The Importance of Integrations in the Telco Industry with Alex Baker

In this podcast episode, Alex Baker talks about those expectations and why it’s important to integrate knowledge management sources, so agents won’t need to navigate multiple systems when providing customer service.

Transcript

Pete Wright: 
Hello everybody, and welcome to Connected Knowledge from Upland Software on TrueStory FM. I’m Pete Wright. Today’s topic is not just vital, but increasingly complex. In this constantly evolving digital landscape, telcos face the perpetual challenge of upgrading technology while simultaneously maintaining a superlative customer experience. Today’s customers expect nothing short of excellence, and meeting those expectations is crucial for both customer acquisition and retention. To shed light on this topic, we have someone whose vast experience makes him the ideal person to guide us through this CX labyrinth. Alex Baker serves as Upland’s ace in customer service and support. With a career spanning over a quarter of a century, alex has worn many hats, which we hope he’ll don for us today. At Upland, Alex has been instrumental in implementing the RightAnswers knowledge management solution. His work has given him a unique perspective on the essential tech integrations for telcos, making him the perfect person to help us understand how to best optimize the customer experience in the telecommunication industry. Alex Baker, welcome to Connected Knowledge. 
 
Alex Baker: 
Pete, thank you for having me. 
 
Pete Wright: 
I’m thrilled to have you here and shed a little bit of light on this topic, particularly around integrations in the telco industry. But I want to start with that topic that I hinted at in our introduction, which is that telecommunications infrastructure upgrades as do customer expectations. This is a, I don’t know, horse race, chicken or the egg. What is the metaphor that best applies here? 
 
Alex Baker: 
Herding cats. 
 
Pete Wright: 
Herding cats. That’s fair as well, right? These are the questions I imagine you’re thinking about, how do you maintain excellence and continue to recruit and continue to retain customers, and they just expect more and more and more? 
 
Alex Baker: 
It’s difficult because you have to worry about the demands of the customer, but you also have to worry about the demands of the support center, the people actually managing the business because they’re real human beings too, and they have a lot of other opportunities, and if you hire them into a business where it’s difficult to figure out what they’re supposed to do... Also, one of the things I always say is nobody ever wakes up in the morning saying, “You know what? I’m going to call customer support today.” People that call in usually don’t want to have to call in. So, it’s a lot like being a state trooper on the highways. Everybody’s glad that you’re there when you need them, but nobody’s ever happy to see you. So, it’s a necessary job, but it can be stressful because people are trying to deal with the problem or they’re trying to get something changed, but nobody really wants to be calling in. 
And then on top of that, you’re listening to people. You’re usually trying to create a ticket of some kind or a record. You’re trying to look up the customer’s past call history. You’re trying to type in what they’re saying. You’re trying to listen. You’re trying to get good customer service. And then if you have to search in five other places on top of that, while you’re trying to do all those things, it makes life very difficult. The customers notice because you put them on hold forever. Who among us hasn’t been put on hold 20 times for something that you think should have been a simple question? It makes life difficult for the agents because just like you don’t like waiting on hold, they don’t like putting you on hold because they know you’re going to come back unhappy the longer you wait. 
So, the more that we can do to try and make sure that people have access to everything they need without having to navigate multiple systems, open multiple tabs, hit multiple bookmarks, log into multiple systems. The more clicks you have to make, the more of a nightmare it becomes for the agents and then they pass it on down to the customer. So, those are really some of the things that we try to address. 
 
Pete Wright: 
Well, I want to talk about this passage from Gartner, a passage that I think is interesting and it gets to some of the things you’re talking about. “Next Generation CX replaces this slow and reactive approach with one that is simple, predictive and proactive in order to create genuine service differentiation. This involves combining customer, operational, and network data to create highly personalized, relevant experiences in real time.” Highly personalized, relevant experiences in real time. Now, everything you just said highlights the real challenges that customer service agents feel. You already set the bar at very low from a customer perspective. We already expect the lowest of the low. It feels to me like all of these technologies and this intent is to effectively increase, what, authenticity of messages and support from service agents? Is that what we’re trying to get to build that relationship? 
 
Alex Baker: 
Well, the joke is authenticity is the coin of the realm, and as soon as you can learn to fake that, life will go easy for you. 
 
Pete Wright: 
Ouch. Ouch. 
 
Alex Baker: 
But really, people want an authentic experience, but they have expectations about what that authentic experience should be. People don’t want you to guess. And it’s very obvious if you’re calling in and somebody doesn’t know what they’re doing. I personally have had to call someone and it’s very obvious the person… I’ll excuse myself, I’ll hang up, I’ll call back and hope I get someone better. And that’s just a nightmare experience. So, what can we do to address that? Some of it is consistency of service, making sure that everybody has the same training and access to the same tools. 
And also just one of the things you were kind of alluding to is just within organizations and the different parts of the organization, like from my time when I was AT&T, it was very cloistered. Network operations was their own kingdom and customer service was their own kingdom and operations was their own kingdom. And you had people that didn’t want to share information with each other because you had different division managers that are empire building or different parts of the business where there nobody’s making them talk to each other, so why should I talk to this other part of the business? So just having information, having knowledge resources available where if something’s down in NetOps and they know about it, your customer service people know about it so they don’t spend half an hour on the phone troubleshooting something with somebody where you should have known about it in the first 30 seconds. 
Those are the kinds of things that frustrate people like, oh, there’s an outage and I had to sit with you and troubleshoot it for half an hour. At the bare minimum, we want to avoid angry people. At a maximum, we want to try and actually satisfy them like we’re on top of things and we know what’s going on right away. We have communication across departments so that if something’s known in one part of the business, it’s available to everybody else. Everybody’s got access to it. Everybody knows how to use it. And everybody kind of shares and contributes. That’s a lot of, I think what we’re trying to do. 
 
Pete Wright: 
I think you’re getting to a really interesting point. You’re talking about your experience at AT&T and the cloistered kind of approach, and it reminds me of one of my favorite episodes of that fantastic underrated show, Community, where the air conditioner repair division department of the school was its own separate entity. You know the one I’m talking about. 
 
Alex Baker: 
I know exactly what you’re talking about, yes. 
 
Pete Wright: 
The whole point of this is in that farce, that’s a farce for a reason because there are units we know in the larger organizations where there is disincentive from tying systems together. There’s disincentive from trying to actually make the operation more smooth and more integrated. When you talk about best in class operations, how do you overcome that particular perspective? 
 
Alex Baker: 
A lot of it is having a strong hand in terms of leadership and having somebody that’s willing to take all the divisions that need to talk to each other and say, “Hey, we’re implementing an initiative to share knowledge across all departments. You’re all required to do this and I expect you all to participate enthusiastically.” Just bringing it back to telcos specifically, one of the challenges specifically that I’ve seen is a lot of people think like, “Oh, Ma Bell,” where somebody set up shop in a building a hundred years ago and it’s just grown from there. But they don’t realize that it’s just mergers and acquisitions and selling parts and selling the whole business. 
And if you look at a lot of telcos now, they’re just in name only, but they’ve been bought and sold three times. They’ve switched systems 15 different times in the last 20 years. They’re constantly just moving from one system to another and trying to maintain some type of normalcy and consistency while they’re doing all of that. And that’s a huge challenge for them. I personally witnessed a project where there were a ton of acquisitions and the company spent millions and millions of dollars trying to have one system that brought everything together, and they ended up scrapping it after three years because they said, “We just can’t do it fast enough to keep pace with the changes in the business. By the time we roll this out, it’s already going to be obsolete.” So, just having information that’s kind of system agnostic where regardless of what system, if you have a new acquisition, if you get acquired, it’ll still be available to whatever system you’re using. That’s a big part of it is not having your information kind of locked into one system that may become obsolete. That’s really important.

Pete Wright:
Significant. Yeah, that’s a significant challenge. Well, all right, so we’re going to dig into actually building a best practice organization here. And so I wonder if we could start—do you have any customer service organizations that you don’t kind of cloak yourself in self-loathing for having to call? Is there anyone out there that you feel like, “These guys have done it right? I feel good when I’m making these calls?”

Alex Baker:
There are some customers that do it really well. Some of them are very heavily regulated industries, so people like insurance. If you have to file a claim, there’s no way around it. A lot of times you could do it on an app. You can do it online. Some of it is honestly generational. So, you’ll have older people where they’re never going to use an app, they’re never going to email, they’re never going to use a website, they want to call and talk to somebody. And I’m in my 40s, I hesitate to call myself part of the younger generation, but I’d rather die than call somebody. I consider it a personal failure if I can’t figure it out on the web myself. So, I have this expectation for the companies that I deal with that they’re going to make the information available to me because they appreciate that my time is valuable, and rather than calling and having somebody read something to me from a webpage, I can just read it myself from a webpage and save that time of waiting on hold.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, self-service, a number one. That’s huge for me too. I have to say I’m out of my 40s and I still deeply, deeply consider it a failure not to be able to figure it out on my own. But that gets to the right flow of information, and that’s something that we consider telcos, whether you have been bought and acquired or integrated from some other source, really your stock in trade is how well you move information from one place to another.

Alex Baker:
It really is. And that really is kind of the lifeblood of not just telcos, but a lot of large industries. I don’t think it’s unique to them, but they’ve definitely had a lot of that since 1984.

Pete Wright:
1984, what an auspicious year. What goes into a smooth implementation, to an implementation that really you’re ready to crow about?

Alex Baker:
For knowledge implementation specifically, usually there’s kind of three big time-consuming variables to it. You have your basic parts. You want to make sure people understand the software that they’re trained, that they’re ready to use it, that they understand that this is not a project, that it’s a lifecycle discipline. So, if you’re using knowledge with any piece of software, usually CRMs or ITSMs, you want people to know this is something we are doing forever, it’s part of our job now, especially if you’re following KCS or another knowledge discipline.
You have those basics of just making sure people know what the software is and how to use it, but the variable is usually setting up a single sign on. So, if people have to actually take extra time to go to a bookmark and log into something and type in a username and password, they’re less likely to use it. So, if you’re already using SSO, just set it up so that they’re automatically logged in. You want to do content conversion. So, a lot of times for us, especially in the knowledge management space, we’ll talk to people and we’ll say, “What do you have right now?” And they’ll say, “Oh, we don’t have anything in place right now.” You do. You’ve got stuff in people’s heads. You’ve got stuff in Google drives and in binders on people’s desks and printed out and shared in their email and the Jira tickets.
Everybody’s got something. So just doing some type of content conversion, whether you’re taking stuff from an existing ticket system and putting it into a cohesive knowledge base that you’re going to use for the whole enterprise, or if you’re just kind of collecting all this mishmash that people have all over the place and you’re putting it into a single source, that’s a big piece of it. Nobody wants to start with an empty knowledge base. It’s not very attractive.

Pete Wright:
I’m actively watching you wave your hands around and I’m so glad you ended with, “That’s a big part of it,” because that seems like a significant part of it in terms of just training and development, how to do this content conversion. The moment you said, “You have stuff in your heads,” I thought, Oh my goodness. Now, we have to train people to write it all down well, right? This is huge.

Alex Baker:
You don’t want to intimidate people with it though. So, you’re not going to go to anybody and say “Everything you know, write it down.” That’s going to terrify people. But knowledge is a demand science. If you’re somebody where you want to do everything in advance and have everything ready so that the day a new service launches, okay, nothing to worry about, it’s not for you because you don’t know what people are going to call and ask about until they call and ask about it. You know what you know, so you’ll be well-prepared, you have some good ideas. But if you have legacy data and you’re like, “I’m not sure if anybody’s ever going to ask about that or not ever again,” you can just wait until they ask about it. Somebody calls in, say, “Okay, somebody asked about it, I’m going to capture it now. I’m going to make a knowledge article, I’m going to submit it.”
So, you can create things on demand. And then also if you’re creating them on demand, you can create them in real time. You can use the customer’s language, so you’re actually capturing stuff using the language that they talk about it with. And that way if you do decide to ultimately use self-service, when a self-service customer searches for something, they’re going to find it in their own language. So, if I write an article, if I’m a techie and I write an article called Active Directory Password Reset, a user might not even know what that is or have any idea, but they’re just going to say, “Hey, I’m locked out of my computer.” So they’re going to go to your self-service or go on their phone and say, “I am locked out of my computer.” And you want to capture that stuff. So, if you’re actually using their language to capture it as they’re giving it to you, that’s actually a really valuable resource that a lot of people just don’t capture and they just let it slip away.

Pete Wright:
Okay. So I’m going to footnote a companion question here, which is on successful telcos and how you deal with knowledge rot on the other side. And so we’re going to hold that for a second because I feel like I hijacked you in your answer when talking about the steps to creating a seamless integration. So, what’s next after this data conversion and knowledge integration?

Alex Baker:
Well, the third part is actually the integrations. So you have the single sign-on. You have the kind of basic training and make sure people know how to use the software. You have the content conversion. But then you’re setting up your integrations. The buzzword that I’ve started hearing in probably the last three or four years is everybody talks about the moment of need. It’s where is your customer service agent? Where is your tech support agent? Where is your end user customer? Where are they? What are they doing when they need to look something up? And, if I have somebody in there making a Jira ticket or they’re using Salesforce or any internal tool that you have built in-house and they’re making a ticket and the customer says, “Okay, here’s my problem,” and they’re typing that problem in, usually that’s where they are when they want to look up what the customer’s looking for.
And if you actually have to go and open a new tab and click on a bookmark and log into something and copy the thing from one tab into the other tab and click on search—at that point you’re probably about 20 extra clicks in. And it’s really hard to do while you’re trying to do everything else, versus if you can just use the tool you’re already using—you’re in Jira, you just click on search knowledge. It takes the subject of the case that you just already typed in and it gives you the results of your knowledge base on the other side of the screen. That’s what people want and they’re more likely to use it. They’re more likely to engage with it. They’re more likely to have a high opinion of it. And they’re more likely to give feedback and potentially even contribute new knowledge on their own as well.

Pete Wright:
Okay. Well, then that gets us to this sort of two-part question—the first is, the premise of our conversation is on how quickly things are changing in the industry and keeping up becomes a significant hurdle—so, how do you condition your telecommunications customers around what it means to be a long-term success in a space that is changing so quickly?

Alex Baker:
Part of it is just viewing knowledge management as a discipline. And I mentioned before, not as a project. A lot of times you have people where they want to be done with it, and you will never be done. But you mentioned how do we avoid the knowledge rot? Nobody wants to say, “I need help with Windows.” And you do a search and the first five pages are articles about Windows 95 and Windows XP.  

To avoid rot, you want processes built in where you’re constantly reviewing things. Some things are going to get naturally reviewed. So, if you have a process or a price package or something that gets checked or updated all the time, people use it all the time. But if you have some things that aren’t getting used on a regular basis, you want a review process built into your knowledge base. If something hasn’t been touched in say 365 days, you want it to say, “Hey, I’m going to flag this for review.” It’s not a no harm, no foul situation to have old or outdated knowledge existing in your system. Because some people say, “Oh, well if nobody’s using it, just let it sit there. What’s the harm?” But if everybody’s using some kind of search—and if you’re searching for it, if you’re getting that stuff mixed in with the stuff you’re actually looking for—the longer you let it sit and rot, the more you start polluting your search results with stuff that’s old or outdated or incorrect. So, we really do have to stay on top of it.
Having a reuse is review mindset, which is part of the KCS philosophy is good. But, also having system tools in place where it’s, “Okay, if nobody’s touched this next number of days, we’re going to automatically put it into a review queue or somebody’s got to review it.” You want those system tools in place as well because those things don’t happen organically.

Pete Wright:
That’s very cool. So, let’s talk then a little bit more specifically about the products you work on. So Upland’s RightAnswers and working with telcos on third party integrations, tell us a little bit about that.

Alex Baker:
So, RightAnswers is what our marketing team calls a platform-agnostic knowledge management platform. So, even if we have customers using multiple ticketing systems, using us via API, going directly to our user interface, whether it’s for their support agents or for self-service customers, it’s a tool where you can use it standalone, you can use it integrated, or you can use it both. We’ve got people using it on site if they have severe security restrictions or governmental restrictions. People use it in the cloud. But, it’s a tool that’s been around for a long time. I personally have been there for 10 years and some people still think I’m the new guy. So, we’ve got a lot of really tenured folks who not just understand this. Software is software. It sits there, but you have to use it and understand it, and honestly, you have to care about it.
Greg Oxton, who was the head of the Consortium for Service Innovation for a long time, always said that knowledge is a volunteer activity. And you can’t make a horse drink, you can lead it to water. That’s knowledge. We’re very fortunate in a lot of our customers, and our prospective customers care about the work that they do. They care about making a better customer experience, making a better agent experience. Those are the things that help get me up every day and keep me going with RightAnswers. And we have a lot of amazing features. We’re working now on doing generative AI where it writes knowledge articles for you, it edits them for you, it summarizes them for you. There’s really great multilingual and translation capabilities because we have a lot of customers where some people, they have presence in almost every continent except Antarctica, so you’ve got folks that use it for all kinds of different things. And who doesn’t want to buy the world [inaudible]?

Pete Wright:
That’s perfect. Can I ask you a little bit out of line question? I’m curious, you mentioned Generative AI. What is your perspective on Generative AI in the call center? You talk about how it is managing content. I feel like flagging and fixing content rot is likely going to be central to that. What’s your general worldview when it comes to this material?

Alex Baker:
It’s going to change in the next probably five years. In the next five years, I think five years from now, almost any call center you call, you’re going to be talking to a bot that’s using Generative AI to try and answer your questions. And then just similar to chatbots right now where it’ll chat with you, it’ll try and solve the most common questions and then it’ll dump you to a live agent if it can’t answer your question—you’re going to see the same thing with Generative AI. The challenge with Generative AI is so much of it’s controlled by third parties right now that you’re putting a lot of faith in them. If you’re a large company, you’re going to hand the reins to speak to your customers over to the OpenAI, and you don’t control them, you don’t have their data set. And people always have those fringe cases where somebody asks it a question and it says, “Help me. I’m a robot. I don’t want to be here anymore. Get me out of here.”
And I’ve seen that where it’s not quite ready for prime time as far as putting it directly user facing, or at least not from what I’ve seen. So, one of our initial focuses has been using it for content generation, summarization, creation, editing, translation, where you can use it as a time saving tool for authoring and creating the content, but not necessarily for interacting directly with end users. It will get there. I’m sure we’ll all be working for it one day.

Pete Wright:
Dare to dream, right? More vacation time.

Alex Baker:
Hopefully, yeah.

Pete Wright:
Is that our utopian future?

Alex Baker:
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.

Pete Wright:
Our AI overlords. All right, Alex. Thank you so much for taking that question on, and I so appreciate you hanging out with me today. Where do you want to send people to learn a little bit more about RightAnswers and our telco integrations in particular?

Alex Baker:
Upland’s actually a huge company, but just go on the uplandsoftware.com website, look for RightAnswers, and just feel free to reach out to us if you want to see a demo, if you want to ask questions. I’m happy to talk knowledge with anybody at any time, just regardless of whether they want to buy our software or not. Knowledge management is a community. You can never have too many friends. The people that do it care about it. I still talk to people from years ago where I just know them from the industry trade shows, former customers, current customers, people that move from one job to another and brought us with them. So, just don’t be afraid to reach out. We’re nice people.

Pete Wright:
We’re nice people. That’s it. You get the mic drop, Alex. We are nice people at Upland. Absolutely fantastic. And swipe up in your show notes, you’re going to get a few more detailed links that we’ve got in the list there in the resources. We so appreciate you all for downloading and listening to this show. Thanks for your time and your attention. We would love to hear what you think. Just swipe up again in your show notes and you’ll see this feedback link where you can send the show a question. You have a question for Alex? I don’t care when it is—we’ll get that question to Alex and he’ll answer it and we’ll talk about it on a future show. We would love to hear more from you. So, on behalf of Alex Baker, I’m Pete Wright and we’ll see you right back here next week on Connected Knowledge.