Welcome to Working Smarter, presented by Calabrio where we discuss contact center industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success stories and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. We're glad you're joining us to learn and grow together in order to provide world-class customer service to each and every one of our clients.
My name is Dave Stra, product evangelist here at Collabreo, and my guest today, I am super excited because we have the legendary Jim Davies. Now, Jim Davies recently joined Collabreo as Chief Experience Officer, but as you'll probably learn today, has an extensive amount of background in the contact center industry with his time at Gartner, and I am. This is of like interviewing one of your heroes here, to be honest with you. So Jim, how are we doing today?
Oh yeah, very good day. Thank you. And I'm very kind you to say hero. I've not been called that before.
Oh. It's it truly is. And I remember when when it was announced that we were hiring you, it was I can imagine someone's, that's like their. Baseball coach in little league is, the MVP of the American League or something like that. So it's really fantastic to have you here. And so I'd like to I'd like to, before we get into the topic of today, which we're gonna talk about some of the things that contact centers could do to look towards the future I'd like to.
Hear a little bit about your background. Tell us how you got here now. I did a little research before we started, and I see that not only in your time at Gartner, but you are also the guitarist for Prodigy, the prog rock band. Is that yeah.
I saw Is that a different Jim Davies? It's possibly a different guy. Yeah. And I didn't, Create Garfield. Either that's somebody else's again. But no, my, my background is actually quite unusual for being in this position now because I was a Gartner analyst for 22 years. But before that I was actually a scientist. So I used to work for the Ministry defense as an organic chemist. So I was a classic person in a laboratory with a white coat mixing A and B and having fun there.
But yeah, moved into Ghana primarily because I had the right sort of thought processes, the right of analytical minds, and I became one of Ghana's lead analysts for customer experience and contact center. So I've been tracking the, what used to be called workforce optimization market, and then I rebranded it to workforce engagement. Been tracking that for 15 plus years. But also as we were both talking about earlier, most jobs you can't just do one job.
I was also the Gartner's lead analyst for Voice of the Customer. I'm one of our lead customer experience analysts.
So let's, I I would, I've, this is actually a great question that I've been meaning to ask you. You are directly responsible for every time I talk to a customer or a client or a contact center, and I have to say the phrase uh, w e e M, but I always have to add the clarifier after it. What used to be called W F O what's the story behind the shift in branding there? . And why are you responsible for torturing all of us in the contact center?
I think that's what it is. An analyst, you can't let the vendors have it easy. You've always gotta make them work. So yeah we changed the acronym, but no, seriously, I, the W F O acronym was around for 7, 8, 9 years, and it was very much focused on driving operational performance. Whereas what I felt was missing was the emphasis on the employee and the engagement level of that employee. Now, they were treated like a cog in the machine, a. They weren't human beings.
So I thought we, we have to change that perception. And the best way of doing that is to change the acronym. And so we change the acronym from W F O to WEM, but at the same time change the technology and the functionality that's associated with that acronym.
So all of the old original W F O functions and traditional recording qm, workforce management, they were still there, but now they were looked at through a different, So workforce management wasn't just about how do we forecast and schedule as efficiently as possible. It's now also a tool that can help drive employee engagement because you're giving those employees greater flexibility on when they come to work. So it's looking through the same technologies through a different lens as part of it.
But then the other part of it was overlaying it with new technologies things like real-time assistance, automation, gamification, things that can really help drive that engagement level of the employee even.
Yeah. And I do sincerely appreciate that kind of rebranding and relenting of the discussion because I, like a lot of people in the industry used to wear the headset, right? I slogged through years of customer service on the end of being in a contact center.
I reflect back to my early days and I never really thought of it, I never really thought of, Hey, here's a piece of paper that has your breaks and lunches on it, and this is, sit down, shut up, and take calls, which is, know, what I often refer to as. The old school contact center, and now the new school contact center is very much when would you like to take your breaks? What schedule would you prefer?
W making sure we're involving the entire workforce and engaging it as opposed to just optimizing it. And so I, I. , I agree with your sentiment. Just know that it has caused me I, I've lost a lot of productivity in meetings, having to say what used to be called W F O as part of it, but mission accomplished. I think W E em has taken a nice solid foothold into what we do. And I'm I think we're gonna be better for it. Yeah, in
addition to, it being the right thing from the employee's point of view, there's gonna be a massive uptick in how that influences the customer experience because it is a bit of a cliche. But if you've got a happy employee, you've got a happy customer and so therefore you're more likely to have a higher retention growth, all the things we care about as organizations, you're gonna get those cuz you've got a happy, engaged employee who's going above and beyond delivering that experience.
So it's gotta be a win-win.
It's a cliche because it's true. Yeah. I've said this many times before, when you go into a business, it doesn't have to be a contact sentence. This could be any business. You can almost immediately tell whether the employees are engaged or not. Sometimes that means they're. They're being paid appropriately. But a lot of times it also means that their work-life balance is being addressed. That their personal needs are being addressed, that they're getting fulfillment out of their job.
And you can also very easily tell when they're not engaged and it's pretty obvious. And, there's a, it's the alchemy of creating. And fostering a great work environment is a pretty complicated formula. There's no one magic bullet or, formula that does it. But engaging the employees is definitely a sizable chunk of that. So it's good to see, and I personally appreciate it, as do many other people. And hopefully we're creating a new wave of contact center management.
We continue to grow the engagement of the overall workforce as opposed to just the optimization of. . Absolutely. That's fantastic. All right, so
say one, one final point on that as well is I believe that it's becoming even fundamentally more important because the more the well pushes towards AI and automation and sales service and all the digital channels that don't involve an agent, the more we're gonna find that when those channels can't help us and we have to escalate to a human, that customer's already a little bit frustra. And so this human being, this agent, they're the last chance to save the experience.
And so if they're not engaged and they're not willing to help that customer and put the effort in, then that's gonna be very detrimental to the overall loyalty of that customer. So it's more important now than ever.
more important. Yeah. As the tools get better the EM empathy becomes more important. It's a loose adage to what we're talking about. And it actually leads very well into kind of the point that we wanted to discuss with you today is the idea of. What contact centers might need to be looking for the future? Your time as a Gartner analyst, you've spent a lot of time analyzing the tools and the processes and things that are out there.
And as we look to the future what should we be focusing or should we be thinking about?
I. There, there are so many cool things we can think about to improve the experience in the future. In the future, and improve our service operations. But actually I don't think that's what we should be doing at the moment because what I've seen from many years of being an analyst is that we are just doing a really bad job of the basics. Now we tend to get carried away with the new shiny toy. The new ai, the new this, the new that we, we latch onto that as the savior.
But actually, if we want to do the best we can do right now, just doing those basic things better is what we need to focus on. And the analogy I always use is I buying a car? When you go and buy a car, The brakes of that car are not very glamorous.
Now, you're not gonna choose a car because it's got good brakes or bad brakes, but if you buy that car and you get to the first junction and that car doesn't stop because the brakes don't work, then you're gonna be pretty unhappy with that car and that's gonna ruin your experience of owning that car. but if the brakes do work, you're never really going to tweet about the amazing brakes on your car. So having the brakes working really well is fundamentally important for your car ownership.
But you are never gonna start raving about it. You're never gonna put it into Facebook, you're never gonna tweet about it just because the brakes work. But if they don't work, very bad. Now the opposite of that could be having Apple CarPlay or having a wifi within your car call, you're gonna tweet about that absolutely is a great thing to have, but there's no point having that.
If the brakes don't work, you could have your Apple car play, but if the brakes don't work, there's no point and it doesn't have any impact on the experience. And I think linking that into customer service. We get carried away. So new shiny toys are the things that are the equivalent of the the wifi or the upper CarPlay. Whereas the basics of say, having a forecast that's accurate or having a QM program that actually fairly es your staff are the basics.
We've just gotta get those in place first, which many companies don't. Before we start looking at these bigger, more glamorous technology, invest.
Yeah, I think it's a great point. I often tell people that every contact center out there, whether you have two agents or 200,000 agents, every contact center does w e m. They just do it sometimes rather poorly or they do it with ineffective tools, right? You can have very effective forecasts through Excel spreadsheets, but you can also have very long manual processes that take up a lot of extra time. That could be done in significantly less time working through that.
And let's maybe talk about some of. Examples? What, maybe give me a few things that back to basics that that, that could be, it could be focused on by an organization that maybe doesn't realize what their what the problem might be.
Yeah, and I think if you look at it look at it across all contacts into technologies, it's just, it could be things such as, when was the last time the knowledge base was updated? How accurate is information that those agents are providing to customers? Is there a different knowledge base on the website compared to the contact center? A small thing like that can be quite profound. If you look at it from the routing. Or routing engine based on where you come from.
I I've worked for an American company for so long now, , but bringing English, I dunno whether it's rooting or routing. I, so whichever way is it bound to be wrong. But even the accuracy, does that routing engine send that customer to the right agent or not? Most of the time it doesn't. Simple things like that can make a huge difference.
If you drill into the W F O WM space, can that workforce management system cope with a hybrid working environment where you've got some employees at home or some at work or doing a. Part part of each can the QM system actually fairly and accurately assess an employee's performance, identify training needs? Or is it more of a random lucky guest to pick a call where you identify some training opportunities?
So there's things like that that I think we don't need to go massive investments of millions of dollars to try and focus on some of these basic things that can make. Transformational difference in terms of the performance, the center, and the experience we provide.
It's a great point, and you actually reminded me when I first got into this industry, I went to some training over in London and I never caught more flack in my entire life by saying call routing. Instead of call rooting it that you actually brought back some past feelings there when you mentioned that, so I remember Yeah. It was, it was the focus of the entire week that how I pronounced specific words. But, there, there was a kind of a theme in what you said when we're going back to basics.
A lot of those, a lot of those points that you made had to do. Focusing on the people and focusing on the right things. Some of the things that are easy to solve ba are basically how you look at the people that are performing the customer experience operations in the organization. You mentioned focusing on quality and instead of randomly finding, Being very pointed and detailed about the information that you're looking for.
For example instead of just listening to a random call, how about we check out every single call from yesterday that had more than two or three holds in it to find out why we're putting people on hold so much, which leads you to. Updating the knowledge base because the knowledge base isn't very effective. It's that trickle down effect of making sure. And so I think that's a really great point in, in, in working through that.
So you mentioned, hybrid scheduling the in-office versus at home, which is a big thing right now and probably is not going away anytime. Being able to check on whether you're reporting actually delineates between those two things. Those are actually really great points. And I wonder if there are suggestions, just in general, what would you suggest? A co where could a contact center start? From to, to really take a step back and look at what to do.
How would, if someone came to Jim Davies and said, Jim efficiency is down. We know why, but we don't really For sure. Where would maybe somebody start to take a step back to the basics?
I think what I'd do is make a list of every single process system, technology that, that is used in that center and firstly identify, is this technology fundamental? Now, is this one of the must have technologies that with it, we can't do with each? Can't do. And then, so that would be the basics of the basic technologies or if it things that if we turn this off tonight, we're still gonna be able to function, but we are not gonna be able to do maybe ABC on top of what the basics are.
And then once you've identified those two lists, then start to look at that. primarily looking at the basics list and say if we had to, this is really crude, really basic, but if you said for each of those technologies on that basic list, if you said, let's give ourselves a score from one to 10 on how optimized that is really crude and get three or four people who know that technology, get 'em to sit down and say, let's give you a score. It's just the best it can possibly.
or we are just scratching the surface of this technology now, the workforce management, for example, and if you've got a score of between, you averaged out of less than five, outta 10, put your priority there because that would suggest that if you're scoring five or less outta 10, those breaks are not gonna work when you get to the next roundabout. And that's where the energy should be. So it doesn't have to be very scientific because you could.
A huge amount of time doing this analytically, but literally just having the experts in the room sitting down and manually going through the little spreadsheet they've created. Here's all the technologies. These are the must haveve technologies to run our business. Let's give us scale a score of how optimized they are, one to 10. Simple as that. Ending less than five. Start focusing that and get those up to a seven or eight. , and that could be the routing, routing engine.
It could be the knowledge base, it could be the QM system, it could be whatever, could be the CRM system, the case management handling. Get those up to a state where they're at least seven out of 10, and then start looking at some of the more glamorous technologies, whether that's real time interaction, assistance or whatever it happens to be, that can then overlay on top and provide that extra layer of. The other case thing, I would go.
I was just gonna say that's I, it's so simple, but it's probably so effective identifying that low hanging fruit just right off the bat. It's it, like you said, you could probably do this in a two hour meeting with. Four to five people in your contact center or your organization, and then come out with, all right, we now know where we should be spending our time. And then that's the next challenge is spending your time. And we won't delve too deep into that, but think that's a great start.
All right. So you were, continue on, you were saying the next step there.
Yeah. The ne the next step I'll try and look at. when you are looking to maybe start in investing in some of these layer on technologies and where to prioritize this these basics as well. The tendency is to try and focus on areas that are linked to one particular business goal, such as efficiency, which is the flavor of the market at the moment, driving efficiency.
. The reality is a lot of these technologies can do more than that now, that they can also provide a, help you with your revenue growth or help you with your loyalty help you with your engagement as well as your operation efficiency. So whenever you are looking at saying, how well are we doing with this technology? Don't just look at it from the point of view of how well are we doing with this technology in terms of its driving our EF.
look at it also in terms of how well are we doing with this technology in terms of how it improves employee engagement. In terms of how well it improves customer loyalty in terms of how well it's potentially helping us with customer growth. So you're now looking at it from a three or four dimensions rather than just the one dimension, which is what companies tend to do. They tend to look at it just from that internal operational efficiency perspective and not other perspectives.
So going back to workforce management, the easy assessment is to say, okay, our workforce management is, let's give it a five, outta 10 for how we optimize is from the efficiency point of view. But maybe it's only three outta 10 in terms of how it's driving employee engagement, because you haven't got work-life balance capabilities within it. So that's the other dimension, second layer to this.
Yeah. So instead of your Excel spreadsheet saying workforce management system and one number, the elements of the workforce management system underneath there, and maybe looking at the numbers of that as well and see what those, what that return comes. Yeah,
exactly. And don't just limit it to the web technologies because even your routing, routing engine will have an impact not just on efficiency, but it'll also have an impact on employee. Retention employee experience. Cuz if you've got employees dealing with customers asking questions, they dunno the answer to cause they've come through to the wrong agent, that's not gonna be a good day for that employee.
And equally has an impact on the customer experience if they're put through to an agent who doesn't know the answer, their question cuz of the routing logic. So all of those different components of customer service can have that multi-dimensional scoring. Again, one to 10, keep it simple, and then from that work out the way forward.
Jim, I would never solely focus on w e m. That, that is ridiculous to think that it would be something that only I would think of. I'm very multi-dimensional, multifaceted kind of person. No I've been accused of that. It's been basically my life for the last 15 years. I have to thank you for the reminder. Alright, so now let's. The next step, let's say the team sits down in the room, Excel spreadsheet. We're mapping everything out. Everything comes in a nice 7, 8, 9.
We're feeling really solid or we've done some work to get back to making sure those basics are taken care of. What are some of the things that maybe to focus on for, to be prepared for the next wave of customer experience that a contact center could focus on?
I think there's another lab before we get to that. Sorry to, sorry. To keep delay in the future. Oh, let's know. . No. But there, there's another layer which I see. Overlooked too often. And actually to me, when I created W F O all those years ago, it was one of the founding reasons for it, which is the value you get from having all these different basic functions working together as one, it's the one plus one equals three type of analogy.
And what are the incremental things you can do if you have these systems working together as one rather than the siloed systems? and that's something I don't think many companies spend enough time looking at as they try and go above and beyond just the basics. So as a very simple example of that could be using your quality data. To provide more granular granularity to how you generate your schedule.
Now, using performance as a driver for the schedule allocation rather than just a skillset that's been predetermined, something like that, which you can do if these systems are working together. You can't, if they're not looking outside of WEM, it could be using that QM data to influence the routing logic. So the customer gets sent to an agent who's gonna be a better fit because of how they're performing in that particular area that day, that week, that month.
So I would say that layer above getting the basics right is looking for opportunities to get these systems working together more, getting cross domain workflow across the domain value add, because I think that summit that's really been overlooked in the marketplace over the last decade.
And the challenge often that I find in talking to organizations is not that they don't realize this, it's often that they're not taking a step back and looking at it from an organizational perspective as opposed to a context center perspective. And I'll give you a good example. You use the the routing engine. As a way to get callers to the higher quality agents. I think anybody in their right mind would think, yes, we want the best agents answering the calls.
The problem that organizations have is often how to get to that question. It's not saying, what do we do with our C A S. Deployment to work Here it is more taking a step back and saying, boy, our customer survey scores are just not meeting what we need to do. How can we get our customer survey scores better? Okay, ha we need to get people to better quality people. Okay. That, and so that, that step is often overlooked as the, as an organization and taking a step back and looking at.
Organizational issues, not contact center issues. Think asking questions like, are we spending our money correctly in the marketing phase? What, why our abandoned rate is really high. Take a step back. And the abandoned rate is because when we look back at it's, the 800 number not published correctly, right? Those are organizational wide issues as opposed to contact center. So I think that's a really great point.
It's taking that solution to the second level of, and how marrying solutions together can actually drive that, that the goal that we're looking for.
Yeah. And I think, and to be honest challenge isn't the technical one. The challenge is operational. Because quite often the owner of these different functions, they don't talk to each other. I remember 10 years ago when a, and I won't name names, but there was when a QM vendor bought a workforce management vendor, and the first thing they did was go through the two sets of customers and look for customers who were the same.
And then visit those customers and physically introduce the employees of that organization to each other. but they'd never met each other before because one team worked on QM and one works on workforce management and they never knew each other. . So that if you're never talking to each other internally, how on earth are you gonna start thinking about the bigger picture of getting the two technologies to work together to provide the in incremental value?
So a big part of this is having some form of entity, whether it's a customer service CX team or somebody that's looking now from above who can start to try. Break down those barriers internally and start to try and get the different aspects working together. Cause they can see that bigger picture. Wow. Just
chuck full of insight. I love that. We're able to give this kind of information to the rest of the team here because there's so much good stuff. Okay. Now let me see if I could finally get to my original question that you we got so much good information here and I'm so appreciative of it. What. Couple of things that as we look to the future that we could that a contact center or an organization could focus on,
I think to break it into two parts, near future and long term future. So I think that near future, one of the technologies that we should all be investing in every context and should be investing in this now, is analytics, speech analytics in particular, or interaction analytics. It's. It's a technology that's not new.
I remember years ago being asked whether this is witchcraft and how can it possibly understand the voice, but it's proven, it's accurate, and it's a technology that you can apply to so many different use cases. I think it's something that we should all be looking at now.
Now whether that's trying to make our center more efficient, whether it's trying to drive employee retention, whether it's trying to drive revenue growth from up sale, cross sale, it doesn't matter that, that you can tailor the analytics to help drive that business scale or even just make your QM process more intelligent to your analyzing all of your calls, not just that random sampling that we talked about earlier. So I think near future, that's the one technology that stands out.
any other that I think everybody should be looking at now because the value it can provide. The caveat I would say on that is you have to have the competency internally to get the most outta that technology. Because it's like buying a Ferrari and if you dunno how to drive it, you're not gonna get the most out of it. So you've gotta have that competency.
So with the technology comes the appropriate training and onboarding, but as long as that's in place, that's the number one technology I'll be recommending anybody looks at the moment. Longer term, I would say that the bigger opportunity is really starting to get into how we assist the agent live in an interaction with a customer.
So think of it in terms of real-time guidance, real-time assistance, being able to bring information to the agent to help them with the interaction, to help steer the agent through a complex process to navigate between different systems to. Detect that they're getting emotional and recommend they take a five minute timeout to go and grab a coffee.
Really having that sort of real time ability to look at what's going on in that interaction and assist that employee however possible, I think that's the next leg. So I think that can have that type of technology stack can have the biggest impact on all those customer service metrics, whether it's employee, customer, or operational.
Because you alluded to it earlier that. The self-service is taking care of the easy stuff, and the only thing that's making it to the agent is the hard stuff and the ability for them to navigate those waters with empathy and correct information, it becomes more and more difficult. Realtime guys. I, no, I've noticed you, you bring up a good point. I've noticed I, I attend the amount of a fair amount of conference trade shows and those types of things in the context center industry.
And that seems to be the really big focus is realtime analytics, agent guidance, next best action, those kind of things.
And. There seems to be a lot of energy in that space these days, and it's gonna be interesting to see the promise fulfilled with with organizations and really being able to, because at the end of the day, The reason all of us have jobs in this industry, whether it's you, me, the managers, the agents, is because somebody needs assistance with something that didn't go to plan, right? Yes. And when that plan goes awry, What information do we have available for us to fix it?
I'm pretty good at searching for things online, but even I, tech guru Dave still need to contact support every now and again to report an issue or to find out and. When we do talk to that person who is knowledgeable, empathetic, and works it's what's, what I hate to say is that almost comes across as a surprise these days. It's almost wow, that was not what I expected. When we get someone that's nice and knowledgeable, , the, and that's a thing we need to change in our industry and.
We hopefully, as we continue to see growth, and that's why we do episodes like this, is where should the next. Where should the next focus be? What should we really talk about? And so I think it's amazing that we have the ability to do some of these things. And yes, you're right. Analytics used to be like witchcraft, but you no longer need a room full of servers to do it. With cloud-based technologies, we can now do analytics on a hundred percent of every interaction that comes in.
And we understand what's being sent, and I think that's amazing. I know we're getting close to being out of time and wrapping up here. I wanted to, one of the things I always like to do and when we have great guests on the podcast is give 'em the final word, give 'em the, prognosticate a little bit for me, Jim what what advice or what information would you love to make sure the audience hears about?
Going off a little bit of a tangent relief we've covered today. I think what we all need to focus on more is a better understanding of the experience we are providing our customers in customer service and not just a better understanding of it, but actually starting to do something with that understanding. Most contact centers do post call surveys or end of call surveys or follow up with an email. But 99% of the time nothing ever happens.
So I think my, my, my plea to everybody in customer service is to really take a look at that. Post call, that CX program that they've got running at the end of their service incident and looking to are we taking it seriously? Are we really acting upon this information? And are we striving to improve the CX based on what the customers are telling us that they're experiencing? Because I think for the large part, most consumers.
Don't have a good experience but equally don't feel like there's any point telling that brand about the experience because I don't feel like anything's gonna happen. So I think we need to change that expectation.
And I will encourage, for those of you who are listening, remember this is a man who has seen it all. This is a man who has seen every single thing this industry can throw. The good, the bad, the ugly, and the indifferent. And if he's espousing this kind of information, we should listen because there is no one who's probably seen more about what we do than Jim Davies. And that's why it's super exciting that he's a part of the Calabrio family now. And Jim, I really enjoyed this one.
A really fantastic discussion, and your insight and your knowledge is well appreciated, and I think it's going to be very useful for a lot of people. Thank you from me for joining for spending some time with us today. And as always, to our listeners, thank you guys so much for giving us some time in your day. We here at working smarter with Collabreo. Really try to put forth a great product here and make sure that you guys get the information you need.
So Jim, again, thank you for spending time with us today.
Thank you, David. I
appreciate it. Ah, absolutely. Oh, and he called me David only, oh, my mother calls me David. And so that's very British and very
formal, you say. Yeah.
It's actually funny you bring that up because, my name is David James Stra. And a very common nickname for David is Davy. And so my parents when I was younger, called me Davey Jim. So we just take Jim Davies, flip it around to Davy Jim, and that's what we get. So that's great. There you go. So thank you again for joining us. Thank you to everyone out there and we will see you on the next episode of Working. From Collabreo.
As always, if you have information you'd like to see, just go to collabreo.com, find any email address, send it in, and we will respond. If you need help or want to discuss anything with us, we really appreciate it. Otherwise, we will talk to you on the next episode of working Smarter from Collab. Thanks everybody.