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How is music from David Bowie, Steely Dan and the Who related to the contact center? Find out by joining Dave Hoekstra and Zack Taylor from Cisco to learn how the contact center overcomes current challenges they face in the contact center.
In this series we will 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. Join us as we learn and grow together in order to provide world class customer service to each and every one of our clients.
Addressing the Challenges of Modern Contact centers with Cisco and Calabrio
Dave Hoekstra:
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 Hoekstra product evangelist for Calabrio. And my guest today is Zach Taylor. He is senior director of Cisco contact center, business unit, and we are super excited to have Zach as part of this. We're definitely excited to work with the Calabrio partners that we spend so much time and energy with.
It's really great to have you. Zach welcome. And I'd love to hear a little bit about what you do for Cisco and kind of how you got into this business. Like, tell me a little bit about the history of Zach and how you, how we got here today.
Zack Taylor:
Sure. And Dave, thank you for having me really appreciate you reaching out and Calabrio is a great partner.
Thank you so much. I guess the question is not, how do I get into this? How do I get out of this? I have been doing this for a long time. And my basic role at Cisco is to describe our value proposition accurately to our customers, our partners, and the analyst community.
So, I deal with a broad range of people, and I'm chartered with expressing what we do and what business outcomes we support through our customer engagement technologies, which is inclusive of what we do along with our partners. So, it's a very fun job. I've been doing it here at Cisco since 2009.
When I joke when we arrived, we were fifth at a three-horse race in the contact center marketplace. And after about six or seven years, we gained number one market share. And we were doing quite well. How did I get into this walking through the halls at AT&T the year was 1991, I was selling PBXs and phones and kind of voicemail.
And it was that, you know, how interesting is that after a while. I run into a gentleman in the hallway. His name was Eugene Matthews. Eugene was an innovator has 50 patents a very interesting person. And he said, you know, I'm doing this work in this thing called call center. And it's a very interesting place.
It's probably the most meaningful place in the, a business you can impact. Customers and what they do, would you like to come along and learn about this? And this gentleman poured into me and help me understand the importance of this value to customers. And I basically have spent since then doing it, and it, you know, is extraordinarily interesting because no two days are alike. So, I really enjoy it. And it never gets old.
Dave Hoekstra:
That's great. And so, you know, to peel back the curtain a little bit for our listeners, you know, we obviously have a prep session when we talk about this, and Zach and I pretty quickly discovered that there's a pretty deep passion for music in what we're doing here today.
You know, and ultimately our goal of the day is to talk about some of the things that are happening in our industry and the contact center really get a good perspective from different areas. And what we thought we'd do is kind of theme it around music. Right. And so, what's really interesting is we talked about a format here that could be great fun.
And what we want to do is we want to throw some facts at each other and see if we can figure out who we're talking about or what's going on. Right. So, it's almost like a little bit of a game show within a podcast here. And then we'll do the fun part and turn it back around. So, I'll throw you my first one.
Okay. I'll throw you, you know, what I think here. This fact is pretty interesting. This was actually the final song that David Bowie played live on stage before he passed away. Do you have any idea what song I'm talking about?
Zack Taylor:
Yes. And it's quite sad. He was such a great performer. And he went too young, right.
For sure. I have to believe it was changes if possible. And that is correct if it was pretty interesting background of that song too. He played saxophone on that song.
I don’t know if you know that he was a multi-instrumentalist and for few Yes, fans out there, Rick Wakeman, the keyboardist of Yes was in the band, in the studio band that recorded that song and tried in studios in London.
So, it's quite a song, but well, thinking of that, especially thinking about that, we got the word changes, you know, they, what changes are going on? In your opinion in, this world that Calabrio is addressing, and I can share mine, but you know, what are you folks working on and what are the massive changes that you can help address?
Dave Hoekstra:
Well, I think we can stop pretending that the cloud is a fad. I think we can start there you know, the scalability, the ability to spin up a contact center in minutes rather than weeks without a lot of equipment that's definitely a huge part, you know, and Calabrio really takes the position that we are the only true cloud WFO provider in, the industry.
And I know that Cisco has really made some strong strides that transformations never easy. Right going from, like you mentioned back in 1991, the on-prem PBX piece, but I'll throw the same question back to you. How is Cisco really approaching the changes that that have the industry has kind of thrown at us?
Zack Taylor:
Well, there's two ways to look at change. One is that there's no new news, there's old news happening to new people. So, and there's also that there's new news. I would say that there are a lot of things that have historically occurred that are just happening in, a new form factor called the cloud. That's the lift and shift model.
We are not involved in that. We are doing new things in new ways, not old things in new ways. As I joke, this is not rerecording Elvis from a eight track to a cassette and a cassette to a DVD. You still got the same recording at the end of it. This is essentially doing new things. What are those new things that we're looking at doing?
Well, of course the big operative words, Dave in the industry are automation and customer engagement, right? One implies automation and self-serve and doing things for yourself, low cost. There's much better form factors to do that these days. And then the second of course, is enhancing live assist, making it more personal, making it relevant making it a more I would call it collaborative and cognitive interaction between the agent and the customer, rather than an automaton a robot.
You know, that's being handled by software in Silicon these days. And the problems coming into the contact center. That are left over are far more complicated and they're outliers.
They're fractals they're they can't be automated. So, the contact center is fundamentally an exception center. It does things in an exception basis anymore. It doesn't do those run rate things. Those are all sitting in IVAs IVRs self-service outbound SMSs, you know, things that can be done cheaply quickly in the life. So those are the changes we're working on.
Dave Hoekstra:
That's pretty awesome. And I really like the way, you know, I've never really heard that approach of the contact center is an exception center. Right. And if you look about it, you're right. It's the contact center exists because that's the only way that people can get the problem fixed that a robot can't fix for them or an automated system can't fix for them.
And, you know, the new change that we've kind of seen is that all of the only thing that contact centers are handling nowadays are the complicated things. And that kind of brings up some new things like agent stress and fatigue and little interesting things like that.
But that's a really great way of looking. at it All right. So on to fact, number two, now you get to throw me this one and we'll see if I can figure out what song you're talking about.
Zack Taylor:
All right. This song was done by a group that was considered at the time and probably in history to have the best guitarist, the best bassist the best drummer and the best lead singer in the, in rock and roll happened to be all in the same band.
And the original title of the album was almost called Lifehouse, but it was retitled. And it was all about doing something that you do when you get in a car. And the band itself was a, was one of, part of the British invasion. So, a little obscure there, but when you get in a, when you get in any mode of transportation, what are you doing?
Dave Hoekstra:
Yeah, you know, the clues you've thrown me best bassist best guitarist, best singer, best drummer. You got to be talking about John Entwistle, Keith Moon, Roger Daltery and Pete Townshend. Yeah. So, I'm going to go with the Who on that. But I have to admit I'm not super familiar with exactly what song, so you get, you're going to, you may have to enlighten me there.
Zack Taylor:
Believe it or not. It's a B side single. The, a side was Behind Blue Eyes, which people know, but the other side, the B side was Going Mobile. And if you've ever heard that song it's one of the few songs at that stage that Roger Daltery didn't sing lead on. He wasn't even in the studio, and it was recorded.
They, it was recorded as a power trio. So why did I, why did, why, you know, why are we talking about this? Because contact center agents are not only mobile, but they're distributed right. As I joke, they, the contact center or the call center is neither. It's neither calls nor centralized. We think 80 to 90% of contact center agents still may be working at home.
So, the question is, you know, does the technology that you, that Calabrio delivers reflect the distributed and mobile and at home nature of the agent and knowledge worker population that you can address through your solutions
Dave Hoekstra:
Yeah, absolutely. So, there's a couple of things that easy answers on that one. First of all, Calabrio started thinking about the cloud well ahead of many of the other players in our space, and to get to a point where you have cloud native software instead of a Frankenstein model between several different pieces. That's a, that's not an easy ask. And so, you know, when we talk. Going mobile or, you know, remote hybrid environments, the cloud plays a big part of that.
The other big part that if you've ever heard me on anything, talk about anything, you know, I'm a big fan. I was an agent myself back in the day. And so, agent engagement is a really big part of this. So being able to take care of the agent while they're working from home or in a hybrid environment, being able to really take care of their work life balance.
You know, really pay attention to it. That's a huge part of what Calabrio does to try and do that. And I know that based on what Cisco is going through, especially with WebEx contact center the different pieces there, you guys are looking at it very similarly as well. No doubt.
Zack Taylor:
Yeah. WebEx contact center is a classic distributed cloud contact center solution. It's super buzzword compliant. You know, it was built rare. You know, one of the few things Cisco didn't acquire in this space, it was built ground up, microservices, you know, all the. All the buzzword you need there, but essentially all.
Dave Hoekstra:
Can I say Kubernetes? Am I allowed to just say Kubernetes? I don't even really know what it means. It's just very buzzwordy.
Zack Taylor:
You can say containers. Kubernetes. You can say it all. You can have the biggest word salad you want. We probably check the boxes on all of them. And in the model that we support as an agent can really log in from any device anywhere.
We actually have one customer right now that has four, about 4,000 agents on the platform and they're in 90 countries and they're logging in from all over the place. Not just, you know, a heads down contact center agents. So, yeah, agents, like I used to say, Dave service is no longer a place.
Right. It's what you do. It's no longer a place people used to say, oh yeah, the contact center over there. I see that room full of people with the 32/ seventies and the headsets and the big clunky phones, you know, that's no longer that place. It's everywhere. Service is a paradigm.
Dave Hoekstra:
So, my favorite bit of trivia about contact centers is no longer applicable. I would always tell people if you drove by a building and there seemed like there was an inordinate amount of cars parked in the parking lot. Yes. That was a contact center. And you don't see those anymore, but I could always tell a contact center when I drove by it. It was like, yep. There's a contact center in that building.
Zack Taylor:
That's interesting. And I grew up in a rust belt town in Ohio, Warren, Ohio. And after the, all the steel mills closed, and we had a bunch of retail stores in town. There was one brand at the time it was called Zara's. You probably never heard of it, but I drove by there once coming back for a high school reunion.
And the parking lot was full. Just like you said, like what's going on there. And I looked up and the name of an outsourcer that we all would know was on the front of that. And they were hiring ex or laid off steel workers to be contact center agents in a rust belt town in Ohio. So, I know exactly what you are talking about.
Dave Hoekstra:
Yep. And so, we'll see if we ever get back to that, but I doubt it. We, the hybrid world seems to be here to stay. Alright. So, it's my turn to throw one at you. This one might be kind of easy, but you know, hey, we're not here to stump each other. This was a song that the artist was paid 3 million dollars, for which at the time was a record for kind of using a song in an ad campaign. Do you know the song and the company that paid the artist?
Zack Taylor:
Gosh, I mean, there's so many of. Songs that have been used in ad campaigns. I remember the one there was a Coldplay song or what was a big thing for Mercedes or Audi or something. It was really striking.
Dave Hoekstra:
I'll give you a, I'll give you a hint. This was 1995.
Zack Taylor:
Oh, I think that's a super hint, right? Because yes, I know what you're talking about. You're talking about windows 95. You're talking about, Start Me Up, right?
Dave Hoekstra:
That is correct. Yeah, that is correct.
Zack Taylor:
You know, I, you got a guitar back there. I got several on the side here. Don't we all, one of the things about that song that's really interesting is it's played in either open G or open a tuning.
So, it's a really interesting riff because it sounds very complicated. But it's super easy to play and it's such a cool road. It's what makes Keith Richard so innovative. You know, anybody's good at something. Dave makes hard things look easy. And when you see that, you're like, wow, look at that.
And you look, and it's just, this, it's just an, it's a, it's an open tuning. And you know, here we are talking contact center and Keith is out playing in front of a hundred thousand people. Right.
Dave Hoekstra:
Yeah exactly. So, along those lines you know, first Start Me Up using that as kind of the theme, you know, what is Cisco doing to kind of get that startup process going. Right. How do they make things easy to kind of get things rolling?
Zack Taylor:
Well, let me talk a little bit, maybe less about technology than about processes, right? We feel very strongly about customer success. As I know Calabrio does very much so you're very dedicated to that.
So as part of our WebEx contact center, Practice. We have developed a CSAM team, a customer success organization run by a colleague of mine, Arvin IER, and it’s really kind of a, I call it not so secret sauce to help people get started up.
Done right, because interesting enough, the product that the is coming the customers coming to the product are half brand-new customers.
They're not existing logos. So, they're all new companies to us, which is rare for an incumbent. So, we have this really kind of, focused team. That's all about business process, helping people move from Prem to cloud. And I got to believe Calabrio is going through the same thing as you transition your customers too.
Dave Hoekstra:
Absolutely. And you know, what I always tell people is that, you know, in this space, in this business, or even just software in general, right, you've always got your Coke and your Pepsi. You've got your RC colas, you've got your, you know, the generic store brands and things like that. And they all at a very base level are the same thing.
What is it that kind of elevates that beyond what the button does or what the lever does and that is the customer success organization, whether we're talking about implementation, whether we're talking about the true customer success part of, you know, post implementation, but yeah, it's all about making sure that initial experience is positive.
And sometimes that is getting the contact center and WFO spun up in a very short amount of time to respond rapidly. You know, we saw a lot of that during COVID, right. A lot of the of the companies that or the new business that sprung up as a result, a lot of state or, federal organizations that needed answers quickly.
Right. We saw a lot of that coming through, but absolutely it's really. The idea that we have to take care of the customer, not just the software, not just the product, but the actual personas that are part of the deal.
Zack Taylor:
I have a question David that kind of popped up as you were thinking, you know, WFO WFM WM.
The category, right, is a mature category. Although new things are happening, right. It's been around it's come together, but are there companies that are getting into this for the first time, for the first time they've ever managed, you know, their resources, you know, a lot of the stuff has always been back of the envelope stuff, Excel spreadsheets, you know, but the companies that really do customer experience well go to sophisticated solutions like Calabrio to solve these problems.
Are there more people entering the utilization of this software than before, and are making the leap around, you know, kind of kludgy processes to do this kind of on the fly and doing the automation and some of the stuff you do.
Dave Hoekstra:
Yeah. There are, you know, the word more, I don't know if the ratio is increasing, but what we're seeing though, is we're seeing more and more customers.
Kind of discover the pain, right. And that's what our business is all about. Right. As people grow and they discover the pain of, wow, it was really easy when I had to run 10 schedules in Excel. But now that I have to run a hundred schedules, that's painful. How do I communicate that information?
How do I ensure quality? And, you know, the latest thing for us is kind of the voice analytics piece of things. Understanding the true customer experience, the voice of the customer doing unsolicited data collection, as opposed to solicited, like sending out surveys and, you know, the old school method of collection.
And that's really, what's funny is seeing these customers kind of grow out of their waistlines a little bit, you know, their pants start to expand too much, and they have to look for a better solution that can handle that growth. And that's, we're seeing quite a bit of that as well. Like you. So, all right, your turn.
Zack Taylor:
All right. Let me give you a, let me try to be as obscure, but as specific as possible. So, I give you a chance here. This song was the highest charting song for this group, but for years they refused to play a concert because they felt like it was cheesy and not really what they ended up being like as in many of this group songs the lyrics are obscure.
And open to much interpretation from the listener of which there are various thoughts of what this song meant. And the one of the primary outcomes of people establishing what this song meant was that the band hired a bunch of session musicians as a practice, and they wanted to get hold of Rick Derringer, the great guitar player, and someone had misplaced his phone number to get a hold of Rick there, to play the lead solo on this song, which was eventually played by a guy named Skunk Baxter. And it's one of the great solos in rock and roll history. Did I give you enough to go on there?
Dave Hoekstra:
Well, yeah you I was struggling, but you kind of walked me through the little pieces there.
I think we're talking about Rikki Don't Lose That Number by Steely Dan. My fun fact on Steely Dan is that Chevy Chase was almost part of the band. Right? I love that story.
Zack Taylor:
Yeah. They were Donald Fagan and Becker who were steely. Dan, eventually down to the two, went to Bard college in New York and they had, and Fagan was famous on campus for being in like 10 bands, because he was so talented and they had a band I think called the Yelp leather Canary or something that that, and they were all in the same artsy college and Chevy Chase was the drummer in one of and Donald Fagan actually said that Chevy was a pretty good drummer.
Which is interesting. So who knows?
Dave Hoekstra:
Yeah. It's a, the what ifs are really fun on that. Now you mentioned number, right? Right. So obviously we got to tie this back to contact centers. Let's even go old school and call them call centers. Right. Which right. You know, we're probably not allowed to do anymore.
We're not allowed to call them call centers, but we still have such a large contingency of these centers that handle voice. Right. So curious, like, do you kind of notice any metrics popping up now in newer call centers that that are a big player today?
Zack Taylor:
Well, there's two things going on, Dave.
There's actually metrics that are going away and they're being replaced, or they're being subsumed, I would say. So, the, all the traditional metrics of contact center, which are still measured, and they're all go back to the Hawthorne works Western electric efficiency measurements, you know, remember the turn, the lights off, turn the lights on.
When the workers in the 1890s and you measure the efficiency well contact. Right. 70% of running a contact center is tied up at a human capital. I mean, Calabrio exists to optimize that human capital and other things. The idea that measuring people around outcomes, like service level, handle, time, maximum delay and things like that are interesting.
And they're useful, right? But they're not material necessarily. There's low correlation between service level and customer experience. They're, you know, highly uncorrelated between something like a higher out order outcome, like net promoter or customer effort score. So, there's two or three metrics.
That are occurring. All the traditional metrics, Dave are being subsumed into one. First contact resolution. So, you take all the five or six things you cared about in the past abandons, delays, and all that. And you put them in a pot, and you boil it and you come up with first contact resolution is the operational metric that contact centers tend to be organized themselves around on an operational level.
Then on a business level. You know, a CX executive would look and say, are we getting recommendations? Are we getting willingness to recommend out of the contact center? And are we producing a low effort experience? And there's a battle in the minds of the marketplace, whether willingness to recommend comes from delight or ease of use that's the net promoter world, or the custom effort score world, the Matt Vixen world, and, you know, they both sell books, right.
So, everybody's got their ideas, right. So that's what's happening. Right. But I'm I have to believe that there's more metrics or more interesting metrics that Calabrio can generate. With all the tremendous amounts of data you capture, particularly cloud captures a ton of data.
Zack Taylor:
So, what are some of the things you're seeing?
Dave Hoekstra:
It's really interesting because what I'm noticing is the industry standard piece of metrics is starting to go away. Right? I'm noticing that as I talk to customers, both Calabrio and non-Calabrio. Like you said, nobody really cares about average speed of answer anymore.
Nobody really spends forever thinking of like what their service levels should be. Although it's still an important metric for a lot of organizations. But what we're seeing is now that each individual customer is now defining the metric that matters the most to them.
And what we're seeing too, is that the capabilities of, for example, voice analytics, again they're enabling metrics, they're questions that are really detailed that we've never been able to answer before.
So, I have customers that I work with very closely that their metric is how many competitor mentions did we have yesterday? And how many of those turned into a save. Or how many people, you know, what phrases led to successful sales in the sales organization, right?
Those are things that you can't measure unless you're able to kind of encompass your entire organization's the breadth of what everyone is saying within, you know, not just voice, but chats and emails and SMS and things like that. So that's, what's really fun. We still hear a lot about net promoter score. We still hear a lot about first call resolution. Those are absolutely critical metrics, but we're even seeing, going beyond like, what's the first call resolution.
On calls that mention this specific keyword right now, we're really getting it to the heart of what matters and we're spinning it outside of the contact center organization. We now have marketing departments that actually care that the contact center exists. We have sales departments that actually really want to now look at the data besides what's in their CRM. Right. That's, what's really fun for the organization that we're looking.
Zack Taylor:
You know, it's you made me think of something. I talked about this mentor of mine. Eugene taught me this, a lot of stuff. And one of the things he talked about is that data becomes information. Information becomes insight, insight becomes, I think the something else.
And the last thing it becomes is wisdom, right? And I think Calabrio is in the wisdom business, basically you create wisdom, you know, you gather information, but it ends up being some form of wisdom because information that's unapplied is, you know, lots of rock and roll facts. Right? My wife always says you're a pile of a lot of information, but is there any wisdom there? So, I have to find other avenues for wisdom.
Dave Hoekstra:
So, I'm going take a wild guess here that you love playing trivia.
Zack Taylor:
For certain categories. Yes. Certain ones.
Dave Hoekstra:
You land on the orange category, right.
Zack Taylor:
No geography.
Dave Hoekstra:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so we got a couple more left. Here's one for you.
Dave Hoekstra:
Let's see if we could see if we could figure this one out. We might have to explain what one of these terms mean to our listening group here, but this was the first hit from an artist that released the number one album of 1976.
Which was consequently the year I was born. So, but what it did, I don't know if you know where I'm going at this point, but what it did was it triggered a wave of people going out and buying a talk box.
Now I should explain what a talk box is. A talk box is, it's essentially a pedal that is connected to your guitar. And it has a tube that runs up to the mouth of the performer so they can speak into the tube, and it translates, it basically mixes the voice and the guitar together, and it makes the guitar sound like it talks.
Hence the name, a talk box. So, with that information, do you know what to, what song we're talking about here?
Zack Taylor:
Well, if it was earlier than 76, I would've said Joe Walsh because he made the talk box kind of poppy with a song Rocky Mountain way, but that was in 74, I think. So, the only thing I can not the only 76 was the year Peter Frankton right.
He came out of nowhere. And so, it has to be it has to be something off of Frampton Comes Alive which, you know, you were just being born. I was standing in line at a record store, buying it, give you an idea multiple copies, double live album. So, it's got to be something off Frampton Comes Alive, Dave.
Dave Hoekstra:
So, it is not Do You Feel. Right. So, I'll say that one. So, which one are we talking about here?
Zack Taylor:
Well, it's got to be either, the other ones off there were All I Want to Be Is By Your Side. And of course, Show Me the Way is the other one, you know, Show Me The Way that was one of the first songs I learned to play on guitar.
And what I found interesting about Frampton Comes Alive is that he had recorded almost all those songs before in the studio. This was not new music, right? Yeah. He just needed an album, and he went out and they recorded him live and he actually was a pretty spectacular live performer. More so in the studio.
The other thing interesting about the talk box, here's one for you. Do you know how he found out about a talk box? He, Peter Frampton was a phenom and he played on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass record in 1971 and he was in the studio, and he pointed at that thing over there and said, what is that?
And there was a gentleman, I can't remember his name and said, that's a talk box or a Squaw box. And so he got exposed to the Squaw box recording a lead solo on one of George Harrison's post Beatles solo albums. So, so that's interesting.
Well, okay, so Show Me The Way, right. So how does Calabrio show customers the way to better manage their business? I mean, is it visualization? Is it new forms of insights, analytics? What are you doing that really, you know, points customers in the way they should go?
Dave Hoekstra:
Well, it, I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier that kind of customer success organization side of things. Right? Whether we're talking about implementation, but you know that's the professional services kind of side of the organization.
But when we talk about the actual software, you know, it's our job to teach, but one of my favorite quotes and I'm paraphrasing is that any sufficiently advanced technology is akin to magic and we have to be careful not to show them the magic. Like if you were just took a smartphone back to the medieval times, you'd be burned at the stake within hours, right?
We have to be careful not to push them too far along that journey. So, it's a lot, it's about moving at the right pace with the customer. Some of our customers are brand new coming into this, just looking at, let's say an Excel spreadsheet where they're tracking their QM scores and they're doing a diligent job of it.
We don't want to violently thrust them into QM analytics fueled QM. And have them just be okay, this is too much. And then you get shelfware right. You get things that, you know, we, you have to very gently bring along. So that process of moving them along is such a huge part of what Calabrio does.
And, you know, I'm sure that Cisco kind of has the same approach with people. You know, we don't, we can't throw them too advanced stuff too quickly, but we do wanna get them there.
Zack Taylor:
Yeah. One of the things we're doing, that's kind of akin to that is that we're looking for one of the things we did last year, two years ago, we acquired a company called IMI mobile, which now is known as WebEx connect and they do this wonderful digital automation, customer engagement technology through SMS and up to 12 different digital channels.
And it's all been integrated at WebEx contact center. That's the technology part. But what we've been doing with customers is identifying candidates for automation and that's to show them the way right. To say, how can we look? You know, contact centers have always been about both either or rather than a both and.
And what do I mean by that is in the history of contact center, lowering cost meant lower service. It's either lower costs or lower service, right? Not and better service. It's right. It's lower costs comes at the expense. Well, it's quite possible now to have a both and, which is lower costs and better service.
And the way you do that is you automate what can be automated and you leave what's left over for humans. You know, like Elon Musk said when the model three factory was almost, you know, didn't open and they all slept on the floor of the factory and he came out and he says, my robots are great, but humans are underrated.
And that humans are underrated when it comes to this complex problem solving. I think we were talking when we were planning for this. I had a situation with a financial instrument recently and took me three months to do something that should really taken three days. And it literally was like 21 messages.
I tracked this just because I wanted to talk about it like nine, nine emails, 22 chats, you know, this and that. And at the end of it all, it took one 19-minute phone call with a human to fix it. And was trying to see how far it could go before I had to ask for a carbon-based unit, as Mr. Spock said to help me solve this problem.
So, you know, showing customers the way to provide better service. Lower cost and better service is really what we're trying to do for sure.
Dave Hoekstra:
I've been on the soapbox for a long time but especially lately that the most under looked at advance that contact centers can do is volume reduction.
Right. Not so few contact centers ever say, well, we can really get more efficient by taking fewer interactions. Yeah. And by, by introducing smarter tools that can handle some of the simpler interactions.
That's a huge part. But what we're really doing is just, like you said, we're freeing up the underrated humans to handle those complicated issues. And unfortunately, just like every other context center solution. It brings a new issue to the forefront, like, agent fatigue. And I think that actually translates really great into our final discussion point here. So, I think we have one more song that you were going to throw at me.
Zack Taylor:
I think I do. And I'm going to be, I'm going to unfairly, because I, if you talked about your, DOB your date of birth. This is going to predate you.
Dave Hoekstra:
And all apologies to our listeners that are under 30 years old. We have really tapped into the mid-20th century.
Zack Taylor:
This is the era of great music. I had a friend in the music business who was a producer and a musician. And he said they truly do not make music. Like they used to. I can attest to that. But all right, I got one for you, but I think it, you know, just like anything else, you may know this, you may not but it leads to a really rich conversation.
You may never heard the name. Terry Kirkman wrote the second most downloaded song on Spotify of all time still is. And he was the I member of a six-person vocal band that was very famous in the late sixties. It had about a string of five or six. And was the initial artist.
This is the best clue. And if you don't know this and I've gotten none left for you. The Monterey Pop festival was the big, first outdoor rock concert in the United States that predated Woodstock. They were the opening act and sang the opening five songs at the Monterey Pop festival. So, this group had the second most downloaded song of all time.
And then the opening act at the Monterey pop festival and the writer's name was Terry Kirkman. That's what I got.
Dave Hoekstra:
So boy, you have you have dug deep into the trenches of musical trivia here. And I am going to say, I think sounds like the Association.
Zack Taylor:
It does.
Dave Hoekstra:
Yeah. All right, then it's got to be Cherish.
Zack Taylor:
It is.
Dave Hoekstra:
All right. All right. Yeah.
Zack Taylor:
You know, they get, that's funny, the Association, how they got to become their, they were a vocal group that was meeting in these hootenannies in Los Angeles. Everybody went there in the mid-sixties. They were in a 15-person band called the men. And one night, nine, the nine guys got mad and quit and the six guys were standing there, and they said, well, what are we going to do?
And one guy said, well, we got to rename our band. And they, and the girlfriend, and one of the guys was sitting there and she took out the dictionary and she's thumbing through it. And she says, let's call ourselves the aristocrats. And they said, nah. Then they said, how about the association? So, it was one of those phone book kind of things.
And they went. Yeah, by the way, Cherish has been downloaded, I think over 300 million times on Spotify. It's a beautiful ballad written by Terry Kirkman and been redone by other artists. But by the way, to the point what does that meaningful to our conversation? What does Calabrio do to help customers quote, "cherish" their agents cherish is an affinity agent, by the way, they are the difference makers.
You can have all the bots you want all the IBAs and great that's good. But humans are the difference makers. So how do what does Calabrio do that helps businesses cherish those human resources that are so critical to customer experience in your estimation?
Dave Hoekstra:
Well, Zach as you may know, and many people who know me, you know, my background has always been in WFM and workforce management has always been that to me, that beautiful balance between math, science, and people. Right? It's, you know, how do we ultimately appropriately staff our contact center, but the equation has changed a little bit.
And how do we staff our contact center and not make our agents hate us anymore? Right. I, I always laugh because there's a great subreddit called tales from call centers that where it’s basically just agents complaining about their call center's job.
And I always tell people, if you want to know what your agents really think about their job, go here, and read what they have. And so, to me, it's always been about balancing that work life balance and making sure that, you know, the agents have the ability to take time off, the ability to take care of the things they need in their personal life.
And workforce management plays a huge part of that. But if we expand even beyond WFM and looking at the entire suite, you know, it's understanding the real problems that your agents are facing, right? It's truly understanding that the, either, whether it's abusive customers or just gathering the right knowledge to, to make the process better.
If you continue to keep the arrow pointing up for the agent, then your contact center's going to be successful. They're really the engine that drives this. And you know, I'd throw the same question back at you. Kind of, what does Cisco do to kind of in enhance that ability? You mentioned the acquisition from earlier that tries to manage some of the self-service pieces, but what else? Does Cisco have out there?
Zack Taylor:
Well, you know, the, what they call the five deadly sins of customer service. Who are you, why are you here? What were you doing before this? You know, explain your relationship to me and make it hard for me to authenticate with you. The agent is on the back. End of all of those.
If the business is not doing those properly, so what we try to do is reduce the simplify and make much easier authenticate number two, provide the context of what the customer has done up to that point. So, the agent has a fighting chance. And says, oh Mr. Hoekstra, I see that you were on the website, and you were trying to buy the Association's greatest hits by the way, which is sold 13 million copies and your credit card was declined.
I'm here to help you, right. Instead of them saying, what are you doing? Why you here? So, we're in the business of providing that friction kind of frictionless or friction free movement between automation, which we do well and live assist, which we also do. So, it's really spanning those two worlds. And helping people get better service.
Dave Hoekstra:
Absolutely. Well, before we wrap up, I'll throw you my little fun fact that I just found about Cherish from the Association that I find fascinating. Apparently at the time radio stations were very reluctant to play songs that were longer than three minutes long.
Yes. So, they, it originally was recorded at three minutes and 25 seconds. And so, they actually sped it up and trimmed it to three minutes and 13 seconds, which still wasn't enough. So, they actually lied on the liner that the song was three minutes long, even though it was actually three minutes and 13 seconds, just so that the you know, the station managers of the radio stations wouldn't double check it.
Zack Taylor:
It's sounds just like contact center. Remember every call has to be three minutes or less. And I gotta go because I have to do 13 calls in an hour. Well, that's what AM radio was like in the sixties. You even, I mean, if you think about it, look at the Beatles, you know, I Wanna Hold Your Hand was like a minute 57 or something. They've changed the world in two minutes. That's amazing.
Dave Hoekstra:
It is amazing. It is amazing when you go back and, you know, the, a Beatles song comes on in your playlist and you, and it's over, like before you can even blink. And I'm sure, just like you I watched the "Get Back" the documentary that was on the Beatles and it was, it's amazing that they were able to create that entire album in basically like three weeks and just sitting there, chatting with each other.
Amazing. And Zach, I'm sure we could go for hours here, and we can make the world record in podcast length, just talking about old music, but this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. I really do appreciate not only your knowledge, but your ability to kind of weave in and out of the music conversation.
And we'll have to do this again because it was too much fun. So, I really do appreciate you coming.
Zack Taylor:
Well, no problem. It was my pleasure. Thank you. It's an honor to be asked by one of our great partners to do this. Yeah. We only hit five or six songs. There are hundreds. Right. But hundreds. Yeah, the thousands, the audience will be the ultimate decider of whether we should do this again. But hopefully everybody, you tuned in enjoyed this as much as I enjoy talking to Dave. So, thank you.
Dave Hoekstra:
Yeah. And for the audience out there. Sure. Give us some feedback at info.calabrio.com if you want to send us an email to tell us how you think, or if you have ideas or suggestions, or if there's anything we can help out with clearly you can go there.
Our great partner, Cisco, you know, you can go to cisco.com. You get a little bit of a bigger navigation wheel to go through. But yeah, absolutely. We're glad to help in everything. So, from me at Calabrio and for Zach at Cisco we want to thank you guys for spending some time with us today.
We really do appreciate. Thanks for tuning into the Working Smarter podcast for Calabrio. If there's anything we can do for you, please do not hesitate to let us know, and we'll see you on the next episode. So, thanks everybody. Take care and have a great rest of the day.