AI Won’t Save Your Agents from Burnout: Why Fixing Attrition is the Key to AI Success

Good morning, everyone. This is Vicky Harrell, executive director of SWPP, and welcome to our webinar today. We’re gonna find out why AI won’t save your agents from burnout, and we’re excited today to have, Intradiem and Actionary presenting this webinar. If you haven’t been on one of our webinars, we usually start with getting, everybody interested in the chat. On the bottom right hand side of your screen, you should have a chat bubble and send a chat to everyone so that when they ask for your feedback during the webinar today, everybody will be able to see it. So let’s start out with just a question in the chat for you to send some information back to us. Let us know how many agents that you have in your organization today, and we’ll see, where where everybody is out there. But, again, it’s on the bottom right hand side of your screen with the chat bubble. I am not seeing anything come in yet. Are you finding the chat in there? Ah, there we go. Okay. Now they’re starting to come in. Alright. So right now, we’re going from three hundred all the way up to two thousand and twelve hundred in the middle. Approximately two hundred from Christina. Right. So if you just put us a note in there and let us know, again, how many agents you have. Just we just wanna make sure everybody finds a chat so that when we start, getting questions from, the panel that that we know where to put put our where to put our answers. Alright. Anybody else up there? There we go. Austin’s got around two hundred and fifty. Alright. Well, I’m gonna go ahead and turn it over to Josh and let him get started. Welcome, and, excited to have you with us today, Josh. Thanks so much, Ricky. Hi, everybody. Oh, hi again. Just a couple weeks ago, I saw all you folks. I’m joined today by Jim Davies and Simon Harrison. Gonna ask them to, introduce themselves first, and they’ll round us up, and then we’re gonna go through an overview on on on AI and the industry at large. Jim, do you wanna go first? Yeah. Hi, everybody. My name is Jim Davies, cofounder of Actionery, which is a research and advisory company and very passionate about the workforce and engagement, and, yeah, really pleased to be on this webinar today. Yeah. I’m Simon Harrison, obviously, cofounder of Actionery two. Spanning the industry, find this, you know, when it comes to contact center and everything adjacent to be really quite interesting areas. Technical early on, went through various iterations in my career up through to, senior marketing positions, lead analyst at Gartner, wrote a few magic quadrants. And now we really enjoy working with, with vendors like Intradiem, on the research and webinars like this. Awesome. Thank you, gentlemen. Hi, everyone. Josh Wilkins. I’m the solutions consultant for Intradiem. I, I have ten plus years in the contact center. I was an agent on the phone some fifteen years back using Intradiem as an end user. I went in management training all the way up to command center and kind of shared services. So, yeah, I’m really excited to have this this session with you guys today. Simon, I’m gonna hand it back over to you. Yeah. Thanks, Josh. I thought we’d start out just by doing a little bit of a take stock of where we are in terms of AI in this customer service world. Obviously, really about framing maybe what’s contributing to this attribute attrition problem that we’re gonna talk some more detail about in this webinar. So first of all, kind of we’ve seen chatbots, automated workflows, real time assistance. We’re seeing the, you know, the demonstration, of of AI delivering what it promised. Right? We’re seeing reduced, response times, streamlined processes, doing better with, you know, with, more with less. And the research is kinda confirming this. You know, McKinsey talking about thirty to forty five percent improvements in operational productivity for orgs that are adopting the AI thing. So let’s not spend much time on that. We’ve got the proven use case. We’re seeing the value. What’s interesting is the perception that adopting AI and supporting customer service to deliver better experiences is more likely perceived to be something that is, an advantage for businesses. When actually, the reality is it’s more likely to be that we’re needing AI to keep up. So, you know, many of us have embraced AI in our everyday lives. Right? You know, we are all using GPT, and we’re more connected, more informed than ever, or we may think we are. You know, we think we know lots more. In fact, it’s it’s fun to see how we we tend to be challenging experts with, well, I asked chat GPT, and it said this. So, obviously, I can I can punch my weight now? It’s a common thing. So we think we know more. We feel more empowered, and we actually tend to actually do know more, it’s fair to say. So when it comes to engaging with real live agents, they’re obviously getting more and more difficult questions to answer. You know, we’re more we’re we’re more up to speed. We’re we’re we’re engaging them later. And we’re and but we’re still expecting those resolutions, the high quality resolutions. Right? So, you know, you could argue that our expectations as customers needs the technology that can keep up. So, in fact, I’ll I’ll I’ll I’ll use one key data point. Forrester did some research called what they call the CX index. And in this research, the headline, discovery was CX is the worst it’s ever been. Thirty nine percent of brands surveyed. About eighty five thousand to a hundred and twenty thousand peoples, that are, you know, engaging with these brands were surveyed. And there was a significant drop in CX scores, more than double the seventeen percent the previous year. And the pervasive issues being inefficient customer service and district experience gaps. So, you know we’re not doing as well as we should be in CX kind of illustrating the point that we do need this technology to keep up. Because you could argue when it comes to that kind of finding is it that companies are getting worse at delivering great experiences or are customers wanting more because they’ve because they’ve become so empowered? Regardless, as Spencer say, AI and customer services need to keep up with us very demanding customers and when it comes to engaging live, we all tend to only get in touch when we can’t help ourselves. Right? You know this is kind of a an important fact. We we expect the intelligent self-service solution so we can solve our problems more so ourselves, but we do not expect them to replace being able to speak to a person. In fact, the thought of that is a little bit scary, actually. So when it comes to, you know, looking at research from the likes of Gartner, who are predicting that by twenty twenty eight, the the EU will mandate the right to talk to a human in service interactions. It’s clear that human touch is going to persist, and, again, that’s a big deal. Agents need to be more equipped and more supported than ever, and it’s not going away. And and, of course, all of these increasing pressures and dynamics mean if we could switch to the next slide, Josh. You know, can you know, attrition continues to be high, and it’s going to remain high in an AI supported customer engagement world if we don’t start doing something about it. And it’s a it’s kind of a big deal. And it’s, it’s one of those interesting things though because it’s as if companies are not really giving the attention it deserves. And I I was looking at this part on the right here, the graphic here. I was looking at search by Salesforce. They do a state of the market report every year. And one of the questions they ask, you know, is about attrition. And a third of the people they surveyed. And I can’t remember how many thousands it was, but it was thousands of organizations they surveyed. A third of those people said, yeah, attrition is a major challenge for our customer service organization. But the thing that then stood out to me was the fact in that same survey, that same research, where they were asking, well, what are your service priorities for the next few years, trying to retain service agents wasn’t even in the top ten. So on one hand, they’re acknowledging that attrition is a major challenge. And on the other hand, they’re not really trying to do anything about it, which to me seems like this is sort of deep ingrained mindset that this is just an inevitable cost of doing business. And I think that’s really worried mindset to have, and it needs to try and break that mindset. And, you know, going back to Simon’s point earlier about the that potential EU mandate about the role to speak to a human. We’ve got to focus a little bit more on this rather than just saying, nope. That’s just the way it is. I don’t know, Josh, if you’ve seen any examples of this recently, but it seems a worrying trend to me. Yeah. Definitely. And what we hear from the field and in my own experience is that that the problem is just the multitude of of different data points, a variety of different tools, conflicting priorities. Teams want actions. They don’t want a litany of tools or reports to dig through. So trying to become an analyst to dig through the the myriad of data points that were fed every day, it’s really an insurmountable problem at times. And and ultimately, it’s the frontline that really bears the weight of that problem. So it’ll be really great if we could pop a poll question in just to ask the audience. Chelsea, do you have that kind of handy to drop in? We’re gonna ask how many of you have some kind of goal to reduce employee attrition, especially from a top line, speaking with leadership, pushing it that way. Love a good poll. Yeah. Connor. Ah, perfect. Thank you, Chelsea. Give everyone a minute or two to answer. But, yeah, largely the the the challenge of understanding the kind of hidden signals and digging into to to see where a problem would start and and figuring out where to spend your time. It’s it’s a big problem in the contact center. You have a hundred different rabbits to chase at any point in the day. You could chase down this data point or for, call recordings or listen to a hundred different samples of something. What we really need is something to kinda guide us and push us towards the the the right action to take to kinda save a lot of our digging, a lot of our time and get right to the action and doing something about it. Yeah. We have an employee attrition plan as part of our workforce and technology road map. That’s excellent. Brilliant. The current And, mister Austin? Maybe from a size perspective. A lot of times, if you’re growing early on, if your your growth is really, really high, attrition could be something you don’t notice quite as much. But especially once you start scaling up and trying to manage the long term budgets, attrition becomes a a huge cost center for a business, and that that’s really what we’re talking about today. Yeah. Interesting. That’s interesting now from Carmen that, that they’ve set goals for teams to reduce it. It’d be interesting to discuss how they’ve gone about that. But, they have seen an improvement in tenure as a result. So it looks like the goals have been achieved, which is nice to see. Because I think part of the challenges that that we’ve observed and that you’ve seen on the coal face Josh is how people have been trying to reduce attrition over the years. They’ve tried different technologies and different approaches, and it might work for a little bit or maybe it doesn’t work at all. And so they end up just thinking it’s just not worth the budget. It’s just not worth the time. So that’s where that’s got ingrained negative mindset comes in, but it’s nice to hear from Carmen that actually sometimes it can work. It’s not just the cost of providing a service organization. You know? That’s the important point, isn’t it? Yeah. Absolutely. And you know what the problem is is from a well-being perspective, just understanding of the contact center, it’s a hard world to exist in. From triple digit occupancy to new products or new tools launching on a daily basis, changing conditions like the occupancy or weather events, everything like that really adds up. And the frontline people taking the phone calls and the managers supporting them, they’re the ones who carry that weight on their shoulders day after day. It really adds up to a chaotic world, and then you layer in the AI kinda automating a lot of work away, chat box removing simple calls, password resets. To be honest, the fun calls back in my day where it was a two minute call, if you’re in and out, you’re your happy you’re solving problems, I’ve got this all around. It it it really means that the the challenge of being well in an environment like this, it’s difficult. So so from an interview perspective, what we talk about, when we talk about automating for efficiency or solving problems, we always try and balance against what we call the three e’s, efficiency, engagement on the agent front, and then experience from a customer perspective. We can automate. We can solve problems, but you really have to make sure that we’re driving towards solving those three things at the same time. Otherwise, you’ll start solving one and maybe another one might suffer. In the past, solving the attrition problem, digging through that data, you essentially have an army of analysts. You have a a data scientist, a whole bunch of data sets, pulling the data together to understand those hidden signals and try and do something about it. With advancements in machine learning and really being able to use these tools to our advantage, we’re getting to a place where we don’t need that army to do that work. We can do quite a bit of it in the moment as it’s happening, and then feed those insights, feed those actions over to someone to do something about to take that action. So so so yeah. So, I mean, obviously, you’re starting to talk about the parts of the way that we might get to some of the solution areas there, Josh. But I yeah. When we look at what’s happening, in terms of AI investments as a whole, there is clearly a lot of mandate from the the the c suite team, the the guys out there going to shows, being inspired, coming into the business and going, we need to use AI to save some money, do things in a more efficient way, and we wanna do better for customer experiences. And these are the the contact centers, the low you know, the low the, the obvious areas to start doing more of those things. What’s fascinating is that, you know, given the depth of the market and vendors are providing solutions to help contact center CRM, customer engagement center, digital customer service vendors. There’s many, obviously, all providing AI capabilities. There is this kind of, you know, shopping list of things that that they tend to talk more about as well. You know, the process efficiency, the task automation, hyper personalization, proactive customer engagement, those kind of things. The elephant in the room is what’s missing from these use cases, of course. And Yeah. And I think if if you if you look at the list on the left there, which is all the sort of main AI use cases that we’ve seen in the marketplace, where’s where’s the focus on the employee and where’s the focus on the, you know, the engagement and well-being of that employee? It it’s all focused on improving CX, which is great, and improving operational performance, which is great, but there seems to be this, this gap is void in terms of the employee side of things. Now if you speak to the software vendors, they will say, well, agent assist is making life easier for the, for the employee. And that’s helping them in their day to day tasks, but really it’s just trying to drive through productivity. You know, it’s not to help them. It’s to make things easier and get things done so you can get more done. And when you look at the budget around AI at the moment, it’s the AI driven customer service technology market is something between twelve and fifteen billion dollars That was what it was in twenty twenty four, depending on which research organization you got, something between twelve and fifteen dollars with twenty two percent CAGR for the next few years. So this is a massive market. But when you look into that multi billion dollar market, how much of that is set aside for AI based technologies that can help drive the well-being of the staff? I think it’s less than one percent, way less than one percent. And I have to say, I’m guessing that that’s an estimate because there’s no public available data that I can turn to that says, yeah. The AI well-being investment budget is x in this organization or why in that organization or Gartner or Forest or whoever is sizing that market. Nobody’s really looking at it. And again, that makes a point in itself that nobody’s really looking at well-being as this thing we need to focus on hand in hand with what we’re doing with AI. Because if someone cared about it, there’ll be a metric I could put in from somewhere, but it just doesn’t exist in in the marketplace. Yes. Brilliantly. It’s scaryly accurate. The point about there not being the research being inside itself. It’s it’s amazing, really, isn’t it? That’s a great take. Interesting trip. Yeah. I was gonna say, interesting to do a quick poll on this, Josh, if we delve into this or budget a little bit more on where the AI is, being targeted. Yeah. You beat me to it. We were gonna ask how many of you are looking at AI tools to improve employee well-being kind of specifically for for this topic we’re talking about. And I’m I’m I’m curious if that ties into the, agent assist that we mentioned a second ago or if it’s something different than that. So there’s some people coming through that should be feeling good right now. They’re Yeah. I was gonna say. Bear on it. Brilliant. Okay. So it is the agent assistant and additional efforts pulled. Okay. Fantastic. Well, I’d love to I’d love to follow-up with, with Chris and Christina to, to delve into those use cases because, obviously, as my my background, I didn’t finish too much detail earlier, but, had twenty two years at Gartner. I was the the gender manager for customer service. I was the creator of WEM, the workforce engagement management acronym, which I introduced to replace the old acronym that was WFO, workforce optimization, because I felt WFO had far too much emphasis on operational performance and, and treated the agent like a cog in a machine. Whereas I want you to put much more focus on the employee and their engagement and their well-being, hence the WEM acronym. So yeah, this is something that’s really close to my heart. So anybody that’s setting time aside with their AI investments to focus on well-being, love to have a follow-up conversation with you. Interesting point. And I’ve missed the name about AI being all about job replacement coming through. I mean, it’s the other end of the the this the spectrum, isn’t it, ultimately? The scary thing you know, the reality is that that’s not necessarily what we want as customers. There’s some interesting research, out from Gartner. I think it was something like sixty four percent of those surveyed said that they prefer just speaking to a person over AI. There’s there’s all sorts of ways to slice and dice the perspective from a research perspective, but somewhere in the middle is obviously the right balance, isn’t it? Yeah. Absolutely. And and then tying into your your background here. Oh, sorry. No. There’s a sign that I’m handing over. Yeah. Yeah. No. I mean and I think the the interesting thing for me is AI and just sort of fits in perfectly with, with Anne’s comments about AI is for job elimination. I mean, I don’t think in my lifetime, we’re gonna have a world without an agent. And with the EU mandate, since you’re coming in, that’s probably gonna reinforce that, but or my, maybe not my life, maybe my career. So wherever long that is, but, I think it’s really interesting to see that AI has so much power and it’s gonna have such the positive impact on organizations, particularly when we start moving to agency as well. But what we are seeing right now is if you think about what AI automation can do, it can help simplify those. It can help solve those simple tasks where there’s low complexity and a low level of emotion. That’s what this, this chart is showing on the left here. But as soon as you start to get into those more complex or those more emotional interactions, that’s when the AI starts to fail a little bit and it’s gonna get better over time, obviously. But right now, as soon as you get that level of complexity or that level of emotion higher, it’s where that human agent starts to kick in and starts to really make the difference. And those calls have always been now over the last many years. But the difference now is they’re occurring in greater numbers because the AI is helping with the address changes in the password resets and the product returns. All the things that the agent can do almost in their sleep means that everything they’re doing now is just those real complex tasks. And so they don’t get a cognitive break. They’re constantly having to be on the top of their game, dealing with that complexity. They need to show that greater level of empathy. They need to have deeper problem solving skills. They need to be more patient. And this leads to greater stress and it leads to greater, greater burnout. So as great as AI is in terms of helping drive that productivity and driving CX is actually me and the agents having, having a much harder time at work because they don’t get that address change where they can just calm down a little bit, and take a breath before the next complex call. Cause they’re just relentlessly one after each other yet. And that’s, what’s leading to this data point in the middle here, which was, from Salesforce who do a sort of state of the market report every year. And they’re showing that you have fifty six percent, fifty six percent of agents are now experiencing burnout. So it’s, it’s getting bigger and bigger. And I was also looking at the, the Gallup report. I don’t know if anyone’s seen that, but it’s worth reading that, which is their latest state of the market. And they’ve shown that seventy nine percent of employees are currently disengaged. So that’s enterprise wide, that’s not just contact center, but seventy nine percent are disengaged. And that’s actually a bigger number than last year. So engagement levels have dropped year on year, and there’s only two times in recent histories of going back over ten years or so, there’s only two times where that’s happened in the past. And both of those times are linked to COVID lockdown. So that’s quite a profound statement that we are dropping our engagement level of employees without the constraints of a COVID environment. So the we’re in this sort of crisis point, I would say, where employees across all departments are starting to fatigue out and they’re not being recognized by management. And actually in this, in the study, in the, developed report, this is them rippling down to management and supervisor as well. So actually the biggest decline in engagement across enterprises is in the management sector. So this is not just an agent thing. This is an enterprise wide thing that we need to be need to be looking at. What’s scary about that, Jim, is also I mean, you’re you’re you’re talking about, the effects in terms of economy are dramatic too. Right? I mean, that specific was it’s it’s costing the global economy eight point nine trillion. And so there’s this spiraling negative effect. You’ve got disengagement, but you’ve also got a huge cost of that disengagement that we need to flip to turn those things around. And, yeah, I mean, as Jim says, that’s a really interesting report worth reading. Definitely worth reading some of the commentary about, you know, you know, of those surveys. And it was about a hundred and twenty eight thousand employees Current some of the commentary they share on why they’re not engaged, why they’re actively disengaged is really quiet. It’s I don’t I don’t wanna say it’s it’s it’s amusing. It’s not, but some of it to read is, wow. It’s quite it’s quite interesting stuff. So but yeah. Okay. So so, moving on then, George. Yeah. Well, I mean, honestly, when it comes to I I’m gonna say we’ve glorified the problem enough, chaps. I think it’s time to get a little bit into the solution. And, and I I know this this slide’s definitely a bit of Jim, the feedback guy. So I’m gonna hand this one over to you, bud. Thanks. Thanks, Todd. Yeah. So I mentioned the beginning you know, I was, the web guy at Gartner, but I was also the voice of customer guy. So, anything to do with getting feedback from customers or employees is is definitely something I’m I’m really interested in. And it sounds it sounds obvious, but I think for me, if we’re trying to trying to address attrition, there needs to be a really robust voice of the employee program in place as as a start point. And people probably roll in their eyes going, oh, we’ve got that. We’ve done that. Or it’s not that value. It doesn’t work. But I think there is still a huge opportunity for doing a good job of of voice of the employee. And I think the challenge is most organizations are not doing it properly. So I I would I don’t wanna run a complete poll on this or stop my conversation, but if someone in the chat just wanna say, yes, we’re doing this or yes, we’re thinking, just let me know what your thoughts are on VOE as I’m talking. I’d love to pick up on that as a side chat, but it’s been shown time and time again, if you focus on a proper robust VOE program, there is a positive benefit for it. Now, now Qualtrics, which is one of the leading VOC, VOE vendors, they state that their customers who use their technology for VOE have a sixteen percent increase in employee engagement. So that’s the power of having a VOE top technology. Now the start point, the VOE is having surveys. And everybody again rolls their eyes at surveys, but they are so powerful if done properly. And in customer service, we should be looking at three types of employee surveys that should all be all be running in parallel. There should be ad hoc feedback collection where somewhere on that agent screen, there’s a little button they can press at any time during the day, no matter what system they’re in, where they can click a button and just give some feedback. Or this process could be better if we did this or my chair’s uncomfortable or my headset at the hearing isn’t very good or the microphone is not strong or whatever feedback they wanna leave, there needs to be a real effortless way of them being able to provide that feedback. Whereas most companies I talk to, yes, you can get feedback from employees, but you’ve gotta hunt around in terms of some internal portal somewhere and scroll down and find that. And you’ll eventually get to somewhere where you can leave some feedback rather than there being this nice little feedback button on the screen so they can leave feedback as it springs to mind. So that’s the first type of feedback that’s important. Second type of feedback is having some sort of daily check-in, some sort of how is your day to day? Thumbs up, thumbs down. How are you feeling? Just a quick pulse check on on where they are, how they’re feeling. And then thirdly, that regular survey with the employee just to understand what their thoughts are now based on the systems they use, the the workload, their career path and training, the the home office setup, and the commute to work. So all the things that make up their day to day life, just checking on that on a regular basis once a month just to see how that’s going and if there’s any trends and learnings from that. So so those three, I call direct feedback because you’re directly reaching out to that employee and asking them for for feedback. And that’s been shown just by having that direct capability for employees to share their thoughts and feelings with you can have a positive impact on their well-being and their engagement level. Even if you do nothing, even if you literally take that feedback and put it in the bin, you will have a happier employee. And that’s been proven many times over. Now I wouldn’t recommend doing that. Obviously the best is to try and do something with that feedback. Process of collecting it has a positive impact on that employee. So collect it, analyze it, and obviously close the loop and do, do something with that feedback. Well, yeah. But your survey piece is obviously just one part of this. And this again then gets into AI because the second part of the VOE program is where you’re looking at indirect feedback. So this is feedback from the employee that they’re maybe giving to you, but they’re not doing it in a direct way. They don’t necessarily know they’re giving it to you as feedback. So that’s where you start getting into, the analysis of the interaction using, voice analytics or text analytics, if it’s a text communication. And AI can have a hugely important role here because you can start to pick up on not just the customer experience, and operational performance gain opportunities, but you can also look at it from that employee’s perspective. And are they are they saying things like, oh, I’m sorry. My system’s running slow today. You know, they’re giving you feedback about their operational environment that you could maybe improve. Or are they saying, oh, I’m very sorry. I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m a bit tired now because I’ve done ten of these calls. Or maybe they’re starting to sigh a little bit or show other signs of fatigue in the interaction, all of which you can pick up to help understand their well-being in in this, in in analytics. But again, what you tend to see in the marketplace when you talk about AI and the use case in terms of analyzing interactions, you, you don’t see it from the point of view of the employee and their well-being. You see it from the point of view in customer experience, in terms of operational performance gains, maybe call summarization, all those topics, but not on how can we use this interaction of the analysis to understand the well-being of our staff. And that’s quite a good good use case to to to weave in to a to a VOE program. But once you start looking at data to understand the the employee’s well-being and this little state end, having a BOE program is just one part of that. It’s a critically important part of it, it, but there’s many other forms of data that you can start to weave into this puzzle to get that holistic understanding of what what’s going on. This isn’t solving the problem of attrition. It’s helping you understand it. And then from that understanding, you can then start to drive programs that can try and improve it and reduce it. But I know, Josh, this is something you’re passionate about, those other data sources. So if you wanna sort of chip in here, that would be great. Yeah. Absolutely. And thank you for that, Jim. I I love what Austin shared about the BOE program and kinda circling kinda circling back and presenting the feedback back to the frontline who shared it. And I my experience, it’s one of the best ways to to drive home that, hey. We’re actually listening. So a great conversation. Yeah. And a hundred percent. If if you can take that feedback, and then go back to the employees and say, this is what you’ve told us. Now the thing that’s the thing that only the best companies do is go back to the employees and hang what I call hang their dirty line. Okay? Because it’s quite if you’re in management, you don’t necessarily want to go back to your employees to say, hey. We’re really bad at this because that’s just you don’t wanna do it. You don’t wanna reveal what you’re not so good at. Right. But, actually, the employees already know it. But if you’ve captured that as feedback, being able to present back to the employees, say, hey. Look. You’ve told us that we need to do better at a, b, c, d. That’s a really powerful thing to do. Yep. But some companies are quite nervous about doing that because they say they’re hanging their dirty washing on the line. Obviously, if you can put programs in place to address those issues, even better. I don’t think you do what you’re talking about, Jim, obviously. Clearly, you’re passionate about this stuff. Sorry, Josh, for that time. No. No. No apology needed. No. That was awesome, and it’s a really good segue into the idea here. Imagine if you were able to continuously measure that engagement. So you have the feedback loop. You have someone raising their hand saying that I feel this way. I need this help. You’ve got the indirect piece that Jim shared where we can measure this with sentiment analysis or going deeper into call recordings, things like that. Again, if you think back to what I shared earlier about the problem, there’s a lot of data. There’s a lot of tools. There’s a lot of insights. If I’m a manager, where am I supposed to spend my time? Who do I focus on? Who do I action today versus just coming in and trying to support everyone? Obviously, everyone needs support, but there’s also bottom, quartiles, people who are struggling more, kinda low hanging fruit or something that I really should be spending my time on today. What we were found when we started looking at this problem, call centers are very rich in data. Because of ACD data and the way that we integrate them from an Intradiem perspective, we’re able to really see a lot of data points that will indicate all of this behavioral all these behavioral challenges. But from a data perspective, we can identify it before it even happens. We can actually predict burnout percentages or burnout categories, which I’ll explain in just a second, by looking at all these data points. We we trend handle time in a variety of different ways. We look at time on call, occupancy data, trending handle time for today, three days, a couple of days, a week in week in advance. All of those different data sets feeding it into a machine learning model. We’re able to really identify patterns that a human wouldn’t be able to see, predict where someone might be struggling, and then ultimately point you in the right direction to take action on it. If you think back to the whole insights and and analysis conversation, we don’t want you folks to have to do all that work. We wanna do as much of it as possible and then feed up a nice idea or a suggestion. Here’s the next step to take. Here’s who you should be focusing on. From an actions perspective, it’s really important to map this against what’s possible from a company side of things. I I have a really good, case study that to share just in a little bit. But, essentially, identifying people who are in any of these categories, if you’re in a low risk or a moderate risk, this is your propensity to burnout. We can we can predict this up to eighty percent accuracy out of two weeks out, essentially letting you know before a problem happens that we should be identifying and doing something about this. In a perfect world, before we get to that point where someone’s gonna treat in two weeks, they’re at a low or a moderate risk, we can take actions like enabling a coaching session, getting extra training, a a surprise break on their birthday or work anniversary, things like that. A lot of times, it’s just a quick conversation that’s needed. We need to go and check-in with that person. It’s kind of that human last mile element. Instead of digging through all that data, I know that this person’s struggling. Let me go and just have a conversation with them and and see where things are. It’s it’s it’s really interesting to hear from customers where they’re identifying kind of how to spend their time once they see the problem. Everyone knows this is a challenge in the industry. It’s more how do I do something about it in the moment and then take action to to to solve something. I like the sort of tiered remedial thinking, Josh. It’s not a one solution fits all, is it? It’s about making sure you’re mapping the right solution to the right problem. Okay. So if we if we’re we are One of the one of the things I’ve I’ve seen being particularly effective is is the ability agent to have a bit more flexibility in their shift patterns as well. So I think if if you’ve got your one hour break at two o’clock and yet you’ve had a particularly stressful call at one fifteen, you don’t necessarily wanna wait forty five minutes until you can take your next next break. So that but it’s like, I just wanna grab ten minutes now just to come and get a coffee, walk around the floor, or walk around our home if you’re working at home, and then come back and check-in again at one twenty five and then carry on for the next thirty five minutes. I think that type of flexibility, I think, is a is a real, good means of just trying to just stop it from escalating. You have that bad call. You can just take a break, take a breather, and then come back rather than having another forty five minutes of just hard work before you get to your break. Yeah. I love that. And and I know we’re we’re come coming up on time, but just to share a really quick story, one of our customers kind of invented a solution where they would extend lunches for people and offer them unpaid time. Hey. It’s really quiet. Why don’t we take an extra lunch? To automate that, it’s a lot easier than prescheduling, going through a request process and updating it. So just, an awesome example of integrating into these different platforms and thinking about a way to focus on the employee. You can balance both sides. That’s a huge budget win. If you’re sitting with idle time and I’m sending people home early, they can go pick up their kids, go have a quick lunch, take a break, take a walk, whatever it is, and then come back an hour and a half later, and everybody’s happier. It’s a win win for everyone. Just a segue in. It’s Simon. We’ve got a couple Sounds good to me. I I think I want some of that myself, Josh. Yeah. Of course, you know, investing in well-being comes in many forms. So we’re just gonna finish up here with you’re talking about, you know, beyond the technology. There’s lots of academic studies out there on the effects of things like empathy training, which can significantly help prevent professional burnout as it’s known, associated with what we call high stress positions, and I’d argue agents are more and more, as we’ve said, you know, everything’s up leveling. They’re more and more in a higher and higher stress sort of positions when it comes to the expectations of us being so informed. And so, you know, so so much further up in terms of the solution before we try to engage with them. Staff can be given the bandwidth and encouraged to do things themselves, of course. And, you know, empathy maps are a powerful form of self reflection to help staff practice a bit of self care, turning the lens inwards and building awareness of their, you know, their internal state needs and patterns. And that can actually help businesses to, you know, to to catch some signs of burnout and misalignment of stress as well based on them doing those exercises. Else, although, obviously, may, you know, it may seem obvious when implementing our solutions, training programs should definitely run-in parallel that go beyond the technical knowledge, of course. You know, educating on soft skills like empathy, emotional intelligence, advanced problem solving. So employees can adjust without feeling overwhelmed by new technology, a change in their role, and what’s expected of it, and still having to do as well as they always have, or even better. So, you know, you know, employees need to be equipped with to work with with AI systems whilst they still manage these ever more complicated interactions. Ultimately, combining the technology and introducing these practices, encouraging staff to help themselves as well has a profound effect on retention and directly, improves AI deployment sec success. So I think Josh has got some great examples of this. He mentioned one a minute ago where where, you know, businesses that have invested in well-being have seen some great, you know, outcomes. One of them is gonna spotlight for us now, I think, before we finish up. Yeah. Thanks, Simon. So just to kind of tie it all together. We ran a a recent pilot customer where they they piloted control versus a pilot group, and we basically loaded the software that I I talked about earlier. Again, the idea was that we’re using those hidden signals to identify risks of burnout, and we categorize them in those different buckets, and we map that against activity to support people. Within the pilot, they spent maybe an hour to two hours each week. About thirty minutes of that was looking at dashboards, which basically highlighted, hey, who which agents are in which category, who is at risk to having a burnout this week, and and what should I do about it? So what should I do about it? In this case, they just had conversations. They had, one on one meetings, very small schedule adjustments. There was one employee who just wanted acknowledgment that the group was really struggling, and it was a rough time at that moment. And that’s what I mentioned earlier about identifying where I should be spending my time. If someone’s at a moderate risk and they’re they’re at risk to move up to a high, if I go and have a quick conversation with them and just talk about well-being, maybe there’s a program that Simon was mentioning where they can do something, a training for some sort of extra adjustment to breaks or lunches, extending lunches, things like that. What would they really found throughout this pilot is that they didn’t know what well-being programs were available at the company. And identifying that this person was at risk, it’s something they knew deep down. Hey. It’s a busy environment, a little bit disengaged. Seeing it on paper in front of them based on the data, it really helped people to hone in who to spend that time on and then to identify what to do about it. And they just saw a huge uptake in those programs to take advantage of already being paid for, employee assistance programs, things like that. And and, ultimately, what they saw was a seven percent reduction in attrition versus the control group. And this was over six months, and we extrapolated it for the year. But that’s a powerful number. If anyone knows about recruitment costs, you’re looking anything where from north of ten thousand US dollars just to get someone into a seat just to do the recruiting and the interviews and things like that. We’re not even talking about training and upscaling and kinda lost knowledge, lost tribal knowledge. That’s another layer of cost on top of that. This is why that the people problem is really one of the most expensive, and we’re throwing all this time and money at solving the technology problem. Let’s throw a little bit of on top of the people side, and then it’ll it’ll the the ROI there is absolutely, it’ll come back in spades. That was the thing that I love about this whole topic and the webinar, Josh, is the return is phenomenal, isn’t it? I mean, reflecting on the Gallup report, reflecting on the positive outcomes in terms of just engagement and staff feeling, you know, valued and so on. But then directly improving the card the the the money to invest in things for improving the way he helps, you know, the customers, etcetera. It’s such a it’s such a great thing. This is just a win win situation with the right technology and, as you say, with some of those practices. And what’s great is the the cost of a false positive is a more engaged employee. Worst case, if I think that you’re coming towards a burnout event and I come and have a conversation with you, everyone’s happier on the way out regardless. So there is really low risk to go and take that effort and do something about it. Perfect. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me, gentlemen. Appreciate your time. Thanks, everyone. I really appreciate you joining us. And, I love the engagement. I love those questions. We’ll follow-up with some people. Alright. Well, this is very interesting and, lots of great information here. If there are any other questions, y’all put them in the chat, and and I’m sure that these gentlemen can address them. But, boy, did we learn a lot today. And, I love this, case study that you put because a seven percent reduction in attrition is a is a huge amount. So, I think that’s a good some great great quest you know, great feedback in the poll. It was really interesting insight, actually. Seems like a lot of you guys are doing a lot of things right and have the opportunity to, you know, really, you know, perhaps, you know, take take some of this back to the business and and really help, drive some things forward beyond what you’re doing already already very well. And Martin is asking if we’d be sending the slide deck to participants. I’m sure we can get a copy of. We’ll work with we’ll work with Melissa and team. And we will definitely send out the recording as well. So if you wanna share this with someone else in your organization, you can share the recording of it. So alright. Well, I don’t see any other questions coming through. Anything else from the panel? Thanks again for such great information. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Thanks for having us. Appreciate it. Have a great day, everyone. Thanks, Paul. Okay. My final. Thank you. Have a great