There are cult classics and then there are cult classics that simply become classics. First airing In 1993, Chris Carter’s The X-Files falls into the latter category. With a mix of sci-fi and paranormal phenomena, The X-Files pioneered the true-believer vs. skeptic formula while exploring the unknown.
Although evidence of aliens may still be elusive, there are many other unknowns we’re all exploring as AI creeps into our everyday lives. I asked Chris Carter to help explore the impacts on employee and customer experience. No, this Chris Carter didn’t create The X-Files, but we still dig into the unknown.
We discuss:
- Understanding Employee Experience in Customer Service
- Strategies for Listening to Employees
- The Role of AI in Employee Support
- Balancing Efficiency and Employee Experience
- Customer Choice and AI Interaction
- Building Personal Connections in Customer Service
- Rethinking Employee Experience in Contact Centers
Connect with Chris on LinkedIn
Music courtesy of Big Red Horse
Transcript
Rob Dwyer (00:01.826)
Thank you for joining another episode of Next in Queue. My name is Rob Dwyer. Joining me today from South Austin, Texas, Chris Carter. Chris, how are you?
Chris (00:13.37)
I'm doing good. How are you today, Rob?
Rob Dwyer (00:15.412)
I am fantastic. You know, I just had a conversation with Mike Kendall and we talked all about voice of customer and kind of how things have evolved over the years. And today you and I are going to dig into an aspect that we just touched on in that conversation. And that is the voice of the employee. So it has a big impact.
on customer experience. So I'm excited to talk with you about that. But before we do that, let's learn a little bit about Chris. Tell us about you, other than the fact that you're in Austin, what should the audience know?
Chris (01:02.842)
Well, actually, Spring Springs, technically, which is about 35 miles southeast of Austin, we're in the hill country.
Rob Dwyer (01:06.029)
Chris (01:15.364)
The beautiful tower growing fast though, lots of construction.
been in this area for a long time since 1979. I was here before a lot of the craziness started in Austin, the growth as it were and was here for the tech boom and it's been a pretty exciting time to grow up in this area I suppose.
Rob Dwyer (01:29.486)
There's a long time.
Rob Dwyer (01:47.758)
I imagine the traffic patterns have changed pretty drastically.
Chris (01:52.121)
Yeah, traffic has always kind of been a problem because we had We had a government in place at the time that was not interested in growing the small little town, you know and wanted to keep it you know our weird little vibe and I can't remember who it was. It was in the news somebody was sitting on submissions for you know permit permitting and they just were
putting them aside. So here's all these permits, you know, requests for, you know, infrastructure improvements and things like that. And then in the, guess it was our night somewhere in the nineties, you know, we started offering these big tech companies tax incentives to come to Austin and, you know, build their buildings and all that. So we had all these tech companies come.
But we didn't necessarily have the infrastructure to support him. So, you know, we've been playing catch up ever since.
Rob Dwyer (02:56.952)
Yeah, Austin is a little bit like Vegas in my mind lately because it seems like there's always construction going on. Tons of cranes everywhere, big buildings going up. That's been my experience. I am sure you could speak more to that.
Chris (03:09.494)
Yeah.
Chris (03:16.588)
Yeah, you know, getting in and out of Austin can be frustrating, but if you're in downtown or you're close, it's pretty, know, downtown is walkable, around downtown is bikeable. In the summer, that's, you know, need to want showers and stuff in your office because it gets pretty hot and nasty. But when I was at Atlassian, you know, I lived north of Austin.
And I biked into work every day and it was great. was the same. It was the same amount of time, if not less for me to ride my bike to work, than it was to drive. And obviously that cost me a lot less money and got me in great shape. Now that I work from home, you know, I got all this extra weight.
Rob Dwyer (04:00.524)
Yeah, absolutely.
Let's let's not bring that into the pod because that hits a little too close to home for me. Well, let's dig into. Voice of employee. think we spend a lot of time when we're talking about customer experience on surveys on journey maps on all of the things that are.
Chris (04:12.639)
Yeah.
Rob Dwyer (04:32.846)
customer facing and often we forget about the thing that touches our customers the most intimately and I don't mean the way that sounded let me restate that maybe we ignore the people who interact with our customers and that's our frontline people and we don't always engage them to understand
customers better. So let's talk first of all when you think voice of the employee. What's the first thing that comes to your mind?
Chris (05:10.291)
Yeah, I mean, guess similar to voice of the customer, would be amplifying the needs of the employee and empowering them with the tools they need, the knowledge they need, you know, training to do the job that we've hired them for. And we should try to make it as, you know, free of effort as possible.
because those especially those who are in the CX world and working in contact centers and things like that, the systems and tools that they interact with impact both their level of stress and anxiety in dealing with calls and their proficiency and ability to handle customer complaints and get them to a solution.
you know, investing employee experience I think is really important because ultimately the return on that investment is, you know, better service to your customer base.
Rob Dwyer (06:17.262)
For those that haven't experienced this, and I think a lot of the listeners of this show have, but I know some have not, tell me about what it's like for an agent in a contact center or support center kind of on a daily basis. What's that experience like from who I'm talking to, to the systems I'm interacting with, to the job that I'm actually performing? Walk us through that.
Chris (06:41.43)
No.
Chris (06:46.486)
Yeah, it's been a while since I've been in the contact center world. So I recognize some things probably have changed. I mean, generally speaking, if they're in an office or they're desks, they plug in. Their time is recorded. They're on their leash.
Yeah, mean, it's all about a lot of companies now, it's all about performance, what's your handle time, what's your close rate, how quickly are you getting customers to a solution. And in my experience, I guess I'll speak from my experience when I was at Electronic Arts, I realized that's been a while, but it's probably similar in some companies and that is that...
Agents at some institutions are logging into multiple tools just to get their day started. You know, it's not like if I can throw a plug out there for who is it? Swift, I think is it Swift CX? that getting that right? Yeah, Swift CX. Yeah, they're doing some cool stuff. if you, you know, they have to log into all these different tools.
Rob Dwyer (08:01.41)
I think so, yeah.
Chris (08:10.07)
Each of them works a little differently depending on you know the customers issue. You might have to access this tool versus this tool Knowledge management, you know at some companies is not great that knowledge is not always updated
You know, you, it's a hard, I know I'm not walking you through the day, cause it's been a while, but I think the pain points that employees that are on the front lines are experiencing, you know, they're just like us, you know, but they're dealing with people generally speaking that are very frustrated and, and, know, they might not have the words or the language or, you know, to, communicate.
effectively, you know, with these people when they're under pressure or if they're having to jump around and search for stuff or if they're too scripted, you know, and then they get thrown off track and, you know, so all of these things can cause, you know, anxiety and burnout and et cetera. So, you know, I think we need to get to a point to where, you know, the person is there more as the support person is there more as an observer or an analyst.
in what's happening in the conversation. Like if you're chat support as an example, you know, you could have AI tools kind of doing scripting based on what they're getting from the customer. And then the advisor is more managing that conversation to make sure that it's accurate, to make sure that the right knowledge is linked in there, things like that. So it takes the pressure and the stress off of them.
you know, having to come up with all of the right words or go find the knowledge or, know, you can use the AI agents to go find and source the knowledge and bring it up to the advisor. And now the advisor's in more of a strategic role. Rather than them being reactive, you know, they can be proactive because they're getting kind of the, you know, the initial solution based on, you know, what the AI knows right in front of them. So things like that, I think, would be.
Rob Dwyer (10:01.602)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Chris (10:17.394)
would be helpful from an advisor perspective.
Rob Dwyer (10:20.366)
Yeah, let's talk about how we talk to those employees or how we listen to those employees. What are some of the strategies that are commonly employed? I'm not talking about effective or I don't not asking you to judge them. I'm just talking about what's what's typical.
Chris (10:42.003)
Yeah. you know, surveys are typical coaching is typical. You know, when I was at, when I was an investment advisor at Janice, you know, we had coaches that would listen to us remotely. and then they'd pull us aside for one-on-ones and we'd review the, know, what happened in those calls. and then you'd get some sort of training and coaching around that. I don't know how many organizations are using that process, but I think it's a pretty well-known process.
and CX to do, either side by sides or remote listening to calls. With the size of contact centers now, and the cost of head count to be able to do that, I think it's a little challenging. It's a lot of calls to listen to. But yeah, I think I don't know what other things they're employing other than surveys and just one on
and call listening. Potentially they're watching things through the interface, the desktop. You could be recording different interactions there. When I was at Electronic Arts, we stood up a brand new contact center. So prior to me starting, everything was outsourced. I think they might have had two full-time employees running...
external partners, you know, to provide support and their support was, mean, their CSAT was like 55 % and you know, they won worst company in America two years in a row and it wasn't good. So they created this organization. I think I was one of the first, I don't know, 30 or 60 employees and that. I got to wear a lot of hats and see a lot of things and interact with a lot of the pieces. And one of the things that I liked was we were looking at the agent
quantitative data and rather than looking at it as a negative on performance if they were in a particular place, we looked at it as an opportunity to change their queue or partner them with a more proficient agent in the same area. You know, just little things to move them around until, you know, they had the knowledge they needed to act efficiently. We also built a custom desktop that
Chris (13:07.549)
plugged into all of the different things they had to log into, so they had a single thing to log into. We also had a really cool feature called Voice of the Gamer. And this was a, it was basically a survey that I could manage at any time, in real time. We had an alert system set up to watch if we were seeing weird stuff coming in that we needed to know more about. And I could
Action that voice of the gamer survey based on what the agent was doing on the desktop So if they selected an issue type that was related to what we were trying to get more information about That little survey would pop up and it would instruct them on things that we needed to capture to validate What was going on so that we could you know put deflection measures up on the web or ICR or whatever it was so I think EA was pretty advanced at the time
I don't know that there are a lot of contact centers doing, maybe Apple, doing what we were doing at the time, and still not. Where I am now, think we're, healthcare usually is behind the eight ball anyway, but they're putting a lot of investment in improving the experience now.
Rob Dwyer (14:25.71)
mean, let's go there in the healthcare space. How are you engaging employees to understand how to improve how they support customers today? What are some of the techniques that you're using to really mine your employees for ideas?
Chris (14:51.827)
Yeah, I mean, you know, with technology now, we're definitely getting a lot of recommendations of things that would be helpful and supportive for them as they're on the phones. You know, I think some of it comes down to really it's like process and efficiency. Are calls being routed correctly? Do customers have, I think a big one is do the customers have the information
that they need to solve their own problems or answer their own questions prior to getting to, instead of having to go to support. We get a lot of feedback that shows that customers are calling in upset about something that they potentially would not have been upset about had they been informed previously. so advisors are having to get, they're receiving these calls all the time.
recommending, we need to do this thing or do that thing. Unfortunately, our industry moves a little slow. yeah, it's very much a, how do we improve this system? How do we improve?
Chris (16:10.513)
The staffing, how do we improve, you know, queue routing? How do we, you know, I think we want to make it as, you know, efficient as possible. And we want the advisors to be, you know, relaxed and have ability that we have videos and stuff on our internal site where you can take quick little meditation breaks and things like that. So we try to provide, you know, resources to.
Rob Dwyer (16:35.214)
Mmm.
Chris (16:37.337)
It's hard working in healthcare, you know, because a lot of times the frontline staff can't solve the problem. You know, it's just the nature of the insurance industry, you know, and I think that can be challenging. You know, you have an employer that chose a particular plan based on the price of that plan, and that plan is made a certain way, and that's just the way it is. And so if somebody is having, you know...
Rob Dwyer (16:42.562)
Yeah.
Chris (17:05.773)
issues with a, with a claim or a bill or, know, something not being paid or whatever the case, you know, the advisor, if it's the way the plan was designed, it's, there's not really much that that advisor can do. And I think that that's, that's frustrating for them. You they, they want to help. know, they want to, they're empathetic. Most people in customer service are, you know, very empathetic people. think, you know, they care. And, I know our people do for sure. And, it's tough.
Rob Dwyer (17:20.706)
Yeah.
Rob Dwyer (17:37.304)
I just had a conversation yesterday with someone who is not in this space. They are in a customer experience type of role, but it's an in-person type of role. There's no contact center. And they were asking me some very pointed questions about contact center agents and how you support them. And you just brought up something very interesting that I don't think we hear from a lot of contact centers. And that's.
Chris (17:58.564)
Mm-hmm.
Rob Dwyer (18:06.602)
a brief way to meditate or relax after I would assume a particularly stressful call. How do you put parameters and operationalize that? What does that look like? Because that seems like a really interesting concept that I think is uncommon.
Chris (18:24.548)
Yeah, I mean, I think now it's more on the advisor to take the opportunity. It would be cool. know, we had again, at EA, know, we had talked about various things there to improve the support experience and the advisor experience and actually the customer experience. You know, customers being able to play fun little games while they're waiting in the queue, you know, if they're on chat, something like that. Advisors, you know, having the ability to
do other things if they're waiting for calls. But I think now, yeah, with AI, I think there's a lot of things that we could do to better support our staff. With AI listening to phone calls or watching chats, if a particular conversation seemed like it was heated or didn't end, maybe that AI could interrupt and take them out of the queue for a second and allow them some kind of a
a break or a meditation or go take a stretch or, you know, think things like that would be, would be really important. I hope that all of the deflection measures that we implement and, reap the benefits, you know, reaping the benefits of AI by deflecting all of those things. hope that that drives CX leaders to,
give some of that time back to the advisors for something besides taking the contact. You know, like three check and currencies and, you know, having to, you know, take a call within however many seconds and stuff like that. Like, if we could staff in a way that we're still saving money from deflection efforts, but, you know, maybe we could be saving more, but we want to invest in the employee experience and let's figure out, you know, ways that we can.
Rob Dwyer (19:58.094)
Mm.
Chris (20:19.055)
you know, make that a lot easier.
Rob Dwyer (20:22.862)
This is a conversation that I also just recently had and I am concerned that the more that we deflect the low hanging fruit, and I don't have data to back this up, this is just my gut, but the more that we deflect the low hanging fruit, the easier transactions in the spirit of efficiency in empowering agents to handle more complex
issues, which there's something to be said, right? I get my brain working. I've got a problem to solve. That's certainly more interesting work, but it also potentially in my mind creates a situation where we don't have these easy interactions where I can de-stress. And if we aren't creating these, cadences where we're giving people an opportunity to
relax, to de-stress, whatever, that we're worsening that employee experience because they are stressed more throughout the day. Do you have thoughts on that? I mean, it sounds like you're certainly hoping that we don't go that route, but do you have concerns that that may actually happen in a lot of companies?
Chris (21:48.526)
Well, it's funny, you know, I used to talk to CX leaders and I thought that tracking CSAT was kind of a funny idea. In that if you have a really high CSAT, in my mind, that means that you have a lot of calls that should be audit that the customer should be able to fix themselves because CSAT is directly correlated with your resolution. So things that are resolved quicker, your first contact resolution things with short handle time and high satisfaction.
Probably shouldn't be taking any of those contacts. Those should all be automated. So then what's left, to your point, it's the harder issues, potentially more technical issues. They take longer to resolve, resolution takes longer, CSAT goes down. So you would end up having really kind of a lower CSAT, but it wouldn't necessarily be bad if you're operating as efficient as you can. But...
Rob Dwyer (22:41.806)
Hmm.
Chris (22:46.55)
Also to your point, it stresses out advisors. I think we got to figure out one, it's like, as a customer, I think I need to have less of an expectation on that advisor being able to resolve my issue if it's one of these very complicated things. How do we prepare or pre-frame appropriately to the customer that this is a technical issue that requires multiple people to look at it and investigate how.
being impacted, cetera. And is that something that we could offload to more of like an AI that is doing research with the customer gathering more information and data from them so that we can get to a fix much quicker? Like does the advisor need to be involved if the advisor can't do anything about it? Maybe they come on board first with some empathy.
what's going on, try to understand the situation better and set it up. Like, hey, what I'd like you to do is shuffle you over to this, you know, feedback form or whatever, or feedback AI. And it's going to leverage the information that we already know and ask you some questions so that it can try to figure out, you know, what's going on and if it's impacting a much larger customer base. And then for the quick stuff...
You know, again, I think customer, you I don't want to call customer service. You know, like, I just want to, you know, I want to be on my Mac and I want to be able to do whatever I want. And I don't want it to break and I don't want to call customer service and I don't want to go get on with their chat. you know, I want a seamless experience. And if I'm going to have a problem, I want them to figure out what it is before I do and either fix it or meet me where I'm at, you know.
Rob Dwyer (24:36.833)
Hmm.
Chris (24:37.141)
And I think that's a lot of what people are talking about now is more of that proactive because there is a point to which you would want to invest in taking someone's contact. One reason would be if it's important to the business, obviously, to get whatever it is that the customer is trying to do. The other reason might be it's a great customer experience if I'm already going to take their contact anyway. If somebody is on the website and they're
going around and you start to see that they're frustrated and lost and, you know, not sure where to go intercept them, you know, and, because they're going to call you, you know, where they're going to chat. just take it, you know, but meet them where they're at, and try to solve the issue. I think it would be great if it was a personal interaction. I know sometimes that's not necessarily cost effective, but I would
Rob Dwyer (25:15.63)
Hmm.
Rob Dwyer (25:19.234)
Yeah.
Chris (25:35.73)
say, argue that, you know, if we can get to more personal experiences in this age of AI and leverage AI more as a resource or like a buddy, you know, somebody to help me troubleshoot and collaborate with, that that will be better for everybody because, you know, there's a personal connection with your customer. You know, that creates, you know, some sort of
guess brand appreciation and I like it when I'm talking to a real person you know versus a computer for especially for some of the more difficult things.
Rob Dwyer (26:16.526)
I wonder you mentioned something and I wonder if we look at the customer side and and how this how this might play out if I'm as a human fronting an interaction and and you've got a challenge that maybe
Maybe I can't just solve right away and I try to push you to a digital channel. I wonder how many customers are going to appreciate that versus how many customers are going to get really upset that you're offloading me onto this automated system when I I called to talk to a person. Do you have any sense?
Chris (26:41.238)
Mm-hmm.
Chris (26:58.636)
Mm-hmm.
Rob Dwyer (27:07.893)
as to...
Rob Dwyer (27:11.894)
what the general sentiment is going to be if we take that approach.
Chris (27:18.417)
If we, I think we should give people a choice. Maybe there are people that would rather chat or maybe there are people that would rather talk to an AI versus a person. I think that's, it's funny sometimes we pigeonhole the customer into certain things based on business decisions to hit metrics.
Rob Dwyer (27:22.574)
Mmm.
Chris (27:48.46)
to improve OPEX or drive revenue. But it can be really short-sighted. That could be more of like a short-term gain versus the long-term win. Because while I'm saving money by shoveling that customer off, maybe, and not giving him the choice, what does their attention look like for that customer?
over the long haul, you know, are you, are you able to build a relationship with the customer, you know, through an automated system? You know, you're going to have to think about, you know, your marketing team, maybe, or your brand team is going to have to really think about what are other things that, know, how else are we going to connect with our customer? If not at the point where, you know, they really need our help. So.
Rob Dwyer (28:34.744)
Ha
Chris (28:46.347)
I think you should give people a choice. think another cool thing that was pitched around, I don't know if I can say who, but at a previous company that I worked for was being able to actually build a relationship with a specific advisor. So if you got paired with an advisor, maybe we used backend information and that we knew about both advisor and customer.
Rob Dwyer (29:05.825)
Mm-hmm.
Chris (29:14.763)
to align on maybe certain hobbies or you know around the same age or things like that and then when you're in queue you could choose I want to speak to so-and-so and then next time you come we could tell you hey Rob's available you're gonna have to wait two minutes or you can talk to Steve right now I liked working with Rob I'm gonna talk to Rob so now
Rob Dwyer (29:31.81)
Mm-hmm.
Chris (29:43.176)
you've got this relationship that you've built with the person on the other end and now you have a personal connection with the brand. And I think that's much better experience, probably for both people too.
Rob Dwyer (29:56.462)
Yeah, it what that I think fosters is an experience that's much more like working with a much smaller company. It feels like working with a smaller company. I know I, you know, I live in a small town in a rural area. My ISP is actually a co-op. If I have to call and talk with someone, I almost always get the same guy.
Chris (30:07.912)
Yeah.
Chris (30:19.402)
Yeah.
Rob Dwyer (30:25.55)
It is probably 80 to 85%. I'm going to talk to the same guy. Luckily I haven't had to talk to him in quite some time. So I should knock on some wood right now, but that fosters a certain level of confidence too in that individual because I've worked with them before. So there's a working history there.
Chris (30:36.659)
Ha ha.
Rob Dwyer (30:51.618)
They understand what problems I've had in the past without having to necessarily dig into the notes, which is what you typically see in a support center or contact center of a larger operation. Every customer I talk to is new to me. Even if they've talked to us a dozen times for me, I got to go back and I got to, you know, read through the history to understand what that journey has been like.
Chris (30:58.674)
Mm-hmm.
Chris (31:06.963)
Mm-hmm.
Rob Dwyer (31:20.286)
Whereas if I can operationally route to an assigned, it's almost like having an account manager. This is the person that takes care of you. It definitely feels more personal. There are some challenges associated with that, but there are potentially some long-term benefits that come with it.
Chris (31:29.789)
Alright.
Chris (31:44.617)
Well, I can tell you back when we thought about it, was technically extremely difficult, but I think today I don't think it would be as
Rob Dwyer (31:44.802)
The question.
Rob Dwyer (31:52.748)
Yeah, it's there are some questions that I would have too, and this would be something that I would want to keep a pulse on with my employees is while maybe I like talking to Chris because I feel like Chris does a great job every time I talk to him. Chris may not like talking.
Chris (32:13.785)
That's true. And you also, guess, you know, that you may have to worry about, uh, yeah, there's probably some, you know, issues that you'd have to worry about legally or HR wise. Uh, you know, if, um, somebody's, just, you know, lonely and wants to contact support because they can talk to, so, you know, to Rob, cause he's just such a nice guy. And sometimes it's not, not as much of, know, the issue with what's going on, but more just shooting the shit.
Rob Dwyer (32:43.502)
Yeah, and that happens. It doesn't happen a lot, but it absolutely happens in contact centers. And then you get the creeps that call in and. That's a whole other issue that you certainly, although. It'd be great if we could just always route them to a particular individual who was just going to shut that down. Let's talk more about. How do we?
Chris (33:05.096)
Hmm.
Rob Dwyer (33:13.086)
engage the employees to help us understand more of what we can do to better things. So we've talked about using AI to help empower them. We've talked about all the ways that we focus on efficiently trying to route the right people at the right time to the right
Chris (33:26.845)
Mm-hmm.
Rob Dwyer (33:41.614)
people on the front line to help them. We've talked about, hopefully making sure that when that customer ends up with them, that the customer has what they need so that we can actually work with them. What are some of the other things that we engage our employees with to try and understand how can we just make your life better? Because I feel like there are often
Chris (33:54.236)
Mm-hmm.
Rob Dwyer (34:12.014)
They're ignored sometimes when it comes to just making their life better.
Chris (34:17.998)
yeah, yeah, I, before I, you know, started doing more, you know, strategy and research and analytics and that stuff, I had worked in call centers before, familiar with some of that. Yeah, I think we should treat it as a collaborative relationship. You know, the tools to support the customer should include tools that allow the advisor to help inform the business on what could be improved or what could be worked on.
You know, how do I, maybe talking about earlier, like understanding like which kinds of calls do I want to invest in versus which ones need to be eliminated, like bugs and technical stuff. Or what can I automate, you know, self-service, make it easier. The advisor is the subject matter expert. You know, if they had the ability on the call, when something happens to say after the call, drop that into one of those buckets, like, hey, here's an opportunity.
for automation, and we somehow grabbed that record and had access to the call and all the information, HT and all that. Now I've got this big bucket of things that the research team and, or ops analytics can try to find commonalities and okay, how do I go to the business and say, we have a whole bunch of things here that if you updated knowledge on.
web or if you made less clicks to get here or made this thing easier to find, that we would see less contact volume. And so now the business has things that can prioritize to reduce operational expenses for support, improve customer experience, not having to contact support. But if they're part of that strategy and we make them part of the team, think, number one, that just feels a lot better.
you know, than being the grunt on the front lines. And number two, I think, you know, the technology that you could deploy to allow that, you could make it fun and interesting. There's so many, so many technological advancements now than when I was on the phone or when I was, you know, at EA doing, you know, analytics and stuff for the contact center. mean,
Chris (36:43.588)
Yeah, there's so many cool things that you could do with an agent desktop. Like I was saying earlier, think Swift CX actually does like an agent, like I was saying earlier, kind of like an agent monitor, like an analyst where they're just watching the responses and then they're editing them. But we could do things that make their job maybe a little bit more fun.
Rob Dwyer (37:04.184)
Hmm.
Chris (37:12.486)
And then some of the guys I worked with at EA, the technical experience of these guys was almost equal to the engineers that were in the other department. I think spend more time understanding who your agents are. What do you like to do on the side? What are your hobbies? Atlassian had this thing, it was like 20 % time, 20 % of the time.
You could work on whatever it was that you wanted to work on. You could, a project, you know, you could work on a project that would support another department. You know, you could do some kind of an analysis thing. could, you know, I don't know, write blogs. I used to write a lot of strategy stuff. So, you know, I think things like that, like how do I leverage, you know, the resources that I have and how do I tap into these subject matter experts, you know.
to improve the experience. Because sometimes, you know, us old guys at the top, you know, we have an idea of like, this is how I did it, this is what, know, and I think there's people that do have the right mindset, but you gotta listen to the front lines because they're the ones doing the job, engaging with the tools, they know how efficient they are, you know, they're gonna be able to be your biggest champions for improving not only their experience, but obviously the customer's.
Rob Dwyer (38:38.39)
I love the idea that you just talked about that 20 % time when you think about some of the challenges that companies have. So even just AI readiness, there's a lot of talk about customer facing bots and how we deflect, but a big gap for a lot of companies is my knowledge base, whether or not that is up to date.
Chris (38:48.454)
Thank
Chris (39:06.534)
Mmm.
Rob Dwyer (39:07.522)
There are absolutely experts within your team that are probably willing to document things that are important to the business that they haven't had time to document because they haven't been given time. We don't have a dedicated resource for that. And so there's this gap in not in knowledge, but in documented knowledge that is hindering
Chris (39:31.93)
Right.
Rob Dwyer (39:34.636)
the business from saying, we want to try to employ or adopt these specific tools to help relieve some pressure, make the customer experience better.
Your team may have exactly who you need to help you get there. And I think far too often we focus on the employee and their role as opposed to what are some potential stretch assignments that we can provide to number one, help them grow and potentially move into a different role. But number two, fix an existing problem that we have.
Chris (39:51.748)
Hmm.
Chris (40:16.889)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we have a big effort going on right now around knowledge and improving knowledge for agents and proactively serving up knowledge to them, et cetera. I think one thing we could do is if the advisor is on a call where they're using a knowledge article that is incorrect.
they tag it. And then if they know the solution and they provide it during the call, you know, that's where you could leverage your like little co-pilot AI assistant to, you could just say use the call to rewrite the article or something and it rewrites it and then they review it and approve it or edit it or whatever. So that's the way that you could do it quickly.
Rob Dwyer (41:01.154)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, Chris, what else is on your mind that you wanted to share with the audience that we haven't had a chance to touch on today?
Chris (41:12.45)
Yeah, you know, there's a lot of talk around this right now and I think it's important and it's about the employee experience and the contact center. And it's like, you know, we've, we've always looked at the contact center as a, a cost center, you know, and I think that that is a mistake. there's a lot of research out there that shows that a good employee experience drives good customer experience, revenue, et cetera.
Harvard Business Review, there's a lot of them. And I think some of the things we talked about, leaning into the advisors and making them part of the team, giving them the tools that work, that is gonna, and freeing them up with maybe these AI assistants that they can use, these little co-pilots to collaborate with, those types of things are gonna generate
ideas that potentially could be revenue drivers. I know at EA, the contact center recommended multiple programs at the time that ended up being huge wins for the business because our advisors there were empowered and they were, one of the things is like, are the metrics that you're using to
judge the success of your advisor accurate. You know, like we found that we were using CSAT, but you could get a bad CSAT if you couldn't resolve the issue and that may not be your fault. You know, or you could get a bad CSAT if it was escalated, but that may not be your fault. That may be part of the process. So we dug into that and we, you know, we made our own score based on things that were, that the advisor could handle versus things that the advisor couldn't handle.
Rob Dwyer (42:46.634)
Mm-hmm.
Chris (43:12.821)
And then one of the guys on my team, I thought this was awesome. Ted, he made a report card for the game teams based on their ownership of the issues that were coming in to the contact center. And they would get a letter grade and it would show all the contacts that they had and why the resolution was bad. Because they used to complain and say, Hey,
all these contacts, they have this low CSAT, you need to train your staff or they need to be nicer or whatever. It had nothing to do with that. It was that you're not resolving the issues that are in the game and they keep calling. But yeah, I think that, like I said, by allowing the advisors the freedom to really feel a part of the team and not just the grunts, I think that empowers them to want to
Rob Dwyer (43:55.607)
Mm-hmm.
Chris (44:11.901)
give more and participate more and give you ideas. I'm definitely way more interested in getting excited about what I'm doing when you're telling me I'm doing a great job and like, hey, go get all that. That one wasn't great, but we learned from it. I think that gets more out of any staff, really. It doesn't need to be just advisors.
Rob Dwyer (44:39.704)
think understanding whether or not the KPIs that you use are truly indicators of success is a great point because
We get stuck on KPIs. Why do we use this? Well, because we've been using it for 10 years. OK. But why? And to your point, you talked very specifically about some reasons that CSAT may, in certain instances, not be effective. And a lower CSAT may be indicative of the fact that we've changed.
Chris (44:54.499)
Totally.
Chris (44:57.997)
That's right.
Rob Dwyer (45:20.354)
the type of problems that we're asking people to solve and, and maybe they aren't as solvable in the immediate as they were before. Those are important things to understand about how your business is changing. Maybe some of the KPIs that you're using need to be addressed as well. So think that's really good advice for everyone to consistently just review that. Are we using KPIs that show us what success looks like?
Chris (45:23.959)
Yeah.
Chris (45:40.387)
Yeah.
Chris (45:50.402)
Because I would almost argue like CSAT is kind of a silly metric to track for support. You know, like if the customer is contacting you, they've hit some friction, I've caused friction.
It doesn't mean I may have a good interaction with you, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to stay with the company. And that doesn't mean that how I feel about our interaction is reflective of how I feel about the company. My wife had an issue the other day where she had a really great experience with the person that was on the other end of the phone and they helped her out and they did a great job. But overall,
She hates working with this particular company, you know, and would rather not, you know, but, you know, has to right now. And so, you know, I think the other metrics that we have are going to tell us the information that we need. And it's about our, how are we actioning the insights
that we receive and what impact is that having on the business? When the issue comes in, what do I do with it? Do I want to make this easier for the person? You know, because I need the information. There's a matrix that I created called the easy matrix and it's based on the irritant value matrix, which you can look up, but I liked easy better.
Rob Dwyer (47:09.71)
Mm-hmm.
Chris (47:31.969)
reframe some of the things, but it's what is the importance of this contact to the business and what is the importance of this contact to the customer? If it's of high importance to the business, but it's a very low importance to the customer, then you better make that really easy to do, right? Like spam in your Twitter feed or something. I need to be able to report them really easily, you know.
something like that. Surveys. Customers maybe don't want to take a pop-up survey. So how do you make that simple or easier at the appropriate time so that you get the important information? And then like we talked about earlier, there's things you might want to invest in. This person's trying to pay a bill and they're having trouble. Well, Accounts Payable wants me to take that money as soon as I can. Maybe I want to invest in taking that contact. So rather than...
you know, causing them all the frustration of now sitting on hold for 20 minutes or whatever it is to get ahold of us, just go get them, solve their problem, let them go on about their day. I created the problem, they're gonna call me anyway, might as well go fix it. And then automation, right? All of the things that we're doing, you know, where the customer calls and goes, hey, I need to check the status of my order.
they should be able to do that on their own. Or proactively, I should be telling you what the status of your order is. Things like that. If we work on those things and track them in that way, now I can start setting up projects that relate specifically to those buckets that I have all my information on. I know handle time, know CSAT or whatever you're tracking. know effort score and I know the cost and the number of contacts and all that.
Rob Dwyer (48:58.776)
Yeah.
Chris (49:21.136)
what am I doing or what is the business doing to affect that? And now you've got a feedback loop. know, say, well, this project that solved this problem cost this much, it reduced costs by this much. It was a profitable project or it was not, it wasn't a profitable project. How do we make it more efficient or less costly next time? I think that would be a good way to go about it. I think people would be happier if it was, you know.
Rob Dwyer (49:28.31)
Mm-hmm.
Rob Dwyer (49:46.766)
Yeah.
Chris (49:50.688)
Nice and smooth and and we knew you know away. were all aware of kind of what was going
Rob Dwyer (49:57.654)
Absolutely. Well, Chris, it's been a pleasure talking with you today. If you want to connect with Chris, go check the show notes. His LinkedIn will be there. Tell him I said hi. And Chris, thank you again for joining Next In Queue.
Chris (50:13.684)
Yeah, thanks, Rob. Sorry, my CX experience is a little behind as far as the agent interactions, but hopefully we, I think we had a good discussion, talked about some good stuff.
Rob Dwyer (50:25.962)
Absolutely, absolutely.