Sign New Hampshire Banking Emergency Contact Form Myself

Industry sign banking new hampshire emergency contact form myself

thank you and welcome for joining our webinar which we are titling so what now what the new realities of remote work in the contact center I'm Zach Taylor I'm direct strategic communications for Cisco's contact center business unit I have some great guests today I have Sheila McGee Smith president and Maggie Smith analytics renowned contact center analyst and person behind the context Center tracted Enterprise Connect and making that forefront for us I have Robin Garen's the president and founder of no manners research does a tremendous job in bringing insights and data to contact center decisions and of course our own o Mart I'll call who is our senior VP and GM of our contact center business what's really unique about this group of people as they bring interesting and different perspectives to what's going on around us now as we know we've heard a lot of words in the last few weeks unprecedented unique etc and those words actually apply to what's going on but the contact center really is in the midst of this so what I'd like to do is break our conversation today into three vignettes a little bit about what's currently and I think most importantly and Sheila brought this up in our planning session what's the midterm impact of what's going on and then stepping back at the end and talking about what is the long-term impact of what's what's occurring globally now as we all have to adjust to some new realities so I'm gonna start with just asking a question here and just basically say how is this impacting you Omar which what's your what is your observations there's no impact whatsoever no I'm just kidding the impact here is tremendous what I think there's two two large drivers the first one is all the sudden a huge group of people have to be serving the contact center on calls from their home and that's a big change for the people run the contact centers and then the second major change that Kovan brought is just huge amounts of volume so if you imagine you are you know running a contact center business you have to deal with both of these it's like all the sudden two black swans met each other and it's a lot to deal with the types of specific use cases those conditions of raining are really for number one you have someone who used to have you know a phone that was answered in a city office or in a County office or in a hospital and all of a sudden they have a huge volume set that set up an emergency hotline that's used case number one the second one is I have a contact center I have hundreds thousands maybe tens of thousands of agents and I'm gonna send them all home and that changes the design of my contact center and the profile the contact centers have to react to that number three is I just have more calls I'm a an airline I'm a travel company and all of a sudden everybody's calling and so I have to handle that and number four is I just all of a sudden need to set up some sort of bought call deflection so using AI to try to answer stuff before it hits humans those are for the use cases we've seen spike up instantly that is really keeping people preoccupied interesting of them are you know I like that man Sheila we've heard terms like essential services and our viewers right now are seeing a slide you shared with us in your in your neck of the woods sort of we're in the same area the country in new hampshire around the notion of what is an essential service what's interesting about this slide Sheila so as you said I live in New Hampshire and our governor last week put out his emergency order and when I looked through the wording of that it was you know heartfelt to see the words in there about how the maintenance of communications infrastructure which were all involved in that the work of technicians and operators and call centers are an important part of essential services and have to continue so as we think about so many people who are losing their jobs and having to go home very often it's a contact center behind that that's going to help them through that process and so it you know it's one thing to think about going home if you're just a white-collar worker it's something else to be going home when you have to be helping to work those people transition out of jobs into healthcare into hospitals and so these notions of empathy and empowerment this contact center you know community that we've always served so much more being brought to the fore over the last couple of weeks and as we stretch into the summer yeah we're finding out a lot of things that we we didn't really well we might have known but we haven't been prepared for and now we're preparing for them in real time Robyn you know you bring a great degree in having an understanding what's going on from a research perspective what is your research is that to to your organization that you've captured about what people's preparedness and other factors regarding what's happening occur yeah you know it's interesting because we we finished some research like right at the start of sort of the shelter-in-place borders you know so it's like the first week of March secondly to March and I imagine that that data will probably be very different right now asking how various virtual workplace technologies are you know driving value and driving benefit what companies are spending on it it was already looking pretty positive but I'd have to imagine it's really going quite a bit up since then in interviews I've done since then I think it was kind of a mix you know many people I would say we're pretty prepared for this because they already had agents working from home so they just said okay well we just need to do more of them maybe they didn't realize how how quickly they were going to have to do more off of them and how you know they had to really put all hands on deck to get everybody in place even even some companies are saying just finding things like furniture for some of their employees and their agents just didn't have a place to work from home so they they would go out and try and find desks and they couldn't find desks you know just little things like that the other thing I would say is that IT people did require some training on how to deal with some of the issues like networking you know how do we set up the network at the home office and how do we maintain security and how do we follow the regulatory issues especially in sensitive industries like healthcare and financial services for example and then the last nigh thing I would say about that would be definitely talk to companies who had some challenges with just the cultural issues the management issues in the analytic so if I'm a context Center supervisor I'm used to being able to walk around a contact center and you know check things out I can't do that anymore so now I have to really figure out how manage my team virtually while still keeping customer ratings that good level and I may or may not have the tool to do that so those are some of the things that we thought yeah that's it's interesting thanks for sharing that you know I'd like to ask the group a question here maybe some specific more than anecdotal examples you've heard of things that are going on with companies or organizations that are involved with I was not walking the other day I see a lot more couples walking out than ever before together on our block and lady was working walking her dog and she and I worked for home for 11 years and this is the first time and she was just talking about what a what a shock this was to her to be sitting in the corner and she actually had to go buy a laptop because the organization wasn't prepared for this so anybody else hear anything like that Omar I know you were recently talking to some customers about this you know I print because they actually were quite prepared for this they've had to test out programs where they sent the agents to work from home they've had to deal with situations where the via hurricane and and and maybe even dealt with situations where they turned their stores into parts of their contact center so the fact that they had experienced tests and they had tested out systems in advance really put them in a place where they were prepared we did a video recording of that conversation with Sprint so I'd like you to listen to it they shared the full set of use cases directly but it was instructive to see the difference between folks who have seen something like this before not coping specifically but having to shift a lot of people to work from home versus if it's the first time and this is really gonna impact how we think through a business continuity planning interesting and Sheila you talked to a lot of companies a lot of situations what what stood out to you and in the last few days that you've heard about so almost the the counter opposite to what Omar just discussed right a smaller healthcare company 17 offices in pain management so not a hospital where they would have had that kind of disaster recovery system in place but think about the patient of a pain management operation right they still need what they need and yet those offices are be close down and those doctors are working from home so we're talking about a population that had premises based systems and one option that they had was to just pick up their phones go home and but then they had the concerns of how do we plug those into the system how do we have HIPAA compliance what are the security concerns do I need extra equipment in front of that and this particular 17 office pain management group decided that a wholesale move to the cloud was the right answer and they were able to do that within a few days and within a few days not just being able to sort out the the contact center aspects but suddenly become a telemedicine an operation near overnight and without the kind of IT support that somebody like Sprint obviously is going to have but able to do that because you know our contact center is a service and you see the service solutions are just that good these days and our video collaboration you know that's a great point we're gonna revisit that when we talk about the immediate intermediate term because people are going to say well wait a minute if we can do it this way should we ever do it any other way and that's I think that's what our planning call we had you brought up a great point we're going to revisit that Robin you know you guys do a lot of research and get a lot of analytics what what are the kind of things that you anticipate people are going to need regarding when this eventually gets to some form of stabilization around insights if they're going to need to know well I think having the insights is is in fact what they need they need the data I mean I'm a very data focused person I think you can make really sound decisions if you have decent data so I think the key right now for any company out there is to be gathering data you have to know you know how are your agents performing how is their productivity how many interactions are they handling per day what's their first call resolution what are their sales numbers if it's a sales contact center and then you can see actually first of all in the short term you can look at what's happening with our metrics we want our customer ratings to go around the tank we don't want revenue to be affected we want to be helping our customers all the things you care about so first you can see from the short-term certainly through these analytics okay what do we need to do I talked to one manufacturer is really working very a consumer product manufacturer who's really trying to get these analytics in place for the supervisors so they could make these quick decisions every day every hour every week you know however they were looking at the different data points depending on what the data point was and they were able to try and you know keep everyone at least the same level that they were when they were on the same contact center so I think it's just having that data for the near-term to keep everything running properly and efficiently well I think it really becomes interesting is after we're over this you know which hopefully is soon hopefully where we're talking about the you know future phase of this sooner than we all hope are they're all thinking but anyway I am I think having this data for the futures really can help a lot too because what I found with one of the companies that were talking to their thing this is crazy we're seeing better performance now with our agents at home they're working more they're they're not taking as many breaks you know maybe that's because they're bored and they don't anything else to do but they're working more and their sales metrics are better so why is that you know what what's happening at home and is that's gonna be the case for other companies are they going to see that their metrics are better when their agents were home and their supervisors remote are there going to be worse are they going to be better for some worth for others better some regions worse than other regions then you can take all that data and make a really really informed decision after all this is behind us as to what you do next you know do you keep people at home and do you keep them at home all the time or part time you know we've had teleworking 20 years and yet there's been a lot of concerns about can we manage our agents remotely will they work an employee and to your point maybe this trial by fire literally exactly it's going to make people realize that yes this in fact does work yeah yeah it's interesting that kind of helps us pivots are kind of our midterm discussion I think this is really important you know Winston Churchill had a saying at the end of the Battle of Britain this is not the beginning of the end it's the end of the beginning and I think we're kind of maybe getting to that phase here and so now we have to say okay so that has happened now what do we do and I think that there's some interesting thoughts around that Rob you just completed a bunch of research on AI which is applicable regardless situation and as you see here on the screen you have some insights that you want would share that could be even more relevant in the scenario we find ourselves in can you talk to that information that you guys captured yeah absolutely so first of all we see that companies are using AI a lot and it's growing quite a bit so if you look at the first start with 2018 data we asked organizations to what extent they were using or planning to use ai in their digital customer experience initiatives that was 45% in one year that went up to 61 percent so 36% percent growth in one year so first point is just companies are using AI or they're planning to use AI and all different levels you know small projects larger projects so as we talk to companies about AI we have a roadmap it's somewhat high-level but we have a roadmap that we look at as a good point a good starting point to think about these things and look at this then again in the current environment so identifying business goals and identifying problems and opportunities as the first two things so what are you trying to do here are you trying to improve your ratings are you trying to increase revenue are you trying to decrease costs what's your real goal from a business perspective and then what are some of the problems and opportunities that you're trying to address so there could be all kinds of opportunities from the business units but right now I think what is really on people's minds as well we've got some problems right now given the pandemic we have to meet the immediate need but then we need to meet the need moving forward as to how we get our business back on track once this is all behind us so what are those problems specifically that you're looking at trying to solve and then from there look at the budget so great there could be all different ways that we can solve some of these problems and you know for example being able to adjust more calls in the amount of time we have first call resolution numbers going up being able to make recommendations that have some prediction you know predictive analytics around them so there's a lot you can do you have to be realistic though so what kind of budget can you put forth to an AI you know roadmap a d then look at all the different technology and there's a lot of different ways you can use AI and then of course success if you don't measure your success it's going to be very difficult to get more budget in the future if you don't have that success behind you to support you so as we looked at what problems and opportunities companies we're looking at for AI to address is very broad like we're trying to improve customer experience so if we can do some NLP or speech analytics and and make some recommendations based on that that would be great or escalate a call we see that a you know customers typing in all caps with exclamation points you know get a supervisor on the line then there are other things like just using more self-service capabilities AI enabled knowledge bases to guide customers around where they can find an answer quickly without requiring any live agents then using those agents more effectively and reducing the long customer hold times - so if we can just have our agents focusing on problems at hand that require you know the human brain you know that don't require just oh yeah overnight mailing addresses this but no it's it's a more complex issue let's put the agents in those calls there and then that can of course help scale company growth overall if you can augment employees inside or outside the context center with AI and then saving I'm sorry to serving your internal customers as well that's another way we see companies using AI just being able to bring HR and IT prophecies in a more automated fashion summarize what you're saying from an intermediate point of view right as we immediately send agents home we don't have the option to sort of start an AI project right but as we think about this being a three or four month process that perhaps being a second wave as we look forward to the fall or the early winter I think there's the opportunity now to Zacks point of being at the end of the beginning to start to think about how do we plan for the next phase almost to your point the next campaign yeah yeah that is interesting Omar you came to us from an AI startup that you built cloud native and you're helping us get a lot of that infused into our business I mean what are some specific ways you would see from your background with this helping in this position we find ourselves in yeah there's there's several ways that we can help agents become super super agents but I just want to go back to something Robyn said you basically looked at the 36 percent increase between 2018 and 2019 and how people would deploy AI if we could do a survey in January and then basically 60 days later I think you would find a huge jump there and one of these basic areas is because of the need to use a voice bot as a form of call deflection that use case alone is just going to get a lot of runtime with agencies that and companies and organizations that were thinking about this but it but it wasn't urgent now it's top of mind we have situations where we are deploying things like this in days and we're doing it in partnership with several organizations so I think that's gonna be one of the big intermediate use cases which is just put up a voice bot which is really just a combination of three technologies it's you know you have someone come through an IVR and you're doing voice to text then you're applying intent detection and then you're going text to speech and then if that doesn't you know there's a couple of turns the conversation if that doesn't work it gets a bubble back up to to a human so it's a escalation back to humans that use case I think is gonna get a lot of airtime in the immediate intermediate time if you look at the next couple of use cases which I think are squarely in the intermediate and not you know in the immediate now for Kovan it's the the turning agents the super agents by bubbling up answers to them because the AI is listening with them identifying previous cases from the knowledge base or from previous resolutions and bubbling up answers to them that's a popular one and the third area I would say is automated wrap-up of the call so they don't have to take the five minutes to wrap it up themselves but one of the key things I'd say again in the intermediate time frame is although you know as someone who's really trying to bring a eye to the market I'd love for our customers to use all of these and more I would mostly recommend that they try one of them at a time and they get really good at it and then they jump to the other because this is the problem you get with AI that you get the unbounded expectation you throw all the difficult problems at it and you wonder why it didn't go as you might have expected so better for you to take a single use case like you were saying the simple queries like you know getting the right address hours of operation that those kinds of things get the easy ones out first get a skill set that's what's gonna get you to be better and ahead of your competitors if you if you step into this carefully so that you learn and start adding to it incrementally excellent points she'll I love your opinion on this a lot of times in financial issues or things like this that affect society people tend to hunker down and things grind to a halt but at the very same time what got us here won't get us there meaning cloud adoption actually might be something we want to accelerate during this time frame which is counterintuitive to what people do they tend to just stop making decisions so what's your opinion on adoption of cloud in regards to what's going on with Kovan right now for contact center right so similar to what Robin talked about with respect to AI adoption mza had just published some research about where they saw cloud adoption today about 17% of agents being supported from a cloud-based application and where they saw that would be at the end of 2023 and what they saw was that 17 moving to about 35% to omars point I think if we were to do that research again this minute let's see that 35% be much higher because to your point Zack we are we're seeing the acceleration of plans companies who looked and said I can stay on this premises equipment for two or three more years I can continue to sweat these assets I can use an offer like Cisco's Flex plan right to start moving toward an operating model instead of capital expense model but I'm not going to make that big leap yet right and we're definitely definitely seeing the acceleration of those plans the telemedicine I talked about earlier or the the pain management company I mean they were perfectly happy with their premises based equipment and then realized that the agility they needed just wasn't supported by the premises based equipment and to your point as people start looking at the long term implications suddenly when you've had this kind of a situation it's like what Omar said about sprint right sprint operates in regions where there are hurricanes where there are so they've always had a plan in place and they had already moved toward a more agile solution people are going to stand that agility really does make a difference and I think we're gonna see a much faster adoption it's you know we've been saying for several years it's not if we're gonna go to the cloud its when yeah that's a great point when is sooner I think that's a quote and I say the secret secret of creativity is to hide your sources so I may be quoting you here and there so okay so now we've sort of talked about the the short midterm now let's step back and maybe take a couple step back and say from a long-term perspective what's the impact of this right what are the long long tail impacts of this Omar what do you think's gonna happen you know 12 18 months in regards to the subject matter they're talking about why would even say just internal to our own business unit at the contact center serving customers that are on-premise and cloud we ourselves have seen how fast we can move in terms of you know first call with a customer and then two days later having them up and running in a significant way and that has reset the bar certainly for me it's reset the bar of what out what I expect in the future and just normal doing business so unfortunate but that's the new bar and I love it so so I expect our customers to be thinking that way too like Sheila was talking about agility it's not how they're gonna only look at a crisis response they're gonna want to do business that way and they're gonna make selections of vendors who understand that and you create the processes that implement that so you know when I was in both previous lives where I was running a SAS company we'd have the same that says you know no butts and seats are allowed to get up you know you've got to think through a customer coming through and becoming a customer in your organization all the way to them using it and deployed without a single human getting out of their seat now that's harder to do in some businesses but it's a way of thinking that you're gonna see be implemented more and more the second area that I think is going to change long term is just you know be more sprint like in the sense of each of us having a business continuity plan that can't foresee everything but lays out things like how do I quickly switch my ratio from in-office to remote or mobile agents and laying out a few items like that how do i quickly spike up my volume what are my response what do I do when I have used a BPO who's in a region that when they go home they don't have bandwidth at home these are some of the things you have to put in your business continuity planning and and will definitely be there to help thank you Sheila what do you think 12 18 months from now what's the long-term of this regarding our you know the areas that we care about here in terms of customer service care contact center agents etc so I think you know you and I have talked over the last couple of years about the impact of Gen Z coming into the contact center and what they need and what they want and a lot of those capabilities the ability to work from home the ability to be part of a gig operation you know the economy operation as opposed to full-time work gamification of solutions you know something that is provides more engagement more analytics to Robyn's point I think what we're seeing is that the cloud really supports all of these and again where it it might have been the long-term plan to start building for that gen Z agent who's already in your contact center and marching in more and more every day I think the long term plan will be to say what worked to the short term that worked in the intermediate-term to handle this works in the long term for what we need to be able to do just for our aging population at all mm-hmm interesting yeah very much and Robin close this out here before I make a few closing comments what about your research regarding the efficacy of home resources and what the long-term may mean yeah so I think there's a few things one of the key attributes I think is just to reduce those employee an agent turnover rates over all other data is showing that if you to make agents happier they're gonna stay longer they're gonna be happier if they have a more flexible work schedule and work location so if you can get your turnover rate in the context Center to be low 15% customer ratings actually improved by 26% in our research so I think that's a nice goal for for organizations is to reduce that turnover rate the other thing I would point to is real estate costs so if you look at the average real estate class I know it was varies widely depending upon where you are in the country but the average real estate cause of the cost per agent per year is about eighty three hundred dollars so if you think just think about a contact center with just a hundred people in it if you went to Hotelling right and and just kind of said okay we're gonna let half of our agents work from home or we're gonna let our agents work from home half the time however you wanted to work out but let's just say 50% of your agent hours were spent at home you're saving four hundred fifteen thousand dollars a year just for a hundred person context and I imagine if you get that even bigger not to mention all the other savings the environmental savings and the you know all the other things even think up that will go along with that I think those are two real important attributes you might want to look at thank you as our leader for being there for us and sharing your insights not only from what you're doing now but what you brought to us when you joined us just a few months ago and it seems like just it seems like a long time even though it's been a short time because your impact on our business for our listeners today what we'd like to do is just remember first of all stay safe do the right thing and and take care of most important thing your family and your loved ones today what we did was we took a look at the immediate impact of what's occurring around us with kovat right and so we said so what now what but I think the real value here today is to say what is next as then we are at the end of the beginning here what is next for us do we do we redact ourselves back to the way we did I don't think so I think we learned today about leaning into and learning from this there's gonna be so many learnings on this on so many ways in society we're just a small sliver that we're talking about and of course saying what is the long term of this one of the things that's really interesting for all of us on this call is to really know that we're part of an essential service a lot of my friends are in positions where they're sitting around and waiting for what's next and we have been very very busy all of us so it is good to be wanted in the situation at this because inherently what we do helps people that's one of the things that attracted me to being in this industry is what we do literally helps people and that's always what is something that's gratifying so thank you for joining us today we hope you enjoyed this I did and what you can do to find out more us go wws cocom look for our contact center solutions and also Omar's blog that he recently announced on some offers we have to help folks through this thanks for joining us today and we really appreciate your time and paying attention and being along with us for the ride take care thank you doctor thanks Sheila and Robin thank you