Sign New York Banking RFP Later

Industry sign banking new york rfp later

as concret sir for CBS I services talking business today from my home office in White Plains New York CBS I services has provided benefit programs to the credit card industry to banks for almost 40 years and we're based in Harrison New York now today we have the great opportunity to talk with Jeff dextran who is the operations VP at visual cue in Utah have a chance to talk with Jeff today on Saratoga Springs Utah how are you today I'm doing great Ken thanks for having me on our pleasure now we have a chance we manage a bunch of contact centers for our bank clients at CVS I have for a long time they've been taking a lot of calls on program especially related to travel cancellations the last few weeks and you've got a there's a lot of discussion in the industry about moving to remote agents because you can't have a hundred agents in a call center today especially around our area so trying to move to remote locations is a very important objective and trying to supervise remote agents is a challenge I tell us something about your company and the solution you have to help contact centers yeah I appreciate that opportunity Ken so the company is visual cue and we've actually been around for over nine years we built the original platform actually in response to an RFP a request for proposal from the Pentagon and that that original RFP asked for a a product that could accept thousands of data points and and then apply some calculations to all those data points and then basically put them in a green yellow red kind of a world map so you can imagine calculating thousands of data points for individual countries and then coming out to a calculation that that country is green or it's yellow or it's red for being a hot spots from that contract we moved to doing some supply chain management for the United States Postal Service and then actually doing some fleet management in being able to visually track water deliveries on trucks and and different things now a little over a year ago we decided to enter the contact center vertical and we built an application that we call Q Fitz that's cu e fi T which is an application built off of that platform that allows agents to see in real-time their KPIs so how long they're spending on a call how long they're there a CW or thereafter call work how long they're spending taking notes or preparing to move from one call to the next and then depending on the type of contact center they're in whether it's a sales center will track their their closing ratios and their revenue numbers if they're a support center you know will track their escalations or their CSAT they're their customer satisfaction scores that they get back and we're able to provide that agent with that same green yellow or red progress report and what you have is you know so many agents in the contact center industry don't have access to this data or they maybe only have access to it once a week or maybe even only once a month when they maybe have a sit-down meeting with a team leader and now they're getting daily real-time access to seeing that data where agents can now literally control kind of their own destiny and they can see oh okay I'm yellow in this area and they've got the rest of their shifts to maybe improve the amount of time that they're spending on their ACW or their calls or take a shorter afternoon break to make up for the fact that they went a few minutes extra on their lunch break and and be in a position to where they're not caught by surprise days or weeks later in a employee evaluation meeting and where this can affect their their shift bids or their bonusing or their Commission's programs and so we all kinds of examples of not just performance improvement because the agents have much more immediate access to this data but just overall job satisfaction in having the ability to see and have a much more direct effect on this performance data well it sounds like you've got a lot of important KPIs performance measures that you track that can help manage and help a representative to improve their performance so their particular measures that you find that you look at all the time so definitely within the contact center we're looking at that handle time and the ACW I mean we've got when you start talking about larger BPOs where you're talking about tens of thousands if not even a hundred thousand plus agents and they're taking anywhere from a hundred to maybe even 150 or 200 calls per day and you can improve their after call work the time they spend between calls by just a few seconds you know maybe you reduce you take a 45 second average down to a 38 second average but you start multiplying that seven seconds you're gaining times a hundred calls times tens of thousands of agents and that adds up to literally millions of dollars in efficiency savings for some of these larger contacts in our companies so those are definitely some of the very common across-the-board KPIs if it's a support center we're definitely looking at customer satisfaction scores and NPS scores if it's a sales center we're definitely looking at closing ratios and revenue numbers yes very important measures now as we said there's a big shift going on to meet the current co vid virus situation towards remote agents and I know you have a special introduction for contact centers during this period we do so even prior to to understanding this coronavirus outbreak we were developing what we call the communication center and this is an ability to utilize the cue fit platform for team leaders and supervisors to send direct messages to the agents one of the key features of the cue fit product is the cue fit bar and and what that is is it's a it's a slim bar that sits at the top of an agent's machine where they're able to see a timer that kind of tells them and that timer will flash green yellow red in real time to let that agent know how they're performing in real time on a call and what the communication Center does is it allows supervisors to send ticker-tape messages that will literally scroll across that screen now what that allows you to do is to get messages in front of your agents without interrupting them even when they might be on a phone call and you might even find that you're able to give them timely information on urgent issues that might help them on the very call that they're on right servers down credit cards can't be processed we just recently have started working with States two-one-one programs and so you know the mayor the governor has just had their press conference and introduced something and therefore you're gonna you might expect to see a rising call volume about this specific issue and you're able to get that in front of the agents what's different with our with our tool when maybe comparing to things like slack or even zoom or Microsoft teams is it is one way only it's top-down you send it to the agents and we provide read reports so the team leaders and supervisors can see which agents have clicked on or seen these messages which agents have not and you know that these messages are not getting lost in a string of replies you know saying oops I got it or even you know smiley face emojis or or whatever so I actually have a lot of customers that are utilizing slack and but they're utilizing slack for more of kind of the social capabilities of interacting with each other and they're letting their agents know that the most important and urgent messages are going to come through that queue fit communication center system boy now to just add specifically because of the current situation with the coronavirus and a lot of contact center agents being legally required to send agents home we are providing that tool for free through at least the 1st of July and so if you go to queue fit comm that's cu e fi t-- dot-com you can then be redirected to a form where you can register to then install and set up that program for free and now how does this work as far as working in conjunction with the software platforms that a contact center is using today so if you decide to then upgrade and not just use the communication center can work on its own and and it doesn't necessarily connect to any of the data it's just for those messages but it works perfectly in conjunction so we do have some integrations with some of the common contact center cloud solutions 5 9 in contact group ong n Avaya and cisco and so we can connect directly into the custom reports or the api calls that provide us those common data set center features such as number of calls made average handle time the a CW and then we can also work directly with our customers to set up automated CSV reports that get sent to a secure FTP site where we're able to generate additional information that maybe it's coming from a CRM or your your attendants being able to check the the scheduled adherence and and those sorts of things okay and you mentioned that the software is able to help clients address attrition of their customer base based on the kinds of calls that are coming in how does this software cupid help a customer like a bank that we might work with on customer on reducing customer attrition so what we can definitely do is Pro is is provide the agents with that real-time data so they can get a sense of how they're performing on those calls and and meeting the needs or the expectations of those people that are calling in to retain them as as credit card customers and I think just you know closing that feedback loop and making it as close to real-time as possible it really empowers those agents to feel like they're seeing the difference that they're able to make you know on a day to day basis rather than on a week or even a multi-week delay of you know having sitting down and saying you know hey do you remember that guy you spoke to three weeks ago and the call started out and you know and you got a really kind of wrack your brain you're able to see that in real time well you it's it's so important and you mentioned there's some other applications for the cupid including helping track fleets of trucking trucks that are out on the road that is correct yes so we work with we work with a large water distribution company and we actually will have map overlays where we can track the routes that are being taken and create efficiencies in that also provide real-time updates both to the supervisors that are maintaining and watching that fleet but then also to the consumers or the end users so they can see the progress of when those deliveries will show up and you know again you've got that combination of being able to look at that historical data and analyze that for efficiencies but then also the real-time nature of that data that's going to the driver to the fleet managers or to the consumers where they can make real-time decisions to improve immediate efficiencies okay and I know there's a lot information and ways to look at some of them the demonstrations that you have of the queue fit on your website what will someone find when they go to your website keep it calm so you go to cute fit calm your first thing you're gonna see is our is our offer for the the free communication tool and the ability to fill that out you'll also learn much more about the product itself some case studies that we've had with some successful customers in improving closing and sales ratios improving retention of agents and essentially you know kind of learn more about the product and and then if you go to visual cue comm that's where you can learn a little bit more about the original platform in kind of the full history of the company very good and I was like to ask my guests a little bit about how they got into their career would have been some of the steps along your career path yeah oh boy so so I spent five years in the Army National Guard and and honestly thought that I was going to make a career out of that and I ended up receiving a medical discharge out of that and kind of had to choose a new career I ended up working for an e-learning company and became a Microsoft certified instructor which then led to five years in the video game industry where I lived in Vegas and and worked on some video game developments unfortunately the some funding ran out on that on that studio and I came to Utah for the kind of the booming tech culture we have here and and ended up joining joining visual cue so I am a certified scrum master and I've spent kind of over 15 years what I love doing is almost being like a translator where I feel very comfortable talking to developers in their language and and understanding what they're doing to build software and do with that but I'm also just as comfortable meeting with with a sales and marketing team or even with customers and end-users and being able to talk in their language from a non technical standpoint of explaining products and services and so that's kind of been the crux of my career well thank you for your service in the Army National Guard we're doing some work we've done here in New York they're doing a great job with the emerging situation a very close on that's down the road inner shell and of course in New York City always like to recognize the National Guard the citizen soldiers that jump into so many emergency situations they just got to ask you to closing you mentioned your work in video games and we've seen tremendous growth in the last couple of years in eSport so work with the College Conference that's running Championships now in that tell us about what why is eSports and growing so fast right now well you know I think there's a lot of reasons one you know I've got teenagers in the house and they spend a lot more time watching YouTube or twitch videos of other people streaming video games than they spend you know actually watching movies or TV shows I think there's an interactivity you know people may be may or may not be familiar with the fact that the last two Sundays Fox has televised enas car video game NASCAR races in place of real races and the ratings were so high that they decided that instead of making that a one-time thing that they're gonna do that for the rest of the of the season where and you think about that interactivity where you're able to watch these professional video game players but even they have some of the professional drivers that are doing the video game style you know and they're playing the exact same video game that you could go in and play and and drive as a NASCAR driver yourself and so I I think there's kind of that that interactivity that exists that that's an exciting level of that and I think that can go across across all the kinds of sports and and there's a certain connection I know a lot of professional athletes that are you know running online or a lot of NBA players are running twitch streams where you can actually play the video game version of NBA basketball against real NBA players and I think there's a level of connectivity that is driving a lot of that success it's astounding that's a lot of good food for an other days discussion hey you just really wanted to thank Jeff dextran from Utah based visual cue and cue fit comms got a terrific solution to help contact centers and great to hear about it today and really best wishes to you and everybody out in Utah getting through this this crisis situation now again thank you for the time can and I'd be remiss if I didn't end with a solid go army beat Navy and a shout out to all of our health care professionals that are just doing amazing work right now absolutely all across the country and a lot of them right very close to home here and our White Plains New Rochelle in New York City Jeff thank you so much we'll do it again and thank you for your time today thank you you're welcome this can crate sir for CBS I services talking business from my home office in White Plains New York have a good day everybody and say well