. But the other is just what it does to contact center operations for those of your listeners who are involved in that. Right. The whole notion of agent coaching. Yeah, the whole is transformed. Right. So instead of coaching, sort of based on listening to a handful of calls with a quality agent, right. We can we can target exactly which agents need what type of of help in what type of areas and coach and eventually even give that give agents the information they need to self coach. Yeah. So the whole coaching paradigm is going to radically change based on this technology as well.

Steve:
Yeah, I think what you're talking about is kind of a re-envisioned model of what the call center looks like. Contact center, really, because it might be might be over text or chat or social media. So what are you envisioning as the kind of the new model of or the future state model of the modern call center based on some of the things that you're doing?

Bruce:
Yeah. So I've introduced sort of the term of an adaptive contact center, and that's a contact center that proactively improves experiences, quality and operations based on actionable intelligence from every interaction. So that's sort of the at the core of it is the shift from making improvements and using insights from samples of interactions. A small piece where we have to rely on a sampling of customer feedback, a sampling of quality reviews and agents summarizing their discussions, which are both timely and inaccurate. And so you put all that together and then adaptive contact centers, we do things like hyper targeted agent coaching. I talked about that real time customer experience tracking, right? We don't have to wait for feedback and have a sample. We know how effectively we're dealing with customers every day, every interaction. We can trend that in the moment. We can trend that by day. We can trend that by agent. We can trend that by group, we can trend that by topic. We can also do what I like to call proactive customer coverage. We don't have to wait for a customer to complain because only a sample of them will do that. We know immediately when a customer interaction is going going wrong so we can think about recovery plans that are based on understanding where customer interactions are.

Bruce:
Like I said, even if they didn't complain, we can do things like active compliance monitoring. A lot of us, if you think about in a contact center, we may want to make sure that if a customer says something like, I'm going to sue you, or they bring up a term in a controlled environment that triggers a red alert or a red alert or a compliance alert, we can understand those and trigger those behavior and make sure that insight about that call or that interaction flows into the compliance or the regulatory department and that same sort of approach can also be used to make sure that a product manager gets to hear about any time someone complains about a feature that they think is important or if if a critical customer had talks about competitor, and we want that to flow into a competitive group, competitive analysis group, right. The flow of insights work their ways right into the hands of the people who can do something with it, with the combination of listening and analyzing for those topics from those customers and having workflow that drives that insight directly to the people who can act on it.

Steve:
You know what? I think I just had a breakthrough and now I know why you guys rebranded it as XM Discover, because this really is starting to deliver on the promises of XM. Your example of how you could use this data to quickly go to target and give coaching to the reps that's linking us to the EX experience. And then you just use an example of where you could organize this feedback by product and now you've got some PX data and then you could be talking about like how your the perception of them relative to some competitor they've brought up that's in the BX category. So this really is powerful. This is this is going to change our role as CX experts and really move us to this vision of XM.

Bruce:
Yeah, I absolutely, absolutely agree. And it all comes back to what do you think the contact center is, right? If you think the contact center is a cost structure and an operational element that needs to be constrained, or do you think about it as the most important, the place where customers are telling you their most important insights, where they're sharing with you their most important feelings? And if you think about that, customers are sharing their most important feelings. So the question for everyone who has a contact center out there, what are you doing with those insights and how are you handling those moments?

Steve:
Well, let's move into that. Let's start to get actionable. And I know you've been on the show several times and, you know, we always end with take home value. But before we get to take home value, just give us a couple of tidbits for assuming I'm a pro and some of this is thought provoking, you know, what are some of the things that they might want to be doing right now to get prepared for this future state contact center?

Bruce:
Yeah, so it's interesting. So I think to get prepared, you really need to start putting yourself on a path where you get insight from every interaction, right? So, you know, it is it is an investment, right? Investing in a platform like XM Discover that allows you to extract insight from every interaction is not like a trivial type of of investment or effort. But I do believe that it's important for every XM professional to think about when and how are they going to get to that? Because I know in five years I don't think that there will be a sizable contact center that isn't taking advantage of becoming an adaptive contact center. I think it's that transformational. So you need to think about at this point, how do you put that into your plan? Right. I don't expect anyone to wake up today without any plans around becoming an adaptive contact center and then tomorrow becoming one. You just have to make sure that you understand where in your roadmap for your contact center are you going to put in this capability.

Steve:
It's always a fun time when you come on the podcast Bruce so thanks for… Thanks for being here today. You know, we've reached that point in our podcast where we ask every guest to give our listeners their take home value. And what's the one, maybe two things that you really want listeners to take from this and that that would be applicable to moving them closer to creating an adaptive contact center.

Bruce:
Sure. So, Steve, since this is my fourth time on it and I really appreciate the opportunity to always to be with you and to be on the podcast, I'm going to break with the norm of my recommendation. I think I already talked about the adaptive contact centers, and I think you need to plan for a product like XM Discover so you can do all the things we're talking about. So instead of talking about take home value against that, I'm going to say we're starting to talk about contact centers. So I want to leave the audience with a much shorter term path to value in their contact centers that they can do. If that's okay with you.

Steve:
That's awesome. You know, when you're a regular guest, you can do whatever you want.

Bruce:
I figured, you know, by the fifth or sixth, I won't even need you. I'll just come on and I'll. Or maybe I do need you and I'll just interview you. Maybe. Maybe that's it.

Steve:
But nobody would listen to that one.

Bruce:
All right. So for Contact Center, I'm going to give you two quick hits for context. They're not so quick, but there are areas where you can drive immediate customer experience impact from your context. And the first is to really think about designing the end of your contacts. Right. I'm a big believer. I've been asked this many times, people come up and say, how can I improve my net promoter score or whatever metric I have in my contact center? Like, I don't even know what their contact center is. So I say, okay, let's work on the end. Because if we go back to Daniel Kahneman, his peak end rule, we're not going to spend time on this. The way that you end an interaction has a disproportional impact on the way it's remembered. So really think about how you're designing the ends of your interactions. The other thing I would say is that every contact center, every company has a no experience, right? You have to say no to a customer. No, we don't have that coverage. If your health plan. No, we can't schedule you into getting this repair that you wanted to have in that time. Or No, we don't have the inventory or the product on hold to get it. Everyone has a no experience. I don't think we spend enough time designing that experience and I think if we're thoughtful and think about how do we not use words like, no, can't, won't or don't? There's a lot of research to show that the way that people remember what amounts to be not getting what they want can be dramatically better if we think about those experiences explicitly. So those are two quick takeaways for the Contact Center. In the long term, I think playing for an adaptive contact center with a capability like XM Discover. But in the short term there are lots of really important experiences that you can design better.

Steve:
You know, not only was that good take home value for the contact center, I think all of us as human beings could, could improve our interactions if we design the end and kind of rehearsed our our no conversations that that would apply to pretty much everything you do, you know, even up to your spouse and your kids and and your important clients and your best friends and all that. So.

Bruce:
So, Steve, I love that. And actually pretty much I look at all of the recommendations we make and I think society would be much better if it followed a lot of the recommendations that customer experience professionals have.

Steve:
Yeah. Not to wax too philosophical, because you and I have been at this a long time, but you know, early in my business career we didn't talk about like loyalty or even caring or empathy. You know, that kind of vernacular didn't creep into corporate speak, but it's always been about humans. And, you know, the other thing, some of this big tech and technology seems really scary, but to be able to put all of this data and insight into action that will come out of tools like XM Discover, it's still going to require the humans to help people adapt to the change. So I think it's a tremendous opportunity for our CX pros and and I hope they embrace it because it's coming.

Bruce:
Cool.

Steve:
Yeah. Bruce Temkin has been our very good guest. If you don't know about him, you need to check him out. Bruce, just quickly let our listeners know where they can find you in the XM Institute. If they would like to further the conversation or explore some of these topics more.

Bruce:
Cool then everyone, xminstitute.com. I'm going to say it three times because they say that's the way people remember it. xminstitute.com. I believe that what we've created is the world's best resource for XM professionals and it's pretty much all free. It's one of the reasons why I joined Qualtrics was the ability for us to do the things that we love to do, which is helping XM professionals and give it for free. And where is it at? xminstitute.com. Visit us.

Steve:
Yeah, I would share that. You've been kind enough to put some of our content up there as well. And it's something that our people literally reference know if not every day, I'm sure multiple times a week, because it really is. It's the leading place for all things XM. So thanks, Bruce. Thanks again for being on the show. I hope you'll come back again.

Bruce:
Absolutely. I'm looking forward to number five.

Steve:
You bet. And if you want to talk about anything else you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your businesses customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, find all our previous episodes, podcast series and contact information so you can let us know how we're doing or drop us a note on a possible future podcast. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again next time.

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