Frost & Sullivan’s 2023 Customer Contact West: Highlights and Trends for Contact Centers with Shelly Lindstrom

Transcript

Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Connected Knowledge from Upland Software on TruStory FM. I’m Pete Wright. We are hot on the heels of the 19th Annual Customer Contact West event for business consulting firm, Frost & Sullivan and our own team was there to represent. Today on the show, I’m talking to Shelly Lindstrom, Principal Customer Success Manager and one of our most distinguished leaders at Upland. Shelly was there and is here to tell the whole story about Frost & Sullivan’s Customer Contact West event.

Shelly, welcome to the show. So glad you are here! Are you recovered?

Shelly Lindstrom:
Hi, Pete. Glad to be here. I think I’m still a bit in recovery mode. Fantastic event. Extremely full of information and sessions to go to. So, it’s not the event with a lot of downtime. It gives you quite the opportunity to network and meet a lot of folks, both customers as well as other vendors, which is just as important.

Pete Wright:
This is the 19th Annual Customer Contact West event, 19th annual, and I’ve never been. I believe this was our first year representing. This was your first year?

Shelly Lindstrom:
It is. It is our first year in going to Frost & Sullivan’s MindXchange event. Yes, they’ve been doing it for 19 years, and it shows. They run a very tight ship. It’s a very organized event, and like I said, it is packed not only with information, but fun from the get-go. So, Sunday when you land, there’s networking and a wonderful dinner in a fantastic setting which makes it a bit more enjoyable. But until Wednesday when they wrap up, I mean, it is a full-time full of, like I said, information and networking. Glad we went. It’s a bit of a different event in the sense that it is not a trade show. It doesn’t have a large floor with booth after booth after booth where you feel like it’s a little bit of the carnival barker environment.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Right.

Shelly Lindstrom:
It’s completely different.

Pete Wright:
Did you come back with a tote full of pamphlets, and magnets, and beer koozies?

Shelly Lindstrom:
Right. Not too much. Not too much swag.

Pete Wright:
Not too much swag? Okay. All right.

Shelly Lindstrom:
But the point is really to have meaningful conversation to allow yourself time to really dig in and have more detailed discussions with the attendees. And like I said, both customers that attended as well as vendors. That’s a good thing, to evaluate what other vendors are doing in the space and how we can collaborate together to bring to contact centers the best experience possible.

Pete Wright:
So, I have substantively two major areas that I would like to talk to you about. And the first one is, just a few weeks ago, our very own Samantha Middlebrook was on the show to talk about her then upcoming talk, How to Maximize Knowledge Management for Agent Effort and Productivity Gain. That is the talk she gave with Jim Porter. How’d it go? Are you a fan? Are you a Samantha Middlebrook fan? Do you show up to all of her conference presentations?

Shelly Lindstrom:
I am a fan. I’m a bigger fan after this event which I didn’t think was possible because I am one of Samantha’s, I would say, biggest supporters. It was a great event. If anyone has had the pleasure of meeting Samantha or listening to any of her presentations she’s given, you know that she really keeps the audience engaged. A delight to listen to but so full of information and conveys that in a way that it’s very easily digestible by the audience, and they want to participate. They want to have fun with Samantha. So, she’s wonderful.

Now, combine that with Jim Porter, who is one of our customers from Primerica, and Jim really gave his knowledge management story to the audience. The most fantastic part is Jim kicked it off with, “I’m not a great speaker,” and then literally, within seconds, owned the room, owned the audience. He was just fantastic, really engaging. Jim told the story about… basically, at Primerica. I’ll call it the KM revolution or evolution that’s going on there, including using KCS, which is Knowledge-Centered Services. It’s a best practices methodology but really something that you’d live by. And that received a lot of questions and intrigue from the audience. Most folks have heard of KCS but have not actually integrated it into their way of doing knowledge.

With the information that Jim gave, I think that’s going to change, just showing the empowerment of agents on how they utilize KCS, the quality of content that’s gathered, and the true ownership and empowerment, like I said, of the agents in utilizing this is just paramount. I think as we know in one of the trends that was definitely at this event was the overall wellness and empowerment of the agents because it is critical. We hear so much about AI, but that human interaction is still going to be a key piece of anyone’s contact center strategy.

Pete Wright:
Well, that, as you know, is a favorite topic on this show is talking about what it means to have a healthy, and balanced, and well-staffed contact center, and making sure that you’re doing the things that help to take care of your agents and giving them, for lack of a better word, agency in their roles. I’m curious. As we move forward in this conversation talking about your experience at the conference, some of these other trends, right? What did you see that seemed like an embrace of change in the air toward knowledge management, knowledge center, knowledge centers, and agent support?

Shelly Lindstrom:
Sure. So, I would say the event in general, there were some trends that folks will not be surprised at, which is AI, AI, AI, AI.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Shelly Lindstrom:
Beyond that, it’s very obvious that contact center digital transformation is a work in progress. It’s well on its way. There’s still work to do. In that, it really will help with agent productivity and empowerment, having the right tools in place. Another trend was harnessing big data for agent performance. So being able to have real-time analytics that feed into what an agent is doing in their time of need will definitely help not only the agent but improve customer satisfaction. So that was a big one, right? That really aids. If you can capture big data, it really aids in a contact center becoming more and more a centerpiece of a company’s strategy. Who else touches the customer more, right?

Pete Wright:
Yeah. For sure.

Shelly Lindstrom:
You do need digital transformation to get there. You need, like I said, the right tools. You need to know when to use information to improve process.

Pete Wright:
Well, right, and this gets to the trend, the balance of what knowledge centers can do for user self-service and the balance between self-service and agent support. I mean, are you seeing more holes being filled to bridge the two?

Shelly Lindstrom:
Self-services is an interesting area because I do believe that is one of the areas that most companies are looking at AI when it comes to… especially in the knowledge space, right? Giving the customer enough information to fulfill their needs, to answer their questions, to solve their issues. Traditionally, on self-service portal, there’s a search mechanism. So, the customer is searching your knowledge base—the information that the company is sharing with the customer—to hopefully provide them with the service that they need. With AI being able to look at the information of that customer, potentially, knowing who that customer is. Obviously, if it’s an anonymous person on your site, you may not know as much about them, but you can certainly know what’s going on with your company and the information and issues that are being reported. With the use of AI, it may be able to contextually change what you’re providing on your site.

So, it’s all about not just giving knowledge, but giving answers, being able to… and this goes for the agent side as well, right? Being able to solve issues as quickly as possible. How do you move that up the chain? Do you start using conversational AI where a phone call doesn’t come into a live agent. It comes into a conversational AI chat and based on what the customer is asking, the conversational AI can take care of the majority of their questions? Now, these are typically starting off with pretty common issues. But then it frees up the human to really delve into complex issues. So get rid of the monotonous that you may have to deal with and really spend time on the more complex issues that may be a bigger bang in serving your customers.

Pete Wright:
Well, I’ll tell you, this is what is so interesting to me when I look at the agent’s role in these kinds of big bang sorts of support scenarios is looking at the customer and how the customer can be bridged potentially from self-support to agent support with a continuity of support between the two. So the customer, me, say, calling never feels like they’ve forgotten who I am to help improve the affinity that I have with the brand, and I’m curious if you see any of that reflected at Customer Contact West.

Shelly Lindstrom:
There was some of that. I think it’s in some of the larger trends that we’re seeing.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Shelly Lindstrom:
What do you have in place to capture the information that you need about the customer to ensure that doesn’t happen? It’s not only why the customer is calling in, but who is this customer? Right? What’s the history that you have with this customer? There’s a lot that goes to it to build, really, that customer profile. And I think with some of the digital transformation and AI specifically, it’s going to allow, I think, companies to do more in that area where there’s an empathetic side on what the customer is going through with the process, coupled with the information that you’re gathering, and feeding that into AI to ensure that you’re handling this customer the way the customer, one, likes to be handled, and two, you’re giving them what they need when they need it, the first go-around. There’s a lot about first call resolution. Now, you can replace call with any omnichannel that you would like. But the reality is we don’t want to be pushed around as a customer from department to department. Right? We don’t want to go from department to department and start over, start from square one. So how do we capture that information within a contact center to make this seamless interaction with a customer possible?

Pete Wright:
That’s the dream. I dare to dream, Shelly.

Shelly Lindstrom:
We’ve all been there, Pete. We’ve all been on the other side of calling a company with a question or an issue and you end up going through three or four different areas within the contact center. They seem to not have any notes or information from the previous dialogue that you just had 30 seconds ago. So this is… it’s capturing information in real time and being able to feed it back to help service the customer better.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. You dropped a term I want to make sure we land on a little bit. When you look at the event overall and the other vendors and presenters in space, who’s really talking about empathy in the call center?

Shelly Lindstrom:
I think it’s on the radar of most companies, right? But getting there is not… It’s kind of like how do you pull empathy and the human side of things into data? Right? So how do you capture that? And I think what it is… We talk a lot about AI. We talk about digital transformation, and people start to form like, “Oh, there’s a robot out there. This robot is going to help me. There’s not going to be any emotion, any tie from the robot to the customer.” Right? That’s not what’s coming. What’s coming is an empathetic feel where the customer feels like they are the most important person to a company. But you’re accomplishing that by gathering information. You are looking at, a lot of times, this sentiment, analyzing the conversation—the wording that was used. Is the customer feeling negative today? Right? Well, you can very tell very easily by the words, by the connotation of the information that they’re passing to you. So you have to tie that-

Pete Wright:
Are they angry? Are they happy? Yeah.

Shelly Lindstrom:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Right.

Shelly Lindstrom:
Absolutely. You can’t lose sight of that, right?

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Shelly Lindstrom:
We’re still humans out here. We still want to feel the love, so to speak, right? But the bottom line is we also want our issues to be resolved in a meaningful way, in a very fast way, in a way that I can then serve myself, “If this occurs again, I don’t have to call you. I know how to handle the situation.” So, it’s so important to be able to track… We always talk about the 360 view of the customer. Well, we really need to make sure that we include the sentiment in that.

Pete Wright:
Because when I call your brand, I am subject to the spotlight effect like no other. I believe I am the center of the universe when I’m asking you to solve my problem. Right? We all do. How companies are able to see that? To your point, the 360 degree view of the customer. That’s why I count on it. That’s why I give up as much as I do.

Shelly Lindstrom:
As you should, right?

Pete Wright:
Right.

Shelly Lindstrom:
I mean, we as customers, we’re typically a paying customer. That’s the expectation is companies do an excellent job of making you feel important.

Pete Wright:
As we get toward wrapping up here Shelly, we’re talking about Customer Contact West. The overall theme of the show, give me a vibe check of the show. What do you think organizations like ours even are taking away and working into the conversation about how to improve community and improve call center conversations this coming year?

Shelly Lindstrom:
Sure. I think the biggest takeaway is, and I mentioned this previously, digital transformation is a work in progress.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Shelly Lindstrom:
I think it’s evolving on what that truly means. The majority of contact centers, they have their CRMs in place. They may have knowledge in place. Right? They have what I’ll call the standard set of applications in place. The next evolution is taking that and improving upon it through the use of AI. And where in that food chain within a contact center does AI fit in? There’s many use cases. I think one of the things that I took away is we’re still really trying to determine at this point in time because AI is fairly early in the process of where are the most valuable business cases that we can utilize AI in the call center. There are many, many companies out there that are in the midst of releasing their first version of a product that includes AI. So when I say that digital transformation is a work in progress, it is. The next generation of that is occurring. What I love is it wasn’t just a focus on the customer. It was truly a focus on the agent as well and the agent still being the centerpiece of your contact center. They really are the most important piece.

Pete Wright:
I find that reassuring.

Shelly Lindstrom:
There’s no discussion about AI replacing agents. It was about empowering, which I think is very refreshing for a lot of people, but it’s really… That human interaction is going to be more and more important with AI and other functions that are out there and I think we can’t forget that. So, digital transformation is happening. AI is a good thing. Agent wellness is just imperative to the success of your contact center. Especially, there’s a lot of contact centers out there that… Post the COVID pandemic, they’re still working remotely. They need more contact internally. Right?

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Shelly Lindstrom:
There’s more of a need for collaboration, for information sharing, and the ability to do that seamlessly throughout the day. So those are probably the main takeaways from the conference.

Pete Wright:
Shelly, thank you so much for hanging out with me today. This has been illuminating.

Shelly Lindstrom:
Well, thanks, Pete, for having me. Appreciate it.

Pete Wright:
Thank you everybody for downloading and listening to this show. We sure appreciate your time and attention. We’d love to hear what you think. Swipe up in your show notes. Let us know your experience at the Customer Contact West event. We’d like to hear it. Look for that “Submit a Question”. We’ll get your question on the show. Maybe we’ll send a note to Shelly and have her come back and answer your question live on the show. We sure appreciate every bit of messaging we get, and we’d love to hear your voice, too. On behalf of Shelly Lindstrom, I’m Pete Wright, and we’ll see you next week right here on Connected Knowledge.