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Dave talks to Kunal Rahalkar of Datagamz about the impact of employee engagement on CX.
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.
datagamz
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[00:00:00] Dave: 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. he is the founder and CEO of data games, which is a pretty sweet little platform that I was actually able to to take a look at. So Cornell welcome. Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:41] Kunal: Thanks today. Thanks for kind introduction.
That's
[00:00:45] Dave: just great. And so let's start a little bit I know that you, you, you mentioned this already, but let's talk about how you and I met. We were actually at one of our industry trade shows here. And I happened by your booth [00:01:00] for data games and you came over and talked to us and you and I had a little bit of a disagreement about.
What to call a particular fruit. Tell me, tell me, tell me in your words, how we met there.
[00:01:12] Kunal: And that was funny. And it was also to bump into you, but the funniest part was cantaloupe, as I learned, it was called rock is called rock melon in Australia. And I kept calling it rock melon and the people who were, so, I mean, the boots where we met, there was a food store next to it.
And the people wouldn't serve me. And I was like, what's this? I was like, where is rockmelon? They said, what's that? I said rockmelon. And then he said, well, we call it cantaloupe. Well, it's a good icebreaker.
[00:01:38] Dave: Never. I've never heard it called rockmelon before, and as I continue to learn more about the globe.
It's great. And I also love how you had to actually physically pause for a second. Before you said cantaloupe in your brain, you had to remember exactly what to call it. I have it open
[00:01:54] Kunal: here. I Googled it.
[00:01:58] Dave: Yes. So we, we [00:02:00] definitely Kunal and I bonded over Mellon. Right? That's that's how we got to know each other a little bit.
So, you know, I know that for our audience here, we, we definitely were never really strong conversation about. Employee engagement, right? It's, it's a big topic these days about how we, we get our employees really turned on to what we're trying to do and keeping them focused on the goal. So we're going to cover that.
Don't worry, but I'm interested in a little bit of the history of data games and how kind of you, you came to you know, birth, this idea of employee engagement that focuses a lot on the performance management side of things. How did that.
[00:02:39] Kunal: Absolutely. So here in Australia, Dave, I used to work for consulting companies like Accenture and Deloitte and ULA Packard.
And the work I was doing was more into data analytics, right. So it was it was all about you know, gathering information coming up with really cool insights and stuff like that. And that really gave me a kick. Right. And when employee engagement and contact center [00:03:00] type of topics started coming in, I was doing, I was working one of the assignments, which was around contact centers.
And I told him, man, contact centers have so much. If I could sort of pull all of this information together and come up with some real cool insights, wouldn't that be great and find out what's how employees are engaging and how they're not engaging. If they're not engaging, what can we do about it rather than just insights?
Can we take the next next step and, you know, take an action. And that's where gamification got introduced in the entire journey and yeah, literally. Quit my job. Went back to my garage, said this, the first version of the product, then yeah, four and half years followed. We have done 60 plus implementations and got about 20,000 or more users using our platform.
So let's do this trip,
[00:03:44] Dave: pause that. Cool. And I have to say, and, you know, obviously we, we have to be careful not to turn this into a commercial for data games. I was, I was really impressed and I will tell the listener, you know, the Th the screens that are available are very appealing to [00:04:00] a contact center implementation, right?
There's, there's lots of great graphics and the challenges and things that you can do between teams and individuals. You know, and, and that's really where this whole conversation kind of wants to go is how in an organization can keep those employees engaged, right? How do they, how do they do that? And I know, like having a platform available to kind of engage to them, Important, but maybe what are some of the other things that you might've seen in your, in your journey with data games that contact centers should be doing to kind of keep those employees at an engagement level?
[00:04:37] Kunal: Yeah, absolutely. David, before we go into how I would rather talk about why to begin with, right. So if we look at. Y we want to engage employees now as you know, right. Everybody's gone on to omni-channel you know, customers have many choices. If they want to contact the brand, I can get onto a mobile app or I can jump on a chat send an email sort of gone the days of [00:05:00] there.
Just one way traditional voice calls. So number of interactions that brands have to handle have gone up and up and up, right? Yeah. When me as a consumer make a phone call to contact center, I've already probably gone through majority of the data digital channels. So for example, you and I go to a restaurant and we shared a great meal, and let's say you pick up the tab and I'll have to pay you back.
And I try and add you as a pay in net. Application that I'm using or internet banking application that I'm using. And if I can add you as a pay, I'm going to be frustrated. And when I've gone to all these digital channels, when I'm making a phone call to the contact center, I'm already a little pissed, right?
I'm already going through that level of dissatisfaction through the channels. And that's where interaction becomes really complicated. And when there was a survey done by God and the 80% of these interactions, which are complex are handled by agents, not by IVR, not by. But not by any other means.
Right? So these agents are super important and in the us 40% of [00:06:00] consumers don't want to deal with digital channels still. They still want to go and talk to an agent, right. So engaging them is super important. And if I'm a CX leader, if I'm not really, really focusing on that, More than likely there is a chance that my transformation project could fail.
If I'm not considering employees as a part of the entire journey, my transformation program would fail. For example, one of the customers we worked with, they introduced chat bot and, and we're expecting greater return on investment. It was a great implementation as well. But after the implementation, they soon realized that chatbot was to.
Not integrated with all the different systems and was able to only cover a portion of the interaction. So the agents still had to be there to cover for the questions which are coming out of chatbot. So why it's important is because if we engage these people who are handling all these important interactions, they going to make money for your brand, they're going to deliver a great customer experience.
Right. And, and now everybody's working from home. So engagement is super important because now [00:07:00] we can see them. That's why I think it's very important that CX leaders look at employee engagement very, very serious.
[00:07:07] Dave: Right. And it's funny how, no matter how hard we've all tried to find the secret sauce of what makes an agent good at their job, we still kind of, there's still a weird little magic that, that runs along with it.
But. That's what you guys try to do, right? Like your goal is to kind of start out, locating what the best agent is and then potentially trying to replicate that. Is that kind of the approach.
[00:07:34] Kunal: Absolutely. And, and, and you're a hundred percent, right? It's not easy. It's hard, right? Because it's about humans.
It's about engagement. It's about motivation, right. Approach that we have taken is very data heavy. Right. So we want to get into data and really understand it. So. If you, if you look at any contact center, right, agents end up using about eight to 10 systems to answer customer queries, there is knowledge management.
There is [00:08:00] CRM that is context and telephony system. There is collaborate. You guys WFM. There's so many systems, right? To understand how agents are behaving and performing across all those systems without understanding that sort of adding rewards and recognition program, or even gamification to it can be a challenging area.
So we really first step for us is data science and really getting into it and really understanding what does data tell us. And then obviously relying on humans, right? To add to that entire data and the AI layer. Generate AI had the safe, unfortunately without really, really getting good inputs from humans.
And we're seeing that now, right. People are checking, oh, is this the right recommendation? If you're on Amazon and things like that. So, so that's why it's a little complex but I'm sure we're getting there.
[00:08:48] Dave: It w we're trying, right. I mean, that's, that's the kind of thing. And you know, one of the, one of the recurring themes to the, you know, the guests on the podcast is I hear a lot from people that [00:09:00] yes, technology is, is definitely a part of the answer.
But the problem that we see is a lot of people. To rely on, on the technology that that's thrown at them. Would you agree?
[00:09:10] Kunal: Hundred percent. And I guess you guys do I, what I like about collaborative is you guys get that right? Because it's workforce management, it's about people, right? So you can throw as much technology as he liked, but if people are not taking it on, it doesn't really matter.
[00:09:26] Dave: So you said something while we were talking in I'm I want to dig a little bit more into this. You mentioned something about the integrations that are such a big part of this. Right? And I know that if I'm a CTO I'm struggling, like crazy to get my arms wrapped around this. And I know that's a big thing about what a data games approach is.
It's less about. What everybody sees in front of the screen, but more about that layer of integration to capture that data. Have you guys seen that to be a, a pretty strong challenge that you've had to overcome
[00:09:58] Kunal: all your it's a big challenge and [00:10:00] it's the challenge that every brand is trying to solve.
Really? That's what I've seen out in the market. I mean it started with you know, when, when it started, it started. Under company that has the largest telecommunications company here called Telstra where I used to work and we made a lot of mistakes. But it was good though. We made mistakes on them.
And, but what we learned is connecting data and creating interactions, which talk to each other and then gave me firing them is super powerful. Right. Because you know, all these systems are interconnected and you guys know this, right? Because you guys are masters of pulling data. The contact center is and telling us how to plan workforces and things like that.
But all that information is also integrated with CRM application, right? So you're taking case notes again, associated with the phone conversation or chat conversation, all these information and associated knowledge management system, particular article needs to be looked at based on the type of quality.
So. Though these are disparate systems, but they're so interconnected. And if we intervene [00:11:00] them, we can actually put together what I call as a human story. Right. How my journey has gone through this entire application galore, so to speak in order for me to deliver a customer experience. Right. And once we stitch all of that together that's where the magic happens and a lot of brands are trying to solve this problem.
But also the. I mean, one of the things to be careful about here is not to turn it into a business intelligence system, because there are a lot of BI projects which kind of do this kind of stuff. But their premise is where different BI systems are telling you what's happening in your contact center.
Yeah. At a high level, as we said, but it doesn't go down at a behavior level and where we sort of play part of where we are interested in as, as a business is going down at a behavioral level and saying, Hey, this is my best employee. Right? And the reason Dave is the best employee is because his help, he helps his colleagues.
You know, he helps customers really well. He knows how to use the systems and he's very knowledgeable. All those different [00:12:00] attributes and traits is what makes. The best employees. So we are really interested in the behavioral aspects of it.
[00:12:06] Dave: So I'm going to put you on the spot here and see maybe, maybe answer a tough question here.
What are those data points that you are able to see that go beyond kind of the typical, right. We all know the average handle times and we all know the QA scores, but what are, what are some of the things that you might be able to unearth that might not commonly be seen in a, in a context. Quote, unquote BI platform.
[00:12:31] Kunal: I'll grow. Great question. Building rapport with customers. So sounds basic, right? Like you and I are talking right now and obviously we've got history and a banter from the past, so it makes it easier for us to have an interaction. Right. But imagine you're talking to a stranger you've never spoken to before, and there's a customer, right.
And they're probably already pissed or angry, or they might just want to get to the information quickly or whatever that interaction level might be. But if you can [00:13:00] build a rapport with the customer we've seen that the best agents are the agents that build rapport with the customer and they might end up not solving problems at time with times, but still, if they build a good rapport with the customer, the customers are not likely to give you such a bad net promoter score or a bad review basic.
Right. But I'll tell you, I'll give you a funny story. I actually unfortunate and funny story. I actually got mugged once. Okay. And somebody stole my iPhone and I was like, oh man. And. Public event. And I somehow found my wife and I said, oh, I got to go contexts in a of apple. I can't remember if I had my find my iPhone turned on so I can track who stole it.
Right. So I went on my wife, she G I took her phone. I called the contact center at apple and the person who answered it, he said, Oh, sorry, you didn't have a one. My iPhone turned on, but tell you what man, I'm going to be with you. And we're going to find that guy, you know, just because he said that I never found my iPhone.
Okay. But just because he said [00:14:00] that I was so happy, like somebody was with me in the journey, right. Just to be a little bit of a rapport, a little bit of bad.
[00:14:06] Dave: That's such a great answer. And I totally agree with you. It's the, you know, you can't always find that moment. You know, I w I was a call center agent back in the late eighties.
You can't always, you know, I think maybe we should patent the idea that on the IVR, when it comes through, it's like, press one. If you call it, rockmelon press two. If you call it cantaloupe, and then we're immediately building rapport with our customers. But I can't tell you how many times. You know, you could turn a negative or even neutral situation into a positive just by finding that moment.
And so how, how does the platform determine rapport? How, how, how do we, how do we get to that number? How do we, how do we create an objective measurement of.
[00:14:50] Kunal: Oh, great. Great point. Right. And I mean, again, rapport is different for voice. It's different for chat, it's different for emails, right? All [00:15:00] those things are different.
And the best part is there's so much data that contexts us have already invested in. Right? So you can get speech analytics, data, pull that in. Right. You can get data coming in from. Good old quality scores, right. That can all sort of come in. But, but how do you tie that entire story together is very important.
So if I get a conversation between you and I yeah, sure. We built a a good banter between you and I, but how did. Manifest into customer leaving me a good feedback. Right. Did I actually get a good first call resolution? Did I take good quality notes in CRM application? Right. So, so a good banter, a good rapper is, is a combination of all those different elements and different things.
So what we try and do is again, internally, All those missing pieces in a platform and say, Hey, David delivered the best customer experience and let's work backwards. The reason he did that, his behavior, a, B, C, D E F G. And that could be as simple as finding out that. Look, [00:16:00] I don't have any information.
Let me get back to you. But rather than approaching a team leader and sounding little lost, they went onto a knowledge management system and look for information or promise to call back to customer and actually deliver the service that he promised. Right. So, so it's all about using those systems building rapport with customers, creating interconnected story and.
You can really form a good picture. You know, there are some other behaviors as well, taking good quality notes, a bit of stewardship right after I finished my conversation. If I take good quality notes, the next person is coming in. And if customers to call again that at least know what the previous conversation was, all these little things is a woman us and interesting.
[00:16:40] Dave: Do you find that when you work with customers you know, whether you're in a con a consulting approach or a straight up customer, a customer sales approach, do you find yourself having to work extra hard to get them to realize how much data they actually are sitting on? Because I know that's, that's, that's something that [00:17:00] Calabrio is working very hard to make sure that we bring to the table is you're sitting on this mountain.
Yes, goldmine of data and it's actually not all that difficult to tap into it, but once, once you start to tap into it, you get that. Do you find that you have to spend a lot of time convincing them
[00:17:18] Kunal: some yes. Some, no. Okay. So this is the, and this is where I have bit of a, not a problem, but bit of a comment about BI industry in gender, right?
So in BI. Context center directors or managers that we work with do tend to look for more information. Many of them are curious. They want to know. And if you speak to those audience, it's a lot easier to tell them, well, you've got all this data and let's tap into it, but there is also a tendency in the industry saying, oh, well, we got the BI.
It gives me all the data. I need to tell them that this is not just B I R and that's where our working, they goes in saying, Hey look, sure, sure. If you have a BI that's great. If you don't have BI users [00:18:00] as a BI. If you do have BI, we are not just about how we connect to take the data from your BI. That means you've done the hard work and let us bring it in any soul.
Right? Right. There's so much data. And, and, and, and, you know, you guys are trying to do the same as in convince customers. We are, we are in in the same.
[00:18:18] Dave: I've been on the the other side of the contact center space for a while now. But I have spent my time in, in a contact center, you know, oh, building CQL queries, trying to mine, any kind of data we possibly can.
And I often say to people, if I'd have had access to the data that that is available now, Back in the day, I would be like probably running the company from the ground up because you know, it was, it was always just the best we could do was handle time. I mean, that was, you know, it's like, you could, you could focus on handle time and maybe some hold time.
But now we have, we have speech analytics. We have metadata that, that [00:19:00] gives us so much. Great information. And we also, and this is a key component to this day and age. We have access to kind of cloud computing that can do all of this analysis in moments where used to take rooms full of servers to get through 10% of things.
Now we can do it all in moments with thanks. So what we have access to now, following along that. This is another interesting thing that you said that really piqued my interest. You said that there's, there's an approach that you guys take called performance testing versus performance management. I think I know what you mean by that, but I want you to kind of explain the approach here because I, I like where it's.
[00:19:39] Kunal: Yeah, thank you. So, so Dave, I mean that's where we, you know, we need to cast our mind towards what's really important. Right. You know, obviously data crunching and bringing it together and all that technical stuff is important. Right. But what does it mean for business? If I'm okay. Here's the deal?
38% of contexts and agents actively [00:20:00] disengaged and 28% say they are neutral, right? Whom I wouldn't call engaged right there. Then you as a CX leader, have tough targets to deliver good net promoter score as good C-SAT scores. Keep your costs down as in business efficiency at the same time you know, improve your sales and all those different types of things.
Right. Imagined before we embark on a program where are you going to make some technology changes or choose a vendor or outsource it to a different business provider or whatever that might be. Wouldn't you like to know how my program is going to work? Right. And that's the curiosity that we had.
Right. And, and, and that's why we say every time you apply testing in a context where. I have a software launch, right? I've seen a ton of companies do a lot of testing before software gets launched show. But how about the humans? Right. So what we want to major is okay, if I'm a contact center, how many of my staff are engaged?
How am I going to perform? If I was to [00:21:00] add new process next to you, what is it? What's my net promoter score, going to be what my average handle time is going to be. If I continue to do what I do, and the best part is data gives us all the insights from the past, and we can just add permutations combinations to it and try and see if I get the engagement up by temporary.
What is it as out I'm going to get as a context center, am I going to hit my customer experience targets? And if I'm not, what can I do? Right. So we actually test your current system not by doing any extra magic, but just literally bringing all the data together and applying data science and AI to it, to figure out how you're going to perform.
And that's what we call it as testing. And we put the scenarios and test cases and artists in our desk. It's a simple, like, would I hit my net? Right. If I want to go from you know, average handle time of three minutes down to a minute, what do I need to do? Right. What would that be as an impact on a context?
And I had all those calculations at our.
[00:21:55] Dave: Right. So it's, this is where we talk about going beyond BI, right? This [00:22:00] is, this is where BI is just going to give you static information, and it's just going to sit there and you, and it's up to you to determine where you want to move the pieces around and, and what you're trying to do, but the difference in kind of performance tests.
Is being able to extrapolate information based on changing variables throughout at least I hope that's me explaining
[00:22:23] Kunal: yeah, no, a hundred percent. And we add another variable to it. Right. Like we actually think, and honestly, you know, this better than I would Dave, but we also think that a lot of calls or a lot of chats or a lot of emails, agents shouldn't even be handling in today's day and age.
Right. There are those. IVR systems that have Chad buds is RPA this so much. Right. So we also try and measure how many interactions should actually land on contexts in any occurrence setup. Right. And we do into an insights on your IVR, your other customer experience tools, which are automated and tell you that, Hey, [00:23:00] by the way, if you optimize this, you're going to have 5% reduction.
And you know, all of them that is coming to context.
[00:23:06] Dave: I can say with a lot of conviction that probably the most underserved approach in contact centers today is looking at volume reduction. We look very heavily at handle time reduction. We look at staff efficiency, we look at analyzing the customer experience left and right, but I don't think a lot of contact centers are really sitting down and saying, Okay.
How can we, you know, everybody's understaffed right now, right? Is you're listening to this episode in the future. It's it's February of 2022. And the great resignation is just in full swing right now. And everybody is understaffed and understaffed. And the questions I keep getting is Dave, how can I keep people or Dave, how can I reduce my handle time?
Or, you know, the questions that are all focused on the old way of looking and nobody ever asks, Dave, how do I reduce the number? [00:24:00] Interactions that come in, because if I could reduce the number of interactions, I might actually be appropriately staffed. And it is one of the most underserved areas that people are focusing on.
And it's cool that you guys have the ability to kind of push that measure a little bit, to say. Yeah, we can actually give you an idea of what it would look like if you were able to do that. That's really cool. I like that.
[00:24:22] Kunal: Absolutely. And, and Dave question I have is you know what is collaborative doing in this area?
Because, you know, I also, you know, we talk about this, but you know, you guys all be CIT pioneers in the industry and you guys doing a lot of cool stuff there.
[00:24:36] Dave: Yeah. So the, the way that one of the best ways that we can focus on it is through the analytics platform that Calabrio has being able to take a hundred percent of those interactions, run them through an analytics engine and be able to help surface the insights that allow us to reduce volume.
I'll give you a good example. Worked with a customer a few years ago that their. [00:25:00] Password reset function on their website. Wasn't working correctly. And the agents knew this, the agents were telling people, we keep getting calls about this. And so it surfaced up to you know, the it group and the it group as they sometimes will do.
I love you it people, but you do do this sometimes. They said, Nope, everything works fine. We're not able to replicate the problem. And you know, so it got kicked back. Well, they use the analytics platform. To determine just how many additional phone calls they were getting on a daily basis. And it turned out that the company was spending like an extra 25, $30,000 a day.
And in time answering this, and all they had to do is take that, that number and put it in front of the CTS. And it got fixed and like a day it was weird how that happened. Right. Once you can quantify the, the, the way that these processes are handled, you can do that. So using [00:26:00] analytics is a huge part of volume reduction because what used to take us months to figure out.
And who is calling and why they're calling and surveys and post-call information and talking, we can now figure these this out. In a matter of hours, we can say we received 25% more calls yesterday that mentioned the word password reset. Something is wrong. Let's go fix it. And then the next day we received 2000 fewer calls that is.
Huge cost and time savings right there. And so it's the same idea that you guys are approaching, right? It's yours is a little more of a, what if approach and ours is a little bit more of a, what did happen approach we're able to surface those insights a lot more. And
[00:26:45] Kunal: how easy is that, right? Like, because now integration, storing data, as you said, it's pretty pretty, I wouldn't say it's cakewalk, but I would say it's not as hard as, as it used to be.
Right. And, and, you know, if we get the, and that's sort of, that's why we call it [00:27:00] a production verification test, right? Like this is out in production and this is what's happening and your traditional it is. His dad, they, you know, they, they will look at system uptime and availability and things like that.
Right. And that's where there is a gap, right. Which is what we want to really address.
[00:27:18] Dave: And it's, it's gotten a lot easier. Right. And at the same time it's gotten harder, right. Because you know what, what used to be a fairly simple transcription engine as the possibilities increase. So do the number of extraneous requests, right?
You used to be able to do a speech analytics on a, on an American English. Accent very easily. And then, you know, now all of a sudden there's different dialects, there's different things. And companies keep springing up that do a better job.
[00:27:47] Kunal: Rockmelon those kinds of papers, right? I mean, it's
[00:27:50] Dave: just confusing the transcription engine left and right.
The way that that, that, that what people call a, you know, green melons is days, but [00:28:00] the, the, the, but that's exactly what it is. It's gotten easier. And again, I'll point to the cloud commute computing side of things. We can now transcribe so much more than we used to be able to do, and so much faster, thanks to the technologies that have been put in place.
And it's actually you know, it has benefited a huge number of organizations and 10 years ago, it was, if you want workforce managers, It's, you know, you, you probably should get it. And then it became like, okay, you need workforce management. Speech analytics is very rapidly falling into that category. If you are not analyzing your interactions that are coming through, you are not getting.
The, the benefit of your contact center that you need. And then what we love about it is that exactly what you and I have been talking about that goldmine of data now becomes the richest most fertile ground for information that is now benefiting the whole organization, as opposed to just the context center.
Right. I used to be able to run a [00:29:00] report and go to my boss and say, Hey, we saw a 60% increase in handle time yesterday in this particular skill, let's figure out why. Now today we can take our information to the marketing department and say, Hey, everybody who speaks Spanish yesterday received a poor experience because we are not serving that community appropriately.
So those are the new, that's the new frontier of contact center.
[00:29:29] Kunal: Right. Absolutely. And Dave, that's where I love your analytics API. Is that right? The collaborative analytics API is wherever we implement and collaborates a sigh of relief, like, okay. Yeah. We know what we integrating with. It's pretty easy, you know, so yeah, absolutely.
A hundred percent agree. They, what I also want to approach is we talked about data a lot. Right. But you know, I see another gap out in the market, right? Like you can, we can talk about data and we can talk about insights. And many, at times we can deliver those insights to management. Right. And say, Hey, look, this is a gap [00:30:00] and this is an area that you need to fix.
Right. But often you know, we don't come back with mechanisms to fix it. Right. And, and, and, you know Okay. So here's the deal, right? We do do gamification though. We are not a gamification company, but we actually think gamification. Okay. Here's the deal. We don't believe gamification is silver bullet.
Okay. It gets applied and used and talked about in a very. Different manner as if it's going to solve all its problems. It doesn't. And I'll talk about this because we have very sophisticated gamification platform in our tool, but what it does is if you have good data insights, it's a great actions mechanism, right.
It's a really, really cool way of engaging staff and motivating them. So what if I've found all those issues in your customer experience, right. Just taking that example that I gave or you gave, right. Like we found out that, Hey, we not serving the Spanish speaker as well. Right. So what do I do now? Right.
Okay. Then you know, some of the things you can solve, right? Like, for example, if we don't have Spanish speakers in your context, and there's [00:31:00] not much you can do about it. Right. But let's say zoom, do you do have Spanish speakers? It's unfortunate. They're not trained properly. Or they don't have right.
Knowledge. Right. Or they don't know how to use the system so well. Right. And then once you understand that data, I think gamification can be a very effective science to point people to the right direction and motivate them and continue to use those systems and continue to deliver. But it does require consistency.
It does require time and space, but if you do that and if you provide that as a brand, I think with gamification, I mean kind of return on investments, I've seen a amazing
[00:31:33] Dave: yeah. To use, to use a, an old school cliche. Gamification is just another quiver in another arrow, in the quiver right there. There's no magic bullet.
That's gonna solve every single solution, honestly. This is the, this is a call to all the listeners out there. It's about the people that you have executing the vision [00:32:00] and their dedication to continual performance management or continual employee engagement or continual CX. Right. It's it's, you know I think there's a phrase you used.
Your, your secret ninja, I think is what you said. A huge part of any initiative. Whether we're talking. I mean, we could be talking outside the context of this episode. The execution plan that comes forth has to really be taken from a level of approach outside of the technology. What are you going to do about it?
Right. I can, I can throw millions of dollars. At technology that will display a number in front of me, but it still requires a, an execution of that plan. And now secret ninja was the phrase you used. So I'm going to let you talk about that for a minute. You, you, you clearly have a something behind that.
[00:32:58] Kunal: Oh yeah. So secret ninja is just [00:33:00] one of the things that. Management and product marketing team came up with, right? So it was a very, it's a very simple concept. W every contact center has a secret ninja. So and it's not and it's it's a funny thing when I say secret ninja, it's not your traditional best performer in the context.
And I just want to really call it out because traditionally the way you would give somebody a best performer award is somebody who keeps, who meets their KPIs traditionally. Right. But a secret ninja is. On a particular interaction, you might be ninja Dave, like for example, you may love helping people to set up their I-phones right.
And you're patient enough. You're good enough. And you can cover them or guide them. Right. And, you know finish the interaction in four minutes and solve all their problems. I might be really good at everything. But even the interaction is of that type. Guess what? I'm impatient. I don't want to do that.
I'd rather get help you pay your bill going to Salesforce or whatever CRM. I haven't quickly get the transaction to get it over with. Right. But then identifying how many interactions of iPhone [00:34:00] type. Okay. How many interaction, billing type you're getting and focusing on what we call as 80% of important interactions, right?
Bringing them in and finding at each and every interaction. Who's the best agent. That's your secret ninja and find that Linda and then, you know like in console Pandora, Panda the master sheet and that Linda becomes master seafood and whatever he does or she does. We want everybody else to do. Right.
So that's the sense, the
[00:34:28] Dave: sips at the very core, it's putting people in a place to succeed, right? Don't set them up to fail, set them up to succeed. And, you know, we all have our strengths in. And honestly, that is a huge challenge in a contact center is finding out where people are set up to succeed and getting those, getting them those interactions that do allow them to do that.
And I mean, and just going further with the analogy, right? It doesn't do you any good to recognize that somebody is good? Helping someone set up their iPhone, if you can't get [00:35:00] those interactions to them in the first place. So it goes beyond just identifying there. It takes process. It takes time, it takes testing to get to that, that particular piece.
And I think that's kind of the point you are ultimately trying to make is that this is one, one one slice of the equation. Yeah, but,
[00:35:17] Kunal: but important consideration is not that we want to direct all the iPhone interactions, not to you, Dave. Otherwise you'll go crazy. Right? The idea is what is it that you do, Dave?
And how can we teach canal to do exact same things that Dave does. So instead of having one day, and now we got two days, so the idea is clone. You create a template of behaviors on the interactions that you're really smashing and doing well, and take that template to the people who are not performing well and say, Hey, do this.
And if you do that, I'll give you a points by this reward. So now we cloning you. So got, we got many ninjas now, army
[00:35:52] Dave: I, my, my very first call center job was activating pagers. Right? So that was my first [00:36:00] job. It was a wild. Thank you for noticing. I appreciate it. But when, when it is, so the, the, the setup in this context center was when you got hired, you were in activations for let's call it six weeks before you got trained on the next level of customer service.
And the goal was that you became really good at this one thing that kind of built a foundation for the next level, right? Because there was a lot more detail and information in the, on the customer service side. Then there was just an activation and. Your point that you made about going insane because you keep getting the same call over and over.
I had flashbacks for the late nineties. I'm doing nothing but activating pagers or eight and a half hours a day. My, for my first six weeks. And you're right. I got very good at it, but, and I, and, but honestly to this day, I don't think I'd ever want to go back and activate another pager because I got so burned.
On the, on the process. So I love that point about [00:37:00] cloning, the agent, right? It's it's how do we, how do we identify, create a plan to, to get other people to that level so that we can replicate that success across it? So I think that. All right. So can I have one more thing I wanted to give you? Because honestly, this is just absolutely flown by and I feel like we could talk forever, but in the sake of our listeners, right?
We want to make sure that we're not driving them crazy. You, you mentioned something to me in our discussion that I want to dig a little bit, and I think you may have answered this question already, at least a little bit, but you told me that 70% of all CX initiatives fail, and I'm really interested in how you know this and why does that happen?
[00:37:42] Kunal: Okay. So I actually really gotten a report. I didn't know I was not the source of the information. I'm just, but, but the interesting thing that it pointed out was the reason 70% of the initiatives fail is exactly as a result of these types of things. Right? Like I may go in and imagine [00:38:00] that, Hey, I'm going to put a chat bot and today I'm getting 500,000 transactions coming every week, every month, if chat bot can handle that.
Let's say 50% of them. I don't need 50% of my agents. Right. Simple calculations like that. It's a little bit more involved than that, but you know many, a times the most important factor, which is not looked at is 70% of contexts in a cost is people not. Right. So people kind of left out on this journey.
We outsourcing contact centers and BPO's are delivering it. There are a lot of people who are not properly trained properly. So when the new product launches happen, when new technologies come in, though, you have great CX initiatives, though. You have great state of the art technology. If people who are delivering these interactions back to customers, Have all of that, you know, it, they're not going to deliver a great experience.
And then you still come back and say, well, we invested all this money in all these different technologies. Why my net promoter score is still low or why [00:39:00] we not increasing our revenue? And these are some of the fundamental reasons, right? How do we use technology to make people's lives better? Like as I said, right?
Or as you gave that example of not serving Spanish language people better, right? That's a very simple way of identifying information and directing your technology to solve those customer experience problems. And if they're not done properly or not used properly after making an investment in technology, that's where those initiatives.
[00:39:29] Dave: So it's is, is your basic argument. The, the technology is great, but it's the people that matter. That's why
[00:39:36] Kunal: they fail people and make their lives better.
[00:39:40] Dave: Right. And, and I, I, I've seen this many, many times and you know, we can talk about WFM into implementations, QM implementations, context center, see CAS platform in implementations.
The it's the person that is. That that is ultimately responsible for [00:40:00] these things. You can have the best project manager in the world. You can have the best implementation people in the world and, and then you get into the, the contact center and you execute. And if, and if that person or that group of people just don't have the passion or the ability to recognize what they have in front of them, you're going to have shelfware right.
You're just going to have this, this shelf where, and so. I think that maybe the important takeaway from this is that as you look at technology before you make the, the, the lift in purchasing technology or approaching a technological solution, look at your people. First find, find that person who is just dying to fix things, find that person who just is able to root out a cause from nowhere.
Then. Make that person kind of the focal point of the implementation and the amount of success you'll see is insane. And we have gone way beyond just talking about you know, CX employee engagement, right. But it's, it's, it's, it's a [00:41:00] great conversation. And so I really do. I think that we've had we've had a fantastic back and forth here.
And I think this has been enormously valuable for the people that are listening. And hopefully we find this episode to be really useful for a lot of people. So I want to be the first to, I guess the only, but in this case, thank you so much for spending some time with us. I really do appreciate, you know, finding the opportunity or you're you're on the other side of the world for me.
And, but we were able to connect, and this is what's great about the technology that we have is that we're. The these kinds of things. So Cornell, thanks for joining us. Really appreciate it. I'll let you say any final words, maybe maybe just a quick word on, on, on where they may be able to find information about.
[00:41:42] Kunal: Absolutely. And thanks, Dave. You know, not just online, we'd love to have you come to Melbourne Australia and we can grab a beer together. But to find out more, you can just go to data games.com. So that's D a T H G a M z.com. And yeah So we'd love to talk more.
[00:41:59] Dave: That's [00:42:00] wonderful. All right.
Thank you, Ken all, have a great rest of the day for those of you listening. We do appreciate you giving up some of your time to listen to us as always, you can go to calabrio.com for more information, and we hope to see you soon on the next episode. Thank you. Can all and goodbye. Everybody. Have a great rest of the day.
[00:42:16] Kunal: Thanks Dave. Goodbye everyone.