Learnings from Contact Center Leaders

Transcript

Pete Wright:

Hello everybody and welcome to Connected Knowledge from Upland Software on TruStory FM. I’m Pete Wright, and today, if you’re a contact center leader, we’re talking all about you. What’s going on in your business? How are you handling staffing in an employee’s market? How are you navigating modern metrics? Our own Samantha Middlebrook is here to share her lessons learned from the contact center summit and beyond. Samantha Middlebrook, welcome. Hello.

Samantha Middlebrook:

Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Pete Wright:

I’m excited for this conversation. I feel like the last episode, just a few weeks back, we were talking a lot about some of the technical and human issues that go into contact center management and I feel like you are here to hammer home a lot of these topics with a lot more detail. You serve as the senior director of product marketing and product management in the contact center productivity business unit here at Upland Software. And as such you’ve been speaking with contact center leaders around the world about the issues they face in their centers and you are here therefore to solve all of their problems in one stroke. I cannot wait.

Samantha Middlebrook:

Yes, I’m solving all of the world’s contact center problems just in this short time span, really is the goal.

Pete Wright:

That’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for the magic wand and you are here to wield it. Let’s start with the human side of contact center problems. What are you hearing from contact center leaders talking about their talent?

Samantha Middlebrook:

Yes. So, retaining contact center staff is not a new problem. If we think about five or 10 years ago, contact centers were a completely physical location, entry level job, picking anyone off the street with a heartbeat, it could feel like, at the time, to fill the seats and to get people answering the calls. So doing that is something we’ve been doing since the dawn of contact center time. I guess the challenge that lots of leaders are facing now is, as you mentioned before, it is an employee’s market. So, now for the first time, contact center agents have the right to choose, choose flexibility, choose where they want to work, choose their working hours, and that is creating a very stressful situation in terms of workforce planning and talent acquisition. So that’s what we’re really hearing. It’s almost getting back down to the hygiene 101 of contact centers. How do we get people in the door and once they’re in the door, how do we train and support them so they’re going to stay?

Pete Wright:

Is this a function of the pandemic transition? Is that how we ended up here with the contact center talent having more agency in the market?

Samantha Middlebrook:

I think it’s definitely a byproduct of COVID. I think if we think about the pandemic and if we think glass half full, what did it mean for many of us working? It meant flexibility, but that is a little bit easier to manage when we have economies of scale in the business or the function that we’re working in. So if you are a product manager or a product marketer working at home in between dropping off kids or having your appointments or whatever it is you need to do, it’s pretty easy to manage because it’s a one-to-one relationship. You manage your stakeholders and that’s how you go when you are an organization trying to manage the flow of calls or contact coming into a contact center. When you’re trying to look at trends of interactions and time of day that your customers like to interact with you, then it’s a lot harder to try and manage that time and also provide that flexibility to the agents that they’re asking for.

Pete Wright:

Well, let’s talk about that flexibility. What are the hallmarks of flexibility that agents are asking for and managers are having to contend with?

Samantha Middlebrook:

So in recent conversations that I had, and I think we mentioned the contact center summit, we were there a couple of weeks ago and it just really confirmed some of these conversations we’ve been having with our other customers and people in the market. So the first thing is, as a contact center agent, as I’m going through the job ads, the first thing that I’m looking for is the ability to work from home. And speaking to different contact leaders, different organizations have different, I guess, metrics they’ve put in place or boundaries. So one of the big banks that I spoke to said, “We allow work from home 100% flexibility once you pass one year probation working in the contact center.” And it reminded me of my time working in the contact center so many years ago, more than I would like to admit. I joined a contact center at a large health organization here in Australia and their one year rule wasn’t about flexible working because at that time nobody was working from home. It didn’t matter your job, you just weren’t working from home.

But their one year rule was once you put in the work and you log those hours for one year in the contact center, then you could apply for anywhere else in the business on secondment. And at that time the person providing that HR induction was in a fantastic looking suit and I thought to myself, “I want to work in the corporate division, so I just need to get through that one year time and it will open up the opportunity.” So if we think about now that one year mark is saying, it’s not about you moving throughout the business, but it’s about you having that entry level role and making it work for your lifestyle.

Pete Wright:

I’m trying to rationalize that as a good change. Your one year mark is more flexibility staying in exactly the job you have.

Samantha Middlebrook:

Yeah. So it’s interesting. We’ve got to think about the persona of the contact center agent and are they looking to grow within an organization or are they just happy being the contact center agent and the doer and getting stuff done? So if you think about post pandemic, people have really reassessed what’s important to them and if flexibility is in the top three goals when they’re looking at an employer, then maybe flexibility is just being in the contact center, but choosing the fact that they work a Tuesday to Thursday and they log in the morning and they log out for drop off and then they come back in and that’s what’s important to them.

The other thing from a flexibility perspective is the organizations we’re talking about the ability to one, choose hours but work from anywhere. So if we think about digital nomads and the next generation, and generally speaking, contact centers are a younger generation. The thought of working from anywhere, picking up your laptop and your headset and working from an island, if that’s where you are and that’s where your life’s taking you, then that is a pretty exciting proposition because who doesn’t want to be working beachside and taking those customer calls if they’re still getting paid? It’s a very different gap year than trying to backpack through Europe without any income.

Pete Wright:

Yeah. I mean you might not be hiking the Pacific Crest Trail with your laptop and your headset, but you certainly have flexibility. In the spirit of making the workplace more flexible for the agent, how do we make the agents experience more useful for the organization? Let’s talk about training and development. How is that changing and what are those challenges that operators are finding?

Samantha Middlebrook:

Yeah. So, I mean the really hard part is how do you support somebody remotely? And we’ve seen this through the pandemic. So regardless of your role, it’s been the challenge of how do you induct someone in, how do you make them feel like they’re part of the team? How do you keep a pulse check on how they’re going and how do you make sure they’re performing.

Pete Wright:

Especially if they’re on an island with their headset.

Samantha Middlebrook:

So if we think about contact center, they are very metrics driven. So every call that’s coming in the time to answer the after call work, the hold time, all of that is being tracked. So we need to look at how do we support those agents no matter where they are working. So the tool set that they have available is really important, but also the guidance that we’re providing their leaders in the contact center and the tools that they have to be able to see and listen in and watch what’s happening, not from a big brother perspective, but just from a guidance perspective. And it’s a very fine line.

One of the conversations I was having recently was contact center leaders were asking, “Hey. Do you use screen recordings and are you monitoring absolutely everything that the agent is doing if they’re not working in a physical office?” And the answer was “No.” No, we don’t because it’s about trust and it’s about building trust for the employees so they actually stay and they enjoy working within that contact center. And it’s not that big brother environment, which is what we thought about working from home was pre-pandemic.

Pete Wright:

Well, and that’s exactly what we’re hearing when you see as the pandemic monitoring shifts from an IT perspective that the number one sellers on Amazon are mouse jiggles. So it looks like your mouse doesn’t stop moving for more than a minute. So those kinds of things, like it’s a relief to hear that we’re pushing back on some of those big brotherish efforts.

Samantha Middlebrook:

And it’s definitely a journey. If I think about the conversations I was having with some of these customers a couple of years ago around digital transformation and really the uptake of newer technologies, they were very, very change resistant. So change resistant out of fear, not understanding how things would work and what the flow on effect would be. So I think that all of that, we’ve learned to deal with things and be a little bit more relaxed in business. One of the people that I was speaking to the other day, they were talking about, it’s almost encouraged now, not encouraged, but it’s completely acceptable if you’ve got a contact center agent working from home.

And there’s a little bit of background noise because they’re finding from their customer experience perspective, it’s making their agents seem like humans because they are humans. And it’s less about the white noise. I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a call with an agent and they don’t even put you on hold, they actually mute you because they’re so freaked out. They’re trying to work out what do they say and what do they do, and it’s a very bad practice, but they mute you and it drops the sound and for the customer on the end of the line, they’re just stuck in this vortex.

Pete Wright:

It feels like you were hung up of.

Samantha Middlebrook:

And if you think about, if they’re in the middle of a really challenging experience, maybe some type of bill has been overdrawn or they’re being charged for a healthcare piece that they didn’t think, going into that cone of silence is very off-putting and scary. So it’s quite an interesting observation saying, “Hey. If there’s a dog barking now,” we’re actually finding that the customer is connecting a little bit more to that agent because they’re really connecting human to human, which is a really nice piece as well, I think from experience.

Pete Wright:

That’s lovely. Actually, that is a lovely sentiment. Let’s talk. You’ve already mentioned metrics and speaking in terms of metrics and forecasting. How do you do that coming out of the last two or three years? How are organizations being forced to shift the way they think about forecasting?

Samantha Middlebrook:

I think we are still working out what the baseline is. One of the customers I was speaking to the other day said, “We feel like we’ve lost two years of data.” And I thought, “Wow. That is significant.” Because the one thing that was sure in contact land for 10 or 15 years was you understand your call volumes and you understand how many people you need to answer the calls in a timely matter, and that was call center 101. But now we’ve got these really large organizations saying, “Hey, we feel like we’re flying a bit blind.” And then the other complexity on top of that, Pete, is overlaying the push to digital. So it’s easy to… It’s easy. It’s easier to try and manage volume when you’re thinking about a single channel, how often is that phone going to ring and how many agents do I need?

But what happens if you add chat into that and now you’ve got a one to many relationship that you need to keep up? Chat agents, generally they’re interacting with four to eight different customers at any one time. So now you’ve got the phone channel and now you’ve got chat. And if you’ve introduced a self-service option, like a chatbot, the other thing that we’re seeing as well is there’s no surety that the inquiry is going to finish in that channel. So what I mean by that is, Pete, let’s say you lose your credit card and you need to replace it. This trend that we’re seeing is this reassurance trend is how I’m going to describe it.

So let’s say Pete, you’ve lost your credit card and you go onto the website and you authenticate into your login and you say, “Hey, I can see everything that I need to do. I am going to cancel my credit card. I’ve authenticated. I know I’m in my bank, I’ve logged in, I can see that I’ve canceled my credit card. I can see that it says that a new card is going to be issued. Hey, you’ve even received a text message verifying the interaction with the SLA.” What’s happening though now Pete is many, many customers are still going back to the voice channel and calling up to say, “Hey, I just canceled my credit card, I got the text, but can you reassure me that I’ve canceled my credit card?”

So that’s throwing a complete spanner in the works because again, if we think about volumes and we think about trends and how we monitor what’s going to come in, one of the banks said to me, the lost credit card is the simple transaction. It’s high volume, it’s low value. It’s something we know we can self-serve. And I know that’s what I’ve recommended to customers over many years when we’re saying bring knowledge into digital. It’s what we demonstrate all the time, but now what they’re saying is actually no, there’s been so much fraudulent activity. The customer still wants to speak to a human.

Pete Wright:

How did they end up talking to my mother so many times? It seems like such a no-brainer, but it seems like also we have to pivot for the emotional reality of the fraud environment and everybody’s been taken advantage of at least once, if not now, then when it’s coming. So I love this pivoting around reassurance targeting, right? Are there other elements that… Look, credit card is a great example, but how do you shift your advice to help call centers stay ahead of some of this?

Samantha Middlebrook:

Yeah. We’re looking at the sentiment of a customer. So if you think about where the customer is in their journey, if you think about how many interactions have had with your organization over let’s say a six month period, Pete, how many times have they connected in with you? What have been their channels? How many times have you provided them incorrect information? Because as they start to distrust you as a customer, the likelihood of them going back into the voice channel, which is the more expensive channel for organizations to manage is much higher.

So if we think about what does that mean for a contact center agent or for a contact center, how can they start to solve for that problem? It’s really around having that single view of the customer. You’ll hear people talk about a single pane of glass. How are we taking our data from our CRM and working that into the telephony and how do we see all of the interactions the customers had to really understand the trust they have with us as an organization, but also the sentiment involved with the inquiry that they have as well. And then we have to get pretty smart with how we’re doing that calculation for forecasting. But I don’t think we’re there yet. I think we’re still working it out.

Pete Wright:

Given the context of everything you’ve just said, I was stunned today to get an email advertising to me that one of my favorite companies is now offering call center video shopping assistance. That was a new thing like saying, “Hey, call us. Jump on a video chat any time I’ve done. Text chat, I’ve done phone, I’ve done all the other things.” But that seems like such a strain on an already perplexed system. And yet to your point, the reassurance marketing, the reassurance communication, it makes total sense.

Samantha Middlebrook:

If we think about industries where the human connection is super important, and at Upland we work with banking and finance and we work with health industries, and when you are thinking about emotional interactions and you’re talking about money, seeing someone and resonating with someone and connecting with a human makes a difference. So if we go back to a banking example, we’ve spoken about lost or stolen card, but let’s think about getting a home loan. Then even speaking with some of the attendees at that conference and they said, “Look, we know everything about banking. We’ve worked in the bank for 30 years.” Even when it was time for me to go and get my home loan, I went and sat in front of a home loan lender to work it out because that is a huge investment. It’s 30 years of my life and I want to connect with the person that I’m talking to.

So video conference makes sense, whether it’s shopping or whether it’s these big life decisions, it’s really around how are you changing the game of customer experience for your customers and how are you allowing them to connect. So offering that is something that I think we’ll see a lot more of. You’ll see the technology companies are investing more in this space, especially when we look at things like video conferencing, live transcription, how AI is being pitted in amongst all of those things. It’s going to become really important. We’ve seen it in the health industry as well with video conferencing consultations, which weren’t really a thing five years ago.

Pete Wright:

Sure. Well, and especially you talk about the way the post pandemic environment has changed inside call centers. Look at people like me and people like your contact center person who’s going in for a human, we’re all looking for human connection after being apart from you. That is a massive shift in humanity, and of course there’s going to be increased demand there. It only makes sense. I feel like you and I could wax philosophical about the massive shifts in humanity all day. But we should talk a little bit about how the products that you oversee can help address some of these things. Can you walk us through what you represent and how Upland Software can help call centers address these changes?

Samantha Middlebrook:

Of course. So I represent the contact center productivity suite. I’m sure you never would’ve guessed based on this conversation. So I look after the strategy for three of our products, RightAnswers, Panviva, and InGenius. So looking after the strategy means understanding what’s happening in the market, talking to a lot of people, whether they be customers or prospects, and understanding the challenges that they have and how we can solve them with our products. So we are really set in our vision that we don’t just want to throw technology at contact centers and hope they catch it and hope it sticks. We want to actually dig in and realize what’s happening.

So let’s talk about InGenius to start off with because InGenius has this cute little saying, which is, “It’s the glue between the two,” and the glue between the two is two different applications. It is your CRM, so your customer record management and your telephony. So both of those applications are the heart and soul of a contact center. How is the customer contacting you? And it’s how do we track everything that’s gone on so we can solve their problems? So with InGenius, it’s really about simplifying that view for the agents. So when they pick up that call, they’ve got all the information that they need to make sure that they are giving that personalized experience, which we touched on last podcast.

So Pete, let’s take the lost or stolen credit card as an example. If you are a contact center agent for that bank and you are using the InGenius product, rather than answering the call blindly and saying, “Hey, how can I help you today?” You will actually be able to see the fact that, Pete has already been on the website, he’s logged in, he’s canceled the call. We’ve sent him the text message because all of those interactions attract, and now I can really focus on the conversation at hand. As an agent, I can think about my empathy, I can think about my recommended wording. I’ve been trained and I can really focus on the human connection because the systems are handled for me. I don’t need to go digging and searching to look for things.

And if I find out, Pete, that, “Hey, you know what? I’m not the best person to speak to. I need to transfer you to an expert in another part of the organization,” then that is also handled through the application as well. So they seem like really little things, but they make a really big difference when we’re thinking about customer experience because again, it’s less about what do I say? What do I press? Where do I go next? It’s really about connecting in with what you need.

Pete Wright:

That’s one of the things I walked away with from our conversation less time about InGenius is just what a lovely bit of synchronicity you get by one, to your point about reassurance, connection. I feel better knowing that I just have a human say, “Hey, I get it, and yes, it is canceled and you’re going to be fine.” But also that as an agent, my life would be better knowing and confirming that those systems are better, my job is better, my experience is better. I’m generally a happier agent knowing I can be of that level of service.

Samantha Middlebrook:

So that is a really basic way that InGenius helps. But if we link it back to the concept of working from anywhere, and let’s think about the team leader who has a really challenging job to support and track metrics. Using InGenius in that scenario, they can make sure that they have the ability to see what is happening on that call, listen in on that call so they can offer support to the agent. So we always look at metrics and say, “It looks like that person’s been on a call for a long time. Let me dip in and see what’s actually going on so I can guide them as well.” So it means that no matter where you are, you’re getting that same level of support and guidance that you would in the physical location.

Pete Wright:

All right. So that’s InGenius. Let’s talk about the other two knowledge products.

Samantha Middlebrook:

So the Knowledge products are similar, but different in their own rights. So if you think about knowledge as a whole. Knowledge is about delivering the right information to the right person at their time of need. And that should be based on a couple of different things. So what role are they in? What is their competency level? Where are they located? All of those things play a factor. Now, the delivery needs to really meet the agent in their channel. So if we’ve got an agent working in Microsoft Teams as an example, and they are chatting all the time, maybe we need to provide a AI-driven chatbot to serve up knowledge there. Or perhaps they are working in Salesforce because that’s where their customer record is, and they want to be able to search for information just right within that single view. So both of the products allow you to do that.

So the beauty of Knowledge management is it changes the response from the agent to the customer to, I think I know the answer to the answer is, and if we think about that reassurance loop, that is really, really important. We’ve all been on the call with an agent where you just know they don’t really know what they’re talking about. And again, if they put you in the cone of silence with mute or they’re putting you on hold, they’re either really crazily searching for information or in the old days, maybe they were raising their hand frantically looking for a floor walker to come over to support.

So Knowledge is about providing them the right answer wherever they are, and making sure the answer has gone through the right levels of checks. So it is the correct thing that you should be saying to the customer. So again, no matter where they’re working, being able to deliver that message out, being able to put through things like change and communications and track and record how effective that is, and bringing it back into that continuous improvement cycle is really important as well.

Pete Wright:

And again, to our point about customer sat and agency agent sat like we, you feel better when you can say with confidence that you know the answer.

Samantha Middlebrook:

That’s exactly right.

Pete Wright:

Creating happier operators. Samantha, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for your tour through the Contact Center Summit responses, some of the stories that you’ve shared. I am fascinated and I hope that you will come back and talk to us again as the environment, as the world continues to change for our call center specialists.

Samantha Middlebrook:

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Pete Wright:

And thank you everybody for downloading and listening to this show. We appreciate your time and your attention. Don’t forget, head over to uplandsoftware.com, you can find us in the resources section. Just look for the podcast. You’ll see all the episodes that we have produced of this show and our others. On behalf of Samantha Middlebrook, I’m Pete Wright. We’ll see you next time right here on Connected Knowledge from Upland Software.https://share.transistor.fm/e/f13c726a