Improving Customer and Agent Experiences with Chief Product Officer Adam Settle at SharpenCX | Ep. 27

Max: 00:10

‍Welcome to the IT Broker Tech Deep Dive. I'm Max Clark. I'm here with Adam Settle, who's the chief product officer for Sharpen CX. Sharpen CX is a contact center or what we like to call CCaaS because somebody branded these things. Everything is branded as a service today.

‍Max: 00:25

So Sharpen's a CCaaS contact center as a service company. And, Adam, thank you for joining. I'm, I'm I'm excited to talk to you today and get into the weeds here. There goes my dog, and there's a doorbell. See?

Max: 00:37

So you just never know what you're gonna get with me. It's it's,

Adam: 00:40

Yeah. That's fine.

Max: 00:41

Thank you, Basil. You can stop barking now anytime. £10 of terror in a terrier format. Then, you know, we went through this period of, like, 2 years where they would just throw your boxes at the door, and then they would, and just pretend like like it was delivered even if it wasn't. And now all of a sudden, there's, like, this big thing.

Max: 00:59

And I mean, you know what? I appreciate it. You know, a lot of packaged stuffs in certain markets. So it's, like, nice that they actually ring the doorbell. But then but then you've got, you know, you've got a little basil this cannot bolt out.

Max: 01:09

Alright. Anyways so, that was fun. Hopefully this this makes the the the final edit here. So, Adam let me actually take this back a little bit here which is there's a lot of motion there's a lot of different vendors in in the c cast space and what I'm really interested in and we talked to you know new suppliers and and offerings here is this is gonna make me crazy hold on a second. You're good.

Max: 01:38

I I wonder sometimes what goes through her head, like like like, do we not does she think that we don't hear it? You know? Like, what's what's the actual Yeah.

Adam: 01:46

It's gotta be. Right?

Max: 01:47

You know? Like, I don't know. So, you know, she's back.

Adam: 01:49

Gotta be.

Max: 01:50

And she said she has a dog bed underneath my return here. So now she's back in her dog bed, and she's gonna go back to sleep until the next door bell rings. Alright. Anyways, so, Adam, Sharpen CX is a CCaaS company. So contact center is a service branded as a service.

Max: 02:03

Right? And and you guys have decided to participate in a relatively crowded space. There's, you know, 1 or 2 other companies that are offering contact centers in in different shapes and forms. So I I think a really good place to start with this, we'll do this a little bit backwards, is, what is Sharpen? Can you give me some background on Sharpen?

Max: 02:24

How did Sharpen become Sharpen? And and how are you approaching this market, you know, and and why? In

Adam: 02:31

the sense of how did Sharpen become Sharpen, we initially started as VoIP. And so, you know, if we're thinking of another as a service, we started as UCaaS, back in 2011. And then as we started really picking through who do we wanna be when we grow up, what do we wanna do as a company, we really thought about the user experience near and dear to our hearts. When we think about Sharpen, we think about how do we improve the agent experience. And the agent experience, you know, encompasses the supervisor experience, the admin experience, but it's just a different lens of how you would look at the software that you're selling.

Adam: 03:06

Right? And and, obviously, customer experience is paramount and is important, but our thesis has always been, well, if we make the agent successful, they will make the customer experience successful. So everything that we do is through this lens of what would it mean to create a better agent experience because we know that that leads to a more frictionless customer experience. And, you know, sometimes it's just as simple as playing a word association game and changing the word customer with agent. You know, everybody's thinking of, well, what does a customer 360 view look like?

Adam: 03:36

And we ask ourselves, so what does an agent 360 view look like for a supervisor? What does a frictionless agent experience look like? Or how would you point AI to help your agents instead of just as your customers? And it it leads to some really interesting thought experiments there. And so I'm I'm rambling a little bit, but our core has always been how do we make the agent successful?

Adam: 03:56

Because, traditionally, you know, working in a contact center is always rated as one of the worst jobs in America. And so really simply, we're saying, how do we make that not so rough? Right? How do we bring the human element back into the contact center?

Max: 04:10

Can you give me an example of that? You know, when you talk about making the agent experience better, what does it actually mean in terms of what you're doing from a technology or UX or or workflow or, you know, like like, how does this actual what does this actually mean?

Adam: 04:26

Yeah. Well, so we'll give you a a couple really high level examples, but we'll kinda land the plane here. You know, you think about agents tend to have 10 to 12 screens open on average. Right? So just consolidating those things.

Adam: 04:39

So we're we're API first, where you can bring in disparate pieces and parts into Sharpen. Now that also would help you to ensure that you get customers to the right place into the right queue, but that also means that the agent can work from whatever window makes sense. You hear single pane of glass a lot from those 1 or 2 other CCaaS vendors that are out there that you said. But it's really about how do we get you the tools that you need in the moment. And so you can bring all of those things into Sharpen, but we've also designed it in a way so that you can bring Sharpen to those other pieces as well.

Adam: 05:10

Where does it make sense for the agent to live in their day to day, and how do we meet the agent where they are? And just little simple things like, you know, you think about your your cell phone. Right? If you were on the phone right now and I needed to send you a message, you just launch the app and send a message. You don't leave the phone call behind.

Adam: 05:26

And so this whole idea of promoting a phone call to something else or promoting a chat to a phone call, it's really it's an interaction, and you layer in the channels that make sense. And we've done that in our agent interface to just let the agent layer in the channels that make sense for that customer, and then we show them their performance right there on the screen in what we call performance tiles that's just a an agent dashboard that's just built into the agent interface. And that's not a that's not an upcharge. It's not an add on thing. It's just a I wanna know how I'm doing and how I stack up against my peers.

Adam: 05:59

Am I focused on the right stuff? And so we spend a lot of time focusing on management, coaching, feedback, and how do we help the agents get those things? Because that's one of the biggest reasons that they cite leaving their jobs is a lack of growth and development. And so that's where a lot of our focus, you know, really comes out is, how do we give you the tools you need to take care of your customers, but then also give you the insight and data to know that you're growing and getting better.

Max: 06:25

I don't I'm furiously taking notes here because you, like, given me maybe think, like, 30 things I wanna ask you now here. So Let's go. It's gonna go off the rails really quickly here. So, you know, one of the first things, you talk about tenetal screens. Right?

Max: 06:37

I mean, so this is this is an issue of the data estate. Right? So data and interaction lives in lots of different places. And usually for a company, that means you have a CRM system. You've got some order entry management system.

Max: 06:45

You've got, you know, if you're if you're an ecommerce, you know, what's your fulfillment? Are you in house warehousing? Are you using an FPL, you know, or or 3PL? Are you using you know, do you have a a a social media support system? Do you have an email support system?

Max: 06:59

Right? Like, so there are a lot of different systems that come in of what what that interaction can land into. And then you've got a lot of different channels now. And, you know, industry talks about this as multichannel that that consumers wanna interact with. Right?

Max: 07:11

And and I like, I've been trained for instance. And I I know this though knowing the industry, but I've been trained. You know, when you want customer service from certain organizations, it just is faster if you get on social media because they have a different team watching their social media channels. And and it just, you know, things just happen quicker, you know, and and that's a a learned behavior now for myself. But, you know, this idea of multichannel is also interesting because, you know, voice versus text versus video.

Max: 07:37

And and you talk about channels. So I'm assuming that's what you're really talking about. You're talking about, like, what is what is the source of interaction or communication between, you know, the customer and the agent that's actually supporting that customer. Is that okay. Just making sure.

Adam: 07:51

Yeah. That's a great way to look at it. We we tend to bucket it in this blanket statement of we're just thinking about it as an interaction. Everything in Sharpen is a, quote, interaction, and they look a little bit different depending on how they come in. But functionality wise, they're the same.

Adam: 08:05

It's still a 3 60 view of if you've reached out on Twitter and then you happen to call in, we have that all in the same view for the agents so that they know that even going back and forth via Twitter or you did call in and you just did it a few days ago. And then we're trying to augment that experience by then saying, you know, well, don't we think that's relevant? If Max called in in the last 3 days and sent something via Twitter, we might wanna route that differently. If it was x number of interactions in the last 72 hours, we might say, it looks like you've been trying to reach out to us. We're gonna go ahead and bump you to tier 2 or, you know, weight that a little bit differently just to create that unique experience.

Adam: 08:43

So it is unique for the agent, but then it's unique for the customer as well because you can you can use that data to make those types of decisions regardless of the channel because it's all captured in that interaction bucket.

Max: 08:54

Let's talk about your customers for a little bit. Who is a ideal I mean, like, who is an ideal Sharpen customer? Was this is this a geography, an industry segment, a size, a vertical, existing technology? What is, like, what is your sweet spot?

Adam: 09:05

Yeah. Our sweet spot is is United States head quartered. We do have some agents that are you know, if if you're in a call center that's, you know, round round the clock, we have some agents all over the world. But, predominantly, it's for US based companies serving US customers, and we're just doing that from a focus standpoint. We could certainly go international if we needed to.

Adam: 09:28

But then predominantly the 5 to 5 or 50 to 500 agents, We're doing a lot of work in the credit union space right now, and and the reason for that is credit unions are really focused on the relationship aspect. Right? They're differentiating themselves on creating a unique personalized and similar to what we're doing for the agents. We believe we do that well from a customer standpoint. So, you know, higher end retail where you expect that, you know, that higher touch where maybe you don't reach out to the store you bought it from, you reach out to the manufacturer because you just expect that better quality.

Adam: 10:03

Those are the types of companies we do the best with. When you're looking to not just be at parity with what you have now, but in the cloud, which we could do, when you're really trying to say, how do we make a unique experience when someone reaches out to us via SMS or chat or phone? How do we really tailor that using the data that we have either in those disparate systems or just inside of Sharpen?

Max: 10:24

So when you say, like, credit unions, that immediately, like, my brain just kinda just, like, like, way down that road because now you start talking about issues with I mean, PCI doesn't directly apply to credit unions. Right? But you start talking about a whole slew of other issues. Right? You know, what's being recorded?

Max: 10:40

How can it be recorded? What sort of data is being exposed to the agent? How do you authenticate a caller? It's not just having a person sitting somewhere and answering a call. Right?

Max: 10:48

You obviously wanna make sure that that user that person's authenticated, that they are who they say they are, that you can give information, that if they're giving the agent information, if you're doing call recording, you have some sort of AI assist. Are you recording that? That opens up a whole like rabbit hole in terms of like a solution that you have to offer in order to to meet those needs of a credit union and and I mean there's parallels for me. Yeah. Because there's a lot of similar issues here.

Max: 11:10

So so are you you know and this I've I wanna I wanna get into this because I've seen a lot of c cast companies. I'll say, okay. We have a partnership with fill in the blank company in order to solve certain issues. Right? We know PCI masking.

Max: 11:22

They're called masking for PCI compliance or, you know, auto attendant diversions for or IVR diversions for, you know, is is Sharpen strategy with these things? Is this in house functionality? Is this stuff where you leverage third parties in the marketplace in order to, you know, solve for these needs? Where are your lines like start and end with these?

Adam: 11:42

Yeah. That's a great question. So we do have some partnerships, but as much as possible, especially as it relates to something like PCI where you wanna be, you know, from an audit perspective, have all your ducks in a row. We try and keep as many things as we can in house, and then we'll partner with best of breed where it might make sense. So as an example, a pen drop or new star on fraud or authentication, we would do those types of partnerships within our own IVR.

Adam: 12:07

And so that way, we're doing self-service upfront, potentially voice biometrics. The actual PCI component itself, we can make and take payments within Sharpen, and it puts the agent in a secure room while the customer talks to an auto attendant. And, again, that's all Sharpen so that that's never a part of the call recording. We do have PCI and Social Security number redaction as a part of our transcriptions. If for some reason they throw out the last 4, you know, of their Social Security number, any other identifying information, but the actual making and taking of payments that occurs in a separate secure environment, the agent is never a part of it.

Adam: 12:46

So we don't have to then go back and scrub the call recording for that. It's just happening natively there in the app, and it's part of that that agent interface that we were talking about where it's just right there on the screen. So those types of things, we we just build into the application. And then, like you said, there's definitely a parallel to health care there, whereas we build out these components, and that's why we choose to build them out in house, we know that a lot of them will scale to health care. When you think about virtual tellers compared to telehealth, right, you're still solving the same core issues of secure video or just ensuring that the information is is locked and secure and rest and that transit.

Adam: 13:25

You know, you solve a lot of the same components.

Max: 13:28

How, cell phones and mobile as a channel. Right? So, you know, I think there's a there's a default assumption that goes into, oh, we want to expose or we wanna support to, you know, SMS. Right? We wanna we want text messaging as as a as a channel for interaction.

Max: 13:43

Right? Of course. Great. Or WhatsApp if you're international or maybe it's Apple Business Messenger, which I don't actually see very often. I mean, some brands use it.

Max: 13:50

Apple obviously uses it. Some brands use it, but it's not as popular as I would have thought. In app chat really feels like it is a much bigger issue now within companies and and it's also depending on what the actual company is doing have they developed their entire application from scratch. And I kinda wanna talk to you, you know, about like how you're supporting mobile in this in world and how you think about mobile as a channel for you. And and I, you know, don't wanna make too many assumptions here.

Max: 14:14

I'm kinda curious how this how this fits in the Sharpen strategy.

Adam: 14:18

So you you hit the nail on the head. It's mostly the in app chat. It's how we're thinking about mobile because that's where, like you said, most people are not picking up their phone to directly SMS a a company that you can. You know, we support inbound SMS, but that brings in a slew of other regulations that have happened here over the last 3 to 6 months in terms of what does the opt in, opt out process look like, what's your total bandwidth, are these toll free numbers, etcetera. So the in app chat tends to work really well, especially when we can bring it in as an interaction so that if for some reason someone's not available, you can still trigger a a callback to that person.

Adam: 14:54

They can leave any information in or take advantage of agentless IVR. When it comes to self-service, we're definitely pushing more towards the in app chat. Mostly because people want stuff now. Right? You know, we don't necessarily wanna call in and go through a long auto attendant and then have to wait to speak to an agent.

Adam: 15:09

We're reaching out via chat first, or we're trying to use a knowledge base to solve our problem and then choosing to place that call. So the digital channel is is just where everybody's moving, and chat seems to be on the forefront of that right now. Is this something where you're giving people,

Max: 15:24

like, an API targets and a guide on how to integrate with and build their own shot out to to, you know, use you in the back end? Is this an SDK that you're delivering of, hey. Here's our, you know, here's your here's our swift SDK and here's our, you know, Java SDK for Android. You know, what what's, customer team looking at this and saying, okay. Now we're gonna use Sharpen for for or or evaluating Sharpen or we've signed a contract, whatever it is.

Max: 15:47

Right? What is that engineering team gonna deal with when they turn around and say, okay. Here you go. Now make this work.

Adam: 15:52

Yeah. There is essentially a a little HTML wizard that lives inside of Sharpen where you create your theme, and then you can point it to our IVR. We use IVR loosely there. Right? It's a build out a decision tree for your chatbot or point it directly to a queue, and then you would just embed that snippet into your app.

Adam: 16:10

It just depends on how someone wants to take advantage of that chat if they wanna kick it into a separate session. But you build all of it within Sharpen, and then you're just invoking that, which triggers the API call to go into either our omnichannel auto attendant or just directly to a queue. And we do have some people that'll do a data dip where you might bypass the chatbot based on someone's status. Or, again, if they've recently been reaching out to you really frequently, you just might choose to route that differently. So we have a lot of people that'll come into what we call a logic bot to make some calculations, pull data in from other places, attach that to the interaction, and use all of that information to go down a decision tree from there.

Max: 16:49

I mean, so you touched on really skills based routing, but also, you know, persona based routing as well. So you could say, you know, Credit Union, super valuable customer, lots and lots of business with us, instantaneous response queue, you know. You touched on we started talking about, you know, agent experience and just the the life of an agent in a contact, you know, any sort of contact center. One of the stats that really comes up a lot when you're talking about anybody that's maintaining a contact center whether they realize they're maintaining a contact center or not at this point is agent churn you know and this being a measurable you know usually significant double double digit percentage. And it's, you know, I mean if you if you don't, you know, if people don't know stats.

Max: 17:30

Right? You wanna look at this and say, you know, are you turning 30% a year? Right? What's your average, you know, if that's the industry average, what are you actually doing? And you start backing up and you start talking about really crazy stuff which is, you know, how long does it take you to hire?

Max: 17:41

How long does it take you to train? How long does it take you to bring on to speed? You know the old context center approach around was was workforce management and workforce optimization really structured? You know how many agents do you need to have on at this time in order to meet seasonal capacity and what's your trend lines? I wanna talk to you about this as well but, you know, there's a big industry push and I'm hearing this from you as well.

Max: 18:00

How do you retain agents and how do you keep them happy and how do you actually it's not even keep them happy. It's like how do you enable them to do their job? Right? If your job is to solve problems via a phone and you can't solve somebody's problem, you don't really that's not like a good work environment for you that you're gonna wanna show up for happy every day. Right?

Max: 18:17

So how do you help customers go through this? And and, you know, if they're talking to you about, like, oh, you know, I need a WFM or WFO, you know, is is that still the driving conversation, or is the conversation to get shifted and directed and pushed somewhere else?

Adam: 18:31

Yeah. It's it's a really great question. And there's a there's a huge push. In my mind, there's a there's a big gap in terms of the WFO side of the house, in terms of really building the right people up. You think about WFM of ensuring that you have the right number of people, and that's still important.

Adam: 18:47

Right? You still have to do your staffing and forecasting, but then you're really pushing into how do we make sure that the people that we have, we are helping them grow to their full potential. Because that that stat you talk about of agent turnover, most of them, when they churn, they go to another customer service like environment. It may not be a call center, but they stay in customer service because they want to help people. So they're not so turned off by customer service that they just leave, but you hear of agents bouncing around contact centers because they do like helping people.

Adam: 19:18

And so it's about empowering them to be able to do so. And so you do still need staffing, but then that WFO component of how do you actually build them up and train them because they cite a lack of growth and development as part of the big reason that they leave. And what that targeted us back to to actually answer your question is, how do we make the supervisor better? Because most supervisors were rock star agents that got promoted. Myself, I left on a Tuesday and walked in on Wednesday and had a laptop and was now managing a team of people that were my peers the day before.

Adam: 19:54

And that that sounds silly to say out loud, but that's really, really common. 70 to 80% of those supervisors say they were really great agents, but they don't know what a good one on one looks like, what a developmental coaching session looks and feels like. They don't know what metrics they should maybe always be looking at. Some of it is so, like, unconsciously competent to them that they had great soft skills. They may not know how to train those things.

Adam: 20:18

And so when we think about that agent experience, part of it was, hey. Are we all focused on the same things so that we can talk about expectations and that we're thinking about the same metrics? So just putting the metrics in front of an agent also helps your supervisor to know, well, these are the most important things. That's why they're in front of an agent. So if all else fails, I should be talking about that in my one on one with them.

Adam: 20:41

How are we getting better at those things? When we're listening to calls, how do we look at those types of metrics? And, unfortunately, this will just become exacerbated if people aren't paying attention to it because the other big movement is the AI side of the house. Right? And so if you get AI perfectly and it handles all your easy questions, the only things that remain are these really hard complicated questions.

Adam: 21:06

Right? Things that those agents have not been trained to do, the critical thinking, the the on the fly decision making, they've been just resetting passwords the whole time. Right? But now your bot upfront is taking care of it, and so you have to be thinking about how do you actually coach and train your agents so that when AI is implemented, and it will be, right, you've actually got a team that can support the questions getting through.

Max: 21:31

I remember reading. I was talking to economist and he was talking about manufacturing output and the big one was, specific to Southern California like Los Angeles and Orange County areas. And, you know, popular perception was that there is no manufacturing in Los Angeles and Orange County and and he was sharing stats with us that actually showed exactly the opposite. You know, the manufacturing output in Southern California was through the roof and continue to increase every year and what it changed was with the introduction of, you know, cnc machines that the job changed from, you know, a lower end manual, you know, manufacturing labor to a very high end skills based labor labor force to drive and maintain this equipment and this machinery whether you're already actually operating the machine or maintaining this machinery and what the machine was producing was changed. So you had you didn't have people running lathes anymore.

Max: 22:22

They were running the machine that was actually doing the laving. Right? So I don't even know if that's the proper terminology. And I'm I'm and I'm hearing the same thing from you here in terms of how you're thinking about this future of the the role changes a lot. You know, what kind of skills you're gonna need after that and so it's necessarily not the lower end skills but now how do you identify, promote, and maintain the high end skills?

Max: 22:42

And and that's it's a very interesting kind of question to talk about and explore and how do you build that into a system to, you know, to support that growth. So an AI is also a fun buzzword. I mean, because you can say people immediately go to AI from, like, oh, I'm gonna be answering and talking to people on the phone. But AI is a lot more than that. Right?

Max: 22:59

Because you can start talking about how do you help the agents actually just pull data out faster. Right? I mean, there's I can't imagine that all you guys are thinking about with AI is how do you deflect calls or interactions from from getting to an a human, you know, human agent in the first place?

Adam: 23:14

Yeah. It's it's certainly one component of it. Right? We'd we'd we wouldn't be honest with ourselves if we said that self-service and containment weren't a big piece of it. But it's when they get through that things start to get a little crazy in terms of the existing makeup of an agent.

Adam: 23:31

Right? So things like agent assist, asking for help, looking at some of those same metrics to say, hey. This call was transferred 4 times. Do you need an assist? Right?

Adam: 23:41

Just just those types of things upfront are very interesting. And conversely, for those supervisors that, again, were rock star agents and may just innately know how to do these things, you surface that to them as well. And you say, hey. Max is on a call that's been transferred 4 times. Do you wanna listen in?

Adam: 23:58

Right? You're trying to surface those types of coaching moments internally as well because those are all relevant things. And so if you've been working with Adam on his handle time and he's on a call that's in a in a cancellation queue, and it's double what the handle time threshold would be. It doesn't mean that anything wrong is happening, but it's a moment for human intervention where you would say, hey. Adam's on one of those calls now.

Adam: 24:21

Do you wanna listen into it? And just surfacing those things to create these coachable human moments. Ultimately, it's the supervisor and it's the people that are gonna drive all of this, but you're trying to leverage the technology to create the right moments. Right? To weed out all the white noise so that if AI is handling the components that are easy up front, you know what you should actually pay attention to for the things that get through.

Adam: 24:44

And even if that's just tagging for later, that's okay too so that you can surface outliers and see those trends in your reporting. But it all it all just kinda comes back to when things don't go down the happy path, how are you reacting to it and finding the human element in there? It's kinda where our our brains tend to go, and we just feel the shift coming. Right? As more and more people get into AI, this human shift will keep occurring in the contact center.

Adam: 25:12

And people will keep calling in, and they'll keep chatting in. They'll always need help. The makeup of what a contact center would be though, I think is is rife for change right now.

Max: 25:22

I had read something that I agree with, which is, you know, the idea of AI being enabling self-service, but not necessarily this idea of AI pertaining that it's human interaction. And, you know, I interact with lots of bots in lots of different places. And, you know, the second that there's a a bot. Right? You know, I'm just trying to figure out how to escape.

Max: 25:40

You know, talk about containment. I'm trying to figure out how to escape that bot as quickly as possible. Like, what is the proper sequence of code words in order to get away from this bot? And part of that's just technology. You know it's complicated.

Max: 25:50

You know it's not easy to train a you know to train a bot you know and go through that programming to actually develop a bot to interact with with with a person. And the other thing about this that I've always kind of curious about and I wonder about is you know customer retention is one of the most valuable metrics for a company to maintain. It's very expensive to acquire customers. It's and we look at it as as a as a, you know, cost of maintaining that customer relationship or you know repeat sales to that customer much easier to do that than it is to acquire new customers. Much better stats.

Max: 26:20

You know, there's there it feels like there's been this pattern for a long time to try to drive cost down, you know, in in a contact center. Obviously, there's a huge cost component, you know, with people running call you know, they're the technology is expensive but the the people are really expensive right everything about it contact surrogates really expensive and, you know you can have a b p o strategy and outsource it but that's not great either you you know a whole another slew of issues come in so you know what do you I mean you talked about this and you started with saying you know credit unions and high end retail and, you know, as your target customer. I mean, this sounds like people that really understand the value of their customer and their customer interaction and now trying to separate themselves with a pack of of saying, you know, we've got this. Everything else is vanilla, and we've got, you know, chocolate chip here, you know, kind of thing. I just pulled that one.

Max: 27:07

I have no idea where that analogy came from.

Adam: 27:09

Yeah. It's interesting just to keep thinking through how you help build that customer loyalty. Right? And some of that comes from there's this this other buzzword. I feel like we're we're just having the discussion of buzzwords.

Adam: 27:21

Right? But hyper personalization is a big deal right now, especially coming out of COVID. And bots aren't necessarily always great at that. They can be. Right?

Adam: 27:30

They can they can help take you down a different path when you're a customer that reaches out. But, you know, you mentioned earlier, you're always trying to get out of bot. Right? You're not you you actively trying not to be contained. And, unfortunately, that's because most bots are about as smart as the KB that you already tried to help yourself with.

Adam: 27:47

Right? And they start back at square 1 of sending you knowledge base links and and just trying to deflect you as though the knowledge base was the only answer. As opposed to, you know, can we see portions of your customer journey? Could we see that you were online? Can we see that you've reached out multiple times so that you are a higher end customer with multiple accounts and make that tree unique from there.

Adam: 28:11

Right? Do maybe we do get you, right, to an agent. And that if you're like me, that's a surprise and delight moment where when I call the number on the back of my card and a human picks up, I'm almost always like, oh, I I didn't think you were gonna answer. And they always laugh and play it off, and they're like, yeah. We're, you know, we're here to help you.

Adam: 28:27

But it genuinely shocks me every time because you think you're gonna go down this cookie cutter experience. And when you can make that somewhat unique, right, to say it looks like you've reached out to us, you know, a few times in the last 24 hours or maybe the last time you reached out, there was a negative CSAT score. And just to say, you know, it looks like the last time you reached out, we didn't quite live up to our standards. We're gonna do x, y, and z. Those little things totally change change the experience for you.

Adam: 28:56

And so, trying to do that so that we can help our customers continue to build that loyalty, because that's that's ultimately what we're trying to do. Right? It's just create a human experience where you don't feel like you're talking to a bot and actively trying to decontain yourself. Like, how do we just help it feel like a connection, Just a one human to another connection. It's a big thing that we focus on, and and it takes a lot of planning.

Adam: 29:20

It's not always the technology. It's generally the what does the ideal experience even look like? Right? For for you, if a gold level customer calls in, what would you want to happen right now? And then we'll we'll help you build that with the tech.

Adam: 29:32

But most of it is planning and questioning just to try and figure out what that ideal experience is because most people haven't had that. Right? They're just trying to get the parity with maybe what they had before, and they're just moving to the cloud for the first time. That's a great goal, But we can also use that as an opportunity to make things better at the same time.

Max: 29:50

You you talk about going from, like, a tier 1 to a tier 2 or escalating support levels. I mean, from a Sharpen standpoint, what's the recommendation for companies who are actually organizing these things? Are you organizing based on, you know, experience level? Are you organizing based on, you know, channel of interaction, you know, voice versus a text based, you know, social media versus you know, what what's what's, like, the ideal layout? And then, and the fall of the second part of that would be, you know, based on that, how many interactions per agent per day, you know, are you, you know, anticipating, you know, within these things?

Adam: 30:23

There's a couple questions floating around in there. I would say that for us, ideal is continuing to try and take advantage of agent pooling as much as you can. Right? So that you can keep your service level low. And we do find that a lot of people from a staffing perspective tend to continue to staff by channel.

Adam: 30:42

Even if you have a a queue that's capable of omnichannel, you're still reserving x number of people to handle chats as they come in or emails as they come in. And whether that's a limit of your WFM or not, it's good from a skills based perspective. So we we love to say that you can pull everybody into the same queue, and that's great, but there's a lot of soft skill difference between someone on the phone and someone that's working on emails. Right? And there may be great reasons from a ramp up perspective that you might only have them handle certain channels.

Adam: 31:13

So we try and at least expose that if you have a group of agents that can do it all, that's wonderful. But we spent the last 30 minutes talking about how hard it is to train up those agents. Right? And so it's not always practical, and that that makes it hard. It's kind of the thing that you shoot for, and we would say, ideally, you have one queue to rule them all, and you can split up these interactions based off of skills or based off of SLAs that you might have.

Adam: 31:38

But the reality is it may make sense to stair step your agents in based off of channel, and that's okay too. So so we can do that. So that's that's generally one of the things that we see there is just splitting it up based off of channel, and then that helps people from a staffing perspective. That way, they're not thinking about the concurrency and utilization of to your second question, how many interactions might they take? It's really different on chat compared to phone calls.

Adam: 32:05

And even the type of queue it's in yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So it's for for us, it's less a total number of interactions, and it's this balance between occupancy and then what we would call just busyness, that time in between brand new interactions. Because you might be doing after call work that relates to those interactions and still be technically, your occupancy might not show that depending on your status.

Adam: 32:32

But if, basically, as soon as you get off a call, you get another one, that really weighs on a person after a while. And so you have those efficiency busy metrics, and we we tend to counterbalance those with, like, a metric that we call active contact resolution is basically an agent specific version of s FCR. And so, you know, first contact resolution is something that you shoot for in the call center. An agent, though, can shoot for this active contact resolution, which is simply saying if someone reaches out to me, they shouldn't have to reach back out in a set amount of time. And so we spend a lot of time counterbalancing these efficiency metrics with something like ACR so that you're trying to ensure that you're not driving callbacks, which just lead to more busyness and, you know, higher SLAs and all the stuff that we know comes with something like first contact resolution.

Adam: 33:23

So to to actually answer your question, there's not a set number that we really drive towards. It's really a at what point do you start losing quality based off of those agents handling those interactions. And the quality, because we can measure that on every single call and it's not just off of that, you know, 12% of people that submit a CSAT, that's something that we spend a lot of time with our data science team trending and mapping over time. How do we ensure that the behaviors that drive positive ACR continue to emerge so that the overall callbacks, you know, become less. The the overall wait times become less due to less callbacks.

Adam: 34:02

It just has a really great trickle effect on all down the line.

Max: 34:06

My product nerd stuff just went like, light bulbs started going crazy over here. And so so really I I think the key key statement you hear it made in this whole thing became driving positive ACR behaviors. In the recent past, this would be trying to build reporting that would actually say, okay. What's, I mean, so what what metrics you were monitoring in your call in your contact center and then what metrics and what KPIs you were actually trying to drive to. Right?

Max: 34:35

So now if you start talking about, like, positive, you know, you know, positive ACR behaviors. Right? You know, I've actually taking that but then being predictive to it. So is is this something where we're talking about being able to actually start modeling and dynamically change you know, because, like, there's, like, what what's what's the what's what I'm looking at here. So if I'm on a really long call, I need a few moments.

Max: 34:55

Like, my brain is just mush afterwards. When we're done with this recording, my brain's gonna be mush for a little bit. I'm gonna take my dog out for a walk, and I'm just gonna reset. Right? There is a certain level of, like, based on what what kind of, you know, conversation I was in that either need more time or less time.

Max: 35:08

And that I would imagine is relatively I mean, there might be some some commonalities between people, but I there's probably some, you know, bigger uniqueness. And and I kinda wonder about, like, this from a, like, a data science but, like, an AI or ML standpoint of, like, when does it start getting exposed to say, hey. You know, Bob needs 4 minutes on average, and he has the best efficiency at 4 minutes, and Sally needs 7 minutes, and John needs 2 minutes, and and Jack is fantastic. He's got a phenomenal ACR but you know he needs 9 minutes in between calls but it's okay because you know it's a single call resolution every time it hits him. He just needs 9 minutes.

Max: 35:41

Dude just needs some time in between to get peak efficiency. So I mean is this starting to implement, you know, come into these platforms where, you know, per agent kind of intelligence and behavioral not I was a behavioral changes but actually just like platform modifications of being aware of this. I mean are we at that point now?

Adam: 35:59

We we are. And so we're thinking about things very similarly. So I like that your product nerd light bulbs went off, and you're describing the things that I talk about with our data science team because that means that we're triangulating on the same things from different perspectives. So we are we are looking at those types of things now and and sprinkling those thoughts in. We're not there yet.

Adam: 36:23

They can be, but we're sprinkling those things in to say, hey. Based off of the busyness that's occurring there with Max, like, hey, supervisor. You should give Max a quick 5. Right? And so it's it's starting again to point back to the supervisor to be the driving factor so that they can interject and have a conversation.

Adam: 36:41

So we're we're looking at things like that or or even just routing specifically based off of ACR. Now you get channel specific active contact resolution and queue specific active contact resolution to effectively say, of the times that I am in this queue, do I do what is generally asked of me? Right? Do I hit the the quote KPIs that are there? They might be KPIs.

Adam: 37:05

They might be other behaviors that occur. But you you start to get, like, a batting average that occurs. So now we're not just saying, hey. You need 2 people in that queue this afternoon. It's based off of the types of interactions.

Adam: 37:16

You should put Max there because Max is really great with, you know, the types of interactions that you're getting in that queue or that we should give preferential routing to Max based off of his busyness and his ACR over someone like Adam who is coming up to speed on this type of interaction. So using these various data points right now to create awareness, but in the future to make decisions. Right? We're we're creating that awareness for the supervisors right now, but to actually just layer that in is is definitely what gets us excited. So when we talk about turning, you know, machine learning inward and thinking about the agent experience, those are all the facets that we're thinking about.

Adam: 37:56

Yes. The customer experience side is incredibly important, but it just feels like most people are focused just on the customer and that containment that we all try and get ourselves out of instead of how do we use technology to drive the right ACR behaviors.

Max: 38:11

This is good. We can talk about this for a long time. Okay. Let's go down this road. I've had 2 relevant experiences recently.

Max: 38:17

I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna share 2 experiences. I'm gonna tie it into a story. I'm I'm, purchasing, you know, something for my house. And, you know, benign. I need a service.

Max: 38:25

Right? So you go through and you start looking and you start interacting with with service providers and and maybe they want you to chat a line. But I like to call. Right? If I get to a certain point, I can't find something.

Max: 38:34

I just I like to call. I'm old. I'm at that point where I actually call. I'm not, you know, I'm not millennials, gen z obviously. You know, now I think about this because I called one company and, the person answered the phone and the interaction was something like hey I'm looking for x y you know x or y and and it was it was oh you know I I don't I'm gonna paraphrase their response.

Max: 38:53

The response is something along the lines of like, you know, oh John's in charge of that I can give you his voice mail you know And, like, boom, the voice mail gone. Now there was follow-up questions that I had. There was follow-up things that I had. And I parallel that with another experience I had with a company where I called, it rang. I've gotten to the sales queue, you know, to to speak to somebody.

Max: 39:12

It rang. It got to voice mail. I was busy. I didn't feel like leaving a long voice mail. I hung up the phone on that voice mail.

Max: 39:18

And, you know, 60 to 70 seconds later, I get a ring back, recognize the number because it was just I just called it. I answer the phone. This this woman says, hi. You just, you know, you just you just called. I missed your call.

Max: 39:28

I'm really sorry. You know, how can I help you? And it was like, oh, I mean, first off, you suck you surprise and delight was a term you used earlier. I'll use it. It was like shocking to me.

Max: 39:36

It was like, oh, you know, what do you mean you saw I missed call and you called me back. Right? And then it was well, I'm I'm trying to do x I'm trying to do this thing. And and she says, oh, okay. Hold on.

Max: 39:44

This person is the person you need to talk to about that. They're an expert in this. Hold on a second. It wasn't like I'm gonna transfer you or send you to voice mails. I'm gonna I'm going to I'm gonna hold I'm gonna hold on a second.

Max: 39:53

Right? So she comes back and she says he's not available right now. You know, he's busy. Can I take your information? What's your name?

Max: 39:59

What's your phone number? What's your email address? What are you calling about? How can we help you? Is there anything else we can help you about?

Max: 40:04

We've got this other stuff that maybe could help you. You wanna talk about that as well. And, like, just, like, went through this, like, Mary, you know, had me on the phone for, like, 4 or 5 minutes and just kinda went through this entire thing with me of, like, what else can we help you with? And what about this thing? And what about this other thing and this other thing and this other thing?

Max: 40:17

And, like and then the call ends with her saying something to me along the lines of, I'm gonna follow-up and make sure that John call you know, this guy calls you back. And if not, I'm gonna follow-up with you directly. Right? And I like I hang up the phone. I'm like, where did this just come from?

Max: 40:28

Like, it was so out of left field for me. And so the story, you know, and and where I wanna come back to with you on this was, you know, talking with, an executive who's driving revenue and trying to get people to capture revenue. Right? So there is a marketing person who's trying to drive, who's spending money to try to make me make that phone call. And obviously, they don't want the first experience to happen.

Max: 40:49

They want the second experience to happen because I'm now a customer and it's spending a ridiculous amount of money with a second company way more than I I intended in the first place because, like, I'm all in. Right? How do you help your customers create this behavior with your agents? And then also and I think it's it's when you talk about the supervisor because I mean, what's the supervisor agent ratio? I mean, 10, 15, 20.

Max: 41:11

I mean, what how many how many agents to a supervisor? How does a supervisor then monitor this at scale? You know? And and it's if if an agent has a 100 interactions a day and they've got 15 agents for a supervisor as a that supervisor is maintaining 1500 interactions in a given day. How do you make sure every phone call or every interaction actually has that level that you want either helping the agent learn how to do these things or then actually prompting the supervisor and saying, hey.

Max: 41:37

This is going on. You should be aware of it or you should listen to these calls because you can't you can't listen to 1500 phone calls a day per supervisor. Right? Like, you just can't do it. People pretend they do it, but they don't.

Max: 41:45

How do you think about this? How does Sharpen think about this? What what's available now? And and how does that company that's spending a fortune trying to acquire a new customer, like those 2 companies were trying to acquire me, end up in a situation that actually captures not only just captures that revenue. Like, yeah.

Max: 41:58

You know, I can sell you tires, but, like, oh, I could do tires and and oil change, and we can do your service. You know, it's a it's a special going on for for this. I'm like, oh, you have any other cars? Oh, you have another car. What do you need for your other car?

Max: 42:07

You know? Having this other thing happen for them. So that's a lot of lineup.

Adam: 42:11

Oh, man. There's so many questions in there.

Max: 42:12

There's a ton of questions in there, but it's relevant because it just happened to me, like, 3 days ago. So

Adam: 42:17

Yeah. Okay. I'm scribbling a bunch of stuff down here so we can try and try and knock them out. So I think it's all just flashing through my brain really quickly. I I I keep saying a phrase that probably does sound really buzzwordy, and I don't mean it that way.

Adam: 42:32

But to create a a unique experience really just means, in my mind, an experience that was maybe positively unexpected. Right? The the person that you talked to when she called you back was a a positively unexpected thing, and those are things that you can do right now just based off of automation. Right? We can see if we just boil this down to its really basic pieces and parts, a call came into this queue that call it a new sales queue.

Adam: 43:04

It was abandoned. We should trigger that up as a callback or put it in a campaign for someone to follow back up like maybe she did. Those are those are simple things that you can do with automation that you could do today, And and that's just one piece of it.

Max: 43:20

Is that something that you're helping customers with? Because, like, if if somebody is programming, you know, and and designing this, if they've never had that experience before, would they do it? You know? So, like, how much how much of this is you guys just, like, by default prompting? Like, hey.

Max: 43:34

You're configuring this queue. This thing is just auto selected to do here.

Adam: 43:38

Yes. That's that's why earlier when I was saying so much of it comes back to, like, just having that human kind of consultative is such a trite word. Right? But everyone's just focused on rebuilding the tech that they had versus saying, pretend that the technology doesn't exist. If someone calls into this queue, what should happen?

Adam: 43:56

If you miss the call, what should happen? And in that moment, that that company that you called, they'd say, well, let's call them back. Right? If someone needs help, let's let's call them back. And then you use technology to help them do that thing.

Adam: 44:08

Or, you know, you take it a step further in a very similar a very similar use case if somebody leaves you you know, you get negative feedback. Supervisor, what do you want to happen? Say, well, let me see all those so that I can, you know, do an outreach and reach out to them. And instead of the supervisor pulling all those things, you use data that you have either within Sharpen or come you know, combined with your your CRM or database to say, why don't we just make a a campaign out of that? And should we do it in an agentless fashion so that we we send emails to those people?

Adam: 44:43

Or can we tee up a supervisor to automatically call those people? You start thinking about what was the thing that you would do if you were one human to another, and then how do we help you do that with technology? And so you had this really wonderful experience. And, effectively, if we if we undersell it and we remove all the the awesome soft skills, it's it's a callback. Right?

Adam: 45:04

And and so then you're you're strategically placing a callback in a certain amount of time, and maybe if it doesn't happen in that certain amount of time, you escalate it into another queue with higher availability. You can do all sorts of things, but it all comes back to you're sitting here right now, and you miss a call. What do you want to happen? And then you you design the technology around that. And so part of it is just the technology needs to get out of the way so that you can train your agents on those soft skills.

Adam: 45:31

Right? So if the technology is surfacing these things that are important, now you know what to train people on to be important. So when you say that she wasn't the one that could help you on x, but she had the answers for y, z, and a, b, c, that happens when you can trust the technology you're using to focus on soft skills instead of process and fighting different screens. Right? It it's the byproduct of something like ACR.

Adam: 45:54

When you have less callback, you get manned hours back, and you could choose to staff differently with that, and some companies do. But you could also then have time to do the off the phone training that you never get to do because you now have SLAs that are more in band. And so some of that just comes from the right behaviors upfront so that now you can spend more time doing that human soft skill training or that cross selling training that, unfortunately, most contact centers don't end up with enough time for. Right? It turns into elearning that you never get to do because you're in the queue all the time.

Adam: 46:26

And so getting the tech out of the way with automation helps to train up those those agents just inherently because now you have it's like, you know, found money that you've hidden somewhere in your in your bedroom, and you find it and you forgot about it. You now have found time that you can use to invest back into your agents. And so from a supervisor monitoring perspective, that comes from determining what those right behaviors are, and we'll just use active contact resolution as an example. Right? You can see that on every single call.

Adam: 47:01

But if you look for the outliers and you say show me the calls in our cancellation queue that, you know, maybe occur for Adam because Adam's average handle time is double what everyone else's is, but his ACR is really high. So when we look at it in the grand scheme of things, his total talk time over the life of that issue is less because he doesn't have 3 callbacks that have to come in because people are just trying to rush customers off the phone. So you're summarizing and collating data to try and determine the right trends. And just like earlier when I was mentioning we could, you know, tag a supervisor to listen into a call, the way that I generally describe this to people is that's an in the moment action, but you could also just tag the interaction. Right?

Adam: 47:43

It's like your your cell phone. You get a notification, and if you miss them, you swipe down and you see all the ones that you missed. You won't always be able to insert yourself into a coaching moment. But if we tag it and then you look at a report that shows you all of the outliers to say this one had excessive transfers, this one had, you know, excessive talk time or too short of a call because we have agents hanging up on customers to try and gain their handle time. Right?

Adam: 48:08

You can see the outliers and you coach to the outliers so that you're not listening to 1500 calls. You're using ACR for a measure of quality, and then you have the subset of calls that said something was out of whack here. These would all be good ones to pull from based on the current initiatives that you have in your training towards so that you can actually have a good developmental conversation with an agent. There's a lot of words, but it all it all kind of comes back to that focus.

Max: 48:34

One of the, you know, advantages of this as a service world is it's relatively easy to go out and acquire technology and then implement. Your time to implementation isn't constricted based on something being physically installed anymore. Right? You've got a browser. You've got an Internet connection.

Max: 48:51

You've got a headset. You're pretty much good to go with almost anything you could you you know that you need. Right? But contact center becomes a really complicated sort of thing, you know. And and you talk we you know, just this one example of, like, hey, you know, do you wanna call somebody back if they abandon their call, you know, in the queue?

Max: 49:07

Right? Like, that may or may not be important to you. It probably is important. Somebody if somebody took the time to get into a queue and, waited there for a while, they wanted to talk to you. You know?

Max: 49:15

And and and I feel like in a lot of cases now, the the bar is set so low that to create these unexpected experiences that you say is, like, it it really doesn't require a lot. Like, I got a callback and I was blown away. Like, could not completely blown away. Completely like, what the heck just happened here? Because they called me back.

Max: 49:39

It was like, what is this? So that's I think that's really interesting. I mean, the the the barrier of the bar to compete really and excel in in customer experiences feels like it's so low in today's world that just doing a little bit just really sets sets a big difference. You know, what is reasonable for implementation? I mean, I I would imagine that if somebody said came to you and said, hey.

Max: 49:59

We've got this, like, dinosaur that we wanna get off of that's running in our office right now. We decided to go to something modern, and let's go to the cloud. Let's just copy what we're currently doing. I mean, when I hear those quite those things, I'm like, no. No.

Max: 50:09

No. No. No. We don't wanna do that.

Adam: 50:11

That was what went through my head when you said all those things.

Max: 50:14

You know, what's an expectation in terms of time? You know, how like, there's there's a selection process I wanna talk a little bit about. But, you know, after a contract is executed, you know, you've done some work upfront. There's some solution design upfront, but then you get into the real meat and potatoes of this. You know, what's what's, you know, you know, if a company's got 200 agents, you know, making making a new and a lot of interactions.

Max: 50:34

I mean, that's a there's a lot of stuff going on there. Right? What is that timeline? What does that expectation look like for you know? And and, you know, how do you how do you help people in this process?

Max: 50:42

And and how do you I don't wanna say speed it up, but just make it as efficient as possible.

Adam: 50:46

Yeah. We, not surprisingly based off the rest of our combo, we we use a lot of human intervention to try and speed the process up. Technology wise, you can you can move really rapidly. You know, if somebody came to us and said, I've got 200 agents. I wanna move, and I have all of my flows built out.

Adam: 51:05

I know exactly the experience that I wanna give to my customers, what queues they need to go to. That can go really rapidly. Right? Those are just clicks and toggle switches. The the hardest part of a move is to to pump the brakes a little bit and say, well, what could it be?

Adam: 51:20

Right? We're we're not just shooting for parity. If we're shooting for parity and we've had some customers that were in a bind and said, you know, our our on prem system is end of life in 30 days. We gotta get off. Right?

Adam: 51:33

Like and and we have those, and we we can we can support those because it's, you know, well, let's upload your CSV list of users. Let's build out the flow. Like, it it, again, is is clicks and toggle switches. It generally takes, I would say, 45 to 60 days, to really kind of slow down and say, you know, why do we need the experience to be this way? What positive impact does it have for your customers and your agents?

Adam: 52:01

Really just take some extra time. Right? Assuming you have all those ducks in a row, I mean, you're talking days or weeks to get set up, but the longest part is let's have combos about what this could and should be. And just to your point earlier, tools that you may not have even known that you had. Right?

Adam: 52:17

And and, unfortunately, for a lot of our customers, that's just layering in new channels. Right? To say if somebody is like, do you wanna trigger an automated callback is, like like, blows people minds. Right? And so even just interjecting those things, usually, parity is not what you want.

Adam: 52:33

There was something else causing you to move. And it wasn't just that the software was end of life. It was that there's something else that you would like to be able to do, and we need to design that that experience out a little bit and leverage the tech that's just built in.

Max: 52:46

Let's talk a little bit about your customer's journey and how they end up with Sharpen. You you know, service discovery and supplier discovery is is is complicated. There's a lot of noise out there for, you know, for buyers to to to weed through. Right? And maybe they're interacting with somebody and then they find out of this term CCaaS which, you know, nobody in the day to day world is going out there and saying I need some CCaaS solution.

Max: 53:06

Right? Let's say they discover CCaaS and that takes them to Gartner and friends at Gartner produces magic quadrant. Right? And there's the 2022 magic quadrant has 9 or 10 suppliers and there's probably 7 that I would never touch, you know, like within that list. I won't name names.

Max: 53:20

But, you know, if somebody's going through this process and saying, okay. We actually know we need to have a contact center. We need a platform. We have 1. We wanna improve it.

Max: 53:30

Right? You know, what is what is that journey look like for them? Are they coming? Are you are you typically taking people that are still on prem and and converting them? Or is this coming, you know, do you have, like, excellent targets where, you know, unfortunately, they signed with somebody else and didn't get where they needed to go, and and then they, you know, end up coming back around and you find them as, you know, a second pass?

Max: 53:48

Like, what's your what's your secret sauce? You're, like, you know, shining moment that really becomes you know, when when you get into this process, the light bulb goes off. They go, oh, this is exactly what I need. Fantastic. We're we're done.

Max: 53:58

Let's do this.

Adam: 53:59

So I would say it's about 6040 in terms of on prem versus what I might call, cloud 1.0 in terms of, like, I made my move to the cloud. Right? And and cloud 1.0 not in terms of, you know, the other players out there, but just my first swing at moving to the cloud. We do a decent number of that first iteration of cloud replacements, but there are still a lot of people that are on prem. And and like I mentioned, it turns into a combo of, oh, jeez.

Adam: 54:30

Our our software is end of life or I can't get maintenance on it anymore, and that becomes a real, you know, catalyst that is a an extra layer of pressure for a move that you may not have wanted to do in the first place. Right? And so we do spend a lot of time helping people there. Our tool is really flexible, and it's mostly because I'm not that smart. And so when you think about, like, development work to go into something, I am always the litmus test of, you know, those questions I was asking earlier of, well, if someone calls in and you miss it, what do you want to happen?

Adam: 55:04

I know the answer to those questions. But I don't know PHP or Java or need to go custom code something. I need to be able to just do it in the application. Right? If you were to say, Adam, what do you want to happen?

Adam: 55:15

I go, well, if I miss a call in that queue, I want a callback to occur. And I should be able to go in and drive that. And that's a big differentiator when it comes to Sharpen is that is how everything kind of happens. You go in, and I mentioned earlier, you you do clicks and toggle switches. It's not code that you're writing.

Adam: 55:33

It's the ability to just see it, visualize it from the beginning of the interaction when you're going through your IVA to on the interaction, and what do you want that experience to be for your agents or supervisors all the way through to the back end reporting. And then it becomes cyclical because you're using that back end reporting to make decisions in the IVR. Right? And it just keeps circling on itself. But all of that doesn't require you to be able to do any sort of coding because I'm not personally smart enough to do any coding.

Adam: 56:03

But I know what I wanna build. And so that's one of the things that people get excited about is to say, you can do this thing. Right? You may have had to reach out to IT in the past or your in house development team. If you wanna go in and change the initial prompt because you're gonna be out of office or close for the holiday, you can go in and do that.

Adam: 56:22

It's it's just a drop down. It's not something that you have to go in and do custom work on, and it's amazing the amount of times that we hear that to say, well, I want this new report to show me this data. You go, okay. Great. Well, let's let's just go build it.

Adam: 56:36

And they're then then they kind of recoil, and they go, well, my last company, I had to like, I had a 3 day turnaround time on a custom report. And we go, that that's not how it works here. Right? It's it's your data. We wanna help you surface it in a way that's meaningful.

Adam: 56:49

And if that's a report, wonderful. If that's an outcome, like a bot that we attach to that data, that's great. If you wanna use it in your IVR, that's all great. But we want you to be able to do it. And so this idea of, you know, we mentioned earlier the agent empowerment, we're thinking about the same things for admins.

Adam: 57:07

What does the admin empowerment look like to say you shouldn't have to reach out to someone else to add a new user or to move them in a different user group or create a new queue? You should just be able to make that stuff. And so we spend a lot of time focusing on that, and I think that's refreshing to people. They like being able to just make those changes because inherently, they know what they wanna do, and it's kind of frustrating to just have to go through the red tape and reach out to someone to do it for you. So there's no forced professional services there or, you know, any of those types of things.

Adam: 57:36

We absolutely help you. But once you get up and running, you can you can drive the system, and we're just trying to be there as your driver's ed coach to help you figure out how you're driving.

Max: 57:46

As the CPO, you get to sit in a very interesting seat. And part of that seat is trying to figure out what's coming in the future. Right? And, you know, so what what are you I mean, you could we could, you could answer this both from a Sharpen perspective and an industry, you know, perspective. But over the course of the next, you know, rest of 2023, 2024 I can't believe I've just said 2024 out loud.

Max: 58:12

What, what are you excited for? Like what what's what what are you seeing here that, you know that that that's you know really jazzed to you know for it to change or shift or be be you know common place or, you know, take take that up for as, you know, what you would.

Adam: 58:30

We talked about it a lot earlier, so I don't wanna I don't wanna retread it too much. But I I am really excited about the various AI technologies that are emerging because I think it's going to lead to that focus back to the agent. There's just a very human AI driven story that emerges there where the human element is the byproduct of it. And how are you using that AI internally? And that might be, you know, to summarize call recordings so that the agents don't have to take as many note.

Adam: 58:58

You know, there's stuff like that out there, but I think AI will catch up from a customer service standpoint and force us to focus back on people. And I I just find that fascinating just as just as a person. You know, there's this technology that emerges, but I think the byproduct is that we're gonna pay a lot more attention to people and their growth and their development. And there's a lot of really fun stuff out there. AI is maturing at an unbelievably rapid rate.

Adam: 59:24

Right? We used to measure things in years. You know? I was listening to a podcast the other day, and they used the iPhone as an example to say, you know, we got new iPhones every year, and then technology started getting down to potentially every month. And now some of these AI algorithms are, you know, in days or weeks that you're starting to see updates to things like chat GPT, and that's all that's all wonderful and fascinating.

Adam: 59:47

And we should take advantage and use it, but it will still drive the focus back to people. And I think that's that's the thing. If there's one thing that you focus on, it's how do you focus back on your people. And even just playing that silly word association game, swap the word customer and agent out for a customer initiative you have. You know, plenty of people do voice of the customer.

Adam: 01:00:07

But when you think of voice of the agent that, you know, e n p s, it's maybe measured once a year if we're being honest with ourselves. Right? But we we we could do more with that to focus on the growth and development of our people. So just that silly word association game, I just find fascinating and it's ironic that AI technology will cause us to focus back on people.

Max: 01:00:26

I don't know I don't know what the current status. You said this earlier, you know, most common job in the US is is contact center related. I mean, it's a massive percentage of the population and the churn rates are massive and the cost to hire train and and then, you know, lose replaced higher chain. I mean, that hamster wheel is terrible. You know, it's always felt like a really easy obvious no brainer that when you're presented with that data and you actually start digging into it.

Max: 01:00:53

It's you know, of just attack that as a solve that issue first. Right? And and everything else kinda comes up, you know, with it.

Adam: 01:01:01

But it's and it's unfortunately something that we just kind of accept. Right? You you hear the term revolving door in a contact center, and it becomes the game of how do we staff fast enough versus how do we stop them from leaving. And we're trying to focus on how do you how do you stop them from leaving. How do you truly empower them to do their job?

Adam: 01:01:22

And it it generally comes back to your supervisor, and it comes back to the tools you use being reliable. And I know that sounds silly, but you haven't fidgeted with your microphone and wondered whether your microphone was gonna do its job. You've just been talking. Right? And that's how technology should feel is when the technology just gets out of the way, then you can have these more human driven interactions.

Max: 01:01:44

Adam, this is a fascinating conversation for me. Any anything that we did not cover. I mean, we talked about integrations and APIs and, you know, I mean, we didn't spell it out but, correct me if I'm wrong. Right? Salesforce, Zendesk, Microsoft Teams, ServiceNow, all very, you know, primary platforms for for Sharpen.

Max: 01:02:05

Obviously, you know, we talk about browser based interactions and and not installing software and desktops anymore. So, any any I mean, did I miss anything there? Any corrections you wanna throw out at me?

Adam: 01:02:17

I guess punctuate all of that through the data that you have. Right? Part of the benefit of us working in interactions and not channels is that the breadth of data that we have spans across all those different channels. You're not getting this one dataset for phone calls and a separate dataset for SMS, and that opens a lot of doors. You know, just being able to have clean data and then choose to do things with it, whether it's building a report or triggering an automation, it all starts with good clean data.

Adam: 01:02:46

And so you can push and pull data from a CRM, but there's plenty of data that resides in Sharpen that we want you to combine with something else to make decisions. We don't just want you drowning in data. We wanna use that data to actually drive whether that's those unique experiences or just some day to day impact that you would I I

Max: 01:03:04

loved your comment earlier talking about ACR as you're defining metric to track and not necessarily talk time or, you know, average talk time or just, you know, these other things because it it changes the behavior a lot. Right? Where, you know, if your KPI is how long was your average interact, you know, talk time and your and an age is being judged on that and is an incentivized to, you know, drive a different behavior or that behavior becomes negative and, you know, for everybody involved versus actually being able to keep track of, you know, ACR across different interactions of different channels and be, you know, be really cognizant of, you know, what what would what do we invest to actually take care of our caller, our customer, you know, here and and looking at that I mean that seems like a relatively subtle shift but the implications of it are pretty significant. And, I I really I really I really liked that and talking about that and and exploring that a little bit with you.

Adam: 01:03:58

Yeah. And it is it is fascinating when you really start digging in. Like, it it it shocked us when we saw it. Things that we thought would lead to worse CSAT, because ACR and CSAT are almost on a on a 45 degree angle. If you if you have solid ACR, your CSAT tends to go up.

Adam: 01:04:16

And so we were really surprised when we were kind of coming up with ACR and measuring it, and it was born out of, you know, this experience that a coworker had. And he was like, you know, I called in 7 times, but that 7th person took care of me. And if we were to associate FCR, that 7th person would have failed, but they did the right thing. Right? And so in that moment, like you just described, 7 calls that led into it.

Adam: 01:04:41

Think of the total handle time. So that's one of the things that we're paying attention to is total talk time, total handle time for a a grouping, like a true interaction spans more than just a channel. Right? The total handle time there is way worse than Adam spending double the handle time metric and that person never calling back in. Right?

Adam: 01:05:03

So it doesn't mean that that's always correct that longer longer calls equal higher ACR, but it's just we're trying to just inject these these questions to you to say, let's let's look at this over time, right, and see what is the number of callbacks that we have and what does the total handle time look like compared to people with really high active contact resolution because you might be surprised. And some of our customers were, and they started, you know, to really bring this full circle when we say we're focused on the agent experience and agent empowerment. They actually started bonusing their agents off of ACR, and it got rid of the other metrics. And so for us, it was like, woah. We did it.

Adam: 01:05:44

Like, we started, like, literally with all that things like handle time actually didn't impact ACR. A longer handle time gave you a better, you know, better chance of having good CSAT, but what we saw was transfers almost always made ACR fail. And so we started looking at those behaviors, and that's why that example I gave earlier of this has been transferred 4 times. Do you need help? It's because that was born out of us going, when it's transferred 3 or more times, usually ACR fails.

Adam: 01:06:11

We should probably make sure we help someone.

Max: 01:06:13

I I start losing my cool on, like, the 3rd or 4th transfer, and I've I've and I I'll get into it. And I feel bad for the person I get transferred to too, and I'll be like, listen. I know it's not you. You're just the 4th person, so I'm sorry. Like, I'm not in a good place right now.

Max: 01:06:26

And I'll just lay it out there. Like, I'm gonna try not to swear and cuss at you right now, but I'm not in a good place because you're my 4th. You know? Like, for the love of God, can you help me here? Bonuses based on ACR, man.

Adam: 01:06:36

Isn't that fascinating?

Max: 01:06:38

I I I mean, talk about, first off, how, you know, progressive that culture shift with that organization must have been to have gotten to that point. I mean, that's a big that is a big shift for culture and that and that organization to, you know, change the metrics and actually track ACR and and then to follow that up based on bonusing it based on ACR. And everybody talks about gamification and scoreboards and leaderboards, all these different things. And if you say no. No.

Max: 01:07:03

No. No. Yeah. We're gonna do all those things. But, like, now here's cold hard cash in your hand based on, you know, this metric.

Max: 01:07:10

Fascinating case study, you know, in in in that to talk about. I mean, it's gotta be crazy to get into the, you know, what what that has actually been like for for them and and and their I mean again what their operations are, what their relationships with their customers are, what their customer satisfaction with them is, what their life cycle is, what their revenue is like, what their retention is like. I mean these are all I I you know, probably you could see all of them going in the right direction if they've actually gotten to that point.

Adam: 01:07:36

Yeah. Absolutely. And and that's the you know, it was a very I say subtle. It wasn't that subtle. It was a very conscious decision that they made.

Adam: 01:07:44

Right? But, you know, you have the Simon Sinek. They know people buy from people that they believe in. Right? People believe the why, and our why has always been to focus on the agent.

Adam: 01:07:55

And it was really great to see some of these customers make that shift and focus on not only the customer experience but the agent experience because there's so much data out there that says that if you have a happy agent, you have happy customers. And there are a lot of facets that go into a happy agent, but dollars and cents can speak volumes. That doesn't stop them from being upset about other things. But if you have the right coaching and you feel well recognized, not necessarily through gamification. Right?

Adam: 01:08:23

There's some really wonderful things that happen with gamification. But if you feel recognized, if you know you're doing a good job and other people know it, and you have good growth and development, and you end up getting some sort of financial recognition, makes you feel pretty darn great. Right? That's that's what you want in your in your job to be fulfilled, and that helps the revolving door. It doesn't stop it.

Adam: 01:08:42

There's always factors that lead to people leaving any job, but it it absolutely helps empower those agents. And we need more of that for when AI is handling all the easy questions upfront.

Max: 01:08:53

Adam, this has been fantastic. Thank you for a fascinating conversation and, you know, dive into Sharpen in the world of CX and agent empowerment today. Really, I cannot cannot say thank you enough. This has got my brain spinning in lots of different directions right now that's gonna take me a while to catch up on.

Adam: 01:09:12

Well, when you go for a walk with Basil afterwards to relax your brain, you definitely think of some more things. I would love to chat again. Thank you for having me on. I love talking about this type of stuff where we keep the the agent at the center, and you just look for ways to use technology to elevate them.

Max: 01:09:29

Again, that was a IT broker tech tech deep dive, with Adam. Adam's a CPO at Sharpen CX. So if you're looking for and evaluating how to improve your interactions with your customers, Sharpen is probably a good place to start with. I'm, Max Clark and talk to you soon.

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