Engaged & Efficient Agents: The Blueprint for Unlocking Exceptional Customer Experiences

This is Vicky Harrell, executive director of SWPP, and welcome to our webinar today sponsored by Intradium. We’re gonna learn about how to get engaged and efficient agents and give you a blueprint for unlocking exceptional customer experiences. We’re really excited today to have, Ted Lango with us from Intradiem, and our presenter today, for the most part is Robin Garris, who is the CEO and principal analyst of Metrology. So welcome to the presenters. I would love for you to interact with them throughout this, webinar this morning. So on the bottom right hand side of your screen, there is a chat button. If you would pull that chat up and make sure that your chat says send to everyone, so that everybody can see what you’re putting in there. But, let us know where you’re listening from today and maybe how many agents you have in your contact center so we can see what kind of size of contact center people have this morning. So if you just put that information in the chat and let everybody see, where where you are and what you have. Alright. Springfield, Ohio, Sun City, Arizona, Jacksonville, Florida, Austin, Texas, East Tennessee, no agents. El Salvador. Had somebody from way off there. Tampa, Florida, Laredo, Texas, Charlotte, North Carolina, South Dakota, Minnesota, San Antonio. Oh, we got some Philippines. I don’t know what time it is there, but it’s not it’s not ten in the morning for you. Ohio, Peninsula, Florida. Alright. Walled Lake, Michigan. Bob, I’ve never heard of Walled Lake, Michigan. Wow. Okay. Alright. Well, thanks everybody for putting that information in there. And I’m gonna go ahead and turn it on over to Robin and Ted and let y’all get started. But welcome, everybody. Great. Alright. Well, I’ll just jump in here and do a quick introduction and then turn it over to Ted to introduce himself as well. So welcome, everybody. My name is Robin Garrett. I saw at least one person from, where I live, which is in the Tampa area. And, I I didn’t type it in because I’m presenting right now, so I didn’t wanna mess anything up with my screen. But, I’m CEO, like I said, you know, like Vicky said, CEO and principal analyst at Metrology. So, we are a research and advisory firm. I’ll tell you a little bit more about us in a minute, but I’m delighted to be here to talk about this because I think it’s a really an important topic. And especially as companies add more and more AI into their contact center, I really do think taking care of these, human agents and not not worrying as much about the virtual agents sometimes is is really, really important, and we’ll we’ll share some research we’ve done on that. Ted? Thanks, Robin. I’m Ted Lango, senior vice president at Intradium and founder of WFM Labs. It’s great to be here today. I’m excited to dive into this critical discussion as well about how engagement, agent engagement, human agent engagement impacts customer satisfaction and the efficiency in call centers. Robin’s got some great data. There’s clearly a connection between satisfied agents and exceptional customer experience. I’m really excited that we can share this data with you because I think it tells a a story that’s important to reiterate to your leaders, and understand where we’re going. So I’ll turn it back to you, Robin. Thanks. Great. Thanks, Ted. I’m sure you can add some great insights just based on all that you’ve done, all the work that you’ve done in your career in this industry and in this space. So, you know, please please, by all means, share the stage with me. Okay. So I’ll start by just talking very quickly, about Metrology for those of you who don’t know us, a little bit about our research. We’re gonna look at the agent experience and how that impacts CSAT with some quantitative data. What is the research actually saying about this? Can we prove that there is a connection? What’s happening with training and shrinkage? We’ll we’ll look at a little bit of that and idle time analysis and, you know, some customer preferences and strategies to success is where we’ll wrap up. Okay. So just very quickly about Metrigy, I think the name says a lot about who we are. It’s the combination of two words, metrics and strategy. So we go out and we conduct a lot of research with IT, CX, and business unit leaders primarily. So we’re, you know, talking to and working with the buyer. So a lot of people who, you know, are on the call today, you know, could potentially be people who participate in our research. And, I think the big thing that we really try and do with all of our research is kinda connect the dots. So if you’re using a certain type of technology, how is that moving the needle in your business metrics? So how is it changing revenue, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, agent efficiency, all those kinds of metrics? We really wanna see what the use of technology is gonna do to change those. So I lead our coverage at the company in the area of customer experience and contact center. I do run the company, but I just love doing research, so I can’t let it go. And, we have other analysts who cover some of the other areas that you see here. But, of course, covering CX, there’s by default, I’m doing a lot with AI these days as well just because there’s so much of that in, you know, in the CX world right now. Okay. So this particular research, or or excuse me, this particular presentation, we, I I pulled from two different studies. One was a targeted study that Metrology did, in partnership with Intra Diem. So we worked together to develop some questions where we really could look at the agent. You know? What what happens with agent efficiency when you use certain technologies? Are there links between agent efficiency and CSAT and things like that? So this was just over a hundred businesses in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and we did this in May. And we focused on, some of the verticals that, you know, we see a lot in the contact center, financial services, health care, telecom, and retail. And they were larger companies, so bigger contact centers here. And then I also pulled some pulled some data from our own independent research that we do, and this was a CX optimization study. Five hundred and forty four businesses that we looked at globally. A lot of alignment with these two studies, very much so. We did this just in August of this year, ten countries, twenty three industries. And this was, like, the ITCX and business unit leaders who had responsibility for customer experience. So it’s kinda we pulled from these two studies to to be able to pull together the data that we’re gonna share with you. So first, I wanna look at the agent experience and what impact does it have on CSAT. I I think that’s something that everybody should be looking at. One of our big goals, obviously, in the contact center is making sure customer satisfaction is as high as it possibly can be. So one of the things we did just to start is we asked organizations, well, does your company even correlate agent satisfaction with CSAT? So how satisfied are agents with your job? Are you doing, you know, regular surveys with your agents to gauge their own employee satisfaction? And do you correlate that with CSAT? And you can see the majority do. Vast majority, seventy eight per or I’m sorry. Sixty eight percent. So almost seventy percent are doing that correlation. And then when we ask them, okay. Great. For those who are correlating, how does agent satisfaction affect CSAT? You can see that more satisfied agents have higher CSAT in almost sixty percent of companies. So that’s that’s a, you know, pretty good, you know, correlation there showing that when your your agents are happy, when they’re doing well, your CSAT is going to be better. Just a small percentage there said they have lower CSAT, and then some will say it doesn’t affect it all. But overwhelmingly, companies are saying when your agents are happy, your CSAT’s better. But this was an area I always was passionate about at my previous job with MetLife. I always said it was interesting. We survey our customers on every single interaction, but we wait till once a year to find out how our agents are feeling. Yeah. Yep. When we did it, we found that direct correlation, and I actually advocated for a little bit more frequent, polling of how agents are feeling because it’s not a once a year thing. Right. Your your your basic satisfaction ebbs and flows over time, but the data speaks for itself. I mean, sixty almost sixty percent of customers report that they see that same correlation. I’ll I’ll just jump in and say too. If people have questions, we should have mentioned this. Feel free to drop them in the chat, and we’ll either take them at the end, or we can enter as we go along to keep people, engaged in this. So if you have any questions as we go, feel free to just drop those in the chat. And I also think, Ted, as we go along, this is an area where AI can help on the agent side. So like you said, a lot of companies do their annual employee survey. Right? But I think with AI doing things like sentiment analysis, do just doing analysis of, not only the customer sentiment, but also the agent sentiment, the agent satisfaction. We can see this more frequently, more regularly. We can get flags raised to supervisors when it seems like an agent isn’t happy. And, you know, like, there might be a problem based on tone of voice or word choice or, you know, how they’re how they’re doing, how they’re performing. And and that kinda gets me right into the next one, which is we asked about more engaged agents. So what are we talking about here? This is more about, like, agents that are excelling in their job performance. They’re generally satisfied with their jobs. They’re productive. You know, they’re interacting with supervisors and whatnot. And, when we, you know, we asked among those companies that look at this to what extent, their CX leaders agree with statement of more engaged agents. So they they fit that, definition we have over there on the left directly affect customer satisfaction. And look at this one. I mean, you’ve got over sixty percent saying they’re either at six or seven where they strongly agree. I I when I look at a one to seven, I usually look at, like, five, six, and seven are are people who are basically on the positive side of this. Obviously, they’re not neutral on the four. So, you know, gosh. Over ninety percent are basically saying, yeah. I mean, if our agents are engaged, they’re happy. They’re productive. They’re interacting. They’re talking to customers. You know, that that’s gonna affect satisfaction. There’s no doubt. Yeah. I think this is interesting because on your previous slide, while it’s fifty seven percent seeing more satisfied or happy agents lead to higher CSAT. Really, when you add that up, that’s like over ninety percent that say engaged agents lead to higher satisfaction. And for me, yeah, I don’t know how you have an engaged agent without that agent being happy, satisfied with what they’re doing. And that’s an interesting statistic, and I I think this speaks even, you know, louder to the fact that we really do have to invest in the time to keep the agents happy, engaged with every customer. It it it’s a logical logical data point, but one that I think people, you know, again, don’t look at often enough. Yeah. And it’s like, I think you can be satisfied with the job. You’d be happy like in the last slide. But maybe what it really takes to get to to correlate with that customer satisfaction is not only just being happy, but being productive, you know, getting that that coaching, interacting with your supervisors, and, you know, being a little more, almost like purposeful action oriented. And, then your numbers get up even higher. Now the next one that we looked at, was how does, you know, does your company correlate agent tenure with CSAT? So how long have your agents been there? About sixty four percent due. And I will say turnover rates are still too high. There’s still you know, depending upon the study you look, the low end thirty percent right now. I mean, they even higher in some companies. So tenure is I mean, the turnover rates are still you know, that we still need to work on those. But you can see when we asked how does agent tenure affect CSAT. Well, just under fifty percent said more experienced agents have higher CSAT. And, the next largest percentage just says, well, it really doesn’t affect CSAT. Now the interesting thing in our independent research data that we’ve done is we found a very direct correlation with the numbers. So if you can keep your c’s if you can keep your agent turnover rate below fifteen percent, your CSAT rate just by that alone will go up by about twenty six percent. So we see that big correlation there. Longevity really does matter. You know, more tenured agents are obviously they’re more experienced. They know your company better. They they’ve, you know, they just know how to handle certain issues. And when you have that turnover, there there’s obviously always that revolving door. You’ve got a mixture of inexperienced agents with experienced agents. Some are well trained. Some are not well trained. And and that can cause a lot of issues with CSAT if they get to an agent that maybe isn’t quite as well trained. I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen that, Ted. Right? Yeah. It and I think there’s another dimension of the complexity of the of the environment that agents are in. I’ve worked, as I said, at MetLife. We had a very complex environment, and there was a clear relationship here because over time, the agents got to know the system. They became more comp confident with complex issues, more comfortable. And and that’s why this slide makes sense to me is because I also see there becomes a point at which the agents maybe are just like, hey. I’ve been here four or five, six years. And at the end of the day, it’s like, okay. They’re just not, you know, as into that job. They’re ready to move on. Yeah. So it it it does make a lot of sense, and this is another one where I think people have to keep an eye on this. As AI starts taking out even more of these transactional inquiries, I do believe AI will be there to help agents as well, but they’re going to be the ones who are left with the more complex issues, and you’re gonna wanna hang on to those folks at the end of the day. Yeah. Absolutely. In our independent research, we we asked about those questions on complex research, and overwhelmingly, companies now are saying that their agents are only handling, you know, that complex question. They don’t have the overnight mailing address questions anymore. So they don’t get their brains don’t get a lot of a break. You know? They’re having to get more they have to get more breaks so that they can kinda like regroup, you know, refresh after, you know, maybe handling one complex issue after another. So that’s definitely something that I think we’re gonna have to be dealing more with, as we move forward for sure. So let’s look a little bit at training and shrinkage now. You know, so, obviously, we I’m sure everyone on this call knows what shrinkage is, but for any anyone new to this term, it’s a workforce management metric. It measures the time that agents are available. They’re I’m sorry. They’re they’re they’re being paid rather, but they’re not available to handle customer inquiries. So I’m here. You’re paying me. Or maybe I’m on PTO or I’m on holiday. I think the most valuable thing of shrinkage is is if they’re getting trained, but, you know, it could be a system outage. Well, that’s not good for anybody. But, you know, like a holiday PTO or leaving early, you’re you know, you’re getting paid, but that’s not doing any real value to the customer themselves. Right? So when we ask companies what percentage of their collective agent time did their, you know, did their contact center managers allow for shrinkage? You can see the largest percentage is actually in that thirty to thirty nine percent. If we do an average across everybody, it was about twenty six percent. You know, so that that’s a pretty fair amount of time that you’re paying people, and they’re not actually, you know, directly working with customers. They’re not solving problems. Right? So then oh, go ahead. I was just gonna say, no. Finish your thought, and I’ll add a thought here. Yeah. So then, you know, my big thing here is that I think as what Ted and I were just talking about as agent responsibilities become more complex, we’re gonna need even more breaks, you know, because just human nature. You need you need to clear your brain. Right? You need to clean or clear your mind. And that, you know, certainly is gonna result in even higher shrinker shrinkage percentages at that point. Right. I the the point that I was gonna make, Robin, on this, and this is one that I’m I’m pretty passionate about is we tried to account for everyone’s time. I mean, on the phone, idle shrinkage, we tried to round it out so that we could bucket out those shrinkage, and then we further categorized shrink at great detail. And we then bucketed sort of what we’ll call good shrink from bad shrink. And this is a recommendation that I make to everyone when I talk about shrinkage and what your number is. Because if it’s twenty six, if it’s thirty, if it’s thirty two, thirty five, I can tell you many leaders look at that number in negative light. They think it’s non productive time. You know, they think of things like absenteeism. Where are people? It’s unaccountable time, And you can remind them, well, it’s training and it’s coaching too. But when we look at it as one number, it kind of shields the fact that underneath that thirty percent or that twenty six percent, some bucket of it is good and some bucket of it is is bad. And that’s a recommendation I make to people is if you don’t track your your your training, your coaching, your team meetings, your breaks, investing and employees from the absenteeism, the unaccountable time, then you have a real hard time saying, is that a good number or a bad number? So I, I, I think this is critically important and you’re gonna build on some concepts here. But if you can just think of shrink as not just something that most leaders look at it in a negative light, but as the true, hey. This is the time we’re using to invest invest employees. Yeah. We know we’ve got some call outs that’s a part of the business, but this is really about taking that time and and and investing in our employees. You know, and also what sometimes interests me is that we have these great details and numbers about the contact center employees, but what about other employees in the company? You know? We don’t really measure it. It it it always fascinates me. It’s like, well, it maybe this number in HR or in, you know, field service or sales or something like that would be even significantly higher, but we we have such detail on the contact center. And I think, you know, we also wanna look at how much like you mentioned, Ted, the the training time. So how much time per week does your company spend on agent training and coaching? And the average there is around thirty to sixty minutes, but you can see some of the, you know, a lot of companies are going even higher than that. Our research aligns with what we looked at in sort of one of the the, you know, good publications training magazine saying that US companies spend somewhere in the range of forty eight to fifty nine hours per employee per year on training, and this was a huge study. And, you know, with with this particular one here that we’re looking at, our our research, most are spending between thirty and sixty minutes, and that aligns pretty well there as well. Yeah. This is this and to build off of what I was saying before, I I advocate for people to go and really separate out the training, the coaching. I mean, it’s development activity. Mhmm. And then go back to your leaders and say, how much do you really want to invest in these activities themselves? And then you can bake onto it, you know, the absenteeism rates and the other things. PTO is gonna be a function of the agent tenure and how much PTO. But when you go to budget for training, I think it’s very useful to get back from your leaders. Really, well, what do you wanna put into it? Is it Yeah. Three percent, five percent, six percent coaching, training, meetings, and get down to that granular level? All too many folks say, well, we just in our budgeting season, we budget thirty two percent shrink. Well, is that good, bad? Yeah. We don’t know unless you break it out into greater detail. And I often wonder if training’s gonna go up a little bit. I’ve been to quite a few conferences this this fall, and, we are and even in our research, we’re absolutely seeing now that when companies bring in agent assist, right, it used to be the average annual time will go down, because, you know, you’ve got the AI assisting you to to make that, to resolve a problem more quickly. Well, this is the first year in our research that we’re seeing that when you bring in agent assist, it’s not affecting every time. It’s about the same with or without. And what we’re seeing companies do is, okay, if this if this call would normally take me ten minutes to resolve, with agent assistance, maybe it’s taking me six minutes to resolve. So I’ve got this extra four minutes now. I could have all my agents, right, just to get another call, keep going and being more productive, right, being more efficient. Or I could take that extra four minutes and do upsell and cross sell. And we are seeing companies do that, do the latter by droves now. I mean, that’s and that so it’s like, yeah. We’ve got we’re we’re making agents more efficient, but let’s make them, revenue producing. And it’s also helping to not have so many layoffs. You know? We have companies I talked to a gentleman from a very large company last week who was saying, you know, we have sixteen hundred agents, and, AI is now automating about sixty four percent of our, of our in inbound calls. We’re gonna go up to about ninety percent with some new technology reported. And I said, oh my goodness. Do you have to lay people off? And he said, absolutely not. We’re not getting rid of anybody. We want to to train them to upsell and cross sell now. So that’s something that could be coming, and we could be seeing these numbers of training and coaching going up because of that, but it’s also gonna prevent some layoffs and also make the contact center more of a value center. So, let’s look at idle time now, and idle time, of course, is defined as well. I’m here. I’m available to work, but there’s no customers in queue, which is kinda what I was just talking about. Like, as AI handles more, will it mean that we’re getting so, you know, productive here and efficient, on the human side that, well, there’s not enough calls for everybody. Again, you start making the agents more, useful in terms of, like, upsell, cross sell, you won’t maybe have as much idle time. You can see here that, you know, about twenty a little over twenty percent of agents have, over an hour of idle time during a typical eight hour shift, but you can see it kinda ranges. There’s there’s quite a few different, you know, slices of that pie. I would call your attention over the to the red one at the bottom of thirty one to sixty minutes. You know, that’s where we see the biggest chunk, and that’s about twenty eight percent of, companies citing that. Yeah. And this this area is is one that I also think is an educational opportunity for a lot of leaders. It isn’t waste of time unless your forecast is real bad. Assuming that, you know, most call centers have their forecast down, It’s really necessary to achieve your service level objectives, but it’s also again an opportunity to invest in our people. So, the the big challenge, which I know you’re gonna get to here is how do we grab that time? You know? Because that’s what most WFM folks are challenged with. Yeah. That’s exactly it. So it’s like, you know, to your point, Ted, great. I’ve got all these people. Like, the people aren’t just sitting there for an hour straight, like, you know, doing nothing. It it actually comes in either short increments of, like, a few seconds to a minute or the the biggest chunk here, almost forty seven percent say, well, it’s medium increments, maybe a few minutes at a time. So what am I gonna do with a few minutes at a time? You know? I’ve got agents just sitting there for five minutes, maybe maybe ten at the most. Right? How do I handle that? What do I do with that time? And, you know, I think that’s where we get into the fact that you can bundle that idle time for training when we asked organizations as well. How valuable is you know, does your company find the ability to bundle that, idle capacity for training? You can see again. Look at the five, six, seven numbers. The vast majority are saying this will be very, very, very valuable, extremely valuable to us. And even with some, quotes directly from people who participated in the research, you can see here, you know, just by converting that time, you know, it it reduces the overall downtime, contributes to more active workforce. Same thing with the c senior VP of health care. Effective use of idle time for training can really reduce that additional training cost and also reduce dependence on external training institutions. So, Ted can talk to us a little bit more about, like, how do you achieve this then? How can you take five minutes here, ten minutes there, two minutes here, one minute over there? You know, how do you take that and make productive use out of it? I think this is That that really is yeah. That that’s the the eye opener for me. Most idle time shows up in these small increments. A few minutes here, a few minutes there. It may not seem like much, but it adds up. And that’s where real time automation can play a huge role. Instead of letting those moments go to waste, we can use them to deliver, you know, little bits of training, coaching, wellness breaks, keeping agents engaged and productive. So, yeah, that’s, that’s where the huge opportunity is. So, you know, basically, let’s focus on what the customers are are telling us. And if you would just wanna go to the next slide here, Robin, we did a survey of over eleven hundred US based customers, and ninety two percent of those customers say that they prefer to interact with humans over AI bots. I think this is critically important, critical insight. You know, so many leaders I now think are focused on AI, how are we taking calls out. The example, Robin, that you gave where it’s like, no. We’re not gonna lay people off. We’re gonna uptrain. That’s fantastic. But it really worries me that people think that with AI and bots that there is potential risk to investing continuously in employees. It’d be easy to say, well, AI is just going to help them answer the calls. We don’t need to invest. And I think the opposite is true. I think there’s a critical insight that, you know, at the end of the day, while AI is coming down the road, if we don’t continue to invest in our employees to ultimately deliver, great satisfaction, the stakes are very high. You know, the customers make it clear and say eighty nine percent will cut ties with the brand over one poor customer experience, and seventy eight percent are willing to pay more just to have a great experience. So I I think this reinforces, you know, what we’ve been saying about why we need to invest in our agents that are the front line of customer experience by focusing on those things like engagement, satisfaction, training, we can deliver better customer outcomes and increase brand loyalty. Yeah. And I mean, at this point in our research too, we do the consumer based research as well. You know, we’ve got, like, forty percent of end consumers saying, I will not use a bot. Like, I will, you know, I will run from it. Only about thirteen percent say they prefer it. So we really do. And and you know what? Honestly, when we look at our our research, about seventy seven percent of all interactions right now go into voice. Either they start there or they have to be escalated to voice. So, you know, that’s a live agent voice, not not AI voice. So, you know, we really, I know we hear a lot about AI, and I really do believe that there’s a lot of, a lot of interactions that AI can be useful for and can automate. I mean, you know, frankly, do we need an agent to say, you know, what your account balance is or to, you know, give you your overnight mailing address, all those kinds of things? No. And I think that AI can help there, but I think, you know, the agents themselves are, as you said, have incredibly vital, and we have to we have to keep going, and training them and making sure they’re satisfied. Alright. So just to wrap up here, on my end here, I wanna say that, you know, investing in the agent experience definitely results in measurable, you know, benefits. So you really do wanna be investing in technology that’s going to help you to reduce that turnover. It’s gonna help you to improve and increase that employee satisfaction. Because like I said, when agents are satisfied with their jobs, like our data is showing you, you know, CSAT scores are higher and more experienced, agents are generating higher CSATs. We are seeing that. You know, as I mentioned, the average time in this study allotted for shrinkage is an average about twenty six percent. You know? Some are higher, some are lower. But the complexity of those agent interactions is definitely definitely facilitating the need for more training, but also more breaks. You know? We need to use technology that enlightens supervisors of what agents need and when. You know? Like, are are they burnt out? Are they struggling right now? Do they need some more training and coaching? And technology is available to do this. Right? Interdiem can do this for you. Knowing idle time is definitely valuable, but a lot of people don’t measure that. So I think it’s really important to make sure you’re measuring that idle time and then making use of that time. I think that the using technology, leveraging technology that helps you to measure and also make use of this time. I think once you start doing that, you’re gonna see such an improvement overall in your agent satisfaction as well as your customer satisfaction and the data backs that up. And I think that by, bundling that idle time for training definitely improves agent satisfaction as well as performance. Yeah. I mean, my recommendation is simple is when we look at technology, let’s look at technology from the lens of how we can better support the agent. Robin, as you mentioned, Intradium focuses on leveraging real time automation to capture those little bits of idle time to enhance training to keep agents engaged. But, you know, technology, we’re under a major technological shift, and a lot of times folks look at technology from, well, this is what we’re gonna do to just the lower agents and to gate off, you know, gate off our customers from getting into the call center. We really have to have a balanced approach where we’re looking at technology and support of the agents themselves. I don’t think this is gonna change. I mean, at the end of the day, agents are gonna need the training, the coaching, the support, and what is especially important are the calls in the future. There will be more calls that are handled by AI, but the ones that matter to me and you, we wanna talk to a human, someone who has true empathy, and, you know, when those calls of critical importance are there, it’s not the bot that we’re gonna wanna deal with. So I think it’s really important that we continue to look at all these factors and data that that Robin shared and figure out how we continue to rise, you know, raise the bar for what we’re doing to invest in our agents. Yep. Couldn’t agree more, Ted. Alright, Robin. Well, let’s we got a couple of questions that that popped in along the way. Let’s, is there an average amount of idle time? I I don’t know if you’ve if you take your data from that one slide, if we can average it or not. My general answer to that is, you could probably average it across all companies, but companies have different service level agreements and have different degrees of planning in terms of how accurate have different degrees of of how they’re leveraging automation to capture that idle time. So I think you’ve really got to look first, you know, we all know in the workforce management level, if I’ve got a ninety ten service level versus a sixty forty, I’m just gonna have very different idle times. If I have a higher higher service level and have to answer those calls quickly, I’m gonna have more idle time than calls where I’ve got in size queue matters as well. I don’t know if if you ever, like, shared people, like, what averages over across. Yeah. I think I think some of the issues are exactly as you said. I don’t have an average. I mean, this this particular case, we asked the question in in buckets like this. We didn’t ask for a raw number, so we couldn’t do an average. So, we don’t have that. Yeah. So, if you another question here is if the idle time is only a few minutes between calls, how do you break up training for a few minutes at a time? Well, I I can tell you directly what I did prior to joining IntraDEM. As I mentioned, I worked for MetLife, and I deployed IntraDEM at MetLife. And we did, have training that was typically bundled up. It could be thirty minutes. It could be forty five minutes. And we found that while some training still does require classroom, get the agents off the phone, a lot of these training pieces could be broken down into smaller bits. So we would simply take something, maybe it’s thirty minutes, and we’d break it down into two fifteen minute chunks or twenty minutes and break it down into a couple of tens. And that allowed us then to deliver training in bite sized bits. So it does require that you work with your LND to, you know, to reengineer how you’re gonna deliver it. But what you find at the end of the day is that it’s a heck of a lot more effective. You can grab these small bites of of time out of idle. You can deliver a piece of training as opposed to a longer training because as soon as the training gets long, you know what happens. Any of us who take, you know, those courses, your your attention to it, you know, just drifts over time. So Yeah. I bet that’s more effective too just having those short sprints because, like you said, you don’t you don’t lose people. A quick question I have for you, Ted. Like, if you’re doing those shorter sprints like that, or do you foresee a a time where you can customize that or do you already customize that for the particular agent, what they need to see or what they where where they might be lagging at that time? I haven’t, but that’s an interesting question. You at the end of the day, we’ll I think we’ll have the technology to be able to do it. I haven’t seen that before. We typically just broke them down so that we effectively could push the training out because we knew that idle time, four different groups came in different, you know, amounts just like your pie chart had shown. So some areas you would need to break it down into smaller bits. Other areas, we could grab fifteen minutes. But the amazing thing about it is is that at the end of the day, this stuff happens every interval. It’s just that workforce management can’t react quick enough to grab the people, and that’s why it’s such a great case for automation itself. Excellent. Using IntraDEM, can you create one to two slide trainings and push them to all agents with time limits? For example, two to five minutes. Time limits, yes. You can basically put a time limit around it. But one of the interesting things we found as well by using automation to deliver training is we actually didn’t tell the agent, how long the training would take itself. In in the old way of of doing things, you would preschedule fifteen minutes to deliver a fifteen minute training. An interesting thing is when you deliver that fifteen minute training and don’t tell them, there’s a number of people who will finish it in twelve minutes, you know, thirteen minutes, eleven minutes, and you actually recoup that time. If you’re scheduled off for fifteen minutes, guess what? You’re gonna take that whole fifteen minutes whether you whether you need it or not. So that’s kind of a interesting benefit in terms of delivering those trainings in real time by grabbing that idle time itself. Yeah. Good point. Yeah. Okay. I think that’s all the questions we have, Robin. Anything else? I I really enjoy your data. I think it’s powerful here. Something that people, should take away and arm themselves with. It’s always great to have this data, to put in front of your leaders and say, hey. This is why we need to budget for this much training next year. Any final thoughts, Robin? No. That’s absolutely right. I mean, we have a lot of our clients use the data in exactly that way, especially if you’re someone you know that this is gonna help, but it’s hard to get budget. If you can put whenever you’re trying to make a case for new technology, new budget, new products or services, if you can have data that shows, look look at what we what the possibilities are, it’s it’s a lot easier to get that budget approval. And then I would also recommend that as you’re doing that, you’re measuring your success. You know, figure out what metrics you’re gonna use, measure your baseline before you start, you know, implementing new technology, and then measure that on regular intervals. Then the next time you’re going for a new budget, next time you’re going for new products or services, you can say, well, here’s what I recommended before and look at what happened to CSAT when we implement implemented this technology. Look what happened to employee, you know, satisfaction or turnover rates. So measure this and make sure it’s working for you before you go on to the next project. And, like I said, this is a good way to get started is just to look at these numbers and say, okay. Well, our CSAT’s struggling right now. Maybe this is something we need to be doing, and we should be able to see our CSAT go up. Sounds great. Well, I appreciate you taking the time, Vicky. Absolutely. I wanna thank you for hosting this. Question. Bob Stevens, how did you start surveying agents more often or more so than annually? I, well, myself, personally, I went on a little mission and said, I worked with, a company called Happiness Works, and and, now it’s known as Fridays. And it was just a different platform, where we we could take, annual, quarterly, monthly. We could go all the way down to a daily pulse question. But, essentially, it was a framework that allowed us to not just survey, but have a a true feedback mechanism for agents so that we could measure that on an ongoing basis. It was a pet passion of of mine, a little bit of a project to say rather than HR just coming down once a year. I think it’s something that we need to measure in a continuous way. I still advocate for it. You you survey your customers every single time that they call, yet you ask your agent once a year. I and we all know that we all have good times and bad times, but if you can get that data without it being too intrusive, to the agents, you can do amazing things with it. So, yeah, thanks for asking, Bob. I’m if anybody wants to go ahead. I would say even just like a screen pop at the end of the day. Okay. How how how how was your work day today? One to five star, you know, and and just start tracking that quantitative measurement over time. Yep. Whenever you do that, even just being able to put one optional open ended, you know, file screen, you know, screen topic. Any comments about your day? And then maybe they can say why they rated it one star today or why they rated it five stars today or three stars, whatever. And then, you know, you can start looking at that as a supervisor as well. Yeah. Well, and just a I love that. Yeah. A quick interdiem plug is we’ve just released a a product that predicts agent attrition, which is a function of, are they happy or not? And we don’t survey the people. We can see it in the data behind there and start to flag folks who have, behaviors. And so that’s another mechanism. There’s the direct go out and ask them. There are other mechanisms now with technology in place where you can start to predict, where you’re gonna run into trouble. So Robin, one other slide that really just startled me was your one that said ninety two percent of people are not thrilled with the AI. Yeah. Yeah. This is something that InterDium did. Yeah. And and it aligns very well with our consumer research as well. You know, I I think the early days of, of AI bots were not done very well, to be honest. I think a lot of companies misapplied bots. They didn’t train their models well. They they didn’t design them well, and that customers were getting stuck in a loop. You know? We’ve all been there where you just can’t get out of a loop, and you can’t get to a live agent. So I think the early days of, bots were were not done very well. I think they’re getting better now. I think generative AI is helping them to get better. However, I think there are very specific use cases where they’re good, and I think that there are very specific use cases where they’re not, and you really need a human agent. And all of our data still shows us that that live agent is is the preferred, method and and same with the study that Intradiem, conducted as well. Yeah. It I I think it’s spot on. You you know, we’ve got a long history of chatbots and bots that just you know, they weren’t they weren’t very good, and that’s left a bad taste in people’s mouth. So you’re coming to it with, like, well, why is this AI different than any other chatbot that I dealt with in in in the in the past? I do think I agree, Robin. I think they’ll improve, but I think there’s a real limitation that many people don’t look at, which is you can’t just put a chatbot out there and connect it to your complex environment. If you work for a company, that that is of any size that’s been around for any number of years, connecting to all the data systems to train these bots is a monumental task, and a lot of companies just won’t be able to. The answers for simple transactional questions are fine. But if you think that your company is gonna roll a bot out that has all the answers, well, good luck. That means you’ve got all your data clean and living in one, you know, one silo or or a few silos, but that just isn’t reality out there. Is there complex data structures of so many large enterprise companies today just won’t allow bots to be the ones who have to answer. We need humans to be able to pivot between the old a s four hundred green screens and everything else that still are out there. So That’s right. And what do you think is the yeah. I mean, to me, there’s a link between an issue with so I’ve got a I go in through a chatbot. Right? And by the time I’m done with it, I am angry, and then I go to an agent. So, you know, what what does that do to that agent’s experience with me because I’m already mad? Yeah. Well, I think that yeah. That’s a fair point. Firsthand experience, I witnessed it where it lengthens the handle time because the first thirty seconds, the agents doing what they’re or the customer’s doing what they’re venting about the experience that they just had on the bot. So you’re you’re exactly right. And that that stands true for even just our legacy IVR technology. You can listen to those calls where people get stuck, you know, and then the first thing they do when they come out is, oh my gosh. Your IVR is awful. How bad is it? Well, it’s longer handle time, and you’re already starting off on the wrong foot with the experience. So Yeah. And that’s where that human empathy comes in. Like, I am really sorry that you had that experience. I’m gonna take care of you, though, so let’s move forward here. You know? And then and then the customer kinda calms down and says, okay. Cool. You know, you’re you’re gonna take care of me, but you’re right. I think that initial, like, you you wanna just yell at somebody and, you know, it it that’s gonna affect agent satisfaction too if they’re if they’re getting transferred a lot from cons from customers who just have had a bad experience with, you know, either self-service alone or or self-service plus AI. Yeah. One of the comments was, you have to tailor AI to the intents of the customers that they will accept I AI as the channel for that resolution. Yep. That’s right. That’s right. You really have to look at intents. I I totally agree with that, and I think a lot of companies don’t do that. Yep. I agree too. Intents and, you know does it mean you have an AI CEO? Well, you know, we are seeing a lot of companies, actually stand up like centers of excellence around AI, especially larger companies. You know, so bringing in, you know, people from all different disciplines in the company into a center of excellence and really it’s not one person running it. But, in many cases, it’s like the chief digital officer that’s in charge of AI now. We are we are starting you know, now that I think of it, we I have talked to a couple companies who are having, like, sort of like an AI czar. You know? I don’t know I don’t know what their exact title is, but but they are responsible for AI across the whole company. And it’s and it’s beyond it’s not like the CIO. It’s not the CTO. It’s it’s somebody who’s really focused on AI. So yeah. Well, there was lots of great information there in that, presentation. And just want to let everybody know this has been recorded. We’ll send you out the recording. If Robin, if it’s okay with you, let me know, and we’ll, send out a PDF of the slides as well. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And there’s my email. If anybody has any follow-up questions, you’re more than welcome to drop me a note or connect with me on LinkedIn. Just it’s just my name. And I do I do put out a lot of, you know, of our research on LinkedIn as well. Alright. Well, we will be sending that out in the next couple of days, so be on the lookout for that. You can share it with anybody who wasn’t able to attend today. But we really appreciate y’all being with us today. Any final thoughts, Ted? No. I just thank everyone for attending. I’d take the data. Take that that deck. It’s some great insights that you can leverage to, go make changes and ensure your agents are being invested in. So Alright. Well, thanks everybody, and have a great rest of your day. Thank you, Vicky. Thanks.