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 * NobelBiz Omni+ Omnichannel Contact Center Solution
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Contact us
FIRST CONTACT: Stories of the Call Center
Hosted by Christian Montes


EPISODE 6 | SEASON 4


KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND AI: REAL-TIME GUIDANCE FOR CONTACT CENTERS WITH MICAH
PETERSON



Available on:






“We cut onboarding time by 50 to 90%, ensuring agents have an average handle
time and quality that is comparable to your best agents.”


Micah Peterson, VP Product Management @ ProcedureFlow 


ABOUT THE GUEST


MICAH PETERSON

VP Product Management @ ProcedureFlow




Micah, a knowledge management enthusiast with over 15 years of experience in
transforming how companies handle their knowledge. Micah is not only Knowledge
Centered Services certified (KCS), but he also possesses an unwavering passion
for human knowledge sharing. With a proven track record of helping organizations
revolutionize their knowledge management strategies, Micah has become a trusted
authority in the industry. His contributions extend beyond expertise, as he has
even developed patented software that empowers businesses to build and maintain
robust knowledge bases.


ABOUT THE EPISODE


KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND AI: REAL-TIME GUIDANCE FOR CONTACT CENTERS WITH MICAH
PETERSON

The intersection of knowledge management and AI is redefining the future of
contact centers. In our newest episode, we’re privileged to host Micah Peterson,
an expert with over a decade and a half of experience in the domain of knowledge
management. Certified in Knowledge Centered Services (KCS) and celebrated for
his patented software creations, Peterson has consistently pushed the boundaries
of how businesses approach and maintain their knowledge bases. Join us to learn
from a leading authority on the seamless integration of human knowledge and
technological innovation in the world of contact centers.




TRANSCRIPT

S3E4: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND FUTURE OF WORK FOR CONTACT CENTERS: JON ARNOLD

Christian: All right. Hey everyone. Welcome back to First Contact: Stories of
the Call Center. Super excited for today’s episode. Today we’ve really been
joined by a true thought leader, a speaker tech analysts, content creator in the
world of digital transformation in the world. That’s a lot to say a mouthful,
but look, I’m not even done yet.

Look, he’s been cited as several times among the top analysts covering the
contact center industry and look 2019 named top 30 contact center influencer
2018 included in the top 10 telecoms influencers and top voice bloggers to
follow over 20 years of experience in consulting and has been at the forefront
of countless digital shifts within the business world has a podcast as well.
Watch this space, which is great. If you have any interests, you got to look it
up where we’re exploring technology driven places, future of work, contact
centers, CX just the name of few, a ton more.

However, we can’t think of anybody that is more responsible for thought
leadership in this space. Then the person we’re going to introduce next, which
is John Arnold, the founder of J Arnold and associates. John, welcome to the
show. So glad to have you on.

Arnold: Wow. Thank you, Christian. Yeah, that’s a, that’s quite the buildup and
you didn’t mention I’m a pretty good piano player, but that’s for another time,
Hey, lots of there’s going to be a spa.

Christian: I’m going to be able to get to the right part on here. And hopefully
we can dive into what, what you do outside of work. But look, we’re so excited
to have you on. And one of the things we love to do here, especially with the
theme of the show is not everybody crosses paths with a call center space and
goes, oh, that’s my dream job.

I’m going to go and end up working or crossing paths in that space, but you’re
also in the tech space. So we’d love to know your story. Understand how did you
get into the tech space? And then where did that cross paths with the context
contact center world?

Well, I’m glad you asked that Christian, because we earlier comment about, you
know, 20 years is a long time.

In our lives, but it’s a really long time in technology. Right. And yes. I can
now say, you know, I’ve lived through and written about and talked about, you
know, various technology trends that have come and kind of, you see the life
cycle of these things and that’s important. And certainly it, it will tell you
how I got here from there.

So I was as is usually the case. We don’t go to school to be working in
technology generally, unless you’re a programmer, you know, I’m not a techie
tech, I’m not a developer or an it guy, but I I was a market researcher by trade
prior to this space. And that kind of took me into the analyst world quite a
long time ago, where the rise of analyst firms that focused strictly on
technology was fairly recent because tech itself was a.

As a relatively new industry. And I got into it that way, where I wasn’t like
trained to learn about this stuff, but in tech, the biggest thing to be
successful, it doesn’t matter what the type of job is. You gotta be curious and
you gotta be a fast learner. And that’s exactly what happened with me. I landed
in a, with a, with an analyst firm and I was told you’re going to be covering
VoIP now.

And my answer to that was what’s VoIP. Their answer to that was you’ll find out.
And that’s all I had to work from, but I’ll tell you a Christian within two and
a half years, I became the top guy in the voice space and don’t ask me how I did
it, but it that’s just kinda how it rolled. And I said, you know what?

It’s, you can enter a new space where this is around 2000, where voice was
really just starting to become a thing. And you. You can enter a space early
without knowing a lot. And it doesn’t really matter, right? You, you, as you
learn, you develop that expertise. And so that’s kinda how it got started and
it’s gone from there.

So it used to be, it was a time when voice was big enough of a story and
disruptive enough of the technology that you could cover that topic full-time
and be plenty busy, but then voice like any other tech matures, right. And
things evolve. So once voice kind of gets seated in the marketplace, we
eventually get to what we call a unified communications, right.

Which is the idea of bringing all of these apps together in one platform, voice
data, video, et cetera. And then along comes the. And so once cloud becomes the
home for everything, you’re you have these concentric circles. As you’re an
analyst, you start with voice, then there’s a circle of UC, which is unified
communications.

Then the cloud becomes the next big club, big piece that you have to kind of
chase and follow. And then as cloud becomes the default for almost everything,
Christian contact center starts to fall into this bucket because like voice and
telephony, which was always premise-based contact center world has always been
premise-based that’s the way technology has always been hardware, right then
cloud comes along and the rise of SAS, the software as a service model, where
everything is in the cloud, nobody owns anything.

There’s no hardware that contact center is starting to trend in that direction.
And before you know it, everyone’s talking the big story you hear from all the
vendors now, We have to marry these two UC and contact center, right? So we call
them seek has, and UCAS in the cloud as a service. So cloud has kind of
homogenized almost everything now, or everything can be in the cloud.

So this world of contact center that you guys know so well and Nobel biz is
like, okay, that’s been it’s universe unto itself, really forever. Just like the
phone system, the PBX lived in its own world in the enterprise for a million
years and no reason to change it. Now that all goes out the window and now
everyone’s scrambling and the contact center is a few years behind where the
telephony space is in terms of migrating Nicholas.

Right. But now they’re going really fast, really hard. And all the contact
center vendors, you know, are pushing cloud summer cloud native, right? That’s
all they do. And so this space is really moving fast because they see that this
is where the future is. And more importantly, because we’re talking about
contact center in the world of customer service, this is all about how do we
make customers happy?

And, you know, consumer consumer ization of it is a trend we all know about. And
it really plays big in this world because when we’re wearing our consumer hats,
especially digital natives, their level of adoption of technology is generally
way ahead of what contact centers are used to supporting right?

Customer service member used to be called a call center because you made a phone
call to go to the con, you know, to get customers. Now it’s become a
multi-channel world where Telephany is just one of many channels. So now it’s
the contact center where you could call, you could text, you could mobile, you
could video, right?

You could, you could find many ways in to get service. And that’s a much harder
thing for a contact center to manage. And now it’s become, okay. Well, not only
that, but customer expectations with all our cool technologies and mobile
phones, we expect instant service, right? We expect solving problems on the
spot.

We don’t want to wait anymore for anything. I mean, you look at your kids. I
mean, five seconds is a, is a lifetime for them to wait for something. And the
contact center doesn’t move that fast. Right? When you’re picking up the phone
and trying to help somebody well, let’s look up your records. Let’s see.

They don’t have the patients. So all of a sudden the ability to provide the
service that customers expect. Now, this is a big kind of what I call it. Right.
There’s a, does this like performance gap and expectation, but with
expectations, the contact centers are really struggling to keep up with,
especially if they’re still living with technology that’s legacy and premise of
spaced, which is still very prevalent in the contact center space.

So that’s a good point to stop. That’s a long ramble, but I think you got the
idea of how I got

here from there. No, that’s a great journey. And I think that sets up a lot of
our discussion in, in a perfect way. But one thing I just want to make a comment
on when you were mentioning, you know, these digital natives and how quick they
want and expect things.

And you know, they’re almost unreasonable by technology standards, but it’s the
expectations. You have to find ways to delight them. And so you go back and you
think of, you know, the beginnings of the telephone. You, we talk about voice,
but you think of the beginning of the telephone, the idea is I wait. This thing
called a call on this device, and I can hear this person across the world or
across the country.

And you can think of any other technology while you can see someone on the
television and so on and so forth. But now people are just so frustrated that
we’re not flying cars yet and doing other things right. That you’ve seen in TV
and movies for a long time. So the dynamic around that shift of the mindset from
going surprised, and I couldn’t believe it, I’m a little scared to adopt it to
now going.

I’m so frustrated this isn’t already so high tech that it meets my newfound
expectations and needs with, with that said, though, let’s go back to where you
started your business, right? Where you moved and you started creating J Arnold
and associates. How did that come about what made you say, I want to do this as
the next chapter of my.

Arnold: Okay. Yeah, sure. Christian, so that that’s more via my own journey, so
to speak. So I I, I mentioned I was a market researcher by trade, so I had my
own boutique consultancy in, in market research for B2B for a long time. And
that business kind of plateaued probably in the late nineties. I, I live in
Canada and there was a a new regulations came along called free trade agreement,
which is a big thing.

And they call it NAFTA for a long time. And the U S people are in the U S
they’re not as interested in stuff like this, but in Canada, this was a very big
deal. And it was free. Trade pack was a good thing for some industries. It
wasn’t very good for my market research business because it, it, Canada has
always been a bit of a branch plant economy.

And so the people I needed to give me business. Who are based here in Canada,
all of a sudden had no budget left anymore because everything was centralized
out of the U S and I couldn’t, it was hard to get work. So I, I saw what was
coming that way. And I, I, I gravitated to the tech space because I, it, it, it
just, I did a lot of work for some of the telephony companies here in Canada.

And that kind of pushed me that way. An opportunity came up for one of the one
of the analyst firms, frost and Sullivan, who were opening offices in Canada.
And they were looking for someone with business experience to help run and
market research prime me for a lot of that. I said, well, analyst work is not
that different.

So I said, okay, I’ll give it a try. And that was really all. I went into it
with Christian and said, I’m going to move from my own business to work for this
company to get into this space. So it worked out as a good idea, but I’m like a
lot of things. If you’ve been entrepreneurial, most of your life, you, you, you
expect different things when you go to work for a company.

So anyways, I, I did kind of hit a wall there after a few years. I stayed, I
think, four years and it was a great opportunity, learned a lot. And a lot of
people I left there when I moved on are still there. It’s a company that has
bred really good loyalty with its people. I think I, I bet right.

Ongoing with them to kind of get my feet into this space. But yeah, 2000 I went
on my own. I, I found, I mentioned I was making a good mark in the VoIP space,
Christian, and that was leading to a lot of requests for me to do things that I
couldn’t really do being strictly an analyst within a company. I was doing
things to really help build the brand, but that’s really not what they wanted me
there for.

And so I reached a point. I said, you know what I, I’m not going to get any
further doing what I’m doing here and I’ll take a chance. And I went out on my
own and that’s how J Arnold and associates started. So then that was in 2000,
sorry, 2005. So yeah, 16, 17 years now. So so far so good. Right? It’s been
keeping me going and when you work as an independent, you’re.

You operate differently than when you work for company, obviously. So I’m, I get
a lot of my business now because I’m entrepreneurial and I take a creative
approach to what I do. And for some companies, that’s exactly what they need.
And you’re not going to get that from a big name analyst firm, aside from costs
being different, obviously you know, a lot of the big firms are structured to
work in certain ways with clients, right?

So they’re a great fit when you want certain things, but they’re not so great
fit for other things. So that’s where there’s opportunity for, you know, niche
people like me. And when you start doing this for awhile, you find your tribe,
right? So there are other independents like me and we’re all kind of similar.

Mindset age backgrounds, very, you know, that kind of thing. And the reason I
say that, Christian, I mean, we may talk about this a little bit later, but as
an analyst, we, we, our stock in trade is, you know, staying current with all
the companies out there. And the way we do that is we do do a lot of briefings
with the vendors.

And if the analysts covering the same stuff, we’re all talking to the same
companies fairly regularly. And they do a lot of analyst events lately. It’s
been virtual, but earlier it’s been more in person. So we find, we ended up, we
kind of travel in packs, right. So, you know, a Cisco has an event. Oh, well,
I’ll see you at Cisco next month.

It might be RingCentral. We’ll see what RingCentral, next month it might be nice
and contact. We’ll see. So there’s kind of a, a comradery there amongst
independence that we can. We’re following the same spaces and we kind of look at
the same things, but we’re all different. We all have different act.

There’s no school. You go to, to be an analyst, right. You, you know, some
people are very technical, I’m very business and strategy minded. That’s just my
forte. And so you stick to what you’re good at. And I wouldn’t be around this
long if I wasn’t finding, you know, ways to help companies. Right. So,

perfect.

Well, great, John, one of the things I think you just had a perfect segue
anyways, for those of my audience that really don’t understand what an analyst
does. Right. And why is it important? Can you just give, I think you touched on
it just a bit, but if you could just give a little bit of an overview of that, I
think that’d be great.

Arnold: Sure, sure. So one of the you know, we live in a very, kind of very, you
know, always on you know, Twitter, LinkedIn, social media, everything happens
really fast. And there’s a lot of emphasis on news and information that flows.
An analyst is different. The main thing that people get confused with,
especially, especially in the PR world analysts and media.

So there’s journalists, there’s tech bloggers, right? So the big difference
between us is that the way I just look at it is the simplest way to look at it
is to think about this is journalists, generally speaking, look, when you read
news stories in the press, right. They’re written by journalists, right?

They describe analysts describe, but they also explain. So like, we try to make
more sense of things and try to, you know, really connect dots rather than just
say, here’s the news. Here are the facts. That’s, that’s the starting point. But
what we do is we step back as we see the broader industry, we try to make sense.

Okay, well, here’s why these trends. Are happening now and why they’re
important. So this idea of the why rather than the what, so we kind of, because
we try to understand the bigger picture. Now there are technical analysts who
only want to get under the hood and really do feature by feature comparison.

That’s not my world. It’s much more about the, you know, what does this mean for
the business? That, that kind of thing. So journalists can do a very good job
with that as well, but they are generally writing as a byline for publisher.
Whereas analysts, we are especially independence. Our brand is our thought
leadership, right?

Because that’s why people come to us to say, well, you’re objective, you’re
independent. What do you think now, if anyone wants to explore this further, or
if I’ve still got you confused, because I know this is a common question,
Christian. I have a thing on my, a spot on my website, on my homepage, where I
actually was interviewed at a conference about this.

What does an analyst. And I post that video there where I talk through the
things that a, an analyst does. And I also have for fun a video of someone
explaining on a, about a technical thing that is just so impossible to
understand. That’s what you don’t want an analyst to. Do. You want an analyst to
clarify simplify, make it relevant, right.

And that’s, that’s good. I mean, we w at heart, we have to be good
communicators, right? You gotta be a good writer. You gotta be a good speaker.
You gotta be able to break things down and kind of connect dots, because
otherwise you can just go on and on and on talking about features and stuff like
that. But that gets kind of confusing after awhile.

This is James. James is a contact center manager with a passion for philosophy
and hiking

as a

Arnold: kid, he made a promise to himself that he would always follow his.

Today, he ponders on the thought that this promise is probably the best decision
he ever made today. James loves his job just as much as he loves hiking so much
that he sometimes brings the scent of fresh pine and the tranquility of the
mountain streams back to the office with,

with Nobel bids as his company’s provider, James found the necessary peace of
mind to finally bridge the gap between his passion

and his work

Arnold: by choosing the partner with the promise-keeping voice and software
provider of the industry contact center, technical issues, downtime, and for
customer experience are now a thing of the past in an industry ruled by
uncertainty, Nobel biz combines balanced pricing with the highest quality

topped off without standing support.

Arnold: But above all Nobel biz delivers peace of mind to contact center
managers and owners. And for the first time, James hit that sweet spot of focus
and confidence that is allowing him to take his business to new Heights, the
profitability and

success after all,

Arnold: no, what they say, promises are the uniquely human way

of ordering the future

Arnold: Nobel bins, the promise keepers of the industry.

No, it makes sense. And look, John, I call that the, so what let’s get to the,
so what, what does it mean? Right. And that’s how I oversimplify things. Is it,
so what, what is the point now? How do we get there with that said, you had
mentioned being virtual for certain things now recently more being in person
than you’ve talked about talking to vendors and events.

And so recently I think you were at enterprise connect and channel partners.
What did you get from now being in person again at, at, at these events?
Anything different than you’ve seen in them? What are you, what was hobbled was
trending that you felt either excited about or things that were continuing from
when things kind of went on pause.

From him

Arnold: in person. Yeah. Well, first thing is what I didn’t get and I did not
get COVID so I I’ll come away with that as kind of like the good news. And
that’s not just because I’m going to a live events, but traveling, I got to tell
you guys when you’re traveling across any cross border activity is, has a few
extra layers.

So traveling out and to Canada is there’s a lot of hassles, a lot more steps
involved. So but you just take that on. That’s just comes with the territory. So
enterprise connect has long been what I call the super bowl events in the
enterprise comms space, which does include contact center by the way.

That is kind of the, that’s kind of like the touchstone event, especially for
the big vendors, especially for those who want to make a lot of impression
impact on the market. So the big vendors will often time they’re big launches
and announcements acquisitions for that event because that’s really.

Industry has gathered and everyone wants to own the spotlight. Right? So the
last two enterprise connects had to go virtual. So 2019 was the last time I went
in person. Then it was this two year gap where you had to, had to do virtual. So
going back last March, well, this March was the first time in like three years.

So it was what I call like almost like going on a family reunion. So it’s almost
like the content was secondary, but for a lot of people, this was the first big
event they’d been to, not just by choice, but also cause a lot of the big
companies weren’t allowing people to travel, which is the big one that killed a
lot of these events for being live.

Because once the tier one vendors pull out the, as exhibitors and sending
hundreds of people, the event is no longer viable economically. So they have to,
you know, pull the plug. But anyway, It’s almost like that the, the, the, the
joy of being in person, again, almost the content almost was secondary. It’s
kind of like, oh, good.

That I’m here, but yeah, it’s just good to see you and all let’s catch up and
all that. So the content of the event is always good. Now, this, if you’d never
been enterprise connect, you would have thought, oh, wow, this is a big show.
And it is a big show, but normally it’s quite a bit. Yeah. And I think one of
the big takeaways, Christian is anyone who came, you know, it’s kind of like
putting your foot back in the water, you say, oh, it’s okay.

Which means it was a good experience. So next time you should fully expect it to
be back to where it’s always been. There’s a lot of pent up demand. People want
to get out. We want to see people and anyone who’s running a trade show, you
know, they need buyers and sellers. They need a market place to go.

So there’s real motivation to be there in terms of the content of the show at
the big, the big kind of story there was hybrid work. Mainly because the concept
never existed before. So for as a first time back to the event, that’s when
people want to talk about, because that’s what everyone’s struggling to do since
the last in-person enterprise connect.

So there were a lot of messages from the vendors there about how they’re making
it. The challenges, the realities, that kind of thing. So I think the event
delivered pretty well on that front. Another surprise if you want to call it,
that is Polly was one of the more visible vendors at the event.

And they were very well behaved because at the time they knew they were getting
acquired by HP and HP could have chosen to make the news public at the event.
And that would have captured all the attention on them, but for whatever reason,
and maybe they had to, they didn’t say anything for like the day after.

And then the news broke. So, you know, the timing is everything with these kinds
of things, but that was a surprise too, to say, oh, well poly sure. Seen very
busy and high profile at the. And, but little did we know? Well, they’re not
around, not should say not around because they are very much around, but they’re
going to be changing hands.

So that was, that was important to see now, switching gears and I’ll, I’ll pause
in a second year, Christian. Yeah. The chow partners event, which was a couple
of weeks after in Las Vegas. I’ll, I’ll S I’ll stop before talking about that,
but just for transparency for the audience to understand the parent company is
informa events and there they put on both of these properties.

So informa has a lot of stake here on the show business. It’s, you know, when
you’re going back to in-person, I mean, that’s where the money’s made. So this
was a very important kind of time of year for them to see. Can we still do these
big events?

Yeah, Nope, totally makes sense. And you know, we can shift if if you want to
cover something related to channel partners.

Otherwise I definitely want to get to some other stuff as well, so I’ll leave
it. Let me know if there’s something that really stood out for you for channel
partners.

Arnold: Well, I think the main one there is, and I’ve written about this first
of all, because they had actually done in person last year, they’ve already been
back to the live event thing, but even that, even waiting to the next one, this
was like the biggest one ever.

I mean, they had like a robust and event is that they’ve ever had again, showing
you not just the pent up demand to get back to the live events, but that the
channel space is thriving. So for listeners out there, especially a contact
center world, it’s like, okay, you know there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of
knowledge.

There’s a lot of learning that these channels need to do. And this is where you
go to get a lot of that. But also it’s important to understand that the takeaway
from that event is the private equity. Community has gotten religion about the
channel secretary as a hot play. So there’s a lot of M and a lot of
consolidation going on in the space right now.

And I think, you know, what that’s translating to is more of more of these
independent channel operators and VARs and agents, whatever that is going to win
out a little bit. And we’re going to have bigger maybe. Deeper pockets running a
lot of the sales channels come the future, and that’s going to maybe make the
space a little less entrepreneurial than it’s always been.

That’s my concern as a solo operator, but also that, you know, the space is
going to be, you know, it’s, it’s going to be run more like a business than it’s
always been. But, you know, I’m just saying scale when you consolidate there’s
more demands on, you know, sales revenues, reducing churn, getting the margins
up.

And so that’s going to put a lot of squeeze on these players to be really,
really competitive. And that might make it a little harder for new introductions
of technologies to come to market because they don’t want to take risks. Now
they’re now they’re being running quarter to quarter or even more than they’ve
ever before.

So that’s kind of a bit of a caution that I take away from that. You know, it’s
almost like one of those be careful what you wish for things. So, but you know,
once they S they sniff it out and say, okay, we’re just, you know, it’s everyone
has a selling price, right. So, you know, they, you know, like, like, well, look
what Musk just paid to buy Twitter.

I mean, you know, whatever you want, you know, I’ll double it. And you’re not
going to say no. And I think that you’re going to see some of that happen in
this space for, for better or worse. But again, back to the way we started
Christian tech, you’ve been in the space long enough. You see these technology
curves come and go.

This is just another example of market reaches. A certain point in maturity
change happens. Consolidation comes, shakes out. You’re a fewer smaller guys.
There’s going to be less choice out there for the buyers more, you know, that
kind of thing. So I expect we’re going to see some, some more. Happening. So

with that, the let’s talk a little bit about a future of work.

You’ve mentioned this concept of work itself becoming very fluid. Can you kind
of elaborate and give some better detail to our audience on that topic?

Arnold: Yeah. Yeah. And this applies equally well, by the way to work, what we
think of as being in the office, right. In an enterprise, in a business setting,
but it applies equally well to agents and supervisors in the contact center,
their employees to their work is being impacted in exactly the same way an
office worker would be, or a frontline worker at a hotel or a restaurant, right.

Or, you know, for healthcare worker in a hospital, everyone has a job to do, and
they need to be able to communicate. They need to have tools to share
information and, you know, that’s what you, Kaz is all about. You see, but the
idea of it being fluid, you know, it comes back to what I said earlier with
cloud is, is a kind of.

It makes everything as possible in the cloud now. And that’s also translating
into, you know a shift in the balance of power in the relationship between
workers and management. And we’re seeing this with the rise of the gig economy,
right? And now the pandemic has just amplified this with all the work from home
that we’ve kind of been forced to do.

The relationship between employer employee has really changed a lot, especially
in traditional settings where you’re used to working in an office. Well, now the
people who’ve gotten a taste of working from home, as we know, and they’ve been
able to work from home, cause that’s not a new thing anymore.

People are starting to make those choices. You hear this term great resignation,
which is a whole other topic, but you know, it’s also kind of given workers a
sense of agency now that they said. I don’t have to be in the office. I can work
from anywhere. Of course now people are leaving cities to go to small towns and,
you know, hinterlands, so they can just work from anywhere, pretty attractive
concept.

But it, th that’s where the fluidness comes in is now you know, employees are no
longer beholden to the employer, like they used to be, and this is creating some
very, you know, I call them existential issues for both sides. Like employers
invest a lot in having office spaces. And if you’re going to be downtown, that’s
expensive real estate to have, if you’re an employee, you say, well, I’m the one
doing all the commuting, you know, I’m the one working, you know, almost 24 7
here, and I don’t have any family life.

And you start to both sides of these dis you know, decisions to make about what
do I really want? So that’s the fluidness that, it’s it, it’s kind of like a
bipartisan thing. Now we’re employees and employers. Kind of have sets of needs
that they have to somehow be balanced. And that’s why we have this hybrid work
thing happening because it’s allowing kind of each to kind of, you know, have,
you know, the best of both worlds, so to speak and technologies right in the
middle of this, because you can’t do any of these things without good tools.

Like I suppose, describing with UCAS and you know, like zoom listen right place,
right time. Right? The, the pandemic was the best thing that could’ve ever
happened to that company. Now, of course, they’ve saturated the market where
they go from here is another conversation. But, you know, it’s given rise to a
tool that without it, we really couldn’t have had a good work from home
experience.

Right. So now again, all these cloud-based tools are accessible to anybody. It’s
like, oh, why do I need to come to an office? Now I can do this from home and,
you know, drop my kids off to school and take them to soccer and, you know, do
all these things in my life by, and what work-life balance is all this.

Pretty good.

So John, when it comes to the contact center, right, let’s look at that hybrid
or even work from home environment shift that everything went home. I didn’t
have a choice for those that could meet the obligations for security and try to
perform in some way. What are the tools that you’re seeing the most in the
context, spinners space, being adopted to be able to help them still provide
great experiences, but maybe not at the rate they would have had the pandemic
not happened.

Arnold: Well, I think a big one and we’re going to get to AI because that is
part of the story here. But the key here is to that, to whether you have agents
in a physical. You know, contact center environment or at home that doesn’t
matter to the customer, right? So you’ve got to make sure that, that the agent
has consistent set of tools and capabilities wherever they are.

So that means if the contact center now has to support a pool of agents working.
Disparately. Right? Cause now we’re all atomized. You know, the agents are all
in different places. You know, a lot of variability there in terms of their
equipment. Like they’re, they’re like we’re doing now. I will wear their
headsets with their microphones, with their broadband, all of that stuff.

They don’t have a desk phone. But you go on a soft phones now anyways, but you
know, the there’s great variability there that has to kind of be smoothed out
somehow. Right? And so this is why tools like UCAS are really gaining traction
because when you’re using one common platform that’s in the cloud, that means
you don’t have to, you know, roll out, you know, phone lines to people’s homes.

You can do it over the internet. Okay. Now we can have that consistent set of
two. Consistent experience all from, you know, it doesn’t matter where you are
that opens up a lot of possibilities actually, for them to say, oh, now I can
have agents anywhere. This is actually a good thing because now I can broaden my
labor pool and have more geographic diversity to serve customers.

So in terms of what they’re doing to support this, you know, UCAS is a good
starting point because now you’ve got similar set of tools that perform fair,
you know, pretty universally. If we talked earlier about it, because customer
expectations are so high now they want it now kind of thing. Well, for agents,
they can perform well in a home-based setting because they know with UCAS, they
can get these back channel conversations going on the fly, because the whole
idea is to be able to provide that resolution on the first, you know,
interaction.

So w with the idea here is that, you know, when agents don’t have all the
answers at their fingertips, you know, CRM might have it. They might not, they
may need to draw from other people in the organization, right? You cash provides
that back channel. And with AI, some intelligence to kind of quickly find the
right people, either, you know, the lithical SME subject matter experts across
the organization, bring them in to resolve the issue right away.

That’s a big value add or we, you know, you start getting the things about like
intelligent routing, right? Where you say, well, I don’t have the special
authorization or the authorization to address this, but I’m going to hand you
off to this other agent right now and do it in a seamless way. That’s harder to
do than it looks.

And you know, a big challenge of course, is that a lot of context centers are
still driven by, you know, premise-based legacy technologies, which don’t have
these capabilities. So this rush to cloud that I talked about earlier is pretty
accentuated in this space because there’s this performance gap I talked about
that they’ve got to somehow address.

So the quicker they can bring cloud capabilities in the better they can support
them. It’s also an important factor to Christian because agents are employees
too, right? So they’re, you know, we know turnover has always been high in this
space. So recruiting costs are high training costs are high. So there’s a lot of
variables there.

This is what. The cloud contact center space is so hot right now, because there
are all of these fundamental challenges that kind of all like it’s like
unintended consequences with one thing happens. All these other things happen
around it. And you say, oh boy. Yeah. Well, great resignation. People are
quitting these jobs because they’re not great jobs.

They’re not great jobs. Not because this, the job suck, but it’s because the
technology kind of gets in the way of allowing them to do a good job. So people,
agents can hit a wall very quickly. Right? And then they say, well, I don’t have
the tools to do this. Why I can’t, this is a crappy job. So I’m going to do
something else.

And then, you know, that’s where all of the, the C cap, the shift from UCAS to
seek has really resonates because now I say, oh, no, no, no, we’ll give now you
can have the right tools to do this. And now, oh. And then I can deliver a
really good experience. Then it’s different story, right? So there’s, there’s a
lot of opportunity there.

And you mentioned you touched on security earlier, Christian. Yeah. That that’s
a big one too, because when you’re working from home and home might be in a
coffee shop for all, you know, cause these agents aren’t necessarily going to be
on camera. They rarely are actually. Right. Yeah, you’ve got to know, oh, am I
using a hotspot for this, you know, public wifi you know, even within the whole.

If they don’t have a good security regime in place, that’s pretty risky. So you
have to anticipate that. So when you roll out work from home with agents, you
got to make sure that, you know, those conversations stay secure and obviously,
you know, compliance issues or, you know, things like PCI, right? Any financial
information you’re taking customer information, it’s gotta stay secure.

So that’s, that’s like a given that that’s gotta be there and we haven’t even
touched on stuff like fraud, you know, impersonating and phishing and all that
stuff, which can ruin everything for everybody in a

hurry. Yeah. And I think one of the common themes across a lot of the
conversations I’m having and it aligns well with what you’re talking about is.

You have to make it easy for people to do good work, right? The harder it is,
the more you put in their way, the more mistakes it’ll happen. The more friction
that cause with the customer. And it’s just going to unfortunately impact other
things, right? Lifetime value, whether or not they’ll want to continue to do
business with you and say good things or tell everyone and their friends that
they’ll never do business with you again with that said, though, when we look at
the dynamic of work from home, I mean, you think of an office environment where
maybe people have two screens, maybe they have good solid internet.

Maybe they have a conducive work environment where they have that comradery.
They have that shift of having in-person contact with people, sense of
community, whatever it may be. Don’t get me wrong. There’s absolute benefits to
being remote, but maybe someone doesn’t have multiple screens, high turnover.

What are you going to do that? You’re going to invest in sending a bunch of
secondary screens to everybody in the first week, and then. You know, they stay
in the job or they keep the screen or you don’t get it back where it’s broken.
So there’s just a logistics piece around it. And a human piece that if the
agents aren’t happy, it’s going to be really hard to have happy customers.

And, and that, that, that line of where technology we’re training, we’re
onboarding where continuous training or reinforcement of a community and a
culture. You have to, over-communicate now both in leveraging all these
technologies we’re talking about to do that communication. Otherwise it becomes
very challenging.

Any thoughts on

Arnold: that? Well, for sure. And you know, what I was hoping we could get to is
yeah. This idea that okay. Work from home has its appeal for sure. But on the
other hand, not everybody is cut out to. And isolation and sooner or later takes
a toll on everybody. And so there, that means there is extra effort needed from
the organization to do things, to make agents feel included part of a team.

There’s gotta be ways to do social things that creates some culture and bonding.
And then, yeah, you talk about, boy, what about the supervisors? You know, how
do they help when they can’t just pop their head in over cubicle and look or
other agents to provide a little moral support? Yeah. You can do it virtually,
but it’s just not the same.

So you have to, as you say, you have to over-communicate and say, how do we, you
know, make sure, cause if these, if new hires do not take quickly, they probably
aren’t going to stay. So you’ve got to make that kind of good first impression
and show that, you know, you understand the challenges and you also know, you
know, you just stick with us.

We will, we’ll give you the tools and we will. And when they see that, yeah,
there’s a good chance that they’re going to gonna stay, but there’s you’re
right. I mean, you, you, you, it’s not just a technology thing right. Where you
say, okay, ah, you need a new computer show. We’ll give you all the right things
there, but no, it’s just like how do you ensure that there’s more to it, right?

It’s not just a technology thing. You’ve gotta, it’s gotta be a culture there
that values employees just as, as people, because otherwise, you know, you don’t
need agents at all. Just do everything on self-service and that’s, that’s a
whole other direction of going where, you know, AI and improving on a IVR
experience, that kind of thing.

Yeah. Well, I think when we get to some topic around that, we can definitely
dive into that balance between where does technology enable the agent to do more
higher level things versus when do you not need the agent, but let’s kind of
before we jump to that, let’s just tackle the term digital transformation for
just a quick minute, right?

There’s a lot of interpretation of what does that mean, especially in the
contact center space, but from your perspective, what is digital transformation
and how is that impacting if anything, the contact center space.

Arnold: Sure. So it’s one of these, what I call meta trends. You know, the cloud
is like this, you know, it’s, this is why, you know, like the difference
between, I hate to say it, but a pandemic and an endemic, right.

A pandemic is everybody’s affected by this. And digital transformation is the
same thing and it’s not, and it’s not a thing, right. It’s a process. And it’s
something that probably never ends because we, we, you know, for, for anyways,
pre-digital people, pre-internet people and that’s a lot of us out there when
the world was only analog, you know, that we didn’t think too much about these
things, but.

Everything is transitioning from analog to digital. Some things are already
there, but some things are not when it’s, when everything is all digital people
like me won’t have jobs anymore because of me, no need for it. We’ll all be in
Nirvana if you want to call it that. But you know, digital means the, once
everything becomes, goes from analog to digital, that’s where you want things to
be because it’s all binary, right?

Ones and zeros. When everything is digitized, it speaks a common language. Now
you can do more with everything that you, you got and you can capture it in a
way you can use it. So for example, in the contact center call recording, right?
I mean, with legacy analog technology, you could, you could record. And in many
sectors you have to record every call, but in reality, for call quality purposes
and compliance, supervisors can only.

2%, 3% of calls they’ll actually listen to, for, to check those boxes. That’s an
impossible task to really do a good job. Once everything is digitized, AI tools
can come in and monitor every single call. So your coverage goes from like 3% to
a hundred percent. That’s a huge plus for the contact center, right?

So the digital transformation has a lot of benefits because once everything’s in
a digital format, you can do a lot more with it and get a lot more out of it.
Right. So in other words, like the content of our conversation here is.
Valuable, right? Because we’re what we’re just talking. But if you layer AI into
this and you, cause it’s digital words recording this on the internet now, so
it’s all digital AI can layer intelligence on top of that, because now it can
search for words, it can connect ideas together that, you know, patterns right.

That you, we couldn’t do as humans. And it will do it more accurately than we
could do with our fingers and typing. And then, so you can glean more knowledge
and more insights out of that data. And that’s important because decision-making
in all organizations, including contact center are increasingly becoming
data-driven.

People make more decisions now with numbers and they do with their instincts and
their intuition. For better or worse as a creative person. I’m not a fan of
that, but that’s just how it’s going. So it’s like your decisions are only as
good as the data you have. Well, where’s your data? Well, it’s all going to come
from digital sources.

Analog information has almost zero value in that, in that sphere because you
can’t bring it into the fishbowl, right? It’s it sits outside. And until
somebody transcribes it and puts it in, you know, it’s not going to be there. So
as we process things into digital, yes, we get more insights out of it, but also
makes things go a lot faster.

And so when you talk digital transformation in a contact center, that means
what’s driving customer service now is digital channels. So people are
communicating a lot more on social media, for example, or SMS. All of these are
digital channels. We didn’t have. 10 years ago, as a matter of course. So when
all your communication is coming through those channels, now it’s happening
faster and they need results quickly.

All this stuff, contact centers, aren’t equipped to handle that. So one of the
biggest challenges in contact centers, how do we support digital channels?
Because if that’s where the customer is at, and we can’t be there with them,
we’re in trouble. So digital transformation is happening in contact center
faster than it’s able to adapt to until it gets on the cloud kind of migration.

Yeah. And so let’s kind of shift a little bit. We talked a little bit about the
pandemic, but one of the things that we saw with the pandemic is it broke the
norm of adoption of solutions that you either weren’t ready for. You hadn’t
thought about, or you needed to do the right due diligence on. And what we’re
seeing with a lot of technologies is this shift to operation folks, being able
to not only look and procure the solutions, but not having to rely as heavily on
it or telecon resources to implement them.

And, and to continue to run the business without having to go back and asking
them. And where do you see that shift? Do you see it going forward in a way
where it resources will have. Job in the call tech center or they’ll work in
different areas, or maybe even work for the vendors because I keep seeing this
shift.

What are you seeing on your side and that dynamic of it’s shifting to the
operation side versus the it heavy

Arnold: side. Yeah, there is that. And you know, so we were familiar with that
term of a shadow it, right where people just have run out of patience. You know,
it is neither willing or able to give people the tools they want and comes back
to cloud again, when I can get Dropbox right when I can get mobile CA sorry, you
know video calling off the cloud, why do I have to go through it to have it
provisioned and blah, blah, blah.

And working in my book. So they worked to that’s the workaround and contact
center is really no different. And so the thing with the cloud is that it makes
everything so kind of user centric, user driven. And, you know, it’s, it’s not
as hard anymore. W when, when everything is integrated seamlessly, of course,
that’s the challenge with this stuff.

Con contact center operations are complex by nature, and that’s largely because
the vendors have always wanted it that way to keep the business. But the reality
is today is so many of these other pieces can come from cloud and be self
provisioned. Yeah. There’s less need for it to do the things they’ve normally
done.

But I think what, what the, the, the challenge for it now is going to be, you
know, they’re going to be more. The traditional roles that they’ve had are
eroding or going away altogether. So they’ve got to be better at, at, you know,
identifying where managed forms of it, like a security or data center, you know,
these kinds of pieces that they might have managed in the past, but because it
also to be fair, The complexity of doing a lot of this cloud is beyond what a
lot of it resource resources can support.

And there is, I, you know, I hate to say it, but there is a generational issue
there too, where some of this cloud stuff may not be that native or comfortable
for, you know, a more traditional mindset that’s running it and they may be
fighting it just because it’s out of their comfort zone and that’s not serving
the business well.

And again, if there’s pushback like that, and you’ve got a real hot shot, 20
something operational guy in a contact center say, no, no, the, we, we can get
these platforms right now. You’re getting in the way they’re going to, they’re
just going to go because they can. And so that’s, that’s really interesting.

I was a great opportunity for channels, of course, to kind of help bridge that
gap. But yeah, this is a real fundamental challenge is facing it the way it’s
normally done, because they’ve always kind of held all the leavers. You know,
they’ve always just said, well, we’ll introduce this when it comes. And I, you
know, I could come back quickly for a moment about USI.

For example, when you roll out a phone system, like it has always done over the
decades, they just deploy it and it’s done, their job is finished. Yeah. But for
you, calves or seek has the success of those deployments is based on user
adoption. When you roll out a PBX, there was no choice. That’s your phone.

You use it, no training required, but you can, these new platforms, if you don’t
bring them to the users and make it easy, like you said, easy for them to adopt
those deployments are gonna fail. And so that’s it didn’t sign up for this,
right? Their job is going to be the teachers and the supporters and the help
desk for all this stuff.

They really probably don’t want to do. But they’re going to have to, or partner
with vendors who are really good at supporting

these things for, we could have a whole nother episode. Adoption optimization,
continuous improvement. That happens when you have products that are always
evolving and stuff like that.

But one of the things that you had mentioned earlier talking about evolution
that, that peaked my interest was when you said that there’s this consolidations
a lot of MNAs and all this maybe potentially blocking of innovation. I also see
that on the tech side, where a lot of companies are acquiring companies or
they’re merging their sheet casts and new casts into one system, and they’re
buying a lot of smaller companies where in your opinion, does a smaller company
that wants to be able to make a positive impact through innovation find its way
when the sea is now being consumed by a lot of the way.

Arnold: Yeah, it’s definitely a challenge. And I th I think a good starting
point is that even though cloud makes it easy to scale, I think you have to kind
of pick your niche where you can, you know, where you can survive and grow
enough, so you don’t get eaten up too soon. And so, in other words, don’t aim
for like the fortune 100 companies, we’re going to solve all their problems
because you’ll never get that too far there.

So I’d say, you know, focus on a customer set that is more, you know, in your,
in your zone that you can, you know sell to and defend. So that’s why as a
business strategy, but also too, I mean, a lot of these smaller companies, they
do. Optimize themselves to, to align with a particular vendor, right? So I want
to be in the Avaya ecosystem or the Cisco or Microsoft or whatever.

And so if that’s the plan then you really have to know what you’re up against
with competitors who are trying to do the same thing, and there’s nothing wrong
with that strategy. You know, a lot of you know, for example, you know I use a
noise suppression application called crisp and crisp is, is the partner that
Microsoft uses for their collaboration.

Babel labs is another one and Cisco acquired them a couple of years ago. And
again, a niche technology that really has a lot of value in nothing wrong.
That’s where we want the innovation to keep coming. Right. But then you got to
say, okay, do I want. Place all my bets on one ecosystem and say, that’s what
I’m going to be.

Okay. Nothing wrong with that strategy. Right. And the other thing too, I
suppose, is to, you know, maybe try to pick a difficult problem set that no one
else is going after. Like I keep mentioning AI, I mean, that opens up so many
new spaces that are just, you know, no one owns them yet. A lot of the value
isn’t even understood.

Right. So if you can be ahead of the curve and that’s where a lot of these AI
companies are, that’s why they’re getting so much funding right now is because
they are so far ahead of the curve. They’ve anticipated with some of these
opportunities are going to be, you know, but anything that you can fix that’s
broken, right?

How do you build a better IVR? Right. You know, that’s going to get attention
because you’re hitting on pain points that everyone is trying to say.

And I think as we get to the end of our time today, when you finish off on AI, I
think that’s the new frontier, because I think we’re not good at it yet. I think
it’s still the shiny object where some people have figured out how to make it
useful.

Other people have put it in play and it’s actually caused more friction with the
customer experience because they may be thought it could just replace a rip and
replace of something. And as we get closer to figuring out where does AI live in
a self-service world versus where does it live in empowering the agent and the
business and to insights and helping in real time versus just after their
interaction.

It’s an exciting thing to see. So any closing or final thoughts around AI that
you think would be good for audience to know?

Arnold: Well, I’m with you, Christian. Yeah. It’s a shiny ball and the danger
there is, yes. There’s a lot of hype. A lot of capability too, though, but you
have for a buyer of there, the thing to be aware of is.

Not everything is AI, even though the vendors say it’s AI for starters, but you
don’t have enough background to really know that, but it gives vendors licensed
to charge a premium. They can just call it AI. And it’s 20% more expensive
because it’s AI, but AI itself is not a thing, right? AI is just a term for a,
an umbrella of technologies that basically try to emulate human capabilities
through technology.

And the thing that the hut term in AI right now for the contact center space in
particular is this is the acronym of the day folks. So it’s CAI conversational
AI. So. The starting point. We’ve seen with a lot of this automation as the
chatbots as again, so improving self service. Well, most of those interactions
have been really poor because AI cause the chatbots are well trained.

The AI was early stage. So what’s different today is that the, the voice
recognition capabilities. This is an area where I do a lot of work has gotten so
good now that not only can these chatbots recognize speech, but they’ve done
enough. They’ve built enough through this, through the use of machine learning
and natural language processing and understanding that they can be
conversational.

So in other words, instead of being command based, yes, no, it’s like dealing
with Siri, right. You know, series start my car or Alexa, you know, turn on the
oven. That’s great. Those are command based, not interactive where we’re moving
to a world of what I call shifting from person to person, to person, to machine.

Or machine to person communication. Well, when you can have conversations, when
that chat bot asks you questions and engages with you, it’s asking you questions
because it knows you’ll give answers that provide more insights than a closed
ended question. And because it has the tools to analyze that and make sense of
it and actually make you feel comfortable.

Cause it, they even try to inject humor and human utterances like oh, I see.
Trying to make it feel like you’re talking to a person, the more comfortable you
feel talking to a bot like that, the more you’re going to share, and that’s the
whole name of the game with, with this. So when it goes to that level and gets
better and.

It’s going to play a bigger role in handling more complex customer inquiries.
That’s a goal of mine for contact centers, because you want to take all that
stuff away from the agents, let them do the really difficult jobs where they
have the most reward when they solve those hard problems. Right?

So this is a big one.

Yeah. And AI also has a home there as well as you had mentioned, but the
extension to that is then how does AI help those more complex interactions with
a human being be that much more effective? And I think we could have a whole
nother conversation with that, but look where we run out of time today.

And I know that there’s so much more, that everyone that has wanted to learn
more about you would want to know more about. So before we get into how they
contact you, you had mentioned you played the piano. What’s your favorite.

Arnold: Favorite piece? Well, I’m into jazz and blues. So I, I improvise a lot.
So I like to play anything that’s is blues base, but we, I do play in a band
with other consultants.

So a good example of a song I really have fun playing would be, I don’t know
these are songs most people would know like after midnight is a great song, fun
song to play. Heard it through the grapevine is a fun song to play. There’s lots
of those kinds of standards that we, you know, we’d like to play in our band
that are just a lot of fun feel all right, Dave Mason song, those are all fun
songs to play.

And I like anything bluesy is my that’s my bag. So

awesome. Well, John, it was great having you. I think our audience got a lot of
great content, but there’s going to be people that want to contact you, how best
they get ahold of you.

Arnold: Sure. Well, old school, you can pick up the phone, but I think where we
really want people going is sure.

A website is always the starting point. So that would be tripled up. Jay Arnold
associates.com. And if you get to my website, check out the video where I
explain what an analyst does and then watch the video. That’s next to that one.
And if that doesn’t make you laugh, then nothing will. So I try to bring humor
into a lot of the stuff and you can see there, my website, yes, the podcast you
mentioned earlier, I have a monthly podcast and a monthly newsletter and both
are easily found in subscribed to there on my website.

Awesome. All right. That wraps another show. Thanks so much for tuning in. We’ll
talk to you next time, John. Thanks so much for joining.

Arnold: Okay, Christian. Thanks. Great. Have great being here and thanks
everyone for listening. Awesome.


KEY TAKEAWAYS

#1 Beyond Implementation: The Importance of Ongoing Data Management Practices

Micah Peterson discusses the challenges businesses face in maintaining
up-to-date knowledge management systems, especially in customer support where
there are constant changes in processes, products, regulations, and more.
Emphasizing the importance of having clear and logical visual paths, he argues
that while setting up an effective system might address 50% of the problem, the
real challenge is in its maintenance. To address the constant changes and avoid
outdated or duplicated information, Micah mentions the introduction of a
collaboration version control for rocedure Flow. Tune in to learn more!

#2 Balancing AI and Human Interaction: The Role of Timing and Real-Time Guidance

Micah emphasizes the complexity and volatility of customer service processes,
which makes them difficult to fully automate with AI. While Sam Altman of OpenAI
believes that customer service call centers might be the first industry
significantly impacted by AI, Micah disagrees, pointing out the intricacies and
often emotionally charged nature of these interactions. He suggests breaking
down the approach to customer service into three categories: tasks that can be
handled through self-service (like chatbots), tasks where AI can assist human
agents in real-time, and post-call tasks where AI can provide supplementary
tools and utilities for agents. This framework underscores the need for a blend
of AI and human interaction in customer service rather than a full replacement.

#3 Micah’s Vision for The Future of Knowledge Management

Micah discusses the future vision of Procedure Flow in the context of knowledge
management. He highlights the gap in software tools that bridge high-level
decision-making with operational feedback. Procedure Flow's goal is to transform
this by visualizing knowledge in a user-friendly manner, allowing for real-time
collaboration and feedback from users. This ensures that corporate decisions,
culture, and processes are continuously updated and optimized. Their ambition is
for Procedure Flow to be the collaborative knowledge graph of organizations,
contrasting their approach with traditional diagramming software and text-based
knowledge systems which they see as inadequate for modern needs.

#4 AI at the Frontline: How Future Work Dynamics Could Evolve

Christian and Micah delve into the impact of AI on frontline employees,
particularly in the context of the contact center industry. While they believe
that the landscape might largely remain the same in the coming decades, they
emphasize the potential of AI to enhance simple self-service tasks and assist
humans in complex roles. Using the example of Chat GPT, they illustrate how AI
tools can bolster human efficiency. Micah suggests that AI, instead of entirely
replacing humans, will function as a tool to supercharge human efforts, likening
the advancement to the leap from using a hammer to a nail gun. They also touch
upon the importance of the visual element in the learning process, stressing
that mere textual information isn't engaging or effective. The human touch
remains vital, especially in determining the outcome and quality of calls in a
contact center scenario.

#5 The ROI of Adopting Technology: Tracking Uplifts and Post-Implementation KPIs

Micah discusses the key performance indicators (KPIs) associated with contact
centers and how optimizing knowledge management processes can have a dramatic
impact on them. He identifies four primary areas of focus: classroom time, the
nesting period, quality, and average handle time. While traditionally
improvements in one area might lead to setbacks in another (akin to playing
"whack-a-mole"), Micah suggests that his company, Procedure Flow, can
holistically enhance all these aspects. By implementing this, organizations can
cut onboarding time by 50 to 90%, thus reducing the time taken to train agents
and improve their efficiency and quality on calls, which ultimately translates
to cost savings.

#6 Augmenting Agent Success: The Impact of AI Outside Call Interactions

Micah talks about the evolving nature of training and onboarding in the contact
center industry. Traditional lecture-based training, where trainees are expected
to memorize content, is seen as ineffective. Micah thinks the value of
scenario-based training is particularly beneficial for businesses with limited
training time and higher turnover. The author also mentions the rise of
simulator companies and the importance of procedure flows in conjunction with
simulations. While this training approach is relatively new, it appears to be
the future for effective onboarding in the industry.


HIGHLIGHTS GALLERY

Play
Christian and Micah delve into the impact of AI on frontline employees,
particularly in the context of the contact center industry.


Play
Micah talks about the evolving nature of training and onboarding in the contact
center industry.


Play
Micah discusses the key performance indicators (KPIs) associated with contact
centers and how optimizing knowledge management processes can have a dramatic
impact on them.


Play
Micah Peterson discusses the challenges businesses face in maintaining
up-to-date knowledge management systems, especially in customer support where
there are constant changes in processes, products, regulations, and more.


Play
Micah emphasizes the complexity and volatility of customer service processes,
which makes them difficult to fully automate with AI.


Play
Micah discusses the future vision of Procedure Flow in the context of knowledge
management.


Play
Christian and Micah delve into the impact of AI on frontline employees,
particularly in the context of the contact center industry.


Play
Micah talks about the evolving nature of training and onboarding in the contact
center industry.


Play
Micah discusses the key performance indicators (KPIs) associated with contact
centers and how optimizing knowledge management processes can have a dramatic
impact on them.


Play
Micah Peterson discusses the challenges businesses face in maintaining
up-to-date knowledge management systems, especially in customer support where
there are constant changes in processes, products, regulations, and more.


Play
Micah emphasizes the complexity and volatility of customer service processes,
which makes them difficult to fully automate with AI.


Play
Micah discusses the future vision of Procedure Flow in the context of knowledge
management.



Previous
Next


MEMORABLE QUOTES

“Improvements in quality, giving the right answer the first time, first call
resolution and savings in average channel time... that's directly measurable.”
Click To Tweet
“Procedure Flow cuts across all four of them. And in pretty dramatic ways. Click
To Tweet
“Procedure Flow cuts across all four of them. And in pretty dramatic ways. Click
To Tweet


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