Summary

In this webinar, Pamela Neil, the demand marketing head at Kustomer, welcomes speakers Gabe Larson, Alex Richards, and Vasili Triant to discuss the modern customer experience tech stack. The speakers cover topics such as the importance of being customer-obsessed, having a true CRM, integrating artificial intelligence, and implementing an omnichannel experience. The discussion also highlights the challenges of having a Frankenstein tech stack and the benefits of shifting to a modern stack. The speakers provide insights into how to unify a tech stack, create a low-effort personalized customer experience, and address the changing customer expectations in the “me economy.”

Key Takeaways

1. Unified and Streamlined Tech Stacks for Maximum Efficiency: Gabe Larson, Alex Richards, and Vasili Triant discuss achieving efficiency by unifying and streamlining modern customer experience tech stacks.
2. Enhancing Customer Experience with Omnichannel Solutions: Topics covered include accommodating omnichannel, creating human experiences in modern contact centers, and leveraging omnichannel for predictive and contextual conversations.
3. Four Keys to Modernizing Your Tech Stack: Discover the crucial elements for modernizing tech stacks: customer obsession, true CRM adoption, AI integration, and implementation of omnichannel experiences.
4. AI’s Role in Revolutionizing Customer Service: Explore how AI can automate routine tasks, streamline complex processes, and enable proactive customer engagement for improved service.
5. Transitioning from Frankenstein to Low-Effort Personalized Experiences: Understand the objective of moving away from a Frankenstein tech stack to a modern, personalized setup that ensures a seamless customer experience.

Transcript

Alright. Well, it’s looking like a lot of folks have already jumped on the call. And so we’re gonna go ahead and get started with our event today. Hello, and welcome. I’m Pamela Neil, and I, run demand marketing at, Kustomer, maker of the top rated customer service CRM.

And, you know, we’re here today to talk about a a topic that I hear a lot about when I’m talking to our customers, and that’s really, you know, how what do you think about when you’re thinking about your modern customer experience tech stack?

From, you know, what are some of the key components in that stack and how do you make sure that it’s unified and streamlined, so that you can get the most out of it? And I’m really excited today to welcome, our speakers. We’ve got some real powerhouse speakers to share with you today. So we’ve got Gabe Larson, customer’s VP of growth who’s kicking things off, and he’s gonna be talking about, you know, what does that modern CX tech stack look like? How do you accommodate omni channel, all of those types of topics. And then we’re gonna welcome Alex Richards, who’s the director of partnerships and biz dev at Stella Connect by Medallia.

And Stella Connect is, a customer service performance company, and they really, they represent a lot of the largest companies in the world like Walmart you know, really big, big, companies use, Stella. And Alex is gonna cover how to create a more human customer experience with a modern, contact center. And then we, get to welcome Vasili Triant, who’s the chief operating officer for UJET, And, you probably know that UJET is, a cloud, contact center. And he’s gonna talk to us today about, how to transcend omnichannel for predictive and contextual conversational customer experiences.

So a real powerhouse group of speakers for you here today. And but before we get started with our first speaker, I just wanted to remind you of a couple things. Number one, this is being record it. So you’ll get a recording of this if you wanted to replay it or share it with others. This is being recorded and sent to you following the event.

Also, if you have questions, please feel free to put them in the chat window to your right. And at the end of the three sessions today, we will get to those questions.

So with that, I’ll turn it over to Gabe Larson, to get things started today. Awesome. Thank you so much. Pam. I’m excited to get rocking and rolling you guys. Let me share my screen.

And then I noticed, before we start, I do want this to be interactive. Kyle already asked the first question, and I’d love to get your guys I’d love to get your guys’ opinion on this one.

So if you can open up your chat and just say yes or no, is games background fake or not fake? So, yes, it is fake. No, it’s not fake. That way we could get you using the chat.

And, we can we can start the the conversation there. So, but Kyle, I will send this background to you if it looks like it. And then sorry. I’ve got my window here and I got quite a lot of light, but these offices, you know, you just don’t wanna be stuck in the dark all the time. So it doesn’t look like most people knew that it was fake. Okay. Dang it.

We try. We try the best we can. You know? So I’m Gabe Larson. I’m vice president of growth.

See, thank you, Jacina. She said it was very impressive. My back vice president of growth over here at customer. Wanna talk about this idea of unifying your tech stack before we hear from the big guns, Vasilio and Alex, so I wanna take you through a couple things.

I’ll start high level then get into a couple key pieces that I find helpful. So number one is I like to name what’s going on and that name that we’ve come up with is the me economy. So I’d like to say we’re all now competing what we call economy. In past decades, I really think customers bought more solely based on products being differentiated from other products I believe we moved to more of a product centric environment where service became a big differentiators is companies really capitalized on this idea of delighting customers and building relationships.

I still love this story. Someone told it to me the other day of Zappos where that agent’s on the phone and they spent hours talking to somebody and giving counseling and they weren’t even a customer.

Such an amazing story, but a lot of customers are not even asking for that anymore. They’re wanting something different and that difference, we’ve kind of been calling the the me economy. It’s where people really want it their way. Well, what is their way?

In summary, over the years, we’ve seen these consumer expectations change and COVID’s made it happen, self-service, mediate resolution to problem personalization, channel of choice, and probably most important that low effort experience. So That’s the environment we’re playing in. But how have companies tried to tackle that? Well, how I think to meet these expectations, companies have turned to what one person told me and I’ve been loving this word their Frank and Stack technology.

And I say that because in certain instances, you can see how over the years technology has changed and evolved to try to support the changing customer expectations. And look, The technologies you see on this, they’re all great technologies, but what’s happened, and I’ll kind of explain it is it gets bifurcated, it gets separate. It’s siloed. So I won’t bore you, but obviously in the nineties, you have some great call center technology, and it allowed for synchronous communication with this start and end, but it was limited in its diversity of channels.

In two thousand, you get that CRM and it gave us data in a single view, but in a lot of ways it didn’t give us that three sixty view. And then in two thousands, you have the ticketing systems that could use phone and email, but the channels didn’t really connect to the CRM and, left agents in the dark. And then recently, I love these these, chats tools and and messenger tools. And but I’ve heard a lot of people say they feel like bolt on technologies that don’t really solve all the service challenges that people have.

And so what we’ve in a lot of ways created is more problems. And I wanted to see if I could walk you through just a quick example, of some of the challenges that I think we’re all facing with this Frank and Stack, again, not my word, technology that some of us often have. So imagine you’re a buyer, right, a customer visits a a website and buys something.

But then they have a a question.

Customer visits a website and tries to engage or doesn’t engage with a knowledge base or maybe a self serve this option. The customer can’t find their answer. So they actually engage with an agent who creates a ticket and then that agent works with multiple systems to attempt to resolve that ticket. Right?

That’s kind of the basic flow of customer service, but that’s where we get all these problems. I won’t bore you with all the detail, but let me just highlight a couple of these. You know, number one, maybe that customer realized they couldn’t get an answer. They wanted themselves.

They had to actually contact support in the first place. A lot of people want that self-service option.

Customer you know, reaches out to a company but realizes they can’t contact them on the channel they want or a customer reaches out on a traditional channel. Doesn’t get the answer they want. They switch to another channel.

What about on the agent side where tickets come in and they don’t know how to route these or they prioritize them odd or Maybe because customers met two tickets, they ended up getting two different answers from two different agents.

The the list The list goes on and and on. And I, again, I don’t wanna go into too many of them, but that unfortunately is the world in which many of us are living with that technology stack that fills sometimes frustrating at times. And so What I believe we need is we need a new way of thinking where it’s what service teams don’t need. It’s just another bolt on technology and they’re already complex, Frank and Steck. What we need is this this concept of of maybe re reframing the problem instead of a ticketing system that forces high effort experience where a customer has a problem and goes to a website and can’t find an answer, then calls an agent and waits on hold and is passed to another agent.

We need to focus on this customer centric that focus on low effort experience where a customer is guided on a journey where each experience is optimized to to match their expectations. So what if we stop? What if we focused not just on that Zapos type relationship where we want someone to spend twenty hours helping somebody. Sometimes that complexifies everything What if we shifted that and said, how do we get that low effort personalized customer experience that customers want? Well, I think that’s where we’ve got to aim our our tech stack.

If we can shift the focus, and I’ll click into that just a minute, of what I mean by that. I I think we it will change everything. We’ll we’ll move from this idea of no self-service to allowing customers if that’s what they want. Self-service or we won’t have agent collision because we’ll have a a CRM of interactions to see that full view of the customer.

You won’t have siloed information You’ll have all the information because CRM and channels. Everything’s working together. You won’t have agents picking and choosing tickets. You’ll have routing.

Again, the list goes on, but we need to go from this kind of freaking stack to this modern stack. And now I wanna get into what I believe are some of the keys to do that where I feel like companies are winning changing from Frankenstein stack to modern stack. So Let me take you through what I believe are the four keys to do that. And I wanna just spend a couple minutes on each one of these.

So let’s dive in. The first one is being customer obsessed.

What I mean by customer success is what I was just highlighting. How do we shift that way of thinking from us to the customer? And I do think journey mapping plays a big role in that, but one of the challenges I find is when I talk to people, their conversation because of where they are starts like this. You know, Gabe, we have a product.

And we’re trying to get that out into the market. And I’ve need a system to help support that product and then I get these agents. And then we have these different channels. People contact us on. And then the, you know, they’re the customer.

And and that’s fine because we have what we have. We have that technology stack, and so oftentimes we start the conversation around the system and the limitations we have.

I don’t blame us for doing that, but if we’re really gonna do this the right way, we’re probably gonna need to shift. We we have to literally say, okay, deep breath.

Let’s start with those customer and agents in mind. Let’s start there and see where they are, what they need. Then let’s talk about the systems and channels that can bring that to fruition.

And just that mindset shift can help us just start on the right path as we think about modernizing.

The tech stack. And, I think from there then you’ve got to get the customer journey. You saw that stat that only thirty, thirty three percent of companies don’t don’t have a customer value journey or a a journey map or however you want to frame that. It’s an exercise we have to go through.

I did a podcast with the NetFrons and It’s an all I loved her talk track, and she walked me through these six steps to to map your customer journey. I just feel like it’s such an important thing to get out if you haven’t done it. Fairly simple. Sit down and plan.

Get to that next step where you actually map it out put something to paper, gotta get pen to paper, identify some of those weaknesses, begin the plan to fix it, really get it nailed down so that you have clear owners, who’s gonna do what, and then you move into into execution mode. So being customer obsessed, I think it’s it’s just starting with that mindset shift. I know we have problems with the systems and that’s often where we start. But if you can just kinda separate that and start with the customer mind, it’s a great place.

K.

That’s number one.

Number two is having a true CRM. I feel like I hear this one so often. And I hope I apologize if it’s seems obvious, but many people come to me and they say, Hey, we’ve got an awesome chat tool for customer service, but Or they say, you know, we have an awesome email solution, and we’re working really good on our digital channels, Facebook Messenger, and but and the but always revolves around well, I don’t have what they bought. So when I’m talking to them, I don’t really know who they are.

Or they keep telling me on chat that they came in on email, and I I couldn’t connect the dots manually, and it’s just we have to upgrade to customer service with a CRM. You you need that. You need that’s gotta be part of the the conversation. I think many of you have probably already felt that.

So, if you haven’t already considered how do you get the CRM capability into the system? I think that’s where you typically want to go. So there are many benefits to this idea of a three sixty view of the customer, but we all have the challenge when it comes to actually building it. And I think one of the main challenges is bringing together data from disparate sources.

Customer’s personal data, for example, might be stored in, this part of a CRM, their their order history data might be in a legacy system. Their purchase data might be in a POS system like Shopify. Their social media data might be on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and it’s so frustrating.

It’s so frustrating seeing all that dated. These it’s disparate systems because that hinders are a bit we will not be able to get, this where we want as a company and where customers expect us unless we tackle that problem, and I don’t wanna say it’s easy.

But the first key is recognizing that you you do. You you have to have that foundational CRM program. Take the time to start to connect some of those different systems so that we can have a real conversation about personalization.

Without the data personalization is just a thought process. Now the the way I feel like companies are getting better at this is finding ways to involve app applications, you know, simple things that can be included onto your text stack, and I’m just showing you a sample concept here. But, if you can, a lot of people have complained to me, Gabe. We know we want the CRM data. We want to get rid of it, but the engineering time required to hook my POS to my CRM to my channels.

It it just kinda goes it blows up. Right? And so one of the ways to get around that is find a way to get apps, much like your iPhone.

It’s just a click of a button where you have your foundational tool and then you’re able in a more simple way as a customer service leader to add those applications rather than going through so much custom development. Sometimes easier said than done, but this I believe is the future way where you can have not such a Frankenstein stack, but you as a customer service leader can almost manage it without so much dev time, without so much IT time. So do be aware and look for some of those as you go about your journey.

K.

That’s point two point point three.

Artificial intelligence.

I have to bring this up. It’s just it’s the buzzword. So it’s gotta be part of the conversation, whether we like it or not.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, the definition I’ve usually liked is what I what I put down here. This is from a friend of mine, but using a machine to understand past behavior in order to first predict and then potentially alter future behavior to produce those outcomes you want. So level setting. That’s the way I’m framing this conversation, but I I do think there’s there there when it comes to AI.

Gotta get your quick opinion in the chat again.

Do you agree with, this statement?

Yes, you agree No, you don’t agree. This is this is bold from our our friends at Google.

Feel free to put it in the chat. I’d love to know where you stand on this one.

Okay. We’re getting some nose on there.

Ronald, no, Mary. No. Okay. Oh my goodness. Think most people are no on this. Okay.

We got a few. Yes. Okay. David’s a yes. Altif is a yes. When it works.

Sarah said when it works, it’s definitely a yes.

Okay.

Looks like you guys are a little bit sweet. I don’t know if I would quite go this far on artificial intelligence and how important it is in your tech stack. But I I I think he’s I think they’re on to something here. And it’s certainly worth thinking about. The main principle I think with AI is that we need to all put it in this context that you see on the right.

And that is that it really shouldn’t be designed to just eliminate agents. We need to find ways to enable them, to make us overall better. So I think that’s principle number one, but I’m finding, about five areas that I feel like AI is actually making some work. And I loved, some of your points here, Kyle actually said without electricity, there is no AI.

So to shake, Kyle, that’s but I do think there’s some ways that companies are finding to get it into their business, particularly on the customer service side. And I do think that, there’s work to be done, but you’re starting to see some inroads, and I just wanna mention a few of these. So let me take you through a couple of. Number one, automating that first level of support.

So what I mean here is it’s really increasing your self-service opportunities to gather information via chat bots or conversational IVRs.

There’s a stat chat box magazine said you can actually increase about thirty percent thirty percent reduction in cost and service when clicking on just that idea of automating that level one support. I’m seeing a lot of success there, and I think it’s a good place to start. Number two is that automation of routine tasks.

Those are just those manual repetitive processes that we as humans and agency. So some of those might be auto tagging conversations or pre filling fields or, you know, tasks like creating invoices or were issuing refunds. There was a stat out there from KPMG that estimated seventy five percent service cost reduction when using this type of functionality, a lot of the RPA stuff. So I do think you can make some inroads and the technology can really help on on that front.

Number three is automating complex business processes. This one, I really It’s really about kind of classifying and routing conversations to the best agent. I just put up a quick flow here, but finding different ways to have the system, read a type of ticket, and then move that to the right place that it should be, seen some really cool stories here on language detection, for example, you know, finding that someone is chatting in a certain language and it automatically takes it and then routes it to a particular agent. Wow. That’s awesome.

Really helps the overall customer experience. And then last but not least is just thinking about some managed use cases. And, I I don’t I think there’s some some good examples here.

And what I mean here is just by you know, allowing management to get ahead of issues with things like proactive engagement or some workforce management stuff or even even maybe SLA management could fit in here. So those are some areas that I feel like AI is starting to fit in, and I do think it’s a nice overlay on your tech stack and something that you should definitely definitely consider.

Now pillar number four on this is this idea of omnichannel, omni experience.

It is the channel component, and I do think that a lot of people want the ability to contact different people, different businesses on the channel that they choose. I thought this diagram was was powerful. Obviously, we’ve gone from more of the traditional to the modern.

Where it was fairly basic in the past, and it’s just been extremely complexified as we move into the future.

COVID has increased this. You can see the Forrester recommendation, the digital interactions are jumping through the roof. The number of channels people are communicating with you on is going through the roof. I I actually feel like the word omnichannel, customers don’t care about it.

You know, it’s just they just want an integrated experience. And So for us, we probably need to talk about it, but consumers don’t really care. It’s just wherever I interact with you, I need to feel like it is that one experience. So optimizing the channels and bringing in that CRM makes a huge difference.

One example I wanted to give on this was that I felt like it’s just it’s just such a bigger trend as this this omni experience from the retail in shop experience and the digital experience and how those have just come to merge. This was a story. I believe out of Chicago with glossier, I wanna actually read the quote here and then maybe talk about it for a second. But, you know, since sales associates are armed with iPads to give real time product information, which You know, some of us are familiar with.

We’re starting to see that a little bit more. The iPad also acts as a cast register, making it easy. Okay. That’s we’re starting to see that.

The cherry on top, if something’s out of stock, it can be ordered and delivered from home. In addition to this, what a lot of people are doing. So if those in store associates are a little bit slow, they’re actually jumping into the queue and answering questions is if they were like a, you know, a digital agent responding to chat requests, for example.

Wow. I mean, I and and we’ve we’re seeing some of this, but to see it kind of put in this context and to experience it where, an in store rep is now answering digital requests.

In store rep is now working with the digital website to bring those two together in the way that I think the future holds just another channel that’s being added to our already omni experience program.

So finding a way to kind of look at your business from the eye of the customer, which integrated experience channel in different, I think makes a huge difference as well. So that’s what I’ve got for today. I’m thinking about how to modernize that tech stack in summary Definitely, we’d all agree that the times have changed and consumers are expecting something different. I like that word economy because they It’s just I don’t know if we can pinpoint it, but I know they want what they want.

And I gave you a couple trends that people are focusing on. But ultimately, if you wanna get your tech stack in line with that, the four things I think companies are doing well is shifting that mindset. So, yes, you have a franken stack. Yes, it might be frustrating. How can you put that aside for a minute? Get that journey map and then say, okay.

How can we take what we currently have to where we currently want to go and look at it with a fresh pair of eyes? Number two is you can’t get away from the CRM component.

You might have an in store experience. I get that. You might have a great service chat program in Appra on your website.

I get that. You might have you’re all in digital or social or Instagram.

Fine. But if you can’t combine order data with that. From your POS, it just blows up. The the thing falls apart. So you’ve gotta find a way to get that CRM element in there. Can’t stress that enough.

It’ll be difficult to tie some of those systems together, but but App Store is finding a way to do that is gonna be port. The AI, it’s something to be aware of. I think a lot of you have commented in certain ways you don’t like where it is. It should be further along a couple of you I agree, but we’re starting to find some places where it can make a positive impact.

And I wouldn’t I wouldn’t run away from it. I think there’s something to jump on it. And then, lastly, bringing those channels in. More and more consumers are saying channels I don’t even know what you’re talking.

I I just communicate. I have conversations with companies, and it’s an ongoing conversation, phone, email, chat, in store. It’s just one ongoing relationship, and that’s hard for us to look at because we’ve often been, you know, we’re we’re we’re all in store. We’re all digital, but I I think customers just wanna work with us.

So how do we mimic that and finding a way to bring that into our tech stack? Becomes very important. So that’s what I have today. Appreciate your participation.

Those of you who guess Again, it is a fake background on the on my my Zoom here, but I have three people who ask for it. So that must be a a a pretty decent background. I will be sending those personal UPS your direction. So with that, Pam, I turn it back to you, questions, or can we jump on to our next distinguished guest? Just, fast forward a couple slides there for me, and then we can turn it over.

Just wanted to to remind everyone that if you enjoyed what you heard, Gabe’s always a a blast to listen to. You know, high energy of fun, but if you wanted to download more, dig a little deeper. We’ve got a modern customer experience ebook, there on the the site for you. And then next slide, is basically just, you know, welcoming our speakers and reminding you, you know, Alex from Stell Connect and Vasili from UJET.

Alex will now take us through creating a more human customer experience with a modern contact center, and I’m really looking forward to that. So let’s get those slides teed up.

Yeah. I really appreciate Alex and Vasiliibil joining great partners of customer in really important parts of, the technology stack. So I mean, Alex, excited to jump in and hear about some of the ways you guys are helping solve some of these problems with So cool technology.

I really appreciate it. Just confirming everyone can see my screen.

Okay.

Beautiful. Cool. Awesome. Well, yeah, appreciate you guys having me here today. And, yeah, I really love everything that, customer and the guys at UChat are doing. So, yeah, this is really, really exciting.

Just a bit about me. I’m Alex Richard’s director of partnerships and business development for the contact center vertical, for Medallia Medallia acquired Stela Connect about six months ago. And we’re, the, essentially, the contact center solution, within Medallia. So, you know, contact center performance, surveys, QA, all those great things.

We kind of fit, in the umbrella now. So, excited to take you through some stuff today. So what I’m gonna be looking at is, how to create a more humanized customer experience within the modern contact center. And I think gave you teed this up really, really nicely, but there are there are a lot of different things that are going on, in the space today.

And there’s a lot of different technologies and a lot of different challenges we face. Now today, as we all know, gone are the days of support agents working side by side, answering phone calls and emails in the same room, and able to essentially turn around, to the next rep and get questions and advice answered. And And there are some really great upsides to working in the same place with people. But at the same time, we’ve had to adapt.

And with that, there are some components that are missing around supporting the the people on the front line, and it can lead to things like unengaged agents.

And it also means as well that there can be challenges when dealing with customers because they sometimes don’t have the tools to essentially answer things in a certain way. And they might not be putting their best foot, forwards. So when we look at this sort of remote world, how things I think will be changing, over the course of the next year, you know, we’re gonna be getting back to more people in their contact centers, but we’re also gonna have more dispersed workforces.

There are certain things that we need to be more aware of when it comes down to the processes, the tools that we’re using, as you mentioned earlier on Gabe, you know, there’s a lot of people different tools together, because they are best in breed, but at times you do compromise because your teams have have way more knowledge in how these communicate with each other.

And sometimes it can mean you mean you you essentially miss gaps when it comes to sort of the the customer journey as well. At the end of the day, we want to make sure people aren’t duplicating support processes and they have support, across the, across the way as well.

So with that, just jumping into sort of the contact center and reps these days, I I think we’d all agree that now, a lot more people are purchasing online, e com, direct to consumer, even insurance and and fintech, there’s a lot more focus on the rep essentially being at the forefront and being a representative to, that that company. And that human to human interaction is core, I think, to the agent’s role, and shouldn’t end once a a ticket’s being closed. We essentially wanna make sure that we’re having more of a stickier, relationship with our customers. So in turn, they’ll be more loyal and have more of a humanized connection to a brand.

And just on on this, you know, we’ve found looking at a number of our customers around eighty six percent of customers, are more likely to leave feedback regarding a post customer service interaction, if they knew that would get back to the rep. And I think that’s one of the really nice things in the day and age that we live in. I think a lot of people do gather feedback, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s like one of those operational metrics that goes to a senior team, like your CSAT score, your average handle call time, your FCR.

And we should be doing more with that. And at the end of the day, we need to arm the, the representatives with the things they need to essentially do their job properly. And the way that we see this is if you can create that stickier, more humanized connection, be coupling just a brand transactional feel. It you can get more out of your customers, and you can create more of the following more loyal sort of relationships, as a whole.

Now with that, I love how you sort of touched upon AI earlier on. I think one of those really interesting areas where some people are AI till I die sort of sort of focus and then some people are a little bit more on the fence and some people are completely against it. And I think, there are a number of use cases and, you know, if you look at Gartner and places out there where there there are really good uses. And I think we see a lot of people who have very, maybe, simple requests, or we’re looking to sort of, circumvent every agent dealing with really complex issues, it it allows us to sort of differentiate what does an agent really need to get involved into rather than doing sort of everything across the board. So that sort of like ticket deflection, and simple questions and answers, that sort of stuff. We found, I think, in the industry that things are moving in the right direction.

It’s probably not at the level it needs to be today, and a lot of people do still prefer that human connection, whether that is over chat, email, it’s phone.

I think a lot of people are on the fence, but we found that around eighty percent of customers prefer talking to a, to an agent, especially those things that might require more a conversational, aspect or context, over using things like up today. So I think it’s a really cool topic. It’s just I think we need to be doing more to adopt it in the right way. And I think as a whole, there needs to be more on how do we evolve this, a little bit more. So when we hear people saying, I don’t need agents. I just need AI. I think it kind of at that stage where we still need a a bit of both, within that.

Now, reinventing how customers interact with your brand, I think is a really key component to customer loyalty.

At the end of the day, I think today, the process of working with companies is very transactional. It become very dehumanized with funnel ads marketing on this is the product. This is the feature.

These are the things you need to buy. But we kind of lose that component of people being behind the scenes, and this has come from an idea and evolved.

And what we’re trying to do, I think within the industry now is sort of rebuild that connection. There are people behind every computer or most of them, and how do we sort of retain that? There’s more of a a sense of community and more sense of, ethos behind, I think, certain brands, brands that are out there today. We kind of feel that that sort of customer seven agent is now sort of the main touch point between a consumer and a brand. And the the days of just having a dedicated sales team and a dedicated support agent in that function. Now is becoming a little bit more sort of overlapping.

Whereas you know, a contact center usually is the cost center. I think now being on the front line with using different chat providers and, you know, platforms like customer, that rep is more pivotal to just creating more of a a revenue centric sort of contact center, and and we’re kind of moving in the right direction, which is great.

Now I’ve put it on this as well.

You know, with with the fact that we are moving more digital, we essentially have to meet our consumers in a lot of different places and whenever they want. And that sort of expectation of nine to five support, things like that is now a little bit more Well, we actually need to be way more flexible, and we need to understand our customers more. And I think that’s where the reps and the agents really do come into play and help with that journey mapping, the end of the day as well.

Now with Stella, by Medallie, you know, we unify the customer feedback and quality assurance and coaching process Our sort of main focus is that we wanna help motivate and engage, reps. And a lot of people do, as I mentioned before, capture these VOC metrics, the capture SLAs.

It doesn’t really go anywhere. And at the end of the day, I think we found especially with, the pandemic and just everything over the last, like, three or four years with out, the more that you can empower contact center leaders and brands to bring more of a human touch to every in every interaction really helps the, reps feel good about things when those service interactions come through and they’re like, you know, Alec did a great job it it makes you feel good. But at the same time when things don’t work in a certain way well, let’s correct that. Let’s change that behavior.

Let’s armor reps and, and agents out there with the tools they need to succeed. Because knowing how many calls they’ve handled, isn’t really gonna tell you what they’re doing well on and what they’re not doing. Maybe they’re not answering as many calls, but there’s probably a reason behind that. So let’s try and dig into that.

And with that, there’s a number of the other different components that come into this as well. We we feel as a as a company, and I think it’s leaning more in the industry now that there is limited visibility into agent performance as a whole.

Very static metrics, if you’re using a BPO, sometimes you don’t have visibility into what’s going on well there, what isn’t, it’s a little disconnected.

At the same time, you want to be maintaining top talent.

In a recent industry study, it was, said that an average rep cost around twelve thousand dollars to a business plus. So if you’re investing that time and effort in their I think the industry and and companies need to invest a little bit more as well into supporting those reps. It’s not just we train you up by get on with this. They deal with a lot and generally are the unsung heroes, so we feel that there should be more focus around that.

We need to automate processes, manual tasks, quality assurance, one of those things that can be a little bit. It’s not the sexiest of subjects, let’s say. But if we can automate that, we can make it fun we can use other data points in there. It makes it way more engaging, and it means we can use this more as a coaching mechanism.

And then as well when customers have bad experiences, it’s terrible when somebody says one star of this person was terrible, all of that. But let’s capture that before they go to Twitter or Facebook or social channels because things like that can can cost a business overnight their reputation. So we we’re all about sort of capturing all of those things as well as just doing, sort of agent led metrics. And and I think making the customer experience more human is the key aspect to that.

We wanna look at trying to engage, agents wanna make them feel like they’re part of a company. They have a say, and at the same time giving them visibility into their performance I think it does keep people understanding. Okay. I’m doing this really, really well.

I’m gonna keep doing this. This component, I need to work on it and and going from there. And it really enhances them to do their job well. Additionally, as well, giving visibility into, customer feedback directly tying into things like QA and coaching, really gives you more of a holistic toolset to essentially focus your efforts in certain ways rather than being very siloed components of customer service.

You’ve got your CSAT, You’ve got your QA, you’ve got this. That’s great, but really joining together gives you more power.

And more insight. So we think that’s really keen as well. And then also having things like reward mechanisms, you know, recognition programs within companies also allows you to have sort of a better control and more presence within that contact center so they feel valued as as individuals. So I think today, like, the industry is coming a long way, but it it I think one of the key components is humanizing those interactions.

You got your Frank into that sort of pool collection you have dispersed teams having transparency, and having a pulse on all those different items. I think is really leading to having some really successful brands. And I think, you know, the customer team, UJET, and ourselves would that we have some really successful brands because they are linking the right data together. They’re using the right tools, and it really allows them to be sort of leaders, in this space And that’s it for me.

Alright. Thanks so much.

Alex. I really enjoyed that.

Your tips for being more human in customer experience. That’s a really important topic. And enjoy that greatly. So now we’re gonna get into what it takes to get predictive and contextual and, conversational, with Vaceli Triant. Thank you, Vacilient.

Look forward to to hearing more about this.

Alright. Very cool. Can you see my screen, Pam? Is that working okay there? It’s looking great. Alright. Fantastic.

So so talking about transcending omnichannel, right? We’re we’re ultimately trying to make the customer experience and think about everybody that’s on this call, you and me as individual users of the brands that we’re talking about. I want you to kinda think in that context. So pull yourself a little bit out of what you do today to do day to day, and let’s start thinking about our personal experiences.

I am the COO of UJET. We’re a cloud contact center application, but I’m also a passionate leader in just transcending customer experience in general. My goal is to change how our experiences are with the brands that we deal with day to day. Like, whether that’s your mobile phone, your airlines, hotels, like, these are the things I deal with in my personal life, and I want that to be better for all of us. And if we look at How do we make that experience predictive contextual and conversational?

This ultimately looks at all the technologies some of you are asking questions about. It’s a great segue from what Gabe was showing and what Alec or Alex was talking about because we’re bringing in you’re talking about the feedback from customers and voice of the customer. You’re talking about omnichannel. You’re talking about automation and and artificial intelligence.

But the first thing I wanna talk about real quick is when you look at our experiences as people and around human behavior, It has dramatically shifted over the last thirteen to fourteen years. And this has been driven by the advent of the smartphone. So in in two thousand seven, Apple released the iPhone, and that began the shift of how we interact with one another, how we interact with technology, And ultimately, what’s been happening over the last couple years is how we interact with brands. And COVID has only accelerated it It’s not a one and done event. It has just accelerated what we are already doing.

We are engaging our brands and services through mobile apps and through web.

This year, it’s predicted there’ll be somewhere around a hundred and forty billion dollars spent through mobile apps and No. It’s not just my kids buying all their widgets in their in their games, but literally other purchases. Whether it’s buying clothes, groceries, food. You know, I mean, we see the rise of the service economy through mobile apps.

And this is how we are becoming and want to be serviced.

With all of that, we’re still servicing from a contact center perspective like we have for thirty to forty years. I’m gonna put a phone number out for someone to dial in one place and then have a chat widget somewhere else. You can email me in this place. And if you’re frustrated, don’t you go to Facebook or you can go to Twitter and and and make another comment?

And when we look at our experiences, when we’re doing research about the products and services we wanna buy, and and I’ll use an example. My my son won a new mountain bike. And, of course, it was like a, I think, a Santa Cruz or something like that. And I go search, you know, Santa Cruz Mountain bikes, And I’m looking for stuff.

Well, next thing I know when I go to Facebook, I’m getting ads that pop up. Every time I go to any of the type of, you know, web browser to pull something up, I get you know, mountain bike ads from the competitors of Santa Cruz and all these things. And the reason is there’s all this data and intelligence that is now sitting around my profile and following me that companies can use to determine my own intent. Right?

My my intent to buy something. So they’re looking at predictive intent. They’re trying to make it contextual and serve up data that matters to me. Yeah.

Within the contact centers, this stuff doesn’t exist. So our behaviors from a sales and marketing perspective have shifted to where we want and need a lot of this information. Like, bring it to me rather than me having to go find everything, yet when it comes to problems, What happens? It’s you come find me.

Or let me put a place here where you can come find me, and then I’m gonna try to find a couple different ways to push you off So maybe I can reduce cost of transaction or, you know, people start talking a lot about automation.

And the idea is I wanna push off live interactions rather than using automation to augment live interactions.

So with this human action, human interaction evolving, why can’t we take that same technology and place it in our customer support and our other, you know, experiences once we actually procure a product. I think Gabe showed, a stat, talking about people changing brands because of bad experiences. And this is a statistic that many companies are adopting when they look at customer experience, when they look at lifetime value of customers, If you’re frustrated with the brand, it you will change brands just because of the experience rather than the product was great. There was there was something that I bought with my wife.

For Christmas. And I had to return it because it ended up being the wrong thing. My experience lasted forty five days. I’m not kidding.

It lasted forty five days for me to return an item I went through email, I went through chat, and I went through phone, and, like, the phone menu said, hey, we’re really busy. Call us back later and just click hang up. And this is a very high end like luxury brand, I’ll never buy from them again because of my experience. Like, there’s so many alternatives out there for us, and it doesn’t matter if something is not as great a quality.

You want that entire experience to be better.

So here is kind of an idea of like what can be done. Let’s leverage information. You’re coming through a web page or you’re coming through a mobile app. Maybe you’re logged into a mobile app, like like your airline or your hotel.

So know who I am. If I’m already looking at the web page of the app in Spanish, why are you asking me to press one for English and two for Spanish? Let’s Let’s bypass that step. Right?

Second, map whatever information you already have, to me as a user. So whether that’s chat, Right? So now we can actually identify that someone’s coming through a mobile or web app and identify that user. Get them to a live agent as quick as possible.

And we’ll talk about cost in a moment like what this means to a business, and then let’s authenticate via more modern means. When you grab your mobile phone, you pick it up Do you put in your pin and your mother’s maiden name or your last four digits of your social? No. You’re using biometrics.

Right? You’re using face or touch ID for the most part nowadays. And we’re also used to now being very collaborative and and contextual when you think about how we interact with one another. I’m gonna share photos.

I’m gonna share videos. I’m gonna put things up on social. Why not make that same collaborative experience happen within a support case? These things can all be done.

And these are some of the things that we have looked at around where consumers are going, where consumer behavior is going, and helping meet consumers where they’re at. Alex mentioned in his presentation, I thought it was great. He says we need to meet customers It’s exactly what we’re talking about. Everything to this point has been customers go meet us at some point of your choosing.

Rather than our consumers, our customers are engaging us in a place, let’s meet them in that place and then provide all the channels within that one place. I’ll show you some some points in a moment. Right? Now further, to kind of bridge this journey and to also make it more collaborative and solve experiences quicker and better.

To make it contextual, we have to unify the data. The the Frank and Stack as Gabe was talking about earlier, in all those applications you saw, what also has been done is all these separate system of records have been created. There’s a system of record in your contact center. There’s a system of record in your CRM.

There’s a system of record in your ERP and so on and so forth. We have to unify all that data in order to have one place to then apply whether you wanna call it AI or intelligence or some type of predictive intent, we have to put it all in one place. And it has to be real time so that then you can look at that data and see past interactions, create patterns, create behaviors to then determine what is the next best action for this customer? What is the information they’re looking for?

If they’ve already procured an item three times in the last month and they’re calling in most likely when it’s about that item, what’s their geo location? Like, let’s look at where they’re calling from. Like, we can literally fig figure that out from all the data that gets gets passed us from mobile apps and and from web. And then we can real time change where we route that call.

We can real time look at where they’re going. And and because of that, you actually start eliminating things like on hold time. On hold time creates customer frustration for you and me. It also creates costs for your business.

Because in the modern day of technology, you pay per minute as a company for all that on hold time.

So what we’ve done is we like unify that data with customer. It’s all within the customer CRM. And so we’re looking at one place, both us and customer and anyone else that’s integrating, we’re looking at one place in order to action that data. It also reduces your security and compliance risks because instead of looking at where all the different potentials for me to lose data or to have vulnerabilities, it’s all in one place at this point. Right?

When we talk about modernizing that journey and we talk about how consumer behaviors change, and we’re engaging brands through mobile and web. When you’re in, I I mean, I’ll just say I I use an airline all the time and I’m a a print well, sorry. Used to use an airline all the time, and I’m a, you know, premium flyer with them. And I hit the contact us button, and I get a choice.

I get a phone. I get a chat. Right? Or I can email. Now if I get email, it throws me into a Gmail application.

Right? If I chat, it throws me to a separate web page for chat. Again, no real context there. And if I hit contact, it throws me to an iPhone or an Android dialer.

And I lose all contacts. The only thing that we know, and we’ve been able to do this for two decades at this point is that the phone number, the caller ID for me identifies me as a user, but I’ve lost all that rich data of where were you at in the mobile app? How long were you spending on pages? Were you trying to cancel a flight?

Were you trying to buy a flight, right, to what location and so on and so forth? Now we can grab that data by keeping things in app. So meet your customers where they are. So if they’re in your mobile app, meet them there, grab that data and actually let them choose.

You see kinda on the left side of this this slide here. It’s a little bit, you know, kind of a faded out here. You get email, chat, schedule a call or call now. Let the consumer or the customer pick how they wanna contact you.

Let that means then happen within the app. And then pass that data through to the CRM, to the agent, and let them action it. So I can email, I can chat. I can hit call now.

It would be an in band data call, or one of my favorites here is is schedule a callback.

We’re in this culture now of Zoom meetings Right? Like, we’re just doing Zoom meetings every thirty minutes.

But when you call in to a call center, you either have to wait on hold sixty minutes, thirty minutes, whatever the the queue times are nowadays, or it’ll say call me back or hold my place in queue and call me back. So great. I get off this webinar. Call in.

You’re gonna call me back in queue at some point in time, and it’s it’s TBD. In the meantime, my day goes on. I’m busy. I have other things to do.

Scheduled callback, actually then says, Hey, what time do you wanna be called back? And actually runs this whole algorithm around availability.

It’s the ability to, one, keep the caller, like, doing their own life. No hold time. I don’t wait in queue anymore. It also saves the business money because nothing’s actually Like, no one’s waiting on hold.

You’re not paying for those minutes. And then you get to the customer, like, live. There’s literally no hold time. So these are like the modern abilities to meet the consumers where they’re at and reduce that friction, then allow it to be collaborative.

Share photos.

Share videos real time. I mean, think about like insurance companies or banking or or other things you do in your life and someone says, oh, can you take a picture and then email it to me. So now you’re creating multiple channels and multiple places for things to come and you’re disjoining that interaction from a time perspective. By making it collaborative in that interaction, I’m sharing the photos and the videos real time so that agents can now see them while we’re on the phone or while we’re in a chat or while we’re doing an SMS conversation, whatever it may be. And again, unifying all that data into the serum into one place. We call this channel blending. It unifies that customer journey and eliminates all these disparate channels and disparate inter is that that people see today.

Using the biometrics for touch and face ID, this is this is something that’s shifting today There’s there’s a whole move around authentication happening. It’s called self sovereign identity, and it’s the move towards using biometrics to authenticate instead of things like Social Security numbers and mother’s maiden names. This information is actually out on the web for anybody. You can actually go buy maiden names and Social Security numbers And this is why identity theft is just literally on the rise.

It’s just too easy. Biometrics is a much more secure way to interact. And frankly, it’s what we’re all used to But by unifying that data in the serum, by leveraging biometrics and looking at where the customer’s coming from, guess what? We can eliminate things like having to authenticate twice.

So call in, put in your account number, put in your PIN, then you get to a live agent. What’s the first thing they always ask?

Can I get your account number and your pin? Like it’s a reauthentication and it just creates that for that friction there.

These items here, these these little features are looking at how consumer behaviors changed, meeting that and changing the entire customer experience. It’s a shift on the play of happy agent makes happy customer. It’s happy customer, seamless information to the agent. Applying intelligence on top of it actually makes a happy interaction and higher lifetime customer value.

So as Alex is talking about customer journey, like, completely agree with all the points he said, but you have to blend all those things together. So when you look at all those things that are happening real time, looking at one system of record and then applying intelligence on top of it. I saw a few questions pop up around, around, you know, what are what are the AI capabilities you have. And I think the answers was around chatbots, chatbot is a piece that happens with an automation.

There’s there’s agent assist. There’s virtual agents And the idea is to augment an interaction ultimately for the goal of better first call resolution shortening on hold times and having a customer and that interaction happy. Every interaction can be different. So you have to look at predictive intent.

Have to look at past interactions and you have to look at things happening real time. If there’s a similar interaction that’s happened twenty times, what was the best and quickest path to get there? And so by having all that data in one place and then applying intelligence, so I don’t wanna call it artificial intelligence. Let’s call it intelligence on top of it.

We can determine the best and quickest path to get there. So if you look at chatbots, is a great example. Today, they’re very monolithic paths. Chatbot on the front end, hit five or six steps, find that trigger point, transfer to a live agent versus bond a live agent with an automated interaction, but looking at data real time to determine that predictive intent.

If that if that interaction was already destined to be with a live agent, why wait to get there. How do we determine that? Where was the age where was the customer in web or in mobile? What were the past interactions that they’ve done around procurement of products, return of products, blending all that data together, and then you can get predictive intent.

I’m I’m simplifying it for the purpose of time on this discussion. But you can route these things much quicker by looking at all those things at once and not creating those monolithic paths. How I think the number one question I’ve seen that’s been asked of chatbots is are you a real agent? Right.

And the reason is inside, we want that human touch, that interaction.

What we need to get to is people look at that interaction as real because you can pull it out of that automated, step predictably, right, and get it to a live agent here.

When we look at some of the customers where we’ve deployed the solution that actually is engaging that modern consumer behavior, so Instacart is an on demand services company, right, providing your grocery store at home, all through mobile or web, we’ve been able to improve their first contact resolution by thirty percent because we engage customer service in app and then web where the consumers are at. WAG is a, you know, a dog walking service through mobile app Right? We’ve improved their service levels seventeen percent by engaging in app and keeping everything in one place for the consumers. IZettle, they have fifty percent reduction in training time for their agents because the app integrated with the CRM, there’s not like these separate places to go for data and everything is logged real time. We can open and close tickets automatically. We can determine close reasons in a predictive way as well. And then cleanly saw thirteen percent improvement in customer percent.

The goals of all these brands aren’t to drive those metrics. The goals are to improve consumer interaction with us as a brand. So by offering those features, you reduce hold time, hold time cost money. Right? If we get to the agent quicker because we’re looking at intent, we know who they are in an app and and we can authenticate better, we also decrease time. We can improve FCR.

So the consumer hangs up happy is, I guess, the easiest way to look at it But in the end, you save about twenty to thirty percent on telco cost. You can improve NPS and CSAT and improve FCR. Right? And see, these are all the benefits that can come from from those things.

So we are UJET is a cloud contact center at scale. It can handle everything from a few agents to tens of thousands of agents and These are the things that we’re doing to change modern customer experiences.

So, Gabe or Pam, I’ll turn it back to you all. Stop my share here. I think I’m just on time. Alright.

Now that’s perfect. Thank you. Let me go ahead and share this last slide. Not a big deal, but we’re gonna get into answering some of these questions now.

We’ve got some, good questions that have been submitted.

So first up, this topic of channel blending seems like a really, really, hot topic of interest here. So do you have any, advice on sort of gotchas when it comes to channel blending any things to consider, you know, advice and pitfalls around, you know, what to think about when you’re thinking about channel blending?

Yeah. I can I can start real quick? Then, basically, maybe you could jump in. I I just I often feel like people do get caught trying to match a thousand channels.

And, you know, we’re finding every channel they should be on and forgetting that they should just focus on the ones their customers. Care most about. And so I’d I’d probably just say the got one gotcha is just to be aware of that. You know, there’s so many cool channels out there, but if your customers don’t care, you know, maybe focus start on the channels they do care about and then come talk to me about other ones you may wanna get involved with.

So that that’d be my quick comment.

Yeah. I think it’s a good point, Gabe. I also think that you can kinda break channels into a few different means. Right?

One is, tech actual channels, and you could kinda break that into chat SMS or depending on region of the world. Right? Obviously, WhatsApp is a is a big thing or we chat. And then there’s live, which is voice.

I think that if you can if you’re looking at doing channel blending within your web application or your mobile app, I mean, you could really break those into three things there and then people when they get there would contact you those methods. When you start to kinda get you’re you’re not doing channel blending is when people start saying like, well, what about Facebook and what about Twitter and what about all these other things? Because you’re actually pushing pushing your customers to a place where they’re not engaging you. Right?

And I always tell people when you get to the social aspect is when you’ve already broken the customer experience, because people go to Facebook and Twitter to complain or when they can’t find the answers. So it’s already been broke. If you focus on channel blending and meeting your customers where they are, those things will become places where, you know, people are promoting you versus complaining. Right?

Alright. And then, one here for Gabe that, you highlighted earlier, which AI vendors, does customer work with?

You know, we actually, have a couple cool things that I think might be worth mentioning. You know, one to consider is that we have some of our own built in AI. It’s called customer IQ.

And I think that, some of the functionalities that I highlighted play a role in there, such as, you know, finding ways to eliminate some of those mundane tasks or some of those agent suggestions. So that’s one thing to note I think it was highlighted here today. I’ll just mention, you know, some of the facilities talk track, bringing in, on some of these different partners that we do have like UJET, how they look at AI, and I think he said it better than I will, is a great example of of a partnered vendor where you combine the power of two different technologies, and I think you get an exponential result.

Great. And then, Alex, someone had, asked the question when you were presenting, where did you get your data for the staff from.

We have stats from everywhere. So we survey, a lot of our, a lot of our customers, Medallia being you know, a leader in the VOC space. We make sure that we’re sort of benchmarking against our own data. But at the same time as well, we do you know, partner with Forrester and and Gartner on some of these stats as well. And along with some emergency partners like Deloitte and Accenture. So, Those ones specifically from my understanding were from our own, our own data sources, which is nice that we practice what we preach. So it’s, good.

Here’s an interesting one, and this is up for grabs. Anyone can take this one. How can I help my remote teams work better with all the different tools in my in my CX stack?

Well, I’m not taking that one to start. Someone else again. I’ll take that one if you have a lot of tools and they’re having to come to a lot of places, I mean, I think the easiest thing is you gotta look at different tools. And and the reason why I say that, is because the customer experience in in the whole support world has been complicated because there’s so many vendors doing things and and they you get convinced to kinda bolt all these things together.

When we were talking about unifying that data or, and I’m just gonna speak from a UJF perspective, we integrate and and essentially blend in the customer. So customer and UJET appear to your agents as one application. The data flows seamlessly, but there’s a lot of com companies out there that don’t do that. And it does become all these separate applications, which is why it it becomes hard for an agent to get data and define places be.

The more you can unify the user interface and especially the data and the cut and the agents can see it all in place easier it is. So if they have a lot of tools already, it’s gonna be tough. Right? Yep.

And, you know, speaking of a lot of tools, someone asked you know, we talked a lot about AI, but what are some of the other, you know, innovations emerging products or tools that I should be considering for my customer support environment. Like, what’s we’re we’re gonna get the most bang for my buck when it comes to innovation.

Yeah. I’ll I’ll throw in a couple things. You know, one, I think a few people have been talking about this video channel. You know, I’m a channel guy.

I always like to kinda see channels. So, you know, how are people using video? We’re all in a Zoom world. Can video play more of a role?

Your customer support org. So some fun technologies I’m seeing pop up around that. I do think I one that I mentioned just this in store experience, you know, digitizing that in so many different ways.

Multiple, companies and functions I I think playing a role in in that as well. But I think the bigger issue that I think people are trying to tackle is more from the other question. It’s actually too many. They don’t want any more technology.

It’s more about how do I get my current ones working together and actually eliminating. And so I’m I’m I’d probably say keep looking for trends of cool technologies, but be cautious to do that until you’ve really gone through the exercise to figure out what you do need. Make sure you get rid of some software, and then find those big gaps that you still have, and maybe you’ll find a couple of these tools helpful. That would that would be my two cents.

Well, I’m probably stepping out of my lane but I would also, advise maybe looking at, a, a event replay that we did, last year when we had, Ali Webb of dry bar as a keynote. And she talked about how, she she believes the in store experience is gonna be transformed by a lot of the things that they did to cope with COVID.

And so I think that there’s some lessons to be learned there about, you know, what, what to weave into your customer support program in the future as as we get back to what, you know, you might call normal or the new normal.

Alright. Any closing remarks before we close this down and send out the the recording? No. No, Pam.

Really appreciate it. Great questions from the audience. Thanks everybody for tuning in, and and certainly it was fun to join, with Alex and Vasili. Thanks so much, you guys.

Thank you.