July 31, 2025 • 34 mins
Is your organization fully realizing the value of your contact center, or is it being limited by a narrow focus on efficiency and cost control?
In this episode of the Delighted Customers podcast, I sit down with renowned Canadian contact center consultant and trainer Mike Aoki to examine how contact centers serve as the real-time pulse of customer experience. Together, we explore the evolution of the contact center from its early telephone-based days to today's complex, omnichannel environments shaped by agentic AI and chatbot technology. The discussion underscores the significant impact that leadership priorities, technology decisions, and agent empowerment have on both customer outcomes and business performance. When the contact center is viewed merely as a cost center and subjected to relentless efficiency metrics, organizations risk not only increased customer churn, but also missed opportunities for competitive intelligence, brand loyalty, and measurable business growth.
You should listen to this episode if you are committed to building an organization where customer experience is not just a catchphrase, but a measurable advantage. Mike Aoki brings over three decades of frontline and management expertise in contact centers, working closely with major organizations such as the Royal Canadian Mint, EQ Bank, and Pitney Bowes. His insights are especially relevant to leaders navigating the intersection of AI adoption, agent turnover, and rising customer expectations.
In this conversation, Mike provides clear, actionable answers to these pressing questions:
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What are the key differences between traditional chatbots and agentic AI, and how should each be leveraged within evolving contact center operations?
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What are the most common mistakes leaders make when managing contact center performance, and what metrics truly matter for customer experience and long-term retention?
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How can organizations successfully integrate AI to support—not replace—human agents and ensure that complex, emotionally charged interactions lead to positive outcomes?
If you are responsible for customer experience, service operations, or digital transformation, I would encourage you to listen and subscribe. Find the Delighted Customers podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, as well as all major podcast platforms.
Meet Mike Aoki
Mike Aoki is a leading Canadian customer service and sales trainer with more than 35 years of experience in every facet of contact center operations. He has advised prominent organizations including the Royal Canadian Mint, EQ Bank, and Pitney Bowes on how to leverage the contact center as a strategic source of customer insight and a driver of customer loyalty. Starting his career when contact centers were voice-only operations, Mike has guided businesses through significant transitions—from FAQ-based telephone service, to the adoption of email, to the complexities of omnichannel engagement and the rise of agentic AI.
A noted speaker and writer, Mike emphasizes that while technology is essential for scale and efficiency, true customer experience excellence is achieved through a balanced focus on agent empowerment, emotional intelligence, and effectiveness. He challenges leaders to reconsider the metrics and incentives that shape agent behavior and to invest in both the technical and human sides of service delivery. Mike’s hands-on experience and practical frameworks have made him a respected voice in the industry.
Connect with Mike on LinkedIn.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Well, today on the Delighted Customers podcast, I have a very
special guest coming from up north in Canada. Mike Aoki is
a Canadian customer service and sales trainer with over 35
years of frontline and management experience in contact
centers. And I was talking to Mike earlier about 150
episodes. To this point, we haven't talked a whole lot specifically
(00:22):
about the Contact center. And yet in many ways it's the pulse of,
of the customer experience in any organization. He's
worked with great clients like the Royal Canadian Mint, EQ Bank,
Utilities, Pitney Bowes and so forth. He has written in many, many
articles and publications. He's a keynote speaker. Mike,
welcome to the show. Thank you, Mark. I'm glad to be here and glad to
(00:45):
help your listeners. Well, I'm excited to get into our conversation because,
and tell me if you agree with this, that in many ways the, the
Contact center is arguably the best
resource to find out how your customers are experiencing your brand.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that because again, your contact center is talking to your
customers every single day and in many cases some of the most upset
(01:06):
ones. And so like a focus group where it's sort of an artificial setup or
a survey where people answer if they're really super happy or super angry,
you actually get a really good real life pulse check from your frontline. Just bear
in mind though, that that pulse check will skew towards people that have to call
in because they have an issue, but it does give you a really good background,
a lot of competitive intelligence about what's going on out there. Yeah, because people
(01:28):
call in, you and me as consumers call in. I remember being
at a CXPA annual event one time. We had
Comcast as a keynote speaker. And at the time they were
doing well amongst their peers and they were doing well. They had 11
years of really good financials as far as Wall street was
concerned, but they were getting hammered on things like NPS and customer
(01:49):
satisfaction. So even though they were good amongst their peers, they were sort of
the standing joke among as utilities tend to be
and Internet companies tend to be. And they got sick and tired. So they
hired a senior VP of customer experience. And
he said, I got a lot of work in front of me, I admit it.
And he said one of the slides was customer customer service
(02:11):
happens when the experience is broken. And that just was a
bit of a wake up call and really changed my perspective. It's not
always the case that people call in because they have some issue
or something that they that's gone wrong, service recovery issue.
But it is often the case. What do you think about that statement? I
love that statement. Totally believe in it. There's such a. I mean, the customer experience
(02:33):
piece encompasses such a wider range, the whole customer journey,
whereas the customer service piece, I mean, some customers will never interact with customer
service, and that's a good thing because it means nothing went wrong. But sometimes, though,
that's exactly when it breaks down. People call customer service. I think the other challenge
there is. I know you mentioned the part about NPS and the idea about who
owns nps. And one of the challenges there, of course, is that NPS is really
(02:54):
the, hopefully the customer's entire lifetime and entire opinion,
you know, of what's happening. And really, I know one thing is the contact center
should not own NPS because they can't directly dictate anything before
or after an issue, just the interaction fixing the issue. And so I think
that's a bit unfair. Yeah. And just a point of definition,
most of the listeners would be familiar with what NPS is, but for those
(03:17):
who aren't, it's the number one, and has been for decades, the
number one loyalty metric. And it essentially, if
you've gotten a survey or if you didn't recognize it before now, it's gonna be
like that car that somebody tells you about that you see now all the time
on the road. It's how likely you to recommend a friend or a colleague.
And then there's a simple calculation and. And it's become a
(03:39):
standard way to measure not just your company, but in theory,
if it's done correctly against peers. So
that's really what you're talking about, Mike. Right, Exactly. That's just it.
Exactly. And that's really the customer's overall experience or
overall feeling of loyalty towards the company. And again, the customer
service team can affect part of that, but it's not the be all and end
(04:00):
all. There are a lot of other inputs that go into it. So it's really
tough sometimes when, you know, if you make your contact center own the MPS
piece because it's just a component of it. We're starting here
framing out the contact center and kind of its role as in many
ways it's the hub or the pulse of the organization. As we shared, we're going
to be talking about balancing agentic AI with
(04:20):
human connection because let's face it, AI can not only
save us on efficiency, it can help us with effectiveness and it
can be used to improve the customer experience. Again, like
if it's done correctly. But. But we're going to we're going to dig into
that before we do, since you've been multiple decades now into
contact centers specifically, I really would love to get
(04:43):
your opinion just because I'm curious about how you would
describe the evolution of the contact center in the years that
you've been working with and for them. Okay, we're going back to dinosaur
days here now. But certainly evolution has been, you know, when I first
started working in contact centers in the early 90s, it was telephone based. It was
always voice communication with a little bit of snail mail. Believe it or not
(05:05):
back then and really the whole thing there was a lot of interactions were fairly
simple ones. How late does a certain store stay open? Where do I mail a
check check to? Very much what would now be called FAQ or frequently asked questions
type interactions with only a small percentage being really highly
emotional or highly complex issues. And so in terms of looking at
this, it could be an entry level job in the sense that somebody could come
(05:26):
in, get a three to six week long new hire training program and answer very
basic FAQ type questions with a little bit of more advanced stuff.
Certainly, of course things change as far as how people communicated with companies through
customer service now, you know, we got in the old 2000s a lot of, you
know, email communication for instance. Also of course now social media, which
blossomed after the 2010s and now really heavily social media customer
(05:48):
service as well. And so of course, you know, that had a huge impact. Also
integrated Voice Response or IVR. Press 1 for this, press 2 for that.
Some pre recordings in there, My web cell service obviously of course
now in terms of, you know, looking in terms of agenda, AI and
chatbots and what that's done. And so a lot of it has been an evolution,
an incredible wonderful one in terms of technology. I mean these are great tools. They
(06:10):
offer what's referred to as omnichannel, which means a lot of different ways people can
communicate with a company. And it really helps because different
generations, we'll talk more about that have different preferences for how they want to access
information. But it does make it more complicated now for your contact center and
for your company because it's not just going to be, you know, a room with
people answering a telephone anymore. It's going to be people with different skill sets written
(06:31):
in verbal, different product queues for different product lineups that you have
different tiers now frontline tier one or level one being the more basic
questions, Tier two being escalations and more technical questions. So it
complicates how you Run a contact center. And it also complicates in
many ways how you measure that customer success. And so that's been a huge transition.
There's so many, so many things I want to unpack in what you just,
(06:53):
just said. But first I want to start with some basic definitions. Because
you talked about chatbot and agentic AI, could you help
describe the difference between those for our listeners? I'm not a technical
person, so I'm going to go ahead. This from a very basic level. Chatbots, of
course, having been in existence before AI and being very simple
response machines, basically type it. Customers type in certain inquiries,
(07:16):
certain keywords that are scanned and they're given back very robotic answers.
The chatbot, at its simplest pre AI level would have simply read
keywords, you know, whatever silver package, monthly bill,
dollar value, scanned that, looked it up in a database and given a
canned answer where the whole paragraph has already been pre written,
vetted by marketing, vetted by legal, and then put into a database and
(07:38):
the whole entire text unaltered gets plugged into that chatbot
as a response back to the list, to the reader, whether or not it's really
applicable or not. Generic AI, of course, incorporates AI where
an AI will actually read the customer's email, not just those few
keywords, but hopefully the entire context of what the person's writing
and then decide in terms of what is the person actually answering
(08:00):
and formulate based upon its database, its knowledge base,
an answer back. But the answer back might be slightly different for each one of
us. If I type my question as a customer in a very formal tone, it
may respond back in a very formal tone with those details. If you write in
a very casual tone and it reads that, it may give back an answer in
a more casual tone, okay, with contractions, with certain different kinds of
(08:22):
phrases, etc. But get back essentially the same information but in different tones
and styles. So it ends up being more customized, not canned. And
hopefully, if it's really well done, will sound like a real human typing back
the answer. I want to connect. Thanks for sharing that. I think
that's simple and useful. Definition,
differentiation between chatbot and agentic AI. And I
(08:44):
know there's a lot more. Yeah, there's more technical that you could. Have
shared and that's still coming at us right. As things develop. In the
course I teach at Michigan State, it's customer relationship management.
And this relates to what we're talking about here and what you
shared about Omni Channel. So Omni Channel, you mentioned about the different
channels that People can go through to communicate based
(09:06):
on the whole concept as their choice as the consumer. You're not
forcing them into one channel typically, but you're giving them some
options. So if I'm at home and it's midnight and I'm watching
Netflix and I want to check my bank account balance, I can do it.
If I'm driving by a branch and I need to apply for a loan,
I can do that. If I want. If I want to call the contact center
(09:27):
for questionable charge on my account, I
can do that as well. So these are the channels. And one of
the former guests I had and one of the recordings that I include from
that podcast is Joe Pine. Joe Pine, who wrote the Experience Economy,
and him and Lou Carbone are sort of credited with coming up with the whole
concept of experience or customer experience management back decades
(09:50):
ago. And Joe is now talking about the experience
shifting from products or barter to products, to factory
production to services, to moving up an escalation to
an experience. And now he's talking about it in terms of
transformational experiences. So how can the experience actually
improve someone's life? And one of the things he talks
(10:13):
about relates to what you just shared, which is the different modes
that consumers are in. And so today, if
I, I think he used the example of a coffee shop. If I,
if I'm at home, I may want to brew a cup and I might buy
a bag or a Keurig container. If I'm at a
coffee shop, I'm going to go to Starbucks or wherever and sit
(10:35):
down and order a drink. If I'm at a restaurant, I would have it with
my meal or dessert. And that might be each one of these at a very
different price point. And the experience of my coffee is very different.
So the modes of how I prefer
could change. It's not just. You can't just do a Persona on the individual.
Right, Mike? It's even their mode could change.
(10:57):
Yeah, and that's definitely true too. And if you look at those different channels, those
different modes that refer to voice, written, any within written, is it
on their phone, is it on their laptop? It does change the experience and
also the customer's state of mind. Are they calling in for just a simple inquiry
and. And they're okay with having a chatbot or an agentic AI answer, Are they
really upset and want to talk to a human? Those are all factors that take
(11:19):
place. The customer's emotional state and the communication or channel preference
goes a long way towards setting their expectation. And again,
customer experience is about the customer's experience and expectations that take
place. I want to talk about the stakes of the contact
center in general. Why it's such a big deal. It seems
kind of obvious, but. But I know that if you're sitting in the C
(11:41):
suite, you're constantly looking at ways to reduce costs and create
efficiency and contact center people. After all, each one
that's sitting in a chair is a full time employee or full time equivalent.
What are the stakes? Why is this such a big deal
to the organization? Why should the C suite care so much about their contact
center? Well, there's two basic reasons why in terms of looking at. And you touched
(12:04):
upon the idea about efficiency. So efficiency metrics in terms of. And
this has been a big thing in our industry, the contact center industry is looking
at what's called average handle time. And that's a component basically of the amount
of time that a person is a frontline agent is actually talking to a customer
or typing to a customer. And then any kind of call or work that takes
place after the call interaction itself, which is maybe updating files
(12:25):
afterwards or summarizing notes afterwards. And that combination is referred to
as average handle time. The time it takes an agent to really help one
customer. And that has a lot of impact in terms of
efficiency and in terms of, I hate to say it, but cost. And you mentioned
employee salary cost. Surprisingly for contact centers, real estate is a big
cost because it's not just the people that are in the contact center, but the
(12:46):
actual square footage that they occupy, as well as the equipment that they use.
And I know a lot of contact centers are remaining work from home or hybrid
with people when they're in their office actually hoteling or kind of working at different
desks, not owning a desk simply to reduce real estate costs. But all that
goes into the idea about, unfortunately, the contact center as a cost center. And that
is the way that some people in the C suite look at the customer service
(13:07):
or contact center team as being a cost. If they do, though,
and I'll give you one example, one company actually found that for every second they
shaved off of every call, every call per day that person took times, all the
people in the contact center, they could save $40,000 a year for every
one second difference. Now that by itself is a
measurement. It can be used for either a good thing or bad thing. Okay,
(13:29):
Used for a bad thing, it could be telling your agents, and I've seen this
happen, you need to shave 10 seconds off every call. Okay. Or
you need to hit a certain average Length of time, two minutes per call, max.
And then we'll start pinging you through teams saying, why are you taking so long?
The problem with that though is it drives the wrong mindset. If you tell a
frontline person you've got to make all your calls, land within X amount of
(13:50):
time, they'll find a way to do it. But it may be through things like
rushing a customer off the phone, giving incomplete answers, making
mistakes in terms of changes that they make, and those things drive additional
calls. So you can save 10 seconds on a call by demanding it and really
increase your call volume overall. Okay, so again, the obsessive focus on
metrics can have a bad side. Now there's also a good side. You can look
(14:12):
at that same thing, about one second equals $40,000 in that example,
and think, how can we make it better in a good way for the frontline
team and for the customers? Okay, so it's the mindset you take into this for
efficiency is what can you do to make things better and be more
efficient in cost cutting? Yeah. So, Mike, what do you
think are we talked about the stakes being high, right?
(14:34):
And you're talking about real money, real dollars. We've got a team of full
time employees in the call center. Now, as you've shared,
part of the evolution is they're working more from home than in physical office because
there's some real estate expenses associated with that. But what are some mistakes
that leaders make when it comes to contact centers? I think one of the biggest
things we talked about the sort of C suite obsession on the cost side of
(14:55):
things. And the contact center is a cost center. I think one of the challenges
both in the C suite and through the leadership of contact centers is
not focusing on the benefit piece, which I think you kind of hinted at earlier,
which is there's the efficiency metrics, but they're the effectiveness metrics.
Okay, what's the impact to customer experience? And then you wind up with
example, where if you give your agents more leeway to
(15:17):
adapt to your customer. Okay, so an example is moving, say, hard scripting
to being able to give more flexible answers based upon knowledge and being able to
help customize with your customer, you can actually really greatly increase. And you mentioned
sort of those wow experiences, you know, that are out there. You can really increase
customer loyalty, you know, and take the time. It's not the contact
center. But I saw a wonderful comparison, which was if medical Doctors
(15:40):
took just 30 seconds more per patient, they could actually avoid so many
down the line malpractice. Lawsuits, people being unnecessarily
ill, et cetera. Just that little extra time can really help an awful lot.
So. And again, I know there's a cost associated with that, but you have to
look and think is driving people to shave one second off a call
worth getting really bad MPS and CSAT scores and having a high
(16:02):
churn or customer turnover rate. You know, that's there. And I think one of the
drawbacks I do see is that contact center leaders, because we're so immersed in
metrics. Mark, if I shared with you all the metrics that team leaders and directors
and VPs look at, you'd be stunned by all these metrics and so many
things that all these modern platforms can spit out as metrics. But the challenge of
that is if you're training as a VP of a contact center, you're C
(16:24):
suite to ask about abandon rate, speed of answer,
average handle time per second, how many seconds, et cetera. You're training to respond to
efficiency metrics, and the conversation should really shift to those effectiveness
metrics. Let's talk now about csat. Let's talk about mps. Okay.
We'll talk about churn rate. But don't say we saved. You know, we managed to
go and save 3% of people calling in. Okay. What you want to do
(16:45):
instead is reframe that to be. How much rescued revenue do you have? Okay. It's
not a 3% effective retention rate. It's what we prevented $12
million from walking out the door. That's the rescued revenue, lifetime value for the
people we saved and retained this month. Okay, that dollar
value, $12 million in rescued revenue this month, that's going to get the C suite's
attention a lot more than saying we had a, whatever point, half a point
(17:07):
increase in retention rate. Most CX
leaders are working hand in hand with the
contact center leader. I know I did. One of the things
that was critical was, number one, they did a
great job. I mean, most of the people who are taking that job
are interested in serving people. Yes. By nature, they're
(17:31):
people who want to be there to help. They just need to be empowered and
equipped and trained. Right. And so when we get into things
like average call time or total talk time, and
you're looking really about incenting them for how quickly they can get
customers off the phone, recommending that. I'm actually, actually opposed to that
sort of. No, no, I know, I know you're not. I'm just saying those, those
(17:53):
metrics tend to be about efficiency. As you were just talking about
before. And no matter what you say to them, if you're grading
them on efficiency, there's going to be a huge,
tell me if I'm, I'm wrong. It can be a huge miss when it comes
to, you know, making an emotional connection. We're going back to
balancing agency with human connection. Exactly. And
(18:15):
that's just it. Because, you know, it's interesting, when I consult, when I walk into
contact centers, you can usually tell pretty quickly if they're focused on metrics and
efficiency or if they're focused on effectiveness and delighting customers. And you can
just tell in terms of how they talk about their metrics. I'll ask you and
take a look at the quality, quality assurance or quality monitoring forms. Okay.
Some of them are very heavily skewed towards certain procedural and
(18:36):
effectiveness metrics. Definitely in terms of their agents, their frontline agents,
monthly or quarterly evaluations. Again, what weight do they place on things? Average handle
time versus csat. And also lost in this too are bigger picture metrics in terms
of what is your average frontline turnover rate? And it's interesting in contact
centers because it's not unusual to find
just in house to have a 30 to even 50%
(18:59):
annual turnover rate. And if they're actually working at a third party contact
center, so an outsourced one, it's not unusual to see over 100% annual
turnover rate. And in almost any other department, if I looked at a sales team,
an IT team, an engineering team, an HR team an and they had a
30 to 50% annual employee turnover rate, I'd be concerned, really
concerned about that. You know, and in the contact center we look at that as
(19:21):
being normal. And some of that can be internal. They move up in the company
or go elsewhere, which is really good for them, you know, move on to sales,
marketing, that's a good thing. But a lot of it is out the door and
that's a real sign there that they don't feel empowered, they can't help people
because like you said, usually people apply for those jobs because they like helping people.
And then unfortunately sometimes in an efficiency house, they're given all kinds of
metrics and punishment for going the extra mile for people and, and not empowered
(19:44):
to, and that's a bad one. On a good one though, they are given leeway,
they are given parameters for how much they could credit back for how creative they
can be in solutions, for what they can say to be able to help
their customers have a really great experience. Yeah, I remember
Tony Hsieh from Zappos talking about
creating a wow moment in each interaction with the customer.
(20:05):
How can you wow them? And not sticking to
rote rules and regulations when it came to serving the
customer, but empowering employees. Yeah, exactly. And what's really great
about that is the focus was make the customer happy as opposed to following
all the rules. Now I do realize I know he was selling shoes, right. It
was an online shoe store. And I know that things like banks, for instance, insurance
(20:26):
companies have very strict regulatory reasons why they have to read things
verbatim, for instance, things like that. But still, the whole intention, though, is the
intention a balance of efficiency and effectiveness or is it going to be about just
the kind of cost cutting piece that's there? One thing I like about about
Zappos was the fact that of course they had the legendary 10 hour long call
where a customer called in and the frontline agent actually spent 10
(20:48):
hours trying to help them resolve their issue and was not punished for
it. Okay. And it's actually seen as a legendary story going above and beyond
to help people. So again, it's just really empowering your staff and letting them
know that they can be a hero, they can help people, they can do it.
And that's what the really great centers look at, contact centers look at is being
able to go and help empower their people, train and empower their people to really
(21:08):
give that great customer service. So there's a whole continuum of mindset from
efficiency, effectiveness, cost, et cetera, to delight that's out there.
Yeah. And I do want to add, and let me know what you think of,
from my experience, a myth about a myth or mistake that
leaders make when it comes to call centers is they can be efficient as
possible and keep basically a skeleton crew.
(21:31):
And I think that's a really dangerous mistake.
It's really easy to say nobody's called, you know, there's their
time on, the phones are down because nobody's calling in right now. And
we know that there are peak times. But I can tell you, having gone
through a couple of acquisitions where we've acquired other banks and that
conversion process is very. First of all, the
(21:53):
people coming over from the other bank didn't choose us. Right. We're
forcing them to go start a relationship with a brand
new bank. People they didn't know, they didn't choose. Systems are different,
things look different and they're calling in because they can't access their account
or something. To them, you know, the world is ending and you
now have not ramped up your customer, your contact
(22:16):
center Enough to anticipate that. So you're talking
about a potential, how hard it is to get a customer potential, very quick
churn of customers coming in. That's just one example, right?
Exactly. But it's such a great example though because again, you've got a
customer from the previous bank that got bought out or merged that, that has a
high emotional state because they can't access their money
(22:38):
and they don't know what's going on with this brand new company that took over
their, you know, their provider. And so there's a lot of emotion there. And that's
one of the things that's really crucial is the fact that when it comes to
customer service and contact centers, yes, you're giving factual
answers, yes, you're trying to go and fix an issue. But one of the things
I always say in my courses is you're trying to go, you have to fix
the relationship first before you fix the problem. You have to fix the
(23:00):
relationship first in terms of the emotional management, the emotional intelligence, the
empathy that's there before you fix the problem problem. And I think that's going to
become even more pronounced now with, you know, AI, with agendic AI, because
as it becomes more capable and takes on more of the so called basic
questions and even some of the more advanced ones for that matter, the people that
are left are going to come through to a live person and have more
(23:20):
complex issues and more emotionally charged issues. And so the emotional
intelligence that you know, they have to display and the empathy they have to
display becomes even more crucial as a skill. And so it really is balancing
that efficiency and effectiveness, empathy, knowledge, all those skills
to really give that great customer service. So Mike, how do you see
agenic AI being incorporated successfully into the
(23:42):
contact center? Well, I think one of the things is that it's a really great
tool and it's amazing how fast it's advancing. And so I think it can really
help a lot of customers that try to contact and get information. And as
well too, it's also proving to be a really great agent assist tool because now
instead of having a agent having to go and after a call or interaction having
to go and manually type in what they remember of the details of the call.
(24:03):
And AI can automatically just sum it all up and put a really great entry
into the customer's file for you. So it saves time for that agent, makes it
easier. Okay. In terms of doing that, it can be a great agent assist tool
to listen to. So the AI would actually hear the call, for instance, and Then
give pop up screens to go and suggest try doing this or here's what it
is in the knowledge base. So it can really be a wonderful tool to assist
(24:24):
agents to become even more effective and help them tremendously and help their
coaches as well by analyzing speech analytics or using speech analytics to go and
analyze a call or analyze an interaction and can provide the coaches and
team leaders and managers a lot of information to be able to help coach their
frontline agents to get even better at the role and do it in a way
that gives them a lot of data, not just one call that gets listened to.
(24:44):
I think really what we're talking about is adding more value. Exactly.
Adding more value to the customer. And one of the things that comes to
mind is so NBO has been around for a while.
This is software that communicates to the agent what the
next best best offer would be to the customer. And I would
say from my own personal experience it's moderately accurate,
(25:07):
moderately successful for me personally, less accurate
than more accurate. And so I'm being offered a home equity line
and you know, I have no interest or I already have one
or that's an exaggerate. Do you want to, do you want a car loan? You
know, well my cars are paid off so it's, it's a miss. And my
hope is that with agenic AI the ability
(25:29):
to know me better better
pull information from our database from
external information we call it in the, in the CRM world
customer related data data data that that might be
related to me that's outside of our database. The idea there
is and tell me what you think that AI may be able
(25:51):
to help agents bring more value. Also
we talking earlier about why should the C suite care is
because there are upsell cross sell. There's
opportunities to offer not just in a salesy way but
in a better way. What have you. What's been your experience? I totally
agree with that as well. Again I train customer service and sales skills and the
(26:14):
sales skills I train are upselling and cross selling typically within a inside sales team
or contact center. And one of the, you know, challenges before AI was the fact
that if you asked an agent to go and sell they would typically have to
start cold without any prior knowledge of the customer. The call drops to your
headset or pops on your screen as a, you know, from a chat window and
you're starting off cold. You're actually beginning now the conversation and you don't know
(26:34):
anything about the customer. And then manually as an agent you would look up their
information to find out more about them. So if you called your bank, that person
would then look up your file, look up your information that's in there, and then
try to figure it on the spot. What should I offer this person? What should
I me. One individual talking to one individual. No head start, no big
database. Just I don't know, what am I supposed to go on and ask or,
(26:54):
you know, suggest to this person. And while some people got really good at it
just based on experience or kind of a knack for it, a lot of people
didn't. And so they hesitated in terms of what to offer. And they might offer
you a home equity line of credit or car loan, get shot down immediately, get
discouraged, and not even try for the rest of the day, which I don't blame
them for, because no one likes being rejected. Or they would do the set pitch
every day. Their team lead might say, today everybody offer a home equity line of
(27:16):
credit. Just do it. And they'd all do that. And then as a customer, you're
going, oh, why do they keep asking me that every time I call? Yeah,
that's before AI. Now AI, though, you're right, with a big enough data
set and being able to go and analyze enough, it can hopefully give an accurate
enough suggestion to go and say, suggest to mark this particular product.
Because he and people like him typically, you know, need this
(27:38):
kind of help. All right. And then the agent frames it to be a help
to you. And if it's accurate enough, hopefully you'll go, wow, I never thought of
that. I could use that. Tell me some more about it. Okay, so it adds
value to your interaction as a customer and makes the job easier for an agent.
Mike, I want to. I want to. We have to land the plane.
Speaking of planes. Okay, I'd like to talk to you forever here on this
(27:59):
topic. But what, where is it going? Where are we going to be in three,
four, five years from now when it comes to agenic AI and the contact center?
I think a lot of it. With the way AI is progressing and learning so
rapidly, it will take on a much greater percentage of customer
interactions. And so, and also as well as an agent assist tools, those get better
and better. You'll see more of that helping the frontline agents as well. I
(28:20):
will say, though, that predictions that you won't need human beings involved in
customer service anymore is too rosy. Okay. And in
past waves of technology, you know, we've heard those same predictions as well. And the
reason why I say that is because I think you'll always have some customers based
upon either demographics, complexity of problem, or their emotional state
that will want to talk to a human being. And if your company has a
(28:41):
wide range of customer age ranges, demographics, etc. You want to offer
different ways for your, you know, your customers to contact you. I think that's an
important point that you made there, is that one of the key
differentiators of where it's going is that the
quality or the complexity of the calls that you'll be
handling are going to be higher level and may require
(29:03):
higher emotional skill sets. Yes.
And boy, when that happens, you know, the stakes are higher because
something emotional is going on and often it's not good.
And you stand between customers staying and potentially becoming
more loyal because they had a great experience when they had a tough situation
or just the opposite. Would you agree with that? I would agree with that because,
(29:27):
you know, if someone's. Again, ten years ago, if someone called in to say, how
late is your Albuquerque store open tonight? Okay, that was not a high, hopefully
not a high stakes emotional issue. And now obviously, I mean, AI is going to
handle all that and a lot more. But if someone's calling in, having dealt with
the FAQ on your website, having done maybe a chat with a chatbot, done
gone through a voice response system with an agenda, AI even talk to a
(29:49):
human, for that matter, and they're still really angry, even more
angry because they've gone through four or five efforts and levels, now they're
going to just blast the person who answers the phone, you know, and it's going
to be really emotionally difficult and tough call to go and deal with,
even if the issue itself is not complex. And so you're right, though, for the
people that are left that are in a contact center now, they're gonna have to
(30:09):
deal with much greater issues. Yeah, great, great point. And oftentimes they are the face
of the brand and they, yes, they are the, the
single point of contact when it comes to,
and potentially the point of failure or point of success,
depending on how that conversation goes. Well, it's been a great
conversation. Thanks for shedding so much light. Mike, I want to end the show
(30:31):
asking you the same question that I ask all my guests, which is what
delights you as a customer? I think for me, and maybe I'm kind of an
old guy, but actually getting somebody, you know, getting a person and having that
person actually not just answer questions, but have some energy to
them and some. And some life to them, which I know is very
demanding. And having been in this business for so many years. I want to celebrate
(30:53):
anybody who answers the phone or helps me that actually seems to give a
darn and has some life and energy. And I've actually said thank you so much
for helping that, you know, and if anybody's listening or values, they did a
great job because I know their call is probably being monitored. So I think that
that would be customer delight for me, having been in this business is just to
celebrate people that actually do a great job because it's hard. Yeah,
(31:14):
it's a great point. In the show, we talk about how to delight
customers and we talk about strategies that leaders can use
to do that and to grow their business as a result and hit
the financial outcomes they're looking for. We don't talk a lot about if
you're the customer, how should you behave? And I think it's
worth mentioning that there are times when you recognize you empathetic.
(31:35):
You're empathetic toward the role that someone in the Contact center has,
hopefully by virtue of you just listening to this episode and you
can give thanks. Yeah, exactly. At least remember the fact that the person you're
dealing with in the Contact center didn't cause your problem. Odds are
okay and really does want to try to help you with that. So please
have that in mind. And they're a human and they're a person. Please have that
(31:57):
in mind as well. Excellent. Mike, thanks so much
for being a guest on the show. So many great insights. The Contact
center is in many ways the pulse of the organization. And
thanks for the work that you do. If somebody wanted to get ahold of you
to reach out and talk some more, what would be the best way? Reach out
to me on LinkedIn. So, Mike Aoki, the name spelled a no for the podcast,
(32:19):
just put that in and just reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'd love to
connect with you. Perfect. Mike, thanks so much for being a guest on the show.
Okay. Thank you, Mark, for having me. Appreciate it.
Well, today on the Delighted Customers podcast, I have a very
special guest coming from up north in Canada. Mike Aoki is
a Canadian customer service and sales trainer with over 35
years of frontline and management experience in contact
centers. And I was talking to Mike earlier about 150
episodes. To this point, we haven't talked a whole lot specifically
(00:22):
about the Contact center. And yet in many ways it's the pulse of,
of the customer experience in any organization. He's
worked with great clients like the Royal Canadian Mint, EQ Bank,
Utilities, Pitney Bowes and so forth. He has written in many, many
articles and publications. He's a keynote speaker. Mike,
welcome to the show. Thank you, Mark. I'm glad to be here and glad to
(00:45):
help your listeners. Well, I'm excited to get into our conversation because,
and tell me if you agree with this, that in many ways the, the
Contact center is arguably the best
resource to find out how your customers are experiencing your brand.
Yeah, I definitely agree with that because again, your contact center is talking to your
customers every single day and in many cases some of the most upset
(01:06):
ones. And so like a focus group where it's sort of an artificial setup or
a survey where people answer if they're really super happy or super angry,
you actually get a really good real life pulse check from your frontline. Just bear
in mind though, that that pulse check will skew towards people that have to call
in because they have an issue, but it does give you a really good background,
a lot of competitive intelligence about what's going on out there. Yeah, because people
(01:28):
call in, you and me as consumers call in. I remember being
at a CXPA annual event one time. We had
Comcast as a keynote speaker. And at the time they were
doing well amongst their peers and they were doing well. They had 11
years of really good financials as far as Wall street was
concerned, but they were getting hammered on things like NPS and customer
(01:49):
satisfaction. So even though they were good amongst their peers, they were sort of
the standing joke among as utilities tend to be
and Internet companies tend to be. And they got sick and tired. So they
hired a senior VP of customer experience. And
he said, I got a lot of work in front of me, I admit it.
And he said one of the slides was customer customer service
(02:11):
happens when the experience is broken. And that just was a
bit of a wake up call and really changed my perspective. It's not
always the case that people call in because they have some issue
or something that they that's gone wrong, service recovery issue.
But it is often the case. What do you think about that statement? I
love that statement. Totally believe in it. There's such a. I mean, the customer experience
(02:33):
piece encompasses such a wider range, the whole customer journey,
whereas the customer service piece, I mean, some customers will never interact with customer
service, and that's a good thing because it means nothing went wrong. But sometimes, though,
that's exactly when it breaks down. People call customer service. I think the other challenge
there is. I know you mentioned the part about NPS and the idea about who
owns nps. And one of the challenges there, of course, is that NPS is really
(02:54):
the, hopefully the customer's entire lifetime and entire opinion,
you know, of what's happening. And really, I know one thing is the contact center
should not own NPS because they can't directly dictate anything before
or after an issue, just the interaction fixing the issue. And so I think
that's a bit unfair. Yeah. And just a point of definition,
most of the listeners would be familiar with what NPS is, but for those
(03:17):
who aren't, it's the number one, and has been for decades, the
number one loyalty metric. And it essentially, if
you've gotten a survey or if you didn't recognize it before now, it's gonna be
like that car that somebody tells you about that you see now all the time
on the road. It's how likely you to recommend a friend or a colleague.
And then there's a simple calculation and. And it's become a
(03:39):
standard way to measure not just your company, but in theory,
if it's done correctly against peers. So
that's really what you're talking about, Mike. Right, Exactly. That's just it.
Exactly. And that's really the customer's overall experience or
overall feeling of loyalty towards the company. And again, the customer
service team can affect part of that, but it's not the be all and end
(04:00):
all. There are a lot of other inputs that go into it. So it's really
tough sometimes when, you know, if you make your contact center own the MPS
piece because it's just a component of it. We're starting here
framing out the contact center and kind of its role as in many
ways it's the hub or the pulse of the organization. As we shared, we're going
to be talking about balancing agentic AI with
(04:20):
human connection because let's face it, AI can not only
save us on efficiency, it can help us with effectiveness and it
can be used to improve the customer experience. Again, like
if it's done correctly. But. But we're going to we're going to dig into
that before we do, since you've been multiple decades now into
contact centers specifically, I really would love to get
(04:43):
your opinion just because I'm curious about how you would
describe the evolution of the contact center in the years that
you've been working with and for them. Okay, we're going back to dinosaur
days here now. But certainly evolution has been, you know, when I first
started working in contact centers in the early 90s, it was telephone based. It was
always voice communication with a little bit of snail mail. Believe it or not
(05:05):
back then and really the whole thing there was a lot of interactions were fairly
simple ones. How late does a certain store stay open? Where do I mail a
check check to? Very much what would now be called FAQ or frequently asked questions
type interactions with only a small percentage being really highly
emotional or highly complex issues. And so in terms of looking at
this, it could be an entry level job in the sense that somebody could come
(05:26):
in, get a three to six week long new hire training program and answer very
basic FAQ type questions with a little bit of more advanced stuff.
Certainly, of course things change as far as how people communicated with companies through
customer service now, you know, we got in the old 2000s a lot of, you
know, email communication for instance. Also of course now social media, which
blossomed after the 2010s and now really heavily social media customer
(05:48):
service as well. And so of course, you know, that had a huge impact. Also
integrated Voice Response or IVR. Press 1 for this, press 2 for that.
Some pre recordings in there, My web cell service obviously of course
now in terms of, you know, looking in terms of agenda, AI and
chatbots and what that's done. And so a lot of it has been an evolution,
an incredible wonderful one in terms of technology. I mean these are great tools. They
(06:10):
offer what's referred to as omnichannel, which means a lot of different ways people can
communicate with a company. And it really helps because different
generations, we'll talk more about that have different preferences for how they want to access
information. But it does make it more complicated now for your contact center and
for your company because it's not just going to be, you know, a room with
people answering a telephone anymore. It's going to be people with different skill sets written
(06:31):
in verbal, different product queues for different product lineups that you have
different tiers now frontline tier one or level one being the more basic
questions, Tier two being escalations and more technical questions. So it
complicates how you Run a contact center. And it also complicates in
many ways how you measure that customer success. And so that's been a huge transition.
There's so many, so many things I want to unpack in what you just,
(06:53):
just said. But first I want to start with some basic definitions. Because
you talked about chatbot and agentic AI, could you help
describe the difference between those for our listeners? I'm not a technical
person, so I'm going to go ahead. This from a very basic level. Chatbots, of
course, having been in existence before AI and being very simple
response machines, basically type it. Customers type in certain inquiries,
(07:16):
certain keywords that are scanned and they're given back very robotic answers.
The chatbot, at its simplest pre AI level would have simply read
keywords, you know, whatever silver package, monthly bill,
dollar value, scanned that, looked it up in a database and given a
canned answer where the whole paragraph has already been pre written,
vetted by marketing, vetted by legal, and then put into a database and
(07:38):
the whole entire text unaltered gets plugged into that chatbot
as a response back to the list, to the reader, whether or not it's really
applicable or not. Generic AI, of course, incorporates AI where
an AI will actually read the customer's email, not just those few
keywords, but hopefully the entire context of what the person's writing
and then decide in terms of what is the person actually answering
(08:00):
and formulate based upon its database, its knowledge base,
an answer back. But the answer back might be slightly different for each one of
us. If I type my question as a customer in a very formal tone, it
may respond back in a very formal tone with those details. If you write in
a very casual tone and it reads that, it may give back an answer in
a more casual tone, okay, with contractions, with certain different kinds of
(08:22):
phrases, etc. But get back essentially the same information but in different tones
and styles. So it ends up being more customized, not canned. And
hopefully, if it's really well done, will sound like a real human typing back
the answer. I want to connect. Thanks for sharing that. I think
that's simple and useful. Definition,
differentiation between chatbot and agentic AI. And I
(08:44):
know there's a lot more. Yeah, there's more technical that you could. Have
shared and that's still coming at us right. As things develop. In the
course I teach at Michigan State, it's customer relationship management.
And this relates to what we're talking about here and what you
shared about Omni Channel. So Omni Channel, you mentioned about the different
channels that People can go through to communicate based
(09:06):
on the whole concept as their choice as the consumer. You're not
forcing them into one channel typically, but you're giving them some
options. So if I'm at home and it's midnight and I'm watching
Netflix and I want to check my bank account balance, I can do it.
If I'm driving by a branch and I need to apply for a loan,
I can do that. If I want. If I want to call the contact center
(09:27):
for questionable charge on my account, I
can do that as well. So these are the channels. And one of
the former guests I had and one of the recordings that I include from
that podcast is Joe Pine. Joe Pine, who wrote the Experience Economy,
and him and Lou Carbone are sort of credited with coming up with the whole
concept of experience or customer experience management back decades
(09:50):
ago. And Joe is now talking about the experience
shifting from products or barter to products, to factory
production to services, to moving up an escalation to
an experience. And now he's talking about it in terms of
transformational experiences. So how can the experience actually
improve someone's life? And one of the things he talks
(10:13):
about relates to what you just shared, which is the different modes
that consumers are in. And so today, if
I, I think he used the example of a coffee shop. If I,
if I'm at home, I may want to brew a cup and I might buy
a bag or a Keurig container. If I'm at a
coffee shop, I'm going to go to Starbucks or wherever and sit
(10:35):
down and order a drink. If I'm at a restaurant, I would have it with
my meal or dessert. And that might be each one of these at a very
different price point. And the experience of my coffee is very different.
So the modes of how I prefer
could change. It's not just. You can't just do a Persona on the individual.
Right, Mike? It's even their mode could change.
(10:57):
Yeah, and that's definitely true too. And if you look at those different channels, those
different modes that refer to voice, written, any within written, is it
on their phone, is it on their laptop? It does change the experience and
also the customer's state of mind. Are they calling in for just a simple inquiry
and. And they're okay with having a chatbot or an agentic AI answer, Are they
really upset and want to talk to a human? Those are all factors that take
(11:19):
place. The customer's emotional state and the communication or channel preference
goes a long way towards setting their expectation. And again,
customer experience is about the customer's experience and expectations that take
place. I want to talk about the stakes of the contact
center in general. Why it's such a big deal. It seems
kind of obvious, but. But I know that if you're sitting in the C
(11:41):
suite, you're constantly looking at ways to reduce costs and create
efficiency and contact center people. After all, each one
that's sitting in a chair is a full time employee or full time equivalent.
What are the stakes? Why is this such a big deal
to the organization? Why should the C suite care so much about their contact
center? Well, there's two basic reasons why in terms of looking at. And you touched
(12:04):
upon the idea about efficiency. So efficiency metrics in terms of. And
this has been a big thing in our industry, the contact center industry is looking
at what's called average handle time. And that's a component basically of the amount
of time that a person is a frontline agent is actually talking to a customer
or typing to a customer. And then any kind of call or work that takes
place after the call interaction itself, which is maybe updating files
(12:25):
afterwards or summarizing notes afterwards. And that combination is referred to
as average handle time. The time it takes an agent to really help one
customer. And that has a lot of impact in terms of
efficiency and in terms of, I hate to say it, but cost. And you mentioned
employee salary cost. Surprisingly for contact centers, real estate is a big
cost because it's not just the people that are in the contact center, but the
(12:46):
actual square footage that they occupy, as well as the equipment that they use.
And I know a lot of contact centers are remaining work from home or hybrid
with people when they're in their office actually hoteling or kind of working at different
desks, not owning a desk simply to reduce real estate costs. But all that
goes into the idea about, unfortunately, the contact center as a cost center. And that
is the way that some people in the C suite look at the customer service
(13:07):
or contact center team as being a cost. If they do, though,
and I'll give you one example, one company actually found that for every second they
shaved off of every call, every call per day that person took times, all the
people in the contact center, they could save $40,000 a year for every
one second difference. Now that by itself is a
measurement. It can be used for either a good thing or bad thing. Okay,
(13:29):
Used for a bad thing, it could be telling your agents, and I've seen this
happen, you need to shave 10 seconds off every call. Okay. Or
you need to hit a certain average Length of time, two minutes per call, max.
And then we'll start pinging you through teams saying, why are you taking so long?
The problem with that though is it drives the wrong mindset. If you tell a
frontline person you've got to make all your calls, land within X amount of
(13:50):
time, they'll find a way to do it. But it may be through things like
rushing a customer off the phone, giving incomplete answers, making
mistakes in terms of changes that they make, and those things drive additional
calls. So you can save 10 seconds on a call by demanding it and really
increase your call volume overall. Okay, so again, the obsessive focus on
metrics can have a bad side. Now there's also a good side. You can look
(14:12):
at that same thing, about one second equals $40,000 in that example,
and think, how can we make it better in a good way for the frontline
team and for the customers? Okay, so it's the mindset you take into this for
efficiency is what can you do to make things better and be more
efficient in cost cutting? Yeah. So, Mike, what do you
think are we talked about the stakes being high, right?
(14:34):
And you're talking about real money, real dollars. We've got a team of full
time employees in the call center. Now, as you've shared,
part of the evolution is they're working more from home than in physical office because
there's some real estate expenses associated with that. But what are some mistakes
that leaders make when it comes to contact centers? I think one of the biggest
things we talked about the sort of C suite obsession on the cost side of
(14:55):
things. And the contact center is a cost center. I think one of the challenges
both in the C suite and through the leadership of contact centers is
not focusing on the benefit piece, which I think you kind of hinted at earlier,
which is there's the efficiency metrics, but they're the effectiveness metrics.
Okay, what's the impact to customer experience? And then you wind up with
example, where if you give your agents more leeway to
(15:17):
adapt to your customer. Okay, so an example is moving, say, hard scripting
to being able to give more flexible answers based upon knowledge and being able to
help customize with your customer, you can actually really greatly increase. And you mentioned
sort of those wow experiences, you know, that are out there. You can really increase
customer loyalty, you know, and take the time. It's not the contact
center. But I saw a wonderful comparison, which was if medical Doctors
(15:40):
took just 30 seconds more per patient, they could actually avoid so many
down the line malpractice. Lawsuits, people being unnecessarily
ill, et cetera. Just that little extra time can really help an awful lot.
So. And again, I know there's a cost associated with that, but you have to
look and think is driving people to shave one second off a call
worth getting really bad MPS and CSAT scores and having a high
(16:02):
churn or customer turnover rate. You know, that's there. And I think one of the
drawbacks I do see is that contact center leaders, because we're so immersed in
metrics. Mark, if I shared with you all the metrics that team leaders and directors
and VPs look at, you'd be stunned by all these metrics and so many
things that all these modern platforms can spit out as metrics. But the challenge of
that is if you're training as a VP of a contact center, you're C
(16:24):
suite to ask about abandon rate, speed of answer,
average handle time per second, how many seconds, et cetera. You're training to respond to
efficiency metrics, and the conversation should really shift to those effectiveness
metrics. Let's talk now about csat. Let's talk about mps. Okay.
We'll talk about churn rate. But don't say we saved. You know, we managed to
go and save 3% of people calling in. Okay. What you want to do
(16:45):
instead is reframe that to be. How much rescued revenue do you have? Okay. It's
not a 3% effective retention rate. It's what we prevented $12
million from walking out the door. That's the rescued revenue, lifetime value for the
people we saved and retained this month. Okay, that dollar
value, $12 million in rescued revenue this month, that's going to get the C suite's
attention a lot more than saying we had a, whatever point, half a point
(17:07):
increase in retention rate. Most CX
leaders are working hand in hand with the
contact center leader. I know I did. One of the things
that was critical was, number one, they did a
great job. I mean, most of the people who are taking that job
are interested in serving people. Yes. By nature, they're
(17:31):
people who want to be there to help. They just need to be empowered and
equipped and trained. Right. And so when we get into things
like average call time or total talk time, and
you're looking really about incenting them for how quickly they can get
customers off the phone, recommending that. I'm actually, actually opposed to that
sort of. No, no, I know, I know you're not. I'm just saying those, those
(17:53):
metrics tend to be about efficiency. As you were just talking about
before. And no matter what you say to them, if you're grading
them on efficiency, there's going to be a huge,
tell me if I'm, I'm wrong. It can be a huge miss when it comes
to, you know, making an emotional connection. We're going back to
balancing agency with human connection. Exactly. And
(18:15):
that's just it. Because, you know, it's interesting, when I consult, when I walk into
contact centers, you can usually tell pretty quickly if they're focused on metrics and
efficiency or if they're focused on effectiveness and delighting customers. And you can
just tell in terms of how they talk about their metrics. I'll ask you and
take a look at the quality, quality assurance or quality monitoring forms. Okay.
Some of them are very heavily skewed towards certain procedural and
(18:36):
effectiveness metrics. Definitely in terms of their agents, their frontline agents,
monthly or quarterly evaluations. Again, what weight do they place on things? Average handle
time versus csat. And also lost in this too are bigger picture metrics in terms
of what is your average frontline turnover rate? And it's interesting in contact
centers because it's not unusual to find
just in house to have a 30 to even 50%
(18:59):
annual turnover rate. And if they're actually working at a third party contact
center, so an outsourced one, it's not unusual to see over 100% annual
turnover rate. And in almost any other department, if I looked at a sales team,
an IT team, an engineering team, an HR team an and they had a
30 to 50% annual employee turnover rate, I'd be concerned, really
concerned about that. You know, and in the contact center we look at that as
(19:21):
being normal. And some of that can be internal. They move up in the company
or go elsewhere, which is really good for them, you know, move on to sales,
marketing, that's a good thing. But a lot of it is out the door and
that's a real sign there that they don't feel empowered, they can't help people
because like you said, usually people apply for those jobs because they like helping people.
And then unfortunately sometimes in an efficiency house, they're given all kinds of
metrics and punishment for going the extra mile for people and, and not empowered
(19:44):
to, and that's a bad one. On a good one though, they are given leeway,
they are given parameters for how much they could credit back for how creative they
can be in solutions, for what they can say to be able to help
their customers have a really great experience. Yeah, I remember
Tony Hsieh from Zappos talking about
creating a wow moment in each interaction with the customer.
(20:05):
How can you wow them? And not sticking to
rote rules and regulations when it came to serving the
customer, but empowering employees. Yeah, exactly. And what's really great
about that is the focus was make the customer happy as opposed to following
all the rules. Now I do realize I know he was selling shoes, right. It
was an online shoe store. And I know that things like banks, for instance, insurance
(20:26):
companies have very strict regulatory reasons why they have to read things
verbatim, for instance, things like that. But still, the whole intention, though, is the
intention a balance of efficiency and effectiveness or is it going to be about just
the kind of cost cutting piece that's there? One thing I like about about
Zappos was the fact that of course they had the legendary 10 hour long call
where a customer called in and the frontline agent actually spent 10
(20:48):
hours trying to help them resolve their issue and was not punished for
it. Okay. And it's actually seen as a legendary story going above and beyond
to help people. So again, it's just really empowering your staff and letting them
know that they can be a hero, they can help people, they can do it.
And that's what the really great centers look at, contact centers look at is being
able to go and help empower their people, train and empower their people to really
(21:08):
give that great customer service. So there's a whole continuum of mindset from
efficiency, effectiveness, cost, et cetera, to delight that's out there.
Yeah. And I do want to add, and let me know what you think of,
from my experience, a myth about a myth or mistake that
leaders make when it comes to call centers is they can be efficient as
possible and keep basically a skeleton crew.
(21:31):
And I think that's a really dangerous mistake.
It's really easy to say nobody's called, you know, there's their
time on, the phones are down because nobody's calling in right now. And
we know that there are peak times. But I can tell you, having gone
through a couple of acquisitions where we've acquired other banks and that
conversion process is very. First of all, the
(21:53):
people coming over from the other bank didn't choose us. Right. We're
forcing them to go start a relationship with a brand
new bank. People they didn't know, they didn't choose. Systems are different,
things look different and they're calling in because they can't access their account
or something. To them, you know, the world is ending and you
now have not ramped up your customer, your contact
(22:16):
center Enough to anticipate that. So you're talking
about a potential, how hard it is to get a customer potential, very quick
churn of customers coming in. That's just one example, right?
Exactly. But it's such a great example though because again, you've got a
customer from the previous bank that got bought out or merged that, that has a
high emotional state because they can't access their money
(22:38):
and they don't know what's going on with this brand new company that took over
their, you know, their provider. And so there's a lot of emotion there. And that's
one of the things that's really crucial is the fact that when it comes to
customer service and contact centers, yes, you're giving factual
answers, yes, you're trying to go and fix an issue. But one of the things
I always say in my courses is you're trying to go, you have to fix
the relationship first before you fix the problem. You have to fix the
(23:00):
relationship first in terms of the emotional management, the emotional intelligence, the
empathy that's there before you fix the problem problem. And I think that's going to
become even more pronounced now with, you know, AI, with agendic AI, because
as it becomes more capable and takes on more of the so called basic
questions and even some of the more advanced ones for that matter, the people that
are left are going to come through to a live person and have more
(23:20):
complex issues and more emotionally charged issues. And so the emotional
intelligence that you know, they have to display and the empathy they have to
display becomes even more crucial as a skill. And so it really is balancing
that efficiency and effectiveness, empathy, knowledge, all those skills
to really give that great customer service. So Mike, how do you see
agenic AI being incorporated successfully into the
(23:42):
contact center? Well, I think one of the things is that it's a really great
tool and it's amazing how fast it's advancing. And so I think it can really
help a lot of customers that try to contact and get information. And as
well too, it's also proving to be a really great agent assist tool because now
instead of having a agent having to go and after a call or interaction having
to go and manually type in what they remember of the details of the call.
(24:03):
And AI can automatically just sum it all up and put a really great entry
into the customer's file for you. So it saves time for that agent, makes it
easier. Okay. In terms of doing that, it can be a great agent assist tool
to listen to. So the AI would actually hear the call, for instance, and Then
give pop up screens to go and suggest try doing this or here's what it
is in the knowledge base. So it can really be a wonderful tool to assist
(24:24):
agents to become even more effective and help them tremendously and help their
coaches as well by analyzing speech analytics or using speech analytics to go and
analyze a call or analyze an interaction and can provide the coaches and
team leaders and managers a lot of information to be able to help coach their
frontline agents to get even better at the role and do it in a way
that gives them a lot of data, not just one call that gets listened to.
(24:44):
I think really what we're talking about is adding more value. Exactly.
Adding more value to the customer. And one of the things that comes to
mind is so NBO has been around for a while.
This is software that communicates to the agent what the
next best best offer would be to the customer. And I would
say from my own personal experience it's moderately accurate,
(25:07):
moderately successful for me personally, less accurate
than more accurate. And so I'm being offered a home equity line
and you know, I have no interest or I already have one
or that's an exaggerate. Do you want to, do you want a car loan? You
know, well my cars are paid off so it's, it's a miss. And my
hope is that with agenic AI the ability
(25:29):
to know me better better
pull information from our database from
external information we call it in the, in the CRM world
customer related data data data that that might be
related to me that's outside of our database. The idea there
is and tell me what you think that AI may be able
(25:51):
to help agents bring more value. Also
we talking earlier about why should the C suite care is
because there are upsell cross sell. There's
opportunities to offer not just in a salesy way but
in a better way. What have you. What's been your experience? I totally
agree with that as well. Again I train customer service and sales skills and the
(26:14):
sales skills I train are upselling and cross selling typically within a inside sales team
or contact center. And one of the, you know, challenges before AI was the fact
that if you asked an agent to go and sell they would typically have to
start cold without any prior knowledge of the customer. The call drops to your
headset or pops on your screen as a, you know, from a chat window and
you're starting off cold. You're actually beginning now the conversation and you don't know
(26:34):
anything about the customer. And then manually as an agent you would look up their
information to find out more about them. So if you called your bank, that person
would then look up your file, look up your information that's in there, and then
try to figure it on the spot. What should I offer this person? What should
I me. One individual talking to one individual. No head start, no big
database. Just I don't know, what am I supposed to go on and ask or,
(26:54):
you know, suggest to this person. And while some people got really good at it
just based on experience or kind of a knack for it, a lot of people
didn't. And so they hesitated in terms of what to offer. And they might offer
you a home equity line of credit or car loan, get shot down immediately, get
discouraged, and not even try for the rest of the day, which I don't blame
them for, because no one likes being rejected. Or they would do the set pitch
every day. Their team lead might say, today everybody offer a home equity line of
(27:16):
credit. Just do it. And they'd all do that. And then as a customer, you're
going, oh, why do they keep asking me that every time I call? Yeah,
that's before AI. Now AI, though, you're right, with a big enough data
set and being able to go and analyze enough, it can hopefully give an accurate
enough suggestion to go and say, suggest to mark this particular product.
Because he and people like him typically, you know, need this
(27:38):
kind of help. All right. And then the agent frames it to be a help
to you. And if it's accurate enough, hopefully you'll go, wow, I never thought of
that. I could use that. Tell me some more about it. Okay, so it adds
value to your interaction as a customer and makes the job easier for an agent.
Mike, I want to. I want to. We have to land the plane.
Speaking of planes. Okay, I'd like to talk to you forever here on this
(27:59):
topic. But what, where is it going? Where are we going to be in three,
four, five years from now when it comes to agenic AI and the contact center?
I think a lot of it. With the way AI is progressing and learning so
rapidly, it will take on a much greater percentage of customer
interactions. And so, and also as well as an agent assist tools, those get better
and better. You'll see more of that helping the frontline agents as well. I
(28:20):
will say, though, that predictions that you won't need human beings involved in
customer service anymore is too rosy. Okay. And in
past waves of technology, you know, we've heard those same predictions as well. And the
reason why I say that is because I think you'll always have some customers based
upon either demographics, complexity of problem, or their emotional state
that will want to talk to a human being. And if your company has a
(28:41):
wide range of customer age ranges, demographics, etc. You want to offer
different ways for your, you know, your customers to contact you. I think that's an
important point that you made there, is that one of the key
differentiators of where it's going is that the
quality or the complexity of the calls that you'll be
handling are going to be higher level and may require
(29:03):
higher emotional skill sets. Yes.
And boy, when that happens, you know, the stakes are higher because
something emotional is going on and often it's not good.
And you stand between customers staying and potentially becoming
more loyal because they had a great experience when they had a tough situation
or just the opposite. Would you agree with that? I would agree with that because,
(29:27):
you know, if someone's. Again, ten years ago, if someone called in to say, how
late is your Albuquerque store open tonight? Okay, that was not a high, hopefully
not a high stakes emotional issue. And now obviously, I mean, AI is going to
handle all that and a lot more. But if someone's calling in, having dealt with
the FAQ on your website, having done maybe a chat with a chatbot, done
gone through a voice response system with an agenda, AI even talk to a
(29:49):
human, for that matter, and they're still really angry, even more
angry because they've gone through four or five efforts and levels, now they're
going to just blast the person who answers the phone, you know, and it's going
to be really emotionally difficult and tough call to go and deal with,
even if the issue itself is not complex. And so you're right, though, for the
people that are left that are in a contact center now, they're gonna have to
(30:09):
deal with much greater issues. Yeah, great, great point. And oftentimes they are the face
of the brand and they, yes, they are the, the
single point of contact when it comes to,
and potentially the point of failure or point of success,
depending on how that conversation goes. Well, it's been a great
conversation. Thanks for shedding so much light. Mike, I want to end the show
(30:31):
asking you the same question that I ask all my guests, which is what
delights you as a customer? I think for me, and maybe I'm kind of an
old guy, but actually getting somebody, you know, getting a person and having that
person actually not just answer questions, but have some energy to
them and some. And some life to them, which I know is very
demanding. And having been in this business for so many years. I want to celebrate
(30:53):
anybody who answers the phone or helps me that actually seems to give a
darn and has some life and energy. And I've actually said thank you so much
for helping that, you know, and if anybody's listening or values, they did a
great job because I know their call is probably being monitored. So I think that
that would be customer delight for me, having been in this business is just to
celebrate people that actually do a great job because it's hard. Yeah,
(31:14):
it's a great point. In the show, we talk about how to delight
customers and we talk about strategies that leaders can use
to do that and to grow their business as a result and hit
the financial outcomes they're looking for. We don't talk a lot about if
you're the customer, how should you behave? And I think it's
worth mentioning that there are times when you recognize you empathetic.
(31:35):
You're empathetic toward the role that someone in the Contact center has,
hopefully by virtue of you just listening to this episode and you
can give thanks. Yeah, exactly. At least remember the fact that the person you're
dealing with in the Contact center didn't cause your problem. Odds are
okay and really does want to try to help you with that. So please
have that in mind. And they're a human and they're a person. Please have that
(31:57):
in mind as well. Excellent. Mike, thanks so much
for being a guest on the show. So many great insights. The Contact
center is in many ways the pulse of the organization. And
thanks for the work that you do. If somebody wanted to get ahold of you
to reach out and talk some more, what would be the best way? Reach out
to me on LinkedIn. So, Mike Aoki, the name spelled a no for the podcast,
(32:19):
just put that in and just reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'd love to
connect with you. Perfect. Mike, thanks so much for being a guest on the show.
Okay. Thank you, Mark, for having me. Appreciate it.
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