How is your Capacity Plan Holding Up?

Alright, thank you everyone for joining us today. I’m joined by Robin Grest from Metrajee and Jim Simmons from Synchrony where we’re gonna talk today about how intelligent automation can drive a better employee experience and a customer experience. Before we get started, a couple housekeeping items, any questions that you have, use the chat functionality inside Zoom and send direct messages to myself, we will get those answered later in the day. Also, this presentation will be able to be sent out to everyone at at the conclusion of this webinar. Like I said, my name is Larry Swift. I head up our solution consulting group here at Intredeem, and I will be your host today. Robin, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, thanks Larry. So as Larry said, I’m Robin Gears. I’m a CEO and principal analyst at Metraji. If we wanna I can just go ahead and get started then. If that sounds good to you, Larry. Let’s alright. So we can okay. So we’ll just a real quick agenda. We will start off with I’m gonna talk a little bit about some of the trends that we’re seeing in our research. I’ll talk a little bit about who we are for those of you who don’t know us. What you should measure to improve customer engagement? What’s happening in the channels? And why does voice continue to be sort of the king of all interaction channels? And and what what might be changing over time there? How to optimize agent productivity, and then what tactics you might use to improve agent engagement. And then some of the positive changes for WordPress management teams. And then we will do q and a I at the end, but we have Jim here obviously as well to to talk about what Synchrony is doing with the technology as well. So if we can move on here, I will do a quick about Metra G, So the next slide tells you a bit about us, I think our name tells you a lot about who we are. It’s just a combination of two words, metrics, and strategy. So we go out and conduct a lot of research with IT, CX, and business unit leaders. We do both interviews as well surveys. And we just find out who they’re using, what they’re doing, what their challenges, and inhibitors are what they’re spending, all sorts of data points on how they’re using technology, but in a very metrics focused way. So how does that technology improve you know, various business metrics that they might be looking at, which we’ll talk about in just a minute. I lead our coverage in digital transformation, which tends to be very customer focused, by the way. A lot of the digital transformation activities that we see are CX transformation. So, you know, whether it’s in the back office with the agents, whether it’s doing more technology with customers, within the contact center outside the contact center, all the CX capabilities is where I focus. So that’s what I’ll be talking about today. So the next slide talks about the research that I’m going to be covering. You can see so we just finished a study called CX Optimization literally just earlier this month. It was a global study of six hundred and forty one companies from thirty seven industries. A big range of sizes, ten employees, up to one and a half million employees. So we have a lot of different sizes and shapes of companies here. In parallel with this research, we also did an additional study of just consumers. So people who are consuming all of the technology that we’re putting out there in the CX world. So, you know, do they like chatbots? For example, what kind of channels do they like to use, all that type of all those types of questions. So we were able to see some gaps between what companies are doing and what consumers want. And certainly some alignments as well. Alright. So let’s get started and talk about what you would want to measure to improve customer engagement. So as we look at what’s helping to improve business metrics, typically we see companies measuring five key areas. And you can see those across the top of the slide. Revenue, operational costs, customer ratings, you know, this is typically your CSAT, your MPS, that type of thing. Employee satisfaction. So let’s do some internal employee surveys. Our employees happy with what they’re what we’re doing for them. Are they happy with their schedules. You know, what do they need to see more? Are they getting enough training? All that? And then agent efficiency. So how efficient are our contacts and our agents? And what you see below each one of these is from our research, we asked organizations how all of these different technologies or practices like gamification and rewards or quality management or, you know, just using customer chatbots. General AI integration, all sorts of things. How did they move the needle when it came to revenue OpEx ratings and so on? So there’s actually a long list underneath each one of these columns. I just I just pulled out the top five. And in parenthesis, you can see how significantly each one of these types of, you know, technologies or practices actually moves the needle. So for example, with rate revenue, if you’re if you’re doing something with your agents with gamification and rewards, what we saw in our research is about a forty four percent improvement. Or increase in revenue based on what was being drawn from that contact center before and after using gamification. You can see with operational costs, looking at quality management, that can really reduce your operational costs, those numbers and epics, by the way, are negative numbers. So a thirteen percent reduction in operational costs you know, using something like workforce management at the bottom there, four percent reduction in operational costs. You have a decent range of reduction and operational costs for various technologies that you use. I will say that is one where if you keep going further down that list, there are other technologies that might increase your cost, at least temporarily, but this is where we see some cost reduction. You know, the things like employee satisfaction and agent efficiency, well, The more you can use a self-service knowledge base to automate some of those questions that may be coming into the contact center and let a customer do it on their own if it makes sense, while that really moves the needle on employee satisfaction and agent efficiency. So a lot of different things here that we can do, depending upon what you’re trying to improve. So I think, you know, as any company, you have to look at Before implementing new technology, what are you trying to prove? Are you trying to reduce your OpEx? Are you trying to improve your efficiency? Those two kind of go hand in hand. Are you trying to improve employee satisfaction or boost your customer ratings? If so, these are some of the technologies that you might want to use to move forward with that. So now, I’m gonna turn back over to Larry because we wanted to uphold to to really understand what our audience is doing with some of these business metrics. So, Larry, Yep, thanks Robin. So you guys should see a pop up now of a poll. Please let us know what, when you look at all these different metrics what really is your main focus right now, and then here in just a minute, we’re gonna see what you guys answered and then have Jim talk about what he’s seeing and really what he is utilizing at Synchrony. Yeah. For us, I yeah. Historically, all of it’s important. Right? And it’s hard to I think it’s any particular time of the year or any particular year you can pick one or the other what I’ve seen internally within Synchrony, and really within the industry as we move into, you know, post pandemic norm, is focusing on the agent satisfaction. Right? Really looking at at how the employees are engaged. You know, you have a variety of folks that are either completely remote or semi remote, and ensuring that the agents have the support that they need, that they’ve got the engagement they need from their manager, and that they still feel a part of the organization really feels like it’s becoming a a a hot point for us. And, yeah, I think when you start talking about things like AI and inclusion of AI and how you improve the customer experience through that agent engagement, I think the industry seems to be taking a a significantly different approach and perspective on it nowadays. Yeah, so if we look at our results, operational cost, agent efficiency, both at thirty six percent employees sat right behind that and then customer ratings right behind that. Revenue did not get any any results. So, So definitely investing in the agent is definitely what we’re seeing and kinda what you just said Jim. And you know what? We’re also seeing that in our research. We we saw a shift going from last year to this year, by the way. Last year, even the year before that, we saw companies really focusing on the customer side, like what can we do to make customers happier to increase the ratings and our CSAT scores, let’s get some more AI and let’s do whatever we can on the customer side and I think a lot of them came to realize, well, it’s very hard to make your customers happy if your employees aren’t happy. And in the last two years, we saw pretty high, you know, higher turnover rates. And, boy, companies really made a turnaround said, we’ve gotta we’ve gotta look inward right now sure our customers are happy. Term rates started going down. We saw better employee loyalty. We saw just more longevity with the context in our agents, and I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But there is, there has definitely been a shift more inward focusing now And I’m happy to see that because a couple years ago, I had a data point that if you can keep your agent turnover under fifteen percent, one five percent your customer ratings increased by twenty six percent. So sort of this, hey, happy employees equals happy customers. And I think some companies got that, but I think others, it took a little while. So getting back to the research now, one of the things that we also look at is just getting a little granular. You know, what we talked about before was the the overall business metrics. This looks at more of the KPIs that companies are measuring within the contact center. So things like time and queue things like call handle time and, well, agent turnover rates a little bit broader, but call hold time, back you can see all those types of traditional KPIs that we see companies looking at. And I think that as we start focusing more on automation of internal capabilities for our agent, automated training, doing some automation in scheduling, doing some automation in letting — letting just simple things like letting your agents take a break. When they’re not expecting it. You start seeing a lot of these KPIs that we see companies measuring here in this chart. You start seeing all those KPIs getting better. So it’s just fascinating to watch what’s really happening right now with the agent experience and how technology and automation are playing a role. Okay. So let’s move on to the channels, the channels that we’re seeing. We hear all this talk about digital channels and what’s going on with voice and you know, I I think, first of all, digital is kind of an overused word because what does digital really mean these days, right? Voice can be digital. So When I slip and say digital, I’m basically meaning non voice digital channels, so things like web chat or SMS or business messaging services, things like that. So what we are seeing with channels is that voice is still king. We’ve all heard a lot about how everyone’s moving to digital channels and We’re just not quite seeing that yet in our research when it comes to interacting with customers. So that has a lot about what we need to do with our agents, where we need to be training them, what we need to be making sure that we have in our, you know, portfolios. So, What this chart shows you, I know it’s a little weird going for thirty nine down to sixty nine minutes slower, but let me let me explain it to you. So thirty nine percent of interactions right now are starting in a channel other than voice. So whether it’s SMS or web chat or any social media, so thirty nine percent starting in a channel other than voice. Of that thirty nine percent, sixty nine percent are actually being resolved in that non voice channel. Which means about thirty one percent then have to be escalated up into voice. So if you do the math around those two numbers, seventy three percent of all interactions are using voice either initially or after a digital interaction. So certainly, you know, the digital channels are are making an impact. You know, you can see about twenty seven percent of them of all interactions are using digital channels. So I think we will see change over time but voice is still extremely important. In fact, when we asked organizations how important voice was, you can see either Bidal, my have are not needed. And you can look at it today by twenty twenty five or by twenty twenty seven. Sixty four percent today say vital, that’ll go down to fifty five percent by twenty twenty five, fifty three percent by twenty twenty seven. You still have most vast majority saying it’s either vital or nice to have. However, you do see that that orange bar going up a little bit from one percent up to five point five percent saying it’s not going to be needed by twenty twenty seven. Me personally, I’m not a strong proponent of getting rid of the voice channel. Do I think we’ll use it less in the future. I do. I think as we get our things like virtual assistants better baked. I think as we get other digital channels working better and as people get more comfortable with them, I think we will see less of a need for voice. One other data point that I just I don’t have it in here, but It was a clear crossover. The younger generations, I’ve got the hard day to show it, definitely say that those digital channels are know, and technology are providing a lot more value in interactions than the older generations. We’ve split them into, I think there were six total age band. So the the younger three were like, oh, yeah, give us all the technology, older three. We’re like, yeah, we are still staying with voice, email, and in person visits. Go to tells us this over the next couple decades in order to serve all the different age bands, you don’t have to keep using all of these different channels. So when we look at the channel adoption itself, so this is where we see customer interaction channel adoption looking like by the end of this year. So this is what people are using right now and what they’re projecting to be using by the end of twenty twenty three just from our research earlier this month. Voice and phone still at the top, followed by email, and then you’ve got all those digital channels are very much in the same general adoption, business messaging apps, conversational AI, social, self-service channels, which kind of go hand in hand with a lot of the conversational AI or virtual assistant type of capabilities. Even voice box in there as well. So you see, you know, the digital channel is coming up. I think one of the big things that we’re seeing is you have to have a lot of channels. In general. You can’t just have one or two because you want to be able to serve all your customers. And in fact, this is our consumer research that I talked to earlier. You can see that little in the upper left, that kind of indicates that it’s our consumer research. We ask the consumers, would it be acceptable for you to do business with a company that did not have a way for you to either talk to someone on the phone, the dark green, only twenty one percent said yes, that would be acceptable. So consumers largely want to be able to talk to somebody on the phone, to communicate by a textual means, forty three percent said that that will be acceptable. So there’s not as much of a demand to, you know, if I’m gonna talk, if I’m gonna do business with you. I have to be able to text with you or do web chat. But I think this chart is going to be very fluid over the next few years. We’re really going to see you know, the demands change. I mean, me as a consumer, I say I want, give me as many options as I can, as I can. It depends on what I’m what I need to reach out to you about, where I am, you know, if I can’t talk on the phone, I need to do something via web chat, for example, or SMS, I need those capabilities. So as we look a little bit further about how companies respond to a bad experience, how many when you get the audio and see, wonder this, I guess, as a company, how many bad experiences do you get before your customers are gonna leave you for good? Build adage, three strikes throughout, applies here, three point three is the average. Honestly, it’s a little generous. I don’t know that I would give a company three chances, maybe one or two. But we ask them what the consumers what they’re doing when they have a bad experience with the company, and I think There’s sort of three approaches. The first bar shows you the first approach which is I’m done. I’m done with you. I’m leaving I’m Michael quietly, I’m Michael Baldi, but I’m leaving and you’ve you’ve lost my business. Others are gonna be kind of vengeful, I guess I would call it. You know, they’re gonna tell their friends and family. They’re going to post on social media. They’re gonna leave negative reviews. And then others, which is where I hope most companies, you know, can get their customers to be, is to try and work it out, like talk to a supervisor, get things worked out, send an email to customer support or just try some way, shape, or form to work with the company to improve. And I think the way that agents respond to customer issues and customer complaints. And even if it’s not a complaint, just a problem, really does dictate a lot of this. They have bad experience, they may very well become more vengeful. If they have a a a problem that they can’t get solved, but the agent is really great at showing empathy and the agent is really great getting the problem solved, well, hey, then you might not lose them and they might just try and work with you and have a good experience overall. In the end. Okay. So let’s talk a little bit about optimizing agent productivity and what we see companies doing. So First thing we see is CX transformation project. So a lot of companies are doing this now. You can see about fifty nine percent actually, complete our underway in our newest research, it just came out and shows us even higher, but we see Oh, no, wait, this is I’m sorry. Take that back. This is our new research. It’s even higher if you add in the twenty three percent If the blue bar I’m sorry, the blue slice, the green slice, and the orange slice, are all this year. It’s either completed their project already. It’s underway or they’re still planning for it. So when you add all those up, it’s like eighty two percent. A lot of companies doing a transformation activity, and that’s the addition of a new or existing technology to improve the agent and or the customer experience ultimately driving measurable business success. Now, we ask companies what kind of transformation projects are you doing? And the top type of transformation projects are worker focused projects. There are other things they’re doing too like you know, foundational activities like doing integrations and maybe adding some management tools. They’re also doing new software applications and moving to the cloud, all sorts. There are a lot of projects. But when we looked at the percentages that are highest this year, kind of goes along with what we were talking about earlier, which I was saying, you know, like really focusing in on those agents. So worker focused projects, fifty four percent improving agent scheduling, and capacity planning, fifty three percent adding or improving workforce optimization capabilities. Some are just adding new agent hardware, making experience better for the agent, maybe a new headset, maybe new video, maybe just a new laptop or new screen, you know, making things better, particularly at home like Jim said, there’s a lot of agents networking from home, and we want to make their setup good and sounding good and everything else. And then just improving agent desktop apps are another one. So why do we wanna automate agent functions? A lot of reasons, we wanna be able to reduce costs, employees become more productive obviously. You can have some hiring avoidance. I do not see companies laying off agents, but we do see them hiring fewer than they had been in the past and they’re hiring fewer if they’re using automation and artificial intelligence than if they’re not. Those who are not using AI will hire about two point three times the number of agents this year than those who are using AI. So, a lot of capabilities that we have here now can can save some money in staffing, improving customer satisfaction, so things like reminders, for your customers. This is particularly we see this a lot in healthcare travel, retail financial. Increasing revenue. So just sending out those reminders, yes, on refills, and appointment notifications, doing lead generation, boosting the pace of innovation, so this is where generative AI comes in a lot. Being able to do coding and creating of content and things like that. The manual processes simply take more time. And then even improving accuracy and quality, so a lot of automated systems that we use, and I know Tim will talk about some of this, are designed for precision, and and human error can absolutely be minimized in those cases. So what we see companies doing a lot then is adding their customer feedback and the information they’re getting from customers either through surveys, or through sentiment analysis, or just through website stats, all sorts of ways you can gather that customer feedback. They’re taking them, and they’re adding them into a lot of the automated workflows. So we see a little over half of companies doing this now. I think this is going to be a big growth area. Some of what they’re doing is very basic, just adding that information to a supervisor dashboard, or even the company performance dashboards, but they’re also incorporating it into online agent training. This is huge. And this is, by the way, where our most successful companies are, where we see our biggest gap between our research success group and everybody else. They’re doing a lot with incorporating customer feedback into their agent training, making sure their agents are up to speed. They know where they need to improve, where their quality issues are. This is a big area of focus. And to do it automated, to automate that, is gonna speed your time to improvement for your agents. It’s gonna make sure they get their training, very, very positive results there. Reaching out to customers to resolve issues, of course, you can just have an automated workflow that will dial a phone number of a customer and automatically connect to a supervisor if they’re upset, and then incorporate into gamification and rewards. So, there might be a leader board in a physical contact center or digital one for working from home. And, you know, you can see that some of the gamification that takes place, you know, I’m I’m the top agent or I’ve I want a reward that will show up on the screen. Alright. So wrapping up my research. I have one more section, just a couple slides here. What tactics do you use to improve agent engagement. And we see organizations, this is really huge too and Jim, I hope maybe you can talk a little bit about this of what you guys were doing at your company here too. But do you have a strategic initiative underway to improve agent or and a little over half of companies are doing this already. I think it needs to be a lot more. I think everybody should be doing this because, you know, these agents, it’s it’s expensive to hire them, to find them. To train them. You don’t wanna lose them. If if if they don’t wanna be in the contact center anymore, you don’t want them to go to a competitor. They know everything about your company. So let’s get a career path form, as you can see there in the middle of the bar chart. As part of the initiative, what areas of agent experience are you addressing, First two are really just about your hours and your comp. So tied for first place. We’re gonna give you more flexible work hours. We’re gonna increase your compensation. We’re also gonna let you work from home so that Michael had to go hand in hand with flexible work hours, not necessarily always. Working from home, but, you know, just being able to have some flexibility. Statishing career paths, I think this is huge. Just what do you want to do? Do you want to stay in the center. Do you want to become a supervisor in the contact center? Do you want to do data analytics? Do you want to go completely in another area of the company like marketing or product designer development? What do you want to be doing? So that’s an important thing serving agents to gauge their happiness like Jim talked about, you know, just making sure we’ve got that employee satisfaction. And then adding agent analytics, how are they doing? What do we need to change? Where can we improve? What groups are doing really well? Can we take lessons from what they’re doing and train others to do the same, adding the gamification and coaching, and then adding more direct supervisor coaching as well. Just to be able to have that interaction with your supervisor. And then wrapping up, we do see that companies are Finally, starting to act on act on customer feedback, I will tell you about a year and a half ago, this sixty one and a half percent number was about thirty percent of companies actually taking action. With their feedback, which is such a waste. Even the sixty-one point five percent frankly is waste. This is telling us that almost forty percent of companies are gathering feedback, but sitting on it, they’re not doing anything with it. So if you are doing that, figure out how you can act on that. And the way we see companies doing that today, and I’ve got all the statistics behind it, but just to summarize, they’re sharing it. You know, this is the number one thing they’re doing, just making sure employees in the front of front line and in the back office know what they’re doing right and wrong, what the customers are saying, where they can improve, making adjustments to marketing and sales strategies, and even contact center scripts. So if we see that there’s a particular way we might have changed the script and our CSAT scores are going down, whenever we use this, maybe we need to make a change, and anything you can automate there is better. Asking customers to do things like write a public review or you know, provide referrals to their friends or peers, and then also changing technology. So increasing or decreasing technology based on customer feedback or even adding changing, deleting a customer interaction channel based on some of the feedback or the analytics that go along with that. All right, So, that’s my, I think I’m done at the door for. Let’s see what the next slide is. I’m looking at it. Thought that was it. I was like, wait a minute, I have another Vice holder, but that was actually a place holder for Jim to get started and talk about what what he’s seeing happening at Synchrony and what great data points he has. So go ahead, Jim, take it away. All right, great. We can go ahead and jump to the the next slide real quick. I take folks through a little bit about our journey, like everybody, I would say, yeah, we we’re at a point in time now, we sort of measure everything pre pandemic and post pandemic. And while we had looked at thought about and talked about automation prior to the pandemic, once it hit Once we recognized, we were a fully remote workforce, we were probably gonna stay that way or at the very least give most folks the option We had to rethink where automation fit within our roadmap and our plan. So really around a third and fourth quarter of twenty twenty one, we decided to do a POC with the interim product. We like that one because a, it is not just automation on the back end, which there’s nothing wrong with that, but it is an agent engagement system. As I mentioned, we really have trying to take a very agent forward approach, and not that others don’t, but what I think is unique, it’s specific to the workforce management space. Historically, that’s been, you know, how do you get folks on? How do you get them trained? And then how do you get them in the right spot? And that’s the end of your day. Right? When really it needs to be much more than that. It needs to be how do you make sure that you’re flexible and they they have the autonomy they need. So we did the POC at the end of twenty twenty one, like the product, had great results. Decided we wanted to move forward with it, and then we began the systems integration and implementation. It took us about a quarter or so. Right? In the meantime, we continue to run with the POC. And we launched effectively as of August in twenty twenty two. And and what you can see on the right hand side is a little bit about some of the the volume that this system has picked up and, you know, so, you know, we’ve got over six thousand agents currently in the system. You know, almost that probably at this point about a half a million sessions delivered since last October when we were fully integrated. You know, look at the number of hours that have been provided thirty one thousand hours to agents, and almost twenty thousand of those hours, during idle time. Right? And that’s really important. One of the things I remind folks internally is that that’s all been done automatically. So for anybody who has a a workforce management team that’s, you know, looking at service levels and time available and and communicating with frontline managers about how do you do this quickly? Let’s get these folks off. No, wait. Let’s get them back on. All of those conversations go away once you start thinking about these automation processes. And, you know, I I mentioned, you know, we did this. There’s a lot of win on the back end, but we wanted to make sure that we took the focus from the agent. Right? It had to be a win for these folks because, a, they have a lot to do. They got a lot going on in their screen. They have a lot of information. Coming at them all the time. So we didn’t wanna be just one other pop up. Right? So we wanted to make sure there was value there. We wanted to make sure that they felt that it wasn’t too big brother. Right? It wasn’t overwhelming, and there wasn’t too much. We wanted to make sure that the managers felt that way. As well. So as you can see on the the left bottom corner there, you know, eighty eight percent and our POC group said that that they thought the experience with the product was was a four or five, because they’re very good. Right? And again, this is an automation product. They, you know, they it wasn’t middle of the road. They really liked it. And those neck two numbers, did they find it useful and did it help them manage their time better? Ninety three percent. I I’ll be honest with you. I’m I’m a big fan of the system. But I was amazed at the way that the agent groups embraced it. You know, one of the things that I I remind the team now is it’s it’s interesting if ever there’s a glitch in the system or we have some sort of system issues where things aren’t prompting, we know pretty quickly because all of a sudden the agents are telling us, hey, I’m not getting my prompt for a training, for coaching, for, you know, maybe potential early break, play break, all sorts of things that we do with this. And so if it goes silent, we know pretty quickly. And then there’s just a few bullets there around some of the comments the agents, you know, we have things called daily knowledge checks, d k c’s that lets them know when those are ready. You know, they really like one of the things that we did at the outset that agents really embraced, was one additional break a month. A five minute break was what we offered, and it was very random. As long as servicing was bent, we had a little bit of availability. And the system does it at a scale where humans just can’t do it. Right? It’s it’s a one to many, and it’s very quick. Yeah. And the bottom right here I talk a little bit about, you know, Robin you had mentioned, a lot of folks are looking at attrition, and we always constantly are. I will say, though, We’re one of the few companies that that don’t see it as a major issue right now, and you can see we were recently ranked number twenty on the Fortune one hundred best place to work. And I do believe a lot of that ties into our focus, and you can see the quote from our our CHRO there, DJ, it we really are trying to put the agents first. And and again, it’s it’s not that we haven’t always cared about them. But when we lead with that foot, we feel we’re in a better position. And, you know, we think about automation and not only how do we assist them, and getting trainings done and things like that, but, you know, we start thinking about it in the form of AI, and how do you bring that to the mix? And so we’re really leaning into the whole aspect of it. I saw Robin on some of your stats, you know, they need flexibility in in their schedules. Right? Yep. That, you know, we’ve got it. And again, the nice thing about automation is if you think about how a workforce team plans, we try to plan to degree, and make that plan unbreakable. And then the day rolls around, and the plan means nothing. Right? Something changes, handle times up, vitals off, call volumes off, somebody called in, and the plan is out the window. So, you know, we’ve really started taking the approaches that we act and operate in real time. So how do we build that automation in, and we put it in a way that the agents can feel that they’re a part of that. Right? So, you know, I’m less concerned about the schedule now, and the fact that we’ve got fluidity and flexibility in any given day, and if the agents can be flexible, and our systems can be flexible, we’re much better positioned to meet the customer needs. You talked a lot about a lot of these agent benefits that Synchrony’s seen. Now, we talk about a lot of these things going from a manual reactive process to automation. What kind of time or what does a day of your managers supervisors now look like with this implemented versus prior to introduce? Yeah, we’ve got really good feedback on that. Yeah, I’d say a lot of what they’re doing is that we’re taking probably what was not officially much of their job, which was monitoring service levels, monitoring agent schedules, staying in touch with the WFM team and trying to figure out when where and how to get people where they needed to be, as it relates to training and knowledge and all of that. That’s off of their plates now. We’ve put tools in place that really raise red flags for them to look at if there’s behaviors or or situations that we think need their attention. So instead of having to monitor everything, we let the system go, hey, you may wanna investigate this situation a little bit more. So we’ve taken a lot out of their hands, and we’ve tried to automate and continue to work with automating, giving them the opportunity to decide when they want a coach, but not with the the added work of scheduling Right? In our system, we can actually use InterDM. They click a little button that says I’m ready to coach. Here’s the people I wanna coach. And once those folks are available, the system brings those two together and lets the coaching happen very organically. Great. Now on the same tune, what’s it done to your workforce management like intraday team, right? I have to imagine instead of staring at screens and reacting like you said, we think today is gonna be a great day, and then the day happens. How has that changed their work? Quite a bit, and we’ve got a big team. Right? So it’s one of those things that’s interesting because it wasn’t necessarily one or two people’s job per se, it was everybody’s job, but it was that thing you had to do on top of your work. So we’ve taken that off. We’ve done some estimates. And, you know, even if you consider that, you know, any one of these interactions, to get an offer out, let an agent know where they need to be, and what they need to do, and make sure they they get the exception right and everything. Even if you figure that being five seconds per, which that’s an understatement. There’s still significant value in that. The other thing it does for us is it helps us centralize things. I I’ll tell you, we’ve developed a much greater connective tissue between our team and the training department because it’s a it’s a one stop funnel now. Right? One person who’s working on our Interim side, can take all of the training information, put it in, tell what time is gonna be assigned to each training, determine what order or priority it needs to be in, determines whether or not we’re gonna offer it if there’s queuing or not. All of that happens to really one central point now instead of every site and hub and and client group having to worry about it. Now, you said, you know, the stats show the agents really like this and whatnot. I look at numbers like thirty one thousand hours of learning time, four hundred and seventy thousand sessions. It seems like they’re inundated with these alerts and notifications can you talk about really what the reality is on how often they’re being notified and for different things from interview? Sure. You can look at the stat on the right. Roughly twenty three sessions offered per agent per month. So it’s really about one a day. You know, some will get a little bit more, some will get fewer. But we’ve been able to smooth it out pretty evenly. And on top of that, what we do is we’re adding some agent wellness videos. We’re adding that additional break, so they really are engaged because it might be you know, I’m getting an extra break, or I get two minutes to look at a Thrive video, or it’s training. And again, agents really like the fact that, hey, instead of setting here idle, the system brings me into some training that, you know, better educates me. So we find that generally speaking, we’ve not gotten either from the agents or the frontline managers that they’ve gotten too many of those and it’s a fine line to walk. You really have to test on that one. No. This is great stuff and it really falls in line with what Robin shared that she seeing out there in the industry. Right? We have to invest into our agents, whether that’s more education, whether that’s the gamification like you said, that that one once a month free break. All those things in today, you know, work at home and all of that all plays a part of it. So I really appreciate you sharing your story with us, Jim. I just wanna spend a couple minutes now really talking about how intradium automation works. Just to give a better insight to the things that you’re seeing, how that can be accomplished. And so, really, when you think about what Entadim’s doing is it’s not replacing any tech stack currently in your contact center. It is now a standalone technology that is crucial in the contact center. It sits between your workforce management system and your ACD telephony system to get real time skill and cue stats and also understand what an agent’s doing at any given moment. From a workforce perspective, it allows us to intake schedules and see who’s working when but also any predefined events, when their breaks or when lunches. As Jim spoke about offering maybe a free break or a training session, well, without entry, if somebody would have to preschedule that, and they’d have to actually code it into the WFM system. With our technology, when a prompt is delivered to an agent and they initiate that training or coaching or whatever that activity is, introduteams gonna automatically do a write back to the WFM schedule thus keeping them in adherence to what they should be doing. Now, if we go forward and start to talk about some of the problem sets that Intredeems really solvent. If you think about a day in the life in the contact center, all of these things are constantly happening, right? I have to I have to deliver some type of training. Well, if I preschedule it, there’s always that chance of getting canceled and rescheduled. Plus, I have to add that to my shrinkage requirements, constant schedule updates, whether that’s somebody coming in late, whether that’s somebody going to lunch late or break, things that are like that are constantly happening. Robin talked about, you know, the poll of what are some of the crucial metrics the contact centers are looking at. Talk time, wait time, hold time. Now imagine instead of somebody having to look at screens, you can set up automated rules to say hey, if a threshold’s met on excessive wait time for example, we can send a prompt directly to an agent or a supervisor to take some type of action. Jim talked about empowering your supervisors with coaching. Instead of having your supervisor have to go to your intraday team and say, hey, I need five minutes with Robin to discuss something. Now imagine they have an interface where they can go in and say, I need five minutes with Robin, and automation is looking at real time skill data and saying, hey, I have availability right now. Let’s go ahead and marry up. And finally adherence support. Again, no longer having to look at screens and seeing if the agents doing what they’re supposed to. This is automated now through rules to allow you to set that up and now get more efficient with your intraday team. Let’s go ahead and jump into one example of one of these use cases and really what we’ll talk about is the ability, like Jim mentioned, pushing training time to agents. So now instead of in today’s world without InterDM having to look out into the future and pre plan this based on historical data, only for it to be canceled or rescheduled, now let’s take a paradigm shift where we’re looking at what’s going on right now. We have the pulse on the ACV data and saying something like if my longest call waiting is less than x and my calls in queue is less than y, Let’s go ahead and prompt a user or a group of users to take training. One of our large financial customers, if you look at that prompt there, they shared a best practice where they don’t tell the agent how long they have. And that’s by design. Prior to Entredeem, if you went into your WFM schedule and saw a training session was thirty minutes long, guess what, the agent’s gonna take a full thirty minutes, probably a little bit more. Now, as you go this route, keeping in mind that the segment doesn’t go on the WFM schedule until it actually is initiated, our customers are seeing a twenty percent reduction in overall time and training that’s going straight to the bottom line of productivity. Let’s go ahead and go to the next slide and really look what the agent experience looks like. So now again, the verbiage on the start prompt is customizable to our customers. You decide what it says, but when they hit start now, let’s go to the next slide. It’s gonna prop them to do whatever you told to do in the rules engine. As an example, a lot of our customers will deliver computer based trainings from their learning management system. The good news is all you do is in the inter theme interface is put a deep link to that computer based training and when they hit start out it automatically launches them into that training session. Let’s go to the next slide and really talk about what’s possible with this idle time that Jim mentioned. I talked a little bit about training as did he, but also keep in mind it’s not just relegated to time for training. It’s using idle time to deliver any off phone activity from marketing updates to surveys to side by side observations All of these things are what our customers are leveraging idle time for today to make them more efficient and make the agents experience that much better. And just to finally kick this off, again, I like to talk about the three E’s. Not only is this improving efficiency, but it’s drastically improving agent engagement and customer experience. By creating that experience for the agents, attrition numbers are going down with our customers because they have time to engage in this. Right? Imagine being able to unlock capacity that doesn’t exist today, and fill that with more training, more investment into the agents or at the same time being able to get more efficient or a mix of both. That’s really what intraday automation is doing for our customers and really what you heard today from Robin and Jim. Now, just to wrap this up. If you have questions, we will that I share this with you. You can contact Jim directly myself or Robin if you have any questions. It doesn’t look like any more questions came in through chat. Any last words Robin or Jim? No, I think it’s been really interesting to hear the successes that Jim has had with using the technology and just the feedback that agents have, like that back to me was really really cool to see that it’s, you know, we a lot of us talk about technology and how it’s gonna help, and what kind of metrics it’s gonna move. But then we see the people that’s actually affecting in the field day to day, seeing the value of it, I think that really says a lot, it says a lot to me anyway. Yeah. I would second that, you know, the data that Rob had brought to the tables, very interesting. Yeah. Again, we you as a business, you tend to get a little bit siloed and you get heads down and you think about what you’re doing in your own world, and then you look up and you get an opportunity to see some of the data that’s out there and understand what what the world is doing at large, and it’s very interesting to see some of these trends and So I think, you know, folks that really wanna stay up with at the very least, if not get ahead of these, have got to, in some way, shape, or form, start thinking about automation as it relates to their agent workforce. And just to that point, right, when somebody hears automation, the natural thought is, okay, it’s gonna reduce my employee count or it’s gonna improve efficiencies. But the reality is you know, automation can improve that agent engagement drastically as well, which is really a key something like this. There is one question. You talked about the Thrive videos. Can you go in more detail what exactly that is? Sure. Thrive is a wellness app that we actually partnered with Entrodium on. So Thrive is an app that has that is agent focused, and really employee focused offers some brief wellness videos. You know, they can be customizable. But basically, it’s for a call center agent, Just a few moments out of the day, throughout the day. Generally speaking, we try to do it if there’s been some long calls or a lot of activity. Intredeem will recognize that. It will pop up, ask the agent if they’d like to take this wellness break, And as Larry mentioned, the the link is embedded in there. They click the link, go in, they get a wellness video, and takes about two minutes or so, they get done and they’re back on the phone. And again, we’ve received a lot of really good feedback on it, that’s a great product, and I think Interim has just done an amazing job of of working that into the full Great, thanks Jim. Well, Robin, Jim, I really appreciate spending some time with us today and everybody that attended Like I mentioned, you will get a copy of this deck, and thanks again for joining today. Thank you all. Have a good day. Bye.