SUMMARY KEYWORDS

agent, customers, applications, automation, center, rpa, technology, people, automate, notes, organizations, systems, acquisition, desktop, contact, experience, call, integrate, talk, robotic process automation

SPEAKERS

Aarde, Scott, Alex, Kumaran

 

Alex 00:00

Hello, and welcome to another cloud podcast, a podcast designed to bring you stories from the smartest minds in it, operations and business and learn how they're using cloud technology to improve business and customer experience.

 

Aarde 00:16

Welcome, everyone to another cloud podcast, I want to invite you guys all to join us on this conversation with Jakarta. I'm here today already costume and I see you guys again with my co host, Alex. Alex. Once again, thanks for joining and welcome to the podcast. And we've got Scott and Kumaran, from Jacada. Welcome you too, as our guests talk to us a little bit about your company and what you guys do. And then a little bit about your yourselves first.

 

Kumaran 00:50

For Great to be here already. And Alex, thank you for having us. My name is Kumaran, I'm responsible for solutions and marketing at Jacada and Jacada for those of you who may not know us, we are a contact center automation software company. We've been around since 1990. The company was really founded on the bedrock of what is today called as robotic process automation. That's really what we did in the first 10 years, we modernized many legacy applications and God many large organizations across the globe get prepared for what used to be called the internet era back in the day. And then in the early 2000s, regarding the contact center space. And there, we found our new home. And since that time, we really provided solutions that would simplify the employee experience across the entire customer operations, starting with contact center agents all the way to frontline staff, you know, at retail stores branches, as well as simplify the customer experience for customers across touchpoints read on the voice and an IVR or on the lab or on a mobile application. The neat thing about Jakarta is that we tend to harmonize our clients existing systems, processes, and channels, which typically live in silos. So instead of coming in and drooping and replacing what they already have, so we ended up creating value pretty rapidly. Many of our deployments launch in about three to four weeks, and can create lasting value. Hopefully that gives you some perspective.

 

Aarde 02:40

Perfect. And Scott, you want to give us a little background on what you do and a little bit more about Jacada.

 

Scott 02:47

Yeah, absolutely. So everybody, thanks, Alex. And already for hosting us today. Scott merit, I guess I would describe myself as a process technologist kind of grew up in the process optimization space, you know, working as a consultant with organizations trying to help them optimize, and automate processes throughout their enterprise, and then had a fortunate opportunity to jump into the technology space sell enterprise software. In my past, I've competed against Jakarta, and then eventually, I just had to join Jakarta. So I've been able to count it for about two and a half years, I run the marketing team globally, and work side by side with coumarin to, you know, help really Tell, tell organizations and communicate our value, but also really just help them optimize their contact center space through a number of methods, which I'm sure we'll we'll wrap about today. You know, it's funny, We're often asked what we do, often by people that aren't familiar with the contact center space other than I know that when I call, you know, customer service on the phone, I have a great or a not so great experience. So I often run into those conversations at parties, even with my parents who still question and wonder what I do for a living. But you know, another way to kind of think about Jacada is, you know, I always go back to home automation. I know all of us have invested in the latest technologies Alexa, we've got Google, we've got Sonos, we've got Comcast, we might have at&t. But when it comes to turning those things on, and making them all work harmoniously and together, you know, good luck if you don't have two or three remotes, right and good luck if your your parents are coming over and you have to teach them how to use every one of those before they can turn on the TV for your kids. So I just think about, you know, what we do for contact centers in organizations is kind of similar to the universal remote, right? How do we integrate with all of that existing home automation technology to draw a parallel there, but organizations have those same problems, right. they've bought different pieces of technology, things that are cool things that aren't cool anymore, things that are old, 30 years, things that are brand new, a new CRM system, but the fact that they don't really integrate all of them. And that shows itself and to the customers as they're trying to interact with that organization, we try and kind of bridge that gap and be the kind of connective tissue to to be the universal remote for customer experience. So just a different way to kind of think about what we do. So there's two minutes or less, or five.

 

Alex 05:18

I love it.

 

Aarde 05:19

Yeah. Alex.

 

Alex 05:22

You know, that's a great example. Because the same thing happens to me, you have your nest, you have your Sonos, then you have your Spotify app, and your Alexa, you're trying to get them all to work harmoniously. Like, one's doing something over here, another one's doing something over there. And it's, it can be very challenging. And we're in technology, I can't imagine, like people that aren't technically savvy that are trying to manage all this. How did it grow from you guys being an RPA, with a robotic Process Automation into the context in our world? How was that transition? For the company? Like, and why was the move made towards context center versus something else?

 

Kumaran 05:59

Yeah, it was. It's interesting, right? The call center is, could be characterized as the dumping grounds of, you know, all the tech investments a company makes, right. You know, nobody really designs for the council. And whatever is built for finance, whatever is built for even sales and marketing gets dumped in the call center. And unfortunately, the call center has to deal with it. And which is partly why customer service has always been, you know, the customer service we've all been used to as consumers. And what we found out in the early 2000s, is that many of our clients were actually using our robotic process automation technology, in the call center, because they had all these disparate systems, they had, you know, different mainframe applications that we didn't talk to each other new windows and web based applications, packaged applications that they were using at that time, that wouldn't talk to each other many, you know, service oriented architecture was not a thing back in the day at that time. And it really led to a lot of inefficiencies in the contact center. So many of our clients were actually using our individual RPA tools in the call center. So we recognize that, you know, rather than just selling a generic RPA tool to it, why not focus on this niche, why not focus on a customer operation, and really help them streamline that operation by starting with, with providing integration tools, automation tools. And then the broader vision that we had at the time, which obviously evolved, as the space evolved, as well was to bring bring that connective tissue that that Scott was characterizing, to other aspects of the customer operation, right, because there's also a disconnect between all the digital experiences that you have, let's say on the web, or on a mobile application, or when you're messaging and talking to an agent or to get to a chatbot. And the time, when you pick up the phone and come into the call center, there is another huge divide between digital and voice channels. As much as there are, there are silos, within the business systems that people work with. So so we are, we see our role as somebody who can come in, not with any, any conflict of interest, but usually when a company comes in, they come in to be become the CRM, at some point, become the voice platform become the contact center platform, at some point, we don't have that vested interest, we're coming in truly to just harmonize and elevate the experience. So that way we can come in, we can create value rapidly. And then it can also be sustainable value, because we can always provide an abstraction layer tool, which can live on as you change your backend systems as you change your front end channel. So on and so forth.

 

Scott 08:55

Yeah, I think.

 

Aarde 08:56

Oh, Go ahead Scott.

 

Scott 08:58

Yeah, I just gonna say I think from a process perspective, too, as you as you look at RPA, and you go across an enterprise, right? You know, robots love repetition. And they love high volume interactions and transactions, so that when you, you build a bot, you build an automation, and you deploy it, you know, you want something that's repeatable, and very high volume. So you build one and you impact 1000s millions of transactions. I think the big struggle for RPA kind of as it's known, and it's new acronym here in the last five years was a lot of back office automation. And while there's ugly processes, there's disparate technologies, right, all the things that you find a contact center, the volume isn't there, you might find 50 people in the back office doing 100 different things in a day, right? So you automatically kind of gravitate to the contact center, at least we did, you know, 1015 years ago, because you not only have you know, 60 calls a day and of those 60 calls per agent. 30 of them may be doing similar things, but you also have you know, multiple ad By 6000 agents, so, you know, saving five seconds 10 seconds with an automation or guiding them through a flow, the value of kind of the multiplier, right, you can exponentially bring value to organizations just, you know, five seconds or a second and a call center center, you know, can bring huge value in a quick ROI versus trying to automate, you know, 10 things at 20 people do so, you know, I think all the things that come around talked about and this kind of value multiplier that you get when you when you impact agents in this high transaction environment.

 

Aarde 10:34

And you guys talked a lot about efficiency gains. And you know, that comes as an ROI on the agent side, and I just pull up your website, and the first thing I see, which is an amazing kind of stat or proof concept here it says, Jakarta cuts agent onboarding time by 75%, and reduces errors by 90%. Start with the agent assist, most trusted by customer operations leader at fortune 500 Enterprises. So there's a lot to digest and just those two sentences alone, I'd love to hear a little bit about how you guys address onboarding, how do you how does your product support onboarding because that's, that's huge for contact centers. There's always high churn and turnover. And we're always onboarding new people, even if it's just to keep the same amount of headcount. So how do you guys help with that? And then also, can you guys talk a little bit about what agent assist is an eye during onboarding process? I'm sure it's there, but also, for people who are tenured? What's that agent assist type, ecosystem and product?

 

Kumaran 11:41

That's a great question and onboarding, especially over the last year, Aarde I'm sure you're pretty familiar with this as well, that it's becoming a bigger challenge, right? As it is the the call centers with an environment where you've got this revolving door where people come in, they get trained, they're there for two months, and then they leave. And two years ago, people were saying, you know, Millennials don't want to put up with all these legacy systems, and they don't want to invest the time in training, they have, you know, don't have the patience to kind of go through this. And now it's, oh, no, it's not just the millennials, it's the pandemic, now, it's harder to train people. At the end of the day, the bottom line is, it's a really difficult job for anybody doesn't matter if it's generation you belong to. And it's hard to retain people. And it's a very stressful job as well, right. And, you know, nobody really, again, designs for the call center, nobody tries to, it hardly gets the priority that it deserves, in terms of, you know, how do you really improve that experience? And how do you make, then how do you make it a more productive experience? Everybody wants to talk about how do I drive efficiencies? How do I make it more productive? How do I squeeze a few more seconds. But as we're trying to squeeze a few more seconds out of out of that call, we're not recognizing that it is all that complexity, all that bad experience, that core experience that these agents have that's actually driving that agent, Agent turnover, that's also driving that error rate. That's driving customer churn. It's, it's really the root cause. So So our view is that rather than trying to optimize onboarding, with some magic to magical tool or optimize coaching with some AI, why don't you focus on that interaction between that customer and the agent, and make that a no brainer, so that the agent will learn as they're doing their jobs? Right? If the experience can be so simple, that it is already instructive. I don't need to go do classroom training. I don't need micro learning between my calls, right? It doesn't matter whether their training is virtualized or not doesn't matter whether you're using AI for my coaching, but you're helping me while I'm doing that jobs, when it's time I get the same call, guess what, I'm going to be more efficient. And I'm more likely to, to not literally cry between phone calls, we've been doing a lot of research looking at how agents really feel and what challenges that they've been running into over the last year. And some of the stories that they tell us is really disheartening. And anyway, so it really comes back to so agent assist in a nutshell for us is basically a tool of friend, assistant that will guide this agent to the jobs that they need to do during the interaction in real time. And it will use RPA or automation if needed. It'll use AI in real time, voice based guidance and things like that, if needed. But at the end of the day, it's about providing that guided experience. So that At the end of each call, you know, I'm a little bit more knowledgeable and a little bit more effective in making similar and having similar interactions.

 

Alex 15:08

Yeah. One, one thing that you brought up that I thought was interesting, I think a lot of the listeners and viewers would want to know and just understand better is you talk about the agents, you know, what agents are experiencing, and what they're frustrated about what's challenging about their job, like, what would you say, are like top three things that people that are managing contact centers, should know, like, Hey, your agents might be experiencing X, Y, and Z? Like, what? What are those? What are you guys doing to some examples on how to fix those issues?

 

Scott 15:42

I'm sure we're loaded with a number of hours goober. And I've spent shadowing agents or, you know, talking with, with customers, it's, it's, it's in the 1000s, I'm sure, but, you know, a lot of those pains of old are the same pains, right? Which is why, you know, there's so much opportunity here, and, you know, with some of the survey work we've done with agents lately, you know, still expose a lot of those same problems. And, you know, honestly, it's a lot of, you know, the technology, right, the technology that they have to interact with, you know, during a call while they're on the customer, while they're supposed to be providing empathy, while that customer is often not very happy, right? We're all customers, you know, sometimes we know, we've heard those people that take it out on the agent, sometimes we're frustrated, and we bring that frustration to the agent, you know, as if that's not enough to manage that, you know, interaction and conversation. Now, you know, once I know what you need, I need to go do that, right. And we kind of break up a call into kind of, you know, five segments that we can talk about, but the the big segment where there's the most opportunity to help agents is that point where, you know, yes, I can help you understand, you know, from the customer what they need, but there's a time that says, You know, I need to wire, you know, money from one place to another, I need to file a complaint. As soon as that intent is known as an agent, now, that's my, you know, on hold moment, right, I'm gonna put you on hold. And now I gotta go do something, I have to go execute, I have to login, I have to navigate through 10 systems, a lot of them don't integrate, some may have timed out before I got to relog into them. And all the while I'm probably hearing about your bad day, I'm hearing about another problem you've had, I'm heard about a bad channel interaction you may have had, right? So I'm trying to listen all that while I'm typing and trying to make this call as streamlined as possible. So I think number one is just, you know, the technology burden that we bring on to agents unintentionally, right, you know, we try and give the organization good tools. But ultimately, as Cameron said, what ends up is kind of this, you know, potpourri of applications that weren't ever built for that agent. They're just tools that they end up using that help the enterprise in some way, maybe to upsell, you know, maybe to login single sign on maybe to do different things, but not necessarily, this is an application we're building for the agents. So, you know, I think that's the number one pain point that we see. And that impacts handle time and impacts training. And, you know, the onboarding rd, you asked about, right? Most of onboarding is about how I navigate through this labyrinth of technology and understand these processes, not necessarily on interacting with customers. You know, that kind of comes after once you have that real world experience? And you start, you know, playing back calls for agents, you know, that's kind of the piece that that's probably what we shouldn't be training on, not the technology that should be as intuitive as anything, right?

 

Alex 18:34

Yeah.

 

Scott 18:35

That's number one Kumaran probably has another one another close second, I would imagine.

 

Aarde 18:42

Yeah, and I want to drill into that a little bit. Somewhere, we're talking about the agent. And this Scott, this one might be for you, I don't know who's best to feel this one. But we're talking about contact center and automation, there's oftentimes the fear of the agent, not wanting their job to be automated for a couple of reasons. One is, Oh, no, I'm gonna lose my job, or we're gonna need less of us. So I might be out my job. And there's also the fear of, I'm really good at doing these kind of mundane swivel chair activities. And that's what makes, you know, me, a need for the team. And if they automate all these kind of processes, where I'm really efficient at kind of doing them myself, it's gonna be you know, I'm not going to be the best because I'm not maybe I don't have a great you know, customer voice or I'm not very empathetic and I don't score very high in those kind of customer service degrees, but I actually score really high in documentation, leaving notes and being able to pull up an account appropriately those types of things. So how, how do you guys help your customers through those kind of roadblocks or I guess rumors Before they they try to implement something like your tool.

 

Scott 20:05

Yeah, you know, it's it's funny, that's that's always the it's often the the perceived threat. And you know more so maybe in some of the back office work where you're truly trying to offload full tasks, you know, from people, you know, the daily journal entries that they do, you know, document processing, things like that, you know, every shadow experience that we have, though, where we sit with agents, and we spend a day day and a half kind of just watching and listening and learning, you know, the first thing you do is, hey, you introduce yourself, and you say, I'm here to make all of this stuff work smarter for you, right? And yeah, okay, you can sound like a classic consultant, right from the start, right? But after you kind of watch and you know, you spend an hour, two hours, then you play back to them, you know, hey, wouldn't it be nice if that system took this information and logged in for you, and automatically pop that customer's account? And then brought forward the notes from the last five calls? Right? Wouldn't that be nice thing to have in there? Just, you know, wow, absolutely. Right, you know, so very quickly, just engaging with the agents and asking them, right, what are the 10 things that you you know, if you wave the magic wand, what do you wish your systems would do? What's really painful? Why do you put customers on hold, and they quickly become part of that process. But that's the key point, right? Like, you have to engage them in the process, they have to be a part of it, they have to, you know, they'll go out and sell this for you. And they'll go find more opportunities. What you don't want to do, which has happened a lot of time, right with application development is slap an application on their desktop, nobody's consulted, nobody's talked about and, you know, here, go get it. Here's a training manual. So you know, all the all the things that we do, it's very, it's very iterative, the agents are part of the process, the trainer's part of the process, because they all can point to you where those those main pain points are. So very quickly, you can kind of overcome that hurdle, especially in the contact center. And then as you do that, right, you start to bring value, and they come up with more ideas. But it's not just automation, I think, you know, even the greatest automation, I've seen, we've done something where you can take, let's say, handle time, or a process from eight minutes to, let's say, two minutes. But if they don't press that button, or if they don't interact with that UI, they may just do what you're saying that, hey, I'm comfortable doing this, this is my documentation. I've been here for 20 years, you know, you guys don't know what you're talking about. I'm comfortable, I'm going to do this. So it's more than just the automation, there's guidance, there's kind of the user experience, right, just like you design an application, a an app self service app, you have to think about the agent and how best to kind of navigate them through their experience with their application. So you know, you can't just throw a robot on desktop and hope that you know, adoption will be great. It's just, they really have to be integral. And you got to think about some of those other pieces. So

 

Kumaran 22:52

The other operational element to add on to that is results. So So today, we look at average attrition rates, right, it's pretty high. So call centers are constantly recruiting people as they're hiring and training them. So the first place where you see the benefit of automation is we wouldn't have to do so much of this is mindless hiring, training. And although those engagements are all those enablement, and engagement programs, gamification, all of that, in the hopes that, you know, that's somehow going to keep people in these jobs that are so difficult to kind of do, you know, as a day. So, so number one, for those who want to do this work, you can make it more enjoyable. I use that word very cautiously. Because it is a very tough job. Yeah. And for those which and the efficiencies you gain, will keep you from having to constantly keep hiring, because you'll be able to reduce attrition, you know, typically we see, of course, reducing attrition is a function of many things. So we wouldn't like to, we don't want to take credit for all of that attrition reduction that we see in many of our deployments. But that's usually a pretty big strategic benefit for our clients. And so that's going to have a have a downstream impact on not having to rehire so much. And then we also see businesses that are constantly looking for more capacity, they want to allocate that headcount towards maybe sales, maybe attentions, you know, maybe a new product line, right. And the other thing we are also seeing is, I think, I think it was last year this year, in Gartner's prediction of overall call center market size. They said that the agent count is actually going up this year, which is actually a change in the in the other direction. And we see that it's not just a pandemic that's driving it. It's also the complexity. As the whole idea of doing business, providing customer service becomes more complicated. consumers, you know, young and old, coming from different demographics are still reaching out to the contact center when they need help, they cannot resolve by themselves, right. So, so there's really a need to add more headcount. So it's not like your call center is going to become, you know, 1/10 the size that you're operating cash right now, but gives you more elasticity. Hopefully, better potential you

 

Scott 25:27

Didn't we didn't we make a wager at the beginning who would have the first work from home? interaction or interruption, so I owe you guys the money. So grab it, my,

 

Aarde 25:40

My dog was barking a little bit earlier to I had to go on mute because they were the mailman came in

 

Alex 25:44

it's funny Well one of our guests to how they I think it was like a Great Dane, some huge dogs like throwing out some big barks. Yo, Scott, you're mentioning earlier about all these disparate systems. And it made me think of at&t, we've worked a lot with at&t just on the telecom side and how they've gone through so many acquisitions, and they have so many different systems for for their agents, or for even sales reps, even to the customer. So customer service side, that they don't know, one end from the other, because there's so many systems that they're trying to integrate. And I can see how, as the bigger the organization gets, the more complex things can become, especially if they're in merger and acquisition mode, and how to get those systems talking to each other. How do you see with your larger clients, then working within that environment of hey, we've just bought another company that has 500 employees? How do we get this all work together?

 

Scott 26:39

Yeah, no, it's a it's a great question. And, you know, those are typically, you know, prospects of ours that that we look at, and that we get insight and questions from right as anytime one of those acquisitions happens, you know, we know that that you'll integrate the most important pieces, right? you'll you'll make sure that the business works, you'll make sure that financially the p&l makes sense, right, you want to make sure all of those key components are set the agents, right, going back to you know, what gets left on the agents desktop is exactly what you're saying. And this is not, okay, at&t acquired this group. And you know, now we have one more application. And I've worked with a bank in the southeast here, you know, when they look at their architecture, they manage it, manage up to 350 applications across the enterprise, you know, so imagine acquiring that kind of, you know, technology debt, right, as you onboard a new organization, it's unbelievable. Now, you know, that's not saying 350 applications end up on a customer service desktop. But typically, you know, we talk to customers in a couple different ways on how to use, you know, maybe it's RPA, maybe it's automation, Intelligent Automation, whatever. But when there is that acquisition, there's going to be a time kind of a transition period, where you say, Look, I'm not going to have API's, I'm not going to be able to integrate, my only option is to give this, you know, this training manager, a big document of how these new systems work, and you know, how to perform a particular transaction, and now I've got to go through training and training and more training. So there's a great, you know, use case in there for automation to say, look, you know, a lot of those steps, they're all just, they're all business rule driven, right? They're not asking the the agent for, you know, their discretion, they don't have to make just some some decision based upon, you know, human discretion, this is these are business rule driven. And that's all these training manuals are in most cases, right. So tremendous opportunity for RPA and automation to help organizations transition. And that might not be a, you know, a long term solution, it might be six months. Some of those sometimes those are the best use cases where you can build a couple bots, integrate these systems, give it six months of leeway, right, as they kind of build a build those systems together and drive the API's and integration that you need. And then RPA will take kind of another form on top of those applications. So, you know, I think you'll always have to be evolving in this whole agile DevOps world that we're in now. It's it's critical towards, you know, letting automation helping automation scale and be successful. But I would say some of my largest customers that we've worked with have been, you know, post acquisition, and some of the biggest accounts that you lose, or sales cycles that you lose, or also during acquisition because they can't think about, you know, kind of these bridge technologies, right. I know what I need to do the big stuff, but, you know, in reality, they should be thinking all these things, right, how do I transition, but how do I kind of think long term as well, so great, great question. And, you know, lots of experience in that in that space.

 

Aarde 29:44

Now, for for our viewers, some of our viewers may have just a couple systems that this might work for, and some of our viewers might have literally 10s of systems like 2030 systems. What would you recommend for the people who have a lot to potentially automate with RPA, start small, you know, you use you guys but start small like maybe do a screen pop first and then add on to that later and do iterations or try to tackle as much as possible right out of the gate and try to automate as much as possible. So that it's a training session for all the historical agents, you know, this is the new way to do it. And this is what it's going to look like as a as a version one or version two, what what do you guys recommend?

 

Kumaran 30:32

I think you already made a lot of good points there already. I would start from the end, you mentioned, I think it's important to give the agents a good view into what this new experience could look like. Because so let's say you are looking to unify the home test agent desktop and bring all the applications into one comment. Obviously, you're not going to be able to do that overnight, right. But let's say you want to provide, you want to start by providing some kind of a sidekick to your agent, right? So they can, there's a little bit of a virtual assistant, if you will, on the desktop for them, they can help them. You know, push information and the systems, read information from systems provide some guidance along the way, help them from making prevent them from making any mistakes, they're going through pretty tedious process, things like that, right? It's important to nail down that new experience and get the agents to understand what this new experiences What is this assistant? How does it work for the rest of their applications on the desktop. And you also want to make it a very non invasive experience so that it doesn't significantly disrupt their current experience on the desktop is seen more as a simple add on, and it will come in and it will help them read it and they will step aside during other times. And if you design for that minimal footprint on the desktop, you can, you will still want to tackle a meaningful use case in your first appointment, right. And you can make this about a certain call type, which is already a high volume call, for instance. And then you can say alright, this call type, you know, let's say I'm getting a million, a million of these, and each of these takes about six minutes, but 6 million minutes, maybe I'll take one minute away, right, that's quite a bit of savings. And just in terms of HD, not talking about error reduction, and other kinds of benefits, first contact resolution that can come out of how well that call is handled and things like that, right. So you could still do that by just going after one use case. But you want to nail that user experience so that after that first deployment, and that could go into production in four weeks and four weeks. But once that's done, you've set the foundation to add on more and more use cases on an ongoing basis. So and re also, you know, try not to be disruptive to the operation. And really, from a change management standpoint, it should be very lightweight, no one should have to get trained on this new new user experience, right, the whole idea here is to train on, you know, learn on the go. So it shouldn't require significant training, it shouldn't require, you know, you want to bring them into the change management process into the design experience upfront, and all of that, but you don't want to make it too heavy, too difficult for them to adopt this new experience. Sounds good.

 

Scott 33:40

I was gonna say real quick one, one of my one of my favorite use cases that kind of we build into that non invasive environment, as we call it, kind of auto notes, right. So you think about an agent working through a call with a customer for six minutes, seven minutes, three minutes, they're making changes, they're entering data, they basically just told the computer over six minutes, what it needs to do and what it needs to learn. And so now How crazy is it right, that they're gonna hang up the call and spend another, you know, minute, two minutes telling the computer again, what they just did on the computer, right? So, you know, just it seems really simple, right? Kind of that fix, but it is right with automation. So why not tell the computer to take notes or tell the robot to take notes as you're navigating through those applications, what the data was before I changed the address from here to hear what the case number is, and just that you know, that copy paste, yellow Notepad, electronic notepad that you know, agents usually take all the notes on, you know, that all goes away, and you get consistency and notes for the for the next rep that takes a call. And you get basically all the information that you need in that in that process. And so all the agent has to do is say yep, Oh, that looks good. Yeah, did those five transactions type a couple extra notes and then I'm off to the next call. So that's uh, you know, you don't do that. Every single call type, but like, Goodman said, pick three of your top call types. And, you know, just implement auto notes for it. And, you know, the after call work there is huge, and that's huge, you know, rally cry for agents when you can reduce their auto call work that they need to do. So you know, another one that kind of gives you the go ahead and gets them engaged and excited about, you know, kind of what automation can bring to their day. So, just wanting one example, that's always a first implementation anywhere you go.

 

Aarde 35:28

So yeah, I used to be an agent, I used to take calls for a technology company. So it was a, it was a tech support team. And I always laughed at the looked up, like novels of notes, like an agent had a three minute call, and they wrote, literally like a page and a half of notes. And I'd have to read through all of the details to get this one little tidbit out of it, which didn't really make sense to do that. So yeah, I love auto notation. I also love the idea of, you know, highlighting things that were changed by the agent, like maybe they like canceled on the count, or updated a billing address, the agent doesn't have to type that out, like the system already knows that it happened, just type it up for them something like you know, my initials, and then change, billing address, you know, and then the date, time and date stamp like that's, that's pretty simple stuff that a human shouldn't have to use mental human power to type out.

 

Scott 36:30

And think about that now, like, what if you have, you know, 12 interactions with this customer, and you have that robot that can have delivered consistent notes, the next step that is say, okay, Ai, now you can come in and start learning from that data and suggest, you know, okay, well AI, just scrub through, you know, 40 lines of mainframe notes, for example, now, AI is going to recommend to the agent, hey, really sorry, you had a bad experience, you know, I know this is the 10th time you've called in three days, let me offer you a 10% cut on your monthly bill, right. So even though there's automated notes, that still may take the next agent, a long time to kind of peruse through those notes and kind of come up with a scenario while they're listening to the customer rant. So that's where next right if you have that consistency, then let's layer on some of the the AI components on here to really do some some true processing of language. And then, you know, next best action, next best idea. So just, you know, you just keep building and building and building I'm sorry, Alex go ahead.

 

Alex 37:30

to ask, you know, one of the things I like to find out from providers that we work with, and similar to yourselves is like, where like, what would you say your niches like? What like is the sweet spot for where you guys fit in really well, whether it's SMB, Probably not, but like mid market enterprises are certain industries that you fall really well into?

 

Scott 37:50

Yeah, Kumaran we'll both tackle it, I'm sure.

 

Kumaran 37:55

So, you know, we, we tend to create a lot of value, wherever our clients are struggling with a lot of complexity. The complexity comes in all forms and sizes, right? You could be running a call center with 50 agents, but perhaps your complexities in terms of the complex sales conversation that you're having, right. So you know, you may be reasons need to have objections and rebuttals, and they need to be at the top of their game, as they do that they need to come across as trusted advisors that no one's going to buy, that could be a small Council, where we can create value in allowing our clients, the operations leaders to really build playbooks for their call center agents, right. So that these playbooks then take the form of an agent assist, which will kind of guide them during that conversation in a very fluid manner. So that doesn't sound like scripting, but is actually, you know, for lack of a better term biggest surprise, surprise. So that's, that's one. And then on the other hand, you know, the scenarios we've been talking about here, you got a lot of applications, you got a lot of processes, regulated processes, obligations, we don't connect channels, communication channels, like voice and chat and messaging. And then you need to bring everything together so that the agent or the customer don't have to repeat the same things over and over again. So that's another classic form of complexity, as we all know. So that's, that's on the other end. So if we look at industries, again, the usual suspects or good customers for us, everybody in banking, financial services, insurance, with our customers in telco telecommunications, technology, travel hospitality, as well, especially online travel agencies, who are again, not just booking a hotel or booking an airline, but you're moving these big packages. And then if you need to make a change, then it's a lot of fun. It's a long call. A lot of mistakes can happen along the way too. Right. So And health insurance companies, we don't work that much with the government, it's more of a go to market priority for us or lack thereof. But usually when it comes to b2c or b2b to see, it's, you know, wherever you got any form of complexity, we can create some value.

 

Scott 40:20

I always say there's, there's never been a desktop, I don't like writing, regardless of industry, I mean, honestly, it's just a matter of, you know, kind of what, what area you that you're attacking to Cameron's point, you know, government isn't a focus, but there's tremendous opportunity in government, right, you know, small medium is not necessarily a kind of a focus, but there's tons of automation opportunities. So it's really about kind of, you know, finding those niches, and, you know, understanding kind of where maybe those acquisitions are, you know, where those pain points might be surfacing that are truly kind of burning platforms. And BPO is, that was another one where, you know, we work a lot with BPO is when you think about a BPO is acting on behalf of a client, right, and using their applications to serve their customers, their customers, customers, and so they don't traditionally have control over them, right. So, you know, if I'm a BPO, I'll say, all right, Verizon, all answer calls for you, you know, these 12 different types of calls. But, you know, they can't change those applications, they inherit the technology debt with that implementation. And so they can kind of bring in, you know, RPA agent assist to then sit on top of those applications and almost play puppet master as if they're varizen, right, and they can automate, and they can provide guidance flows on top of those applications, even though they don't own any of the code, they don't have any API's to them. And that's really the power of of RPA. And the Intelligent Automation that we're using, is you can kind of help give control over application surface level control applications for companies like bpos, and allow them to kind of provide better services for their customers and be more competitive bids. So you know, there's, there's opportunities everywhere. It's just how they line up.

 

Aarde 42:08

Perfect. Well, Scott and Kumaran, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. We unfortunately ran out of time, we could talk about this topic forever. I think we learned a lot about onboarding and the agent experience and robotic process automation. We all know that happy agents really turn into happy customers. It's a one to one effect. We want to thank you guys for joining us today. For those who are listening. It's Jacada. It's j-a-c-a-d-a call them and check out the product. If you have any more questions, feel free to reach out to them directly or reach out to Alex and myself. And we'll point you in the right direction. But great having you on the show. And Alex great having you as a co host as always, and we'll see you next time.

 

Alex 42:55

Thank you guys.

 

Scott 42:57

Thanks guys, appreciate it

Alex 42:59

Well, that wraps up the show for today. Thanks for joining. And don't forget to join us next week as we bring another guest in to talk about the trends around cloud contact center and customer experience. Also, you can find us at Adler, advisors.com, LinkedIn, or your favorite podcast platform. We'll see you next week on another cloud podcast.