Tim McDougal & Leah Yousif (Deloitte Digital) | The Transformation of Customer Contact Centers

As an executive or somebody who's a leader and a recurring theme has started to pop up on the CMO podcast, Sustainability. One of our recent guests even incorporated sustainability into his job title. He might not be alone. According to Deloitte's 2023 Global Marketing Trends report, Sustainability continues to be a focus for brands. While some organizations may want to pull back on sustainability initiatives in times of economic uncertainty, consumers continue to stress that a brand's commitment to sustainability is critical to their preferences. However, only 25% of brands that Deloitte surveyed say their focus for 2023 is on urging consumers to take action. Instead, organizations are recognizing that focusing on their own sustainability efforts can have an even more positive impact on the planet and on their business. For more inspiration on how to make this year be your organization's most impactful year yet. Check out Deloitte's 2023 Global Marketing Trends report at Deloitte.com slash global marketing trends. Are you struggling to keep up with the increasing demand to create content? And feel like your content creation process is all over the place? Well, you're not alone. One of the hot topics on this show is content strategy. How to reach your audience? What content is relevant? And whether to do this inside your company or to hire outsiders to help you? Well, Deloitte Digital can help with all of this. They understand the challenges marketers face when it comes to scaling content. And they offer an efficient and sustainable way to create, deliver and analyze content at scale, all without hiring additional resources. With Deloitte Digital's integrated solutions, you can streamline your workflows and create relevant and targeted communications to help improve your business outcomes. Visit Deloitte Digital.com to learn how their content supply chain solutions can help you scale your content creation and could improve your customer experience. In the context and our customer experience or marketing space, whatever it might be, don't lose sight of the importance of the customer service and context center space. Now's the time to invest. Now's the time to differentiate. Now's the time to really turn that from a cost center into a value center. And start now. Start figuring out what you need to do and fix it because you can have long-term implications for your overall brand and the experience that you're able to provide in the market. Hi, I'm Jim Stangle and I help major brands find their purpose and activate it and the profits follow. For seven years, I was the global marketing officer for Procter & Gamble, where I oversaw the marketing of hundreds of brands. You may not know it, but the CMOs, the chief marketing officers of all of your favorite brands, are trying to connect you with your favorite products and services through purpose. And on this show, I delve into how they do it. My guests on this office hours special episode of the CMO podcast are Timothy McDougal and Leah Yusuf. Timothy or Tim is a managing director, strategy and operations at Deloitte Consulting and Leah is a senior manager at Deloitte. They are both experts in the area of on-the-channel customer engagement and contact center operations. Tim and Leah are part of a team at Deloitte that recently released a large global study on the transformation of customer contact centers. A link to this study is in the show notes. Nearly every business has some process for customer contacts and few areas in business are facing more disruption. With the move to remote work, the rise of AI, and the rising and different expectations customers have for interactions with companies. And managing great customer experiences is fundamental to building great brands. This is my conversation with Leah and Tim on what they have learned in the 2023 study on customer contacts and what the implications are for anyone working to make their customers happier and more loyal. Here we go with this dynamic duo from Deloitte. Welcome to the CMO podcast, Leah and Tim. You are the first customer contact center experts we've had on the show. So I guess the question is what took us so long. So my first question to you is an obvious one, but it's the right place to start. Why is this topic we are discussing today, customer experience, customer contact centers, critical to building great brands? Thanks, Jim, and delighted to be here. So the way I would frame this is, customer experiences mostly delivered through contact centers have been, you know, in general, poor. And I think many of our many many people would say, hey, you know, I hate contacting the contact center because my expectations are that it's going to be a time consuming, difficult exercises going to require a lot of effort on my side. And we see we're going to, you know, people and customers really seeking out self-service capabilities to really handle informational and transactional types of transit types of interactions. So I want to make a payment. I really want to do that very quickly. I don't want to talk to somebody. I just want to get it done. I want to find as another example, I want to find the hours of operation for a specific store or location. May I'm just going to go to the web and I'll find that information. What we find is though that, you know, organizations have a unique opportunity to really lean into those relationship building opportunities and deliver in case in those cases exceptional customer experiences. And those customer those exceptional customer experiences can really drive, you know, top line revenue improvements, reduce cost improvements and customer experience. They really will drive repeat customers. And so when I think about that, I think about the evolution of the contact center as a as a mechanism to drive higher levels of customer experience. It's an exciting place to be. And organizations have an opportunity to really invest in the capabilities that will help them deliver on that promise. Lee, I want to go to you in a minute about why this is critical to building grid brands. But just for some context of the Fortune 500, do 500 have some sort of contact center? I mean, does every company have some sort of contact center? So Jim, yeah, in fact, they do. Now they might not call it a contact center. I've talked to many clients who say, yeah, you know, have people who answer the phones, but that's not a contact center. I think the way that I would frame it is a contact center is anywhere where a customer needs to reach out to an organization and, you know, get a complete some sort of, you know, let's call it transaction or relationship event. And so those could be in the healthcare business. Hey, I want to call on schedule appointment at my provider, right? I need to get a doctor's appointment. Or, hey, I want to understand at a retail establishment what the hours of operation are. Or I want to make a payment on my loan or whatever that is. What you're reaching into is a contact center. And where we see organizations focusing on is how do they drive levels of efficiency in those contact centers? So you take these disparate, what I'll call, call handling functions. And you pull them together. And you apply some science, some rigor, but also it allows you to be much more efficient without creating the stereotypical contact center sweatshop for lack of a better term, where you've got tremendous focus on metrics. You can create something that's really unique in many of our clients have done that. Leah, why is this area we're talking about today? And this research will get to in a few minutes. Why is it critical to brand building? So I would say if I thought a little bit about what brand is and how people perceive brands a couple years ago or a while back, people really focus on the product itself. So the product that a company was offering was all about their brand. If you think about like some of the top brands like Coca-Cola, it's all about their product itself. Over time, and more recently, with more competitors coming into each of these spaces, the product is good across a lot of different brands, right? It's good against across a lot of different companies. And so contact centers have started to elevate themselves to help the companies think through, how do we provide a different year to experience to help separate our brand from the five other brands that start to seem really similar to what we're doing if you just look at it from a product perspective. So just recently, I was at the airport, so it's top of mind. If you think about it, a lot of the airlines have the same product, quote unquote, you can get on. You can go to a lot of their same destinations. You can sit in a really small uncomfortable chair and get a very small snack and be starving after. But the way that those airlines, for example, one way that they can differentiate themselves is through the contact center space, through the service space. If there's something that is a moment that matters to you as a customer, let's say you have a death in the family and you really need to change your flight to get there on time for some family events. The airline that steps up through their contact center and their customer service center and is able to kind of help you through that moment that matter. That's how they start to differentiate themselves and really start to gain those customers and have the become repeat customers rather than kind of having the flexibility to go across brands just because of the product itself. Now we are recording the show on Monday. We talked about this before we started our recording. And this is the Monday after the Big Barbie weekend. So did either one of you see the Big Barbie movie this weekend? I did not see it, but I heard that there is a shortage of pink paint. I think it's interesting. Hard to miss it. James, did you see it? Yeah, sadly no. No, my wife, my wife saw it. She said it was everything she'd hoped it would be. Yeah, I would agree with that. I saw it with my wife and her sister on Saturday night and it was outstanding. Well, I do have a customer contact center that's kind of this question is leading to I can only imagine what Mattel has been dealing with over the last couple of weeks and over the next few weeks or months in terms of the contact center, the channels for Mattel, for Barbie. Everyone is talking about her. She's everywhere. It's probably the biggest marketing partnership. I don't know the last decade. So this is a theoretical question. If Mattel had called you both about two months ago and said they have this gigantic event coming up and they want to have a fabulous customer experience through all the contacts that they have, what would some of the principles be that you would tell them to think about for an event like this? So one thing that pops into my head is we have to be realistic, right? If there's a big event that's going on for Mattel or for any company for that matter, we need to realize that we have a certain set number of kind of human live resources that we can leverage to support our customers. And then we have some automation that we can use as well, but everybody cannot come through those live channels, right? So starting to think through what can we support in a way that is the level of expectation that we would like to deliver for the experience we want to deliver to our customers. And then coming up with a tactical plan to say, okay, based off of this customer's value to us, based off of this customer's loyalty, whatever it might be, this is how we're going to start to prioritize who goes where? Who do we want to leverage on our live channels? Who do we want to push to some of our automated channels? So really having a proactive plan about how we would like to address our particular customers coming in, especially during some of those peak seasons. Building on what Leah said, which I would agree with, is I think looking at what is the experience that we want to deliver? If it's, hey, we believe that most customers are going to call for questions about the film or the event, how do we envision those types of interactions being handled, and how would we want those to be done? I think that builds on what Leah has said, because candidly, you're not going to be able to, in a short period of time, it's not realistic to be able to hire hundreds of people to handle everything with humans. And candidly, I don't think you have to. What I would, though, encourage is, let's plan, let's develop the plan of what we'd like to happen. And what is that, how does that build upon the brand or detract from the brand? So if we said, hey, look, if there are some key things, we want to make sure that we hand off, which is, if somebody's calling about the movie itself, how do we deliver the right messages that we'd like to deliver, but also make sure that the customer can, that call to action, which is likely that they want to find tickets or they want to go to the theater. How do we build that closed end loop that drives the value that we're trying to create here? Oftentimes, we find clients are reactive to that. And they try, they, they're trying to engineer after the fact. And that results in sort of some clunkiness. And you end up with having to make some short-term decisions because you could have hired a bunch of people had you planned for it. You could have thought about more technology if you had planned ahead, but you're reacting. And we find many of our clients in the context and our space react to these unforeseen events. And they're, and they're limited in their ability to be creative because really it boils down to a very simple set of equation. How many calls do you get in? How many contacts are there? How long do they take? And if you don't have the technology to handle them, how many people you need? It's a pretty simple equation. Yeah. I suspect a lot of their flood was on social channels, which is a whole different topic. But my guess is that they were, they were, that's where the real action was. My guess is this last week, at least from what I've seen. Well, Jim, I think that that's an important channel that's often overlooked. It's still a really important channel as you think about customer service and interacting, right? There are clearly people in the market, are in the marketplace that use social as an attempt to get attention to a service problem. And we see many organizations really don't use, don't, don't think of that channel as an important service delivery vehicle, but it is. Yeah. Yeah. Now, the airlines, to me, use that in a reasonably good way. Yeah. They've, they've responsive to me when I've had service issues on abuse social. It's, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty effective. They're, they're geared up to do that. As creative and marketers, we understand the struggle to keep up with the ever-increasing content demands. And the recent surge of interest among CMOs and chat GPT and other language learning models has added fuel to this fire. Today, businesses should embrace streamlined workflows and automated processes to step into the future of the content supply chain. Good news, Deloitte Digital can help. Their content supply chain solutions can help your business improve collaboration across teams, increase efficiency and reduce costs, all while maintaining high quality content. With Deloitte Digital Solutions, you can create more targeted and relevant content without having to leverage your internal resources. Visit Deloitte Digital.com to learn more. As a marketer, our job is to be creative. But what does that mean? I love George Lois's definition of creativity. George is, of course, a famous art director. And he said, creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality overcomes everything. I love it. The way I think about creativity, I love George's definition, but I think of it as fresh and unexpected ways to solve a problem or to discover new opportunities and new approaches. In the world of business, however, creativity can be a scary word, but it doesn't have to be. In the 2023 Global Marketing Trends Report, Deloitte surveyed more than 1,000 top executives from today's top brands to understand how they plan to meet their customers needs this year. Turns out, some of these high growth brands are reimagining creativity in their organizations. At a time when we're seeing a shift from creative skills to analytical skills in marketing, these brands are often doing the opposite. And some CMOs are discovering creativity can be their superpower. Are you looking to make a meaningful impact in your organization in the year ahead? Check out Deloitte's 2023 Global Marketing Trends Report today at Deloitte.com slash global marketing trends. All right, let's go from Barbie to this new research that we're here to talk about. Now, you both collaborated with other Deloitte leaders on this large study on customer context center trends, practices and implications for business leaders. And you've been fielding this research from what I understand every two years since 2013. Well, I have to guess that this year is a particularly interesting one, right? We are coming out of COVID by and large. We have AI surging in attention and application. We have employee engagement and retention, still large issues for every company I talk to. So could we start by commenting on, is this study different from previous years? And is this year especially significant in terms of change? I mean, I think to answer the the first part of your question, I think the survey is similar in terms of its construction as we've done in the past. It gives us a really great opportunity to look backwards and say how were these trends meaningful? But the second part of your question, what's different? I think it's really fascinating what's different this year or this time. I think you highlighted some of the key trends. But coming out of the pandemic, we were really eager to understand how are our clients dealing with employees and how those employees were reacting, especially with the, you know, the prevailing sort of current around return to work. And how was that affecting agents in the agent population and how are our clients dealing with those issues? I thought that was an interesting find. I think the prevalence of AI, right? And AI is continuing has been on the mind of our clients for a while. But as we see clients move from, hey, it's an idea to actual implementation of some of those capabilities, we were eager to understand what are some of the tangible outcomes that our clients are seeing in terms of improved customer experience, you know, reduced, reduced costs, improved efficiency. I think the most exciting thing that I learned as part of the survey is this is real, right? And when our clients couple AI capabilities with thoughtful and deliberate channel orchestration and channel orchestration, our definition is really about being very deliberate and how you push or gently nudge customers to a specific channel based on their, the interaction type. And so that's been interesting to see when you couple AI with that channel orchestration, do you get outcomes? And the answer is yes, you really do. And you get tangible outcomes, improvements in customer experience. And customers are more, you know, report higher levels of net promoter score and those measures, but also you see less cost. And we see that working in very, what I'll call informational and transactional types of interactions. So it sort of alluded at before, but it's, you know, it's make a payment and being able to do that extensively and all sort of different permutations. It's informational hours of operation. It's, hey, what's the policy on this? Hey, I lost my bag, right? What do we do there? So we see a lot of the AI use cases that are really driving value in those, those particular cases. And I guess the last point I would make is, you know, we see sort of this continued evolution of those simple interactions like transactional informational disappearing from the agent channel and moving into more self-service. And so it's a shift of the effort from, you know, companies specific effort where you're delivering that through people to more shift to self-service. And we see customers willing to do that and getting better satisfaction in doing it. So it's sort of, it's a really fascinating set of outcomes. Leo, anything to add to that in terms of what's different this year? Yeah, I think something that Tim said really resonated with me of this is real, right? Like when we were going through the pandemic, I think a lot of folks were thinking, we'll go back to what was normal. This is just short term. Oh, like next month, it'll be cleared up and sure enough, like months became years and the pandemic continued to go on. And things really did start to become real things solidified, right? So some of the things that changed during the pandemic, we're seeing our clients report as now the new reality. If you think about agents and where they like to work or really across any industry, where folks like to work, everyone's working from home. Everyone has the expectation that they can balance their life better and be home at night to have dinner with their kids or whatever it might be. If you think about it from a customer's perspective and specific to contact centers, there's been a shift in what customers expect from us, right? So the different times of days that they now want to talk to companies has changed, being home, they have a lot of flexibility in between meetings, they can call and get their question answered rather than having to wait until they're out awful work hours, things like that. Even the reasons why customers want to talk to companies and things that they're asking about have changed, right? So there's been a huge shift in things that really did solidify as part of the pandemic that I think we started to see as part of the survey that I find really interesting myself. Let's talk a bit more specifically about the findings and then I think we can get to the implications in some sense we're already going there. But I'd like for each one of you to talk about, in addition to what we've just said, what are the most important findings this year from the study? I mean, some of them are probably trends that are already happening pre-pandemic, but if you had to sit in front of a group of customer experience leaders, what would be sort of the top three things that you think pop out of this year's study? I'll start with the first one that we have. So talent has really shifted. I know I started talking a little bit about this, but essentially when the pandemic hit, everyone was forced to go home. The work from home programs were either solidified in the companies that already had them, or we're kind of stitched together with band-aids really quickly for those companies that didn't. And because everybody went home at the same exact time, and there was no longer any kind of restrictions as to where you could work, right? I didn't need to be within a 20-mile radius of my house. I don't need to be somewhere that's on the local train line, whatever it might be. A lot of folks started to look elsewhere, right? We saw a big turnover in the contact center space, and I'm sure in other industries as well, because the barriers that once existed, having that in-person work, now we're being pulled down, right? And so a lot of contact center agents started to look at other contact center spaces, or look at other industries that they could potentially work in, because as long as they had internet, as long as they had a laptop, as long as they didn't have like loud dogs barking in the background, like they could work in whatever area they wanted to. And so why is that important in the contact center space? Well, we saw a huge turnover in the contact center space, and so our contact center executives are reporting that they're spending increasing amounts of time and dollars in investment in the talent experience. How do we differentiate ourselves in this space so that we don't have this turnover, so that we can retain our top talent? So things like compensation, finding ways to help agents through their career, and helping them feel like they're progressing, even if it's all their parts of the company, things like that. So a lot of more focus in on exactly what their talent is looking for, and then making sure that they're providing that, so that we can retain some of that talent and continue to provide that good customer experience that we're after. That seems to be kind of positive. I know it. I'm sure it creates tension with the clients, but you're at the end of the day becoming a better employer. We're becoming a better employer, and you want to retain the people that you have to begin with. It's expensive, and it takes a long time to start over new employees. So if you have happy employees, they perform better, they want to be there. Ultimately, you're going to be providing that better customer experience on the backend, which is every contact center school. Tim, bounce it over to you. Keep findings. The second one I think I would share is really the transformation of operations through technology. So spoke about a little bit about AI, and while it's all the rage, what we really wanted to understand is where is it delivering tangible results? So some areas that we see our clients using AI is, if you think of, let's call it as the call, as the interaction is initiated. We see that through the use of conversational AI, which is more of an Alexa-like or more guided conversational interaction. Instead of the traditional press one to get here or press two to go there, it's more of an example of, hey, how can I help you? The system directing the call in the right place, and providing meaningful self-service capabilities along the way that are intelligent. For example, implementing capabilities that say, hey, I recognize you called last month to make a payment. Do you want to make a payment this month? Is that the same amount from the same bank account? It's a very simple, very low effort type of interaction that we're seeing or organizations really address, and it improves the customer experience because it's a much simpler, much quicker transaction. We also see different transactions like an address change that are getting pulled into self-service, and where an address change is really super complex to do, even with a person, if you can create a, and we've seen organizations create capabilities within using AI to really drive answers to deliver on that outcome, and fix those really, I'll say, address and self-service capability, those types of transactions that have historically been very difficult. We also see organizations really trying to get out the customer experience implications that are occurring on every call. When you look at all the data that's captured as part of that interaction when an agent talks with a customer, historically, we record a lot of those calls, but we don't look at a lot of them. We don't analyze them. Where AI really is playing a part is to analyze all of those interactions and analyze them across different, not only what is said, but how it's said, and bring customer experience problems to the forefront so they can be addressed. Where a customer is dissatisfied, emotional, or has just had a terrible interaction, being able to address those, but also to look at how are we actually meeting our clients needs? What are we hearing from customers as they call us? What are some early warnings techniques that we can get in terms of product or service breakdowns? What are we hearing from customers on the positive side? We see this AI really analyzing these interactions and pulling out those insights, and I think they're even more meaningful than surveys or point interactions with customers because you're aggregating a lot more data and looking at more meaningful interactions where a customer has made a point to talk to somebody. I think that's really a fascinating use of that AI capability to really drive outcomes. The speed at which they can get these, it's analyzing these things in seconds and it's probably looking at all interactions, not just the choice ones that we used to, you know, in the past, we would look at a call here and there or a set of comments. This can do all of them and give you, give you, I guess, results sort of above the moment. That's exactly right. Just not the breadth, but also the scope and the speed. I think you're absolutely right. You can identify where something was outside the expected norms and then you can do something about it. You can do that relatively quickly because you're really focusing your high priced human resources, if you will, on those areas that you want to address rather than just confirming what you hope is true. 80% of the interactions are happening like we expect them to. Any anything else coming out of the study that might be surprising, counterintuitive, really different from past years? We've talked about talent, the implications of AI, anything else? I think one of the interesting things that came to mind Jim for me was, and I sort of spoke to it, which is that technology alone isn't achieving the outcomes. That you have to couple that technology deployment with thoughtful and deliberate interaction with your customers. We call that channel orchestration, but as an example, if you're just standing up a chatbot and spending lots of money to stand up a chatbot, but you don't make a deliberate attempt to drive volume to that chatbot, then you've really just created a new channel that creates more volume, and so you've got to figure out how to staff it. What we see organizations who are successful is linking these things together and making a deliberate attempt to say, okay, for these types of interactions, I want to guide a customer to the chatbot, and I want to cannibalize those phone calls that I used to get, right? If you think about Amazon as an example, they do this incredibly well. They're focused solely on if we serve you online, or if you buy online, we'll serve you online, and they expect their customers to follow a certain progression of a customer service issue, and they use the web to drive that sort of cascading effect. What's really good about that is they're driving you in a very deliberate manner to a specific self-service outcome that's helpful for them, but also helpful for the customer, because the customer knows what they're going to get. We see organizations emulating that in a certain way to say, hey, if I stand up this channel, will it deliver the exceptional experience that I want it to, or is it a substandard experience, and if it's substandard, do I really want to stand it up, or should I send a customer to a different channel where I can over-deliver there? And so I think that's the, to me, that was the most interesting part of this survey was that our clients have figured out that it's just not a technology, throw something up, and people will show up, but rather that it requires a very thoughtful, planned strategy to deliver the outcomes you're looking for. Yeah, I think one of the most surprising things for me was contacts that are still have a long way to go to meet customers' expectations, right? So as a customer today, I expect it to be seamless. I expect it to be easy. I expect it to be quick, right? So and contact centers are still missing the mark there. So for example, we found in our survey when we looked at proactive interactions. So this is a company determines that there's a need before the customer even knows that they have a need, proactively reaches out, says, hey, your flight was delayed by 32 minutes. You are still going to make your connection. Here's all the new gate information, whatever it might be. Only 17% of contact centers are using proactive notifications today, right? So lots of lots of growth there. It could be even when I do talk to a customer like when a customer does talk to a company, their expectations are not being met in that it's not being seamless, right? So as a customer, have the expectation that if I call you on the phone and you need to transfer me to someone else, I don't want to have to repeat every single thing I just said to the first agent over again, second agent. Countless number of contact centers have reported that they're having trouble transferring the history and the data of the first interaction over to the second interaction. So lots of work to do, very surprised, honestly, to see how many contact centers are still struggling in some of these key areas, especially those that are kind of customer experience driven and where the customer's expectations have really risen over the last couple of years. This area of customer expectations rise and you named a lot of things there, Leo, that, you know, I think have changed, simplicity, shamelessness, speed, anything else in the customer expectation coming out of COVID that's dramatically increased. I find myself having way less patients for lack of seamlessness and way less patients for filling out the same information. I think it's especially tough in franchise businesses. I mean, I have a couple Toyota's, my family does, and I'm just amazed, my data doesn't transfer from one region to another. I think the expectation is there, Jim, right, that you look at Toyota and as an example, and it's one company to you and the complexity of the business relationships doesn't concern you and it shouldn't, right? And we see that in a lot of, I see that in a lot of industries where the expectation is, hey, look, you know, there's one single brand, treat me transparently across those different channels. And I think Leo's point is to bottom, contact centers have a long way to go. I will also say the level of effort is shifted, right? And organizations historically stitched that together through, you know, that agent, that agent helped figure that out. As things get interactions migrate into the digital channels, what I think organizations have haven't done incredibly well is create that seamless experience and hiding that complexity behind, you know, the veneer of the technology. And so a lot of those gaps are exposed as part of self-service. And so I've seen organizations in the hospitality space where you have this franchise model. And, you know, depending on where you are in the transaction, the responsible party is, it could be the franchisee, it could be the, you know, the corporation, it could be somebody else. You get these, these, these gaps that are tend to be seamless when you're on the property or tend to be seamless when there's a person involved. But when the technologies included, it becomes those seams get, you know, get are more apparent and those gaps become more apparent. And you can fall through them. Well, you both have job security. There's a lot of improvement to go. Some extent, yes. The silver lining. Yeah. What, you know, what, what do you see if you step back from all this, are the most serious implications for our listeners, those who everybody in a company is involved in customer experience in some way, right? Some, some people weren't directly involved with the customer contacts. But when you think about the implications, if you're a head of a brand, head of a sales organization, head of supply organization, head of a customer experience organization, what are some of the things that you would urge them to think about coming out of this year's study? Yeah. I think the implications, I think, are important, right? And as I think, as I look into the future based on what I'm seeing now, what I see is the continued migration of those informational and transactional capabilities into self-service. And so the chances of interacting with customers actually goes down because many of those information and transactional interactions are those routine things that give you a pulse on what the customer's thinking. And so from a sales perspective, that gives me fewer at bats to cross sell and upsell, where in some industries, anytime you would call, you're going to get an upsell or a cross sell, now that those are migrating, I have fewer chances. So the implication is I've got to do better with that limited set set of interactions on a sales world. I've got to be smarter. I've got to understand how do I make a more effective sales pitch, if you will. I think the implications for HR is the types of individuals that are handling those phone calls or those interactions have to be upskilled. And I have to think about how do I train them in maybe in skill, give them skills that may they may not have, right? So some of that is sales. But well, I guess I guess I would call it de-escalation training, right? How do I get, how do I help that employee understand that you're going to get tougher, more complex, more emotionally charged interactions that you're going to have to diffuse and de-escalate, because they are harder, right? They're not simple. I want to make a payment is one thing. I made a payment, you debited the wrong account, you hit, you know, my bank hit me with 25 overcharges, you have to make this right. That's a very different interaction. It requires a different set of skills and a different set of judgment, right? If I think about policy and compliance, what are the rules and sort of the rules and guidelines I want to provide to the context center? I don't want an agent maybe giving away, you know, having a significant budget to give away stuff, right? But maybe that's important because I need to save that interaction. So I think it cascades all the way through the customer service organization and has implications to many parts of the organization. I could come up with others, but really this transition to fewer calls that are more complex is real. It's happening now. We see many of our clients struggling to figure out how do they address that and how do they address it in a manner that is efficient in a world that is constantly asking them to take cost out. And I think that's the paradox that we're dealing with. We'll say Leah, how about yourself, implications? Yeah, I couldn't agree more with what Tim said. And I think kind of just an overarching implication that hits on a lot of points that he brought up is as an executive or somebody who's a leader in the context center, customer experience or marketing space or whatever it might be, don't lose sight of the importance of the customer service and context center space, right? So it used to be that the context center was kind of a cost center, a necessary evil kind of needed to be there. Now things are changing, customer expectations are rising. Like we talked about at the beginning, the context center has a huge role in the brand of the overall company. And so don't ignore the context center of the customer service center and just kind of say all the problems will go away. Now's the time to invest. Now's the time to differentiate. Now's the time to really turn that from a cost center into a value center and kind of all the points that Tim brought up, I think really roll up into that and make for some of the things that you should start thinking through and then really start to dig into what are the different changes or what are the different problems that your context center is experiencing today and start now, start figuring out what you need to do and fix it because it can have long-term implications for your overall brand and the experience that you're able to provide in the market. I've recorded a podcast a little while ago at the Thanksgiving holiday and it was with Butterball, you know, the turkey company and obviously that's a really that's an incredible like 48 hours for them right around the Thanksgiving. All the issues people have with preparation, questions, disasters, ideas, recipes and they I just love how they think about their context center. I mean, they are the heroes. They are helping so many people through digital channels, chatbots, you know, personal interactions help them have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday and that's their whole mentality toward the discipline and and they, you know, those people are cherished in the culture. They're they're carefully thought about in terms of talent development and training. So it's a it's a beautiful example of thinking very positively about valuing the talent and the capability. So if you haven't listened to that podcast, I'd recommend it's a really really great one about valuing the customer experience and the context center more specifically. Okay, well, I want to sort of end this conversation a little bit about your careers and I'm just curious about how I talk about career paths a lot in the show, how you two both arrived at this focus and this expertise in customer experience and customer context centers. What was it that attracted both both of you to this space? I actually started my career at Deloitte as what we call a business analyst, which is our very first role and honestly got lucky and kind of fell into this space. My very first project at the firm where I didn't really have much say as to what it would be was in this space and I just fell in love with it. I tried a couple of different types of things after pricing and hospital operations and things like that and at the end of the year, I reflected and I said, you know, where I felt like I made the most impact where I felt like I could resonate with what I was doing on a day-to-day basis and really make an impact was in that customer experience space and have really been doing it ever since. Why do you think it resonated so much with you? I think it matters to me as a person outside of work and so things that I can do at work that I then can see kind of reflecting back in my own personal life, things that are easier for me or more seamless for me or quicker for me, I could really see that value and on the flip side wasn't annoying me as much anymore. So that's really why I think I got kind of ingrained in the space and continue to enjoy it every day. Tim, how about yourself? So reflecting a little bit back, I've been doing this for 28 years now and sort of reflected back as I started my career. I started as a believer or not as a programmer and I realized it was really not something I really wanted to spend my career doing and I had an opportunity to do a first project with a collections call center and I thought that was sort of interesting. I learned a lot but what I liked about the work was it was a combination of technology, business operations, there was a people component to it, there was some math around it which I sort of liked and I sat down with my career advisor and he says to me he says, oh you don't want to do that context center stuff, right? He says because it's going to go away. Everybody's going to, nobody's going to call the call center anymore, you're just hitching your wagon to a dying operation and I thought that was interesting and I didn't really agree with his point of view but it's resonated with me over the last few years because the death of the call center has been predicted for I don't know as long as I've been doing this almost 30 years and what I find is while we'd all like it to go away it represents a significant investment our clients are making and like Leah it's an area where I feel like I can make a significant impact to improving the customer experience and I sort of look forward to the day when I go to a cocktail party and I tell somebody what they do and instead of the usual let me give you the 10 bad worst experiences I've ever had somebody will share with me the best experience they ever had so I aspire it's sort of a goal that I have but you know today I don't think I've ever had that so maybe there's that can hold out hope but it's been really a fun career so far in terms of picking all those pieces together and putting together sort of the goal the North Star the objective that our clients can sort of grasp and say yeah that's what I really want to be right and and it you know sort of makes logical and business sense to me so anyway for what it's worth that's that's been my career journey a great story isn't and she looked forward both of you what are you looking forward to in terms of this field is it the continued change that we've just been talking about is there one particular area that if you were to do some further research you'd love to jump into it what is it what is about the future you're passionate about go ahead Tim yeah I guess what I would say is I'd like to see this really exciting blend of technology and humans where the super easy informational stuff is you know I don't have to deal with it's proactively served up to me I get some measure as a customer of control over the way I interact with the brands that I matter to me and then when I have a problem I can actually reach out and speak to somebody who actually understands why I'm calling but more importantly is empowered to solve the problem in a way that I may not have understood or fully appreciated so they're sort of empowered today it feels like the amount of effort I have to put forth to interact with any brand is really significant and I would rather really have them treat me as the you know as the the mom and pop store down the street when I walk in they knew who I am they know what my they've I've I've done business with them for a long time so it's just easy it's simple and I feel appreciated that's what I aspire to see at the you know at the end of my you know in my career and hopefully I can do that for some some really global brands I love it Leah how about yourself what are you looking forward to in the field yep so I think everyone when they think of the future of contact centers is it talks about what Tim talked about right it's the technology plus the humans but what I'm interested in seeing is validating what Tim is saying like the contact center's not going away right humans are not going away it's how do we pair technology with humans to augment the experience to make it better to elevate it rather than having technology take over the world and everything just be done through technology so interested to see kind of how those two play together in the future and how technology can augment humans and humans can augment technology to really elevate the experience we're able to offer in those contacts in our spaces is there any I know you you a Deloitte don't like talking about specific clients I'm not asking you to do this but if I in a future episode of the SAMO podcast is there a company or category that you think is doing particularly innovative work in this space that would be interesting to get on the show I would say I'll put a plug in there for retail because they're starting to think outside the bounds of the contact center space just being their own space right they're starting to think about how do we break down the barriers with marketing how to break down the barriers with sales how to break down the barriers with some of our brick-and-mortar retail stores right so trying to think about the interaction model if a customer walks into a retail store needs some help there's not a specific person in the store that can help them at that particular moment but we don't want to provide a disjointed experience how can we seamlessly integrate them back into the contacts in our space to leverage our global knowledge or global expertise live right there in the store while the customers there so really excited about what's going on in that space I would urge you to learn more great super Tim how about you same answer or different I would agree with what Leah has to say on the retail space but I also think financial services is becoming interesting financial services has always led the way and as and have invested previously in lots of self-service capabilities but I see you know sort of a renaissance happening in that industry and looking at how do we pair technology with humans at really moments that matter and you know coupled with the complexity that is you know many of the financial services products and services that are really difficult for the layman to understand right and working with some clients around how do you automate some of those things but also how do you deliver the right you know if a customer has a as a complex question is not entirely sure what they're asking how do you predict what they really might be asking about and getting them into the hands of a person that can you know sort of translate that complexity that customer has but then deliver those really simple financial service products and services that can solve that customer's need and I think that's what's what's fascinating is just unpacking you know as an example you know what happens in you know the retirement space with with all of those different products or how can you deliver wealth management services to folks who have historically not really needed those things but could use those services in very different ways and so I really intrigued to see how many of the organizations in financial services address those needs and really use technology to support it Lee and Tim thank you thank you for I think elevating in our consciousness the importance of context centers and the overall customer experience it's been a wonderful chat thank you for the research you do with Deloitte it's important area and beyond that and it's been just lovely hosting you on the show well thank you for having me yeah thank you for having us yes that was my conversation with Lee and Tim three takeaways from this one for your business brand of life and the first one is they both talked about new reality coming out of COVID going through this surge and interest in AI there's a new reality that customer expectations have dramatically increased and there's a new reality that employ expectations have dramatically increased I think we all know that we read enough about it are we talking about it enough with our leadership teams and they're reacting on it I think that's the key second takeaway we all have a massive opportunity to improve customer contacts and customer experiences one piece of data shared on this discussion was that 17% of companies do proactive notifications to customers and both of these experts in the field said we have massive massive opportunities to improve this capability which is fundamental to growing great brands and third takeaway this maybe is an obvious one self-service is on the rise that's how people want to interact with companies but it gives us let's stop opportunity for personal relationships that's one that we have to figure out and when asked what categories were doing some very creative and interesting work in this space it was retail and financial services so we'll be watching for them that's it for this episode of the CMO podcast if you found this helpful and entertaining I would be so grateful if you could share our show with your friends and I would be super happy if you subscribe so you can be updated as we publish new episodes and if you really want to help leave us a five star rating and a positive review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen the CMO podcast is a gallery media group original production