Leveraging Automation to Offset Emerging Challenges

All right, let’s go ahead and get started. Welcome everyone to today’s webinar, Leveraging Automation to Offset Emerging Challenges. I will be your host today. My name is Larry Swift. I head up our solution consulting team here at Intradium. I am joined today by my colleagues Kevin Jolliffe and Ted Lango. Kevin, would you like to give an intro? Yeah. Thanks, Larry. Thanks for joining everyone. Kevin Jolliffe. I’m the North American lead for Intradium. Just a bit of quick background, I’ve been in the industry for twenty five years, mainly in workforce planning leadership roles. And in my former terror duty, I was head of enterprise planning at a large telecommunications company. We had about ten thousand frontline agents and deployed InterDM, so I was actually had a front row seat for about seven years to see firsthand what, intraday automation can do to combat today’s challenges. Over to you, Ted. Thanks, Kevin. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining. I’m Ted Lango. I’ve recently joined InterDM Q3 of last year after spending about twenty years in the contact center industry and telecommunications and the last ten years in insurance. My story is a lot like Kevin’s. I too deployed Intradium, got to see the benefits of it on the front line and loved it so much that I joined the company. Happy to share some thoughts with everyone today. Thanks, Ted. And just a couple housekeeping items before we get started. This will be recorded and available for you guys to use. And also, if you have any questions that come up throughout the presentation, feel free to put them in the chat piece, and we’ll answer them at the end of the webinar. So today, what I want to start talking about is current challenges contact centers are facing. Three main areas we’re going to focus on today is labor force challenges, dispersed workforce, and increased voice contact complexity. Let’s start with a poll question really centered around labor force challenges to the audience. The question is, what do you believe are the top drivers for your contact center turnover rate? We’ll give it just a minute here for everybody to answer. All right. We’re starting to see some answers come through. And so Ted and Kevin, what we’re seeing is, first, we’re seeing about twenty two percent stating that lack of flexible work arrangements are leading to this. We have about eleven percent lack of consistent training, support, and coaching. Thirty three percent agents have more work than they can handle, and thirty three percent all of the above. So with that, with those results, I’m gonna start it off with, Ted talking about what he’s seeing out there with labor force challenges. Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of the same as what you indicate in the poll. I think most importantly, we really saw attrition spike throughout the course of the pandemic. My own personal experiences, I saw it double, and a lot of the colleagues that I spoke to saw attrition double throughout the pandemic, historic numbers, thirty to forty percent, went up to numbers as high as eighty, ninety percent, throughout the pandemic. Most recently, as I’m talking to people, attrition seems to be coming back down, but the speed at which turnover is happening seems to be accelerating. Companies seem to be losing people in two pockets quicker than ever right after they start. We’re seeing attrition, and then six to nine months after starting. And even though as I speak to colleagues and people are indicating, yeah, attrition’s coming back down into ranges that may still be a little bit higher to pre pandemic or closer to pre pandemic, I still question, you know, should that be our goal? Pre pandemic goals of, you know, thirty to forty percent attrition are still very high, especially with some of the other challenges we’ll talk about with the labor force going forward. Kevin, I don’t know if you have thoughts as well on this topic. Yeah, it’s certainly consistent. This comes up daily when I talk to the client or client community and then broader industry discussions, just the challenges with attrition early life as Ted had talked about, but even equally importantly, even more importantly, it’s just the difficulty in recruiting and backfilling when people walk out the door. It’s becoming really, really difficult. Again, why is that? The complexity of the job, which we’ll talk about more momentarily. Just the rigid nature of the job, know, new generation Gen Ys and Zs like to work differently and just may not want to sign up for the rigidity that is typically associated with contact center work. You know, and the cost here from both, you know, operating expense, customer experience implications are extraordinary. Standard assumption is, on average, is about twenty thousand dollars to backfill for someone that’s left through, you know, recruiting, training, onboarding, and then learning curve to get to get up to the efficiency you need to be at. A recent financial study indicated, so in the financial vertical indicated it’s thirty five thousand dollars or more with two thirds of these costs being associated with the actual recruiting, getting the right candidates and the training, and the third related to actual learning curve. And if you can imagine with forty, fifty six, sixty percent attrition, and a huge portion of workforce is constantly in the early stages of that learning curve, what it translates to in customer experience with, you know, long sort of clumsy contacts, customer time not being respected, customer has to be transferred or called back multiple times. So it’s kind of a snowball going down a mountain in terms of the implications. Yeah. Back to you. Yeah, no, thanks, Kevin. You know, obviously, that really puts on the forefront, the importance of retaining your employees, doing things different to make sure that they want to come day in and day out. I recently talked to a hospitality company that said, they’re currently running at a sixty percent new hire rate of new hire agents defined three months or less on the job. And so what this is leading to, again, is poor customer experience because the agents aren’t properly trained on all the things a hospitality company can provide. All right, so let’s go ahead and now talk about dispersed workforce. We’re going to again ask a poll question to the audience, really what their contact centers look like today. Is everybody in person? Is everybody mainly remote? Or are we working in a hybrid model? All right. Not surprising, at least to myself, is right now we have zero percent that are fully in person again. We have thirty eight percent that are mainly remote. And we have sixty two percent that are hybrid, which is really in line with what I’m hearing out in the customer community. Kevin, I’m going to let you start on if this aligns with what you’re hearing as well. Yeah, absolutely. Another hot topic and the results here are entirely consistent with folks either electing to go full time remote. And again, this is both front lines and in many cases, support teams as well, or a hybrid model, and you know, and hybrid means different things, different people, know, could be a certain contingent of your workforce is more or less full time working remotely with the other portion in more of a traditional bricks and mortar environment, or it could be that you kind of rotate your front lines and support teams through and toggle back and forth between at home and traditional environments. But with this kind of newer way of working, certainly after we’ve had some runway since a lot of organizations did a flash cut over to remote agents, we’re hearing more and more that this is becoming increasingly hard to sustain both performance and culture. So metrics that intuitively you’d expect maybe would organically improve at home. Again, many organizations are struggling with handle time, customer experience, and even adherence in a lot of cases. I’m hearing that more and more. And what’s driving this is, again, you put everything together, the more complex interaction types, which we’re gonna get to in just a minute, lack of that sort of consistent peer group support, floor walkers, etcetera. It can can be very hard to deal with some of these contacts remotely, and and it makes these processes a little bit harder to sustain without introducing some form automation and virtualization. So really critical now that everyone’s had the chance to test drive this, to understand what’s working, what’s not, and kind of what I’m getting at there is some agents that are absolute top performers in a bricks and mortar environment may not have the right wiring to succeed at home because they thrive with the peer group environment, the peer group support. So, again, you know, hybrid can offer the best of both worlds where now that you’ve had the observation time to see how people are performing, you know, make sure that folks are well placed and then you’ve got the folks with the right wiring working from home that are, you know, have the proficiency to work independently. Ted? Yeah, thanks, Kevin. I too see, I think, a hybrid work environment going forward. For me, was interesting to witness what was happening as the pandemic started to ease. I witnessed a lot of companies say, Hey, we’re going back to the office. And in many cases, there were revolts. People then had to go back to the table and say, Well, maybe not. Maybe we stay one hundred percent remote. That seems to have worked. But again, there’s challenges with just trying to maintain a full remote workforce. And I think a number of companies are now starting to recognize that one answer isn’t the right answer, and that hybrid is where I think a majority of folks will navigate toward in the future. There isn’t really a right answer. Tenure, the complexity of the call types, there’s just a lot of dynamics that determine how effective contact center agents can be in either a hybrid, remote, or in person environment. And then there’s aspects around the people themselves. Some people thrive around other people, other people thrive on their own. So I really do think the industry will continue to shift toward a hybrid model at the end of the day. What’s important to recognize for me is companies finding that right degree of balance, But with that balance, we’re really going to need a degree of flexibility to manage dispersed workforces. And I’m not just talking scheduling, but really when we look at traditional legacy workforce management practices, I think we need to go back and rethink end to end how those processes support this new model itself. Hybrid’s got new demands, you know, setting up everything from coaching to how you deliver training, to how you’re managing, you know, as Kevin mentioned, the legacy metrics of adherence. All of that looks different when you’re dealing with a post COVID environment of a hybrid workforce. So I think there’s a lot of interesting things still here emerging, you know, at the end, you know, hybrid, I do think is gonna be very, very strong, because there just isn’t one answer that’s right for everyone. Thanks, guys. And I couldn’t agree more with what you guys said. Of those problems and being able to create flexibility is going to be key to this, which leads us to our third area we really want to talk about, increased voice contact complexity. What are you hearing out there, Ted, around just the increased voice contact complexity? Yeah, well, I mean, after twenty years in the contact center industry, it’s something I witnessed firsthand. As technology advanced, we took easy calls out, and that’s just a natural thing. If you can serve the customer’s answer without having to speak to an agent, leveraging technology, whether it’s the IVR, whether it’s online, then do so. It’s a more efficient way to operate than having someone answer the call. But with that, comes increased complexity. When you take the easy calls out, what are you left with? You’re left with the more difficult calls. And as technology continues to evolve, I really think we’re gonna see how we look at recruiting, training, developing, and retaining talent in a whole new way. It takes a different skill set in order to answer these complex calls than purely transactional calls. For the twenty plus years that I spent, it used to be that contact center agents could be hired from a pool of entry level jobs, or I was competing with other industries, but, you know, as opposed to working, you know, in a fast food restaurant or something, a contact center job was appealing. The increased complexity, though, now requires, in a lot of cases, people to go out, recruit, train up, and support people to handle much more complex call types, and quite often to be able to think without a roadmap in solving those complex customer needs. That’s a different type of talent than what we’ve traditionally recruited into the contact centers for. And when you find talent that really can thrive in a more complex environment, it’s gonna become that much more increasingly important to retain them. And so when we talk about thirty, forty, fifty percent attrition rates, I just don’t think that’s sustainable going forward. So in the end, with these increased complexities around voice transactions, different levels of skills that are needed to retain or to support customers, we really need to look at how we retain those agents who are successful in the environment. Kevin, don’t know if you have thoughts on this as well. Yeah, very much aligned here as well. You know, this is something I lived daily in my prior role, this was a huge challenge, you know, through AI, digital migration process improvement, we were hugely successful, literally millions of contacts. That was the good news. The bad news though was our actual activity in minutes due to the complexity was staying about flat, and this was really hard to solve for in parallel, and this was true with, again, a lot of discussions I had in the industry, when you’re trying to kind of give the front lines the autonomy they need to deliver a call, you know, with top quality, make sure the customer doesn’t have to call back, etcetera. That also adds pressure. So you put the two together and it can be a bit of a perfect storm. Why does this matter? Well, just the cost implication alone, a few seconds of HD in many of these larger is millions of dollars in a year. Secondly, again, combining the perfect storm of at home, we don’t have that consistent support along with the complexity translates, can translate to obviously a very poor customer experience and not respecting time. So again, it just becomes critical. It’s really not a nice to have anymore. It’s a need to have is to introduce intraday automation to ensure front lines, whether it’s bricks and mortar or working from home or getting that consistent support they need in real time, not a day later, in real time to navigate some of those really challenging contacts that they’re dealing with. That’s great insight from both of you, and I appreciate that. Now let’s turn the page and really look at, as you just said, Kevin, how can intraday automation really help with some of these challenges we just talked about? When you look at Intradium’s customer community today, you know, when I said earlier, you got to think differently. Imagine being able to do different types of things than what traditionally is done in contact centers, whether you’re working from home or actually brick and mortar. Doing things like quarterly wellness touch points, open chat time to form connections with your supervisor. That relationship is going to be different now if you’re working from home versus, you know, you’re seeing them day in and day out. Creating elite star programs for your top employees, and increasing your training model. Like I mentioned before, training is a must have and ongoing requirement that is getting overlooked, which is leading to poor customer experience. We have to have the ability to keep that at the forefront as well. And so really, we go to the next slide and we think about what Intradium is, you think about your contact center technology ecosystem. And I’m often asked, Is this replacing my workforce management? Is this speech analytics? Is this next best action? The reality is IntraDM is a standalone technology that should be part of each and every contact center’s ecosystem. It has now become a must have in today’s work environment of trying to retain employees and have the ability and flexibility to not only interact with the agents that are in the contact center, but the ones that are working from home. Imagine being able to have out of the box integrations to ACD and WFM systems, and being able to get real time statistics such as how many calls in queue, what’s my longest call waiting, do I have agents available, But also being able to see real time agent phone states, so I know at any given moment what an agent’s doing. Now, the power of intraday automation takes it a step further and allows you now not only to have insights to that, but to take action directly to agents desktop. Imagine being able to see somebody who’s maybe in excessive after call work, and offer a lending hand to see why that is. And potentially, if they need help, you’re now creating a real time coaching opportunity to marry that agent and that supervisor up without anybody having to manually watch the statistics and see what’s going on. Another area we’re going to talk about now is imagine being able to use that statistics to deliver real time training or other off phone activities. So if we move to the next slide, and we talk about what happens today in today’s workforce environment. So if a training is required, typically what’s going to happen is it’s going to be initiated by the training department and pushed down over the workforce management team to preschedule that out in the future based on historical call volume patterns. Now, more often than not, there is going to be a piece of cancellations and reschedules that occur due to agents calling in sick, call volume not agreeing with what we expected it to be, But regardless, it creates a bad agent experience. Second of all, when you think about keeping track of who’s actually completed this, customers like Citibank and others have shared with me that they would have purchased automation just for the reconciliation of completions. No longer are they having to chase down if somebody actually completed it. Just because they were scheduled with it, they didn’t know if they completed it. So I’m gonna go ahead and turn this over to Kevin to really talk about how what kind of impact this made at Rogers for you and why it was important. Yeah, sorry that, Larry. This was actually the express reason that we implemented the trainings required so much. I had a small army of people with my team, required so much intervention and free work to get that training scheduled. And then with a volatile environment, you know, higher occupancy periods, etcetera, it inevitably translated to constant rescheduling of training, delaying, canceling, etcetera, which of course translated to a poor frontline experience. So we put this in thinking it could help us with our efficiency and we quickly realized it could. And then we were equally surprised by how much it helped with employee engagement. So the main benefits were compressing cycle time to get training done across the floor of several weeks, six to eight weeks down to seven to ten days, number one. Secondly, session compression time of about twenty percent. So delivering that training dynamically to the desktop without indicating, know, hey, Larry, take thirty minutes to complete this training. You’re finding on average it was going to be completed in twenty five to twenty six minutes. Know, if you give somebody thirty minutes to complete training, they’re probably going to take the full thirty minutes regardless of how long the training took. And then what was really sort of pleasantly surprising was just with offloading all of that manual work, how it helped really morale within the workforce planning team allowed them to be much more strategic and forward looking. And then there was the frontline impact, of course, of keeping them consistently current tools to do the job and giving them a bit of mix and job variety throughout the day on a consistent basis. Thanks, Kevin. Ted, I know you have a similar story at MetLife, but taking it a step further, let’s talk a little bit about your J. D. Power awards you received. Yeah, we, I mean, we went after J. D. Power, which is a challenge, and at the end of the day, J. D. Power looks heavily at our investments into our employees. It’s one thing to give a great, experience to the customer, and that’s a big thing for any industry, you know, it’s focused on external customer experience, but one of the things that J. D. Power really focuses on is what are you doing internally to ensure that your agents are properly trained and supported to deliver that experience? For us, you know, we had the same challenges prior to intradigm. We would schedule coaching, schedule training, you know, and at the end of the day, a lot of it got canceled, had to be rescheduled. It was just difficult because of that framework, which I want to mention as well. Post intradigm, we were able to deliver far more training than we ever were, and the great story about that was the next year that J. D. Power came around, looked at things, they sort of asked us what changed here. We’re hearing something completely different from all the frontline agents in terms of us really delivering on our promise to train and develop and support them on an ongoing way. And I pointed straight at, hey, this is what this technology could enable, instead of the cycles of us trying to plan ahead of time only to have the plan not go exactly as we expected, and having to reschedule, we lost huge amounts of opportunity that would pop up in pockets, but would also disappear too quickly to react to. So instead of trying to plan and then replan, intradigm allowed us really to remove most of the preplanned training that we did. We ended up doing all the training on the fly, or the vast majority of training on the fly, harvesting pockets of available time, and at the end just delivered far more training than we ever had before. And that’s really to me, when I had mentioned before, just to wrap this up, this is what I mean about rethinking traditional workforce management processes post COVID, is at the end of the day, we’re all used to preplan, preplan, preplan. Let’s set up our plan upfront and then just hope that it works out. And inevitably, variance is introduced and our plans never go as we plan. Intradium really enables you to rethink instead of spending so much effort trying to plan and schedule all that activity, you can really leverage the intraday variance to capitalize on far more delivery of training and coaching sessions. And I think you hit it on the head, right? That’s where the paradigm shift comes into play from a workforce planning perspective. We’ve known all our life is we look out in the future and we preplan by intervals. Now you’re really changing the tune here and saying, instead of doing that and guessing based on historical data, why don’t we look at the here and now of what’s going on right this moment and let automation take advantage of that that humans can’t react to fast enough? And so if we go to the next slide, we talked a little bit about pushing training to the agents. But the reality is, this same type of automation can be leveraged for any off phone activity. So, can we go one slide forward, and we’ll talk about some of these things are? What if you were able to leverage real time automation to do success stories, product updates, recognition breaks, surveys, to name a few. And what I didn’t mention earlier with the WFM integration, the good news is your team’s not having to go back and recode this in WFM. We’re doing the exception updates automatically for what they did and how long they spent to it. So again, to Kevin’s point, taking those manual activities off your analyst plates, getting them away from transactional work and making them analysts makes a happier workforce team, the benefits leak all the way down to the agent population. So if we go one more slide and we talk about specifically what we’re hearing from our customer communication, where are those benefits? Again, eliminating constant rescheduling for your ops, ensuring prepared agents. When I have prepared agents, guess what? That’s going lead to a better experience. Ted and Kevin both mentioned this, The ability to deliver much, much, much more content is going to be invaluable to your operations as well. As you see below, the head of a customer service health insurance, literally thousands and thousands of on demand trainings, and it just kept growing. Okay, well, wraps up what we were going to talk about today on today’s webinar. I do have a couple questions. The first one comes in, and Ted or Kevin, feel free to jump in. For the impromptu training, was it all digital recorded or was any of it trainer led? Yeah, for us, the majority of it we had preloaded. It was kind of like feeding an engine. And it could have been training content, but it could have been communications. It could be a wide range of things. We took and sort of rethought how we traditionally had delivered training. Because it’s on the fly and it’s at an individual level, if we did have a training that was to be instructor led, that is some of the stuff that we still manually trained. InterDM, in terms of trying to coordinate people for longer off phone activities, that’s not a strong use case, but at the end of the day, that was the minor piece that we did still preschedule. Instead, we took longer trainings, broke them down into ten, fifteen minute segments, and delivered them on demand, just kept feeding the engine in terms of content, whether it was a training, a refresher, a new knowledge base, a communication, feeding them in, and then Intradium would go along throughout the day, every single day. Hey, we’ve got a pocket of three agents available, let’s pop this training session or this reminder or this knowledge base refresher. So to answer that question, yeah, that really, if you’re thinking instructor led, we didn’t leverage it for gathering groups of people off home for longer periods of time, we really leveraged it for all of the just on demand shorter pieces. I don’t know, Kevin. Yeah, same answer. We were CBT based. We were early adopters. So very similar to Ted’s story. Kind of lesson learned for us was just having enough content to feed. We were so surprised by, again, the throughput we could get through dynamic delivery that it took us a while to catch up and just adapt our training to be conducive to that. We have one last question before we wrap up. Kevin, I’ll start with you. How are customers with high occupancy seeing benefits with this? Yeah, good question. Intuitively, think it really kind of would naively impact what we could do from any sort of intraday perspective, but especially dynamic delivery, but as most of us probably know, goes up, it absolutely causes havoc in your environment. Number one, it causes more inflation on AHT, you know, if people are just one call after another, they’re gonna take some breathing time in ACW. We always had a certain threshold where we hit a certain high occupancy threshold that it would actually add forty seconds. It was almost an exact correlation to our handle time. So having those real time lifelines and assistance through interday automation really helps to curtail that and help people get through their day. Secondly, a dynamic delivery perspective, if you think about when your occupancy is up, obviously very hard to get training done. What you’ve pre scheduled all that work you want to do to get those into the schedules gets canceled or delayed or pushed forward. With dynamic delivery, keeping an eye on a sort of second by second pulse read, we were always surprised by how much delivery time could find even with sort of a ninety percent occupancy environment. We were still finding between an hour and two hours of active wait time period and per month. You have a high occupancy environment. Typically it’s not every single interval every day. You got some shoulder periods in the day, you got shift overlap, and those small pockets of opportunity, they’re really hard to find manually and do it in time where you can take advantage of it. So that’s where the automation really pays dividends. Perfect. Ted, do you think that? Yeah, I would just add in addition, we’ve talked today primarily about training delivery, but in high occupancy, you can leverage InterDM for all types of use cases. I could write rules that said if someone was on back to back to back calls experiencing high occupancy, let’s pop them up instead of a training, a small, you know, one minute meditation break. So powerful, powerful technology, not just to keep people busy with training, but to look at environments where, hey, I’ve got a problem. You could look at handle time, queue time, occupancy, a whole number of variables out of your WFM and ACD system to write really creative rules. So I think, you know, some people say, well, high occupancy, this is gonna make it worse. Well, no, actually, you can still deliver the training, you can find the time during those periods, maybe not manually if you don’t have the technology, you can’t respond quick enough, but you can also look at endless other use cases to protect the environment and really support the agents. Yeah, I think you guys hit it on my head today. When you think about intraday automation, obviously, it’s going to bring efficiencies to your contact center, but more importantly, it’s going to improve your agent engagement and your customer experience. So that’s going to wrap up today’s webinar. And I appreciate everybody that joined today. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks.