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The ability of AI to empower, not replace, humans is often lost in the sensational stories about AI’s impact on call centers. In this podcast we explore how conversational and generative AI are being utilized across industries to exponentially scale role-playing, and enable true scenario-based training where you can practice active listening, communication, and multi-tasking skills simultaneously.
David Lawson, Co-Founder & CEO of Call Simulator, will discuss how immersive conversation simulations can be created, distributed, and analyzed by call centers of any size. He will share the success his company’s clients have had in industries as diverse as emergency dispatch centers to Fortune 500 insurance companies. David will also discuss the proven ROI of simulation training, and why it is integral to a call center's quality management.
Guest: David Lawson, Co-Founder & CEO - Call Simulator, Inc.
David has been an entrepreneur focused on technology, data insights, and training for decades. He is the author of Big Good: Philanthropy in the Age of Big Data and Cognitive Computing. He designed one of the first AI for Good applications using IBM Watson, and most recently co-founded Call Simulator, a company that provides Conversation Training as a Service to call centers. Call Simulator uses a combination of conversational and generative AI to enable their clients to quickly create immersive training experiences, and deliver them anywhere at any time. -
Many contact center leaders struggle to get new hires up to speed, and AI will continue forcing human agents to tackle increasingly difficult sales and support scenarios. Adam Levin joins us today to discuss how to empower workers around the globe with new coaching and training tools, rather than replace them.
Guest: Adam Levin,
Adam is an expert in contact center coaching. He is the Founder and CEO of Reddy, coaching software that trains new sales and support hires in half the time of traditional methods. Previously he was the Co-Founder and COO of MYX, a higher-ed alternative that created in-person campuses for online learners. He has focused on developing coaching software that combines realistic training simulations, interactive live call assistants, and automated quality assurance to optimize talent across 100% of conversations.
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Remote and hybrid work are not new to contact centers, but getting really good at it on scale and for the long haul, is quite new. How are organizations retaining best talent once hired, and how are they bringing people into culture folds quickly, while building excitement about these employment opportunities? How do leaders emit the energy and ethos of the organization while clearly laying out expectations and holding people accountable? How are contact center organizations adding more flexibility to the mix? Join this session for details from Michele Rowan, President of WFH Alliance. She's the leading subject matter expert on remote and hybrid work for contact centers and support functions.
Air Date: Wed., March 27, 2024 - 10:00 AM/PT
Host: Bruce Belfiore | CEO & Senior Research Analyst | BenchmarkPortal
Guest Speaker: Michele Rowan | Work From Home Alliance
Season: 15 | Episode Number: 3
Guest: Michele Rowan
Michele Rowan, President of Work From Home Alliance, has spent the last 13 years exclusively helping companies design and continuously improve their remote working programs. Through gap analysis of workflows, business process, guidelines/policies and organization structures, she helps companies achieve best in class work from home and hybrid operating status. She facilitates conferences and workshops on remote/hybrid, bringing together leaders to share their insights and experiences. Prior to establishing her own consulting business in 2011, Michele spent 12 years with Hilton Hotels as Global VP of Reservations and Performance Management. -
Customer service surveys are no longer effective. Response rates are low, customers are tired of endless requests, and it’s becoming more difficult to get actionable data.
A new technique called sentiment analysis analyzes the conversations you’re already having with customers so you don’t have to pester them with survey requests. This technique can reveal immediately actionable insights, including trends you might miss with a traditional survey.
Guest Jeff Toister:
Jeff's first customer service interaction ended in a service failure. Vowing to learn from that experience, he became obsessed with customer service.
Today, he is ranked as one of the Top 30 Customer Experience Professionals in the World by Global Gurus.
He's written four books including The Service Culture Handbook, a step-by-step guide to getting your employees obsessed customer customer service.
More than 12,000 customer service professionals around the world subscribe to Jeff's Customer Service Tip of the Week email.
Over three million people have taken one of his video-based training courses on LinkedIn Learning. His Customer Service Foundations is LinkedIn Learning's most-watched customer service course in the world.
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Chad Tatton brings tremendous experience in using quality assurance to improve customer satisfaction, efficiency, effectiveness, time to proficiency, and sales in the contact center. During this conversation with host Bruce Belfiore, Chad will relay his experiences in helping organizations identify the right blend of people, processes, and automation to achieve improved outcomes.
Chad will include some “out of the box” approaches to automation and AI implementations of QA. He will also talk about approaches to improve the reliability and accuracy of automation by balancing technology, people, and processes.
Guest Bio:
Let me say a few words to introduce Chad Tatton to our audience, for those who don’t already know him. Chad is a 24-year contact center veteran and Founder and COO of Call Criteria, a Quality Assurance as a Service company. Chad is currently focused on helping clients fully exploit AI and automation for their QA needs.
I note that Chad owned and operated multiple contact centers before launching Call Criteria in 2012, so he has a lot of practical management experience.
His work with Call Criteria has included human resources to improve quality and customer outcomes, and, over the last few years, Call Criteria has extended its solution to include automation, speech analytics, and artificial intelligence.
He has a wealth of experience and insights to share with us today. So let’s dig in. -
Summary: This episode of CallTalk will focus on explaining the different types of Generative AI, as well as best practices to follow in selecting an LLM (Large Language Model). The discussion will help you understand what you should know, and helpy you identify the right LLM for your business. Important areas will include picking the right use cases, and the elements you should consider (cost, latency, hallucination, etc.) before pinning down your roadmap.
Guest: Jimmy Padia Founder, CEO & Founder
Jimmy Padia is an Expert in Generative AI-based Conversational AI applications for Contact Centers. He is based in Sunnyvale, VA, and leads Floatbot.AI in USA, India, MENA and APAC markets. He completed a Bachelor’s in Engineering (Computers) from Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI) in India. Jimmy has worked at General Electric as an IT Project leader, and graduated from GE's elite IMLP leadership program. He has 18+ years of experience in GenAI-powered Conversational AI, Digital Transformation and Customer-facing contact center solutions.
CallTalk is a monthly internet radio program for the customer service industry featuring the most innovative managers and thought leaders in the customer contact field, interviewed by BenchmarkPortal CEO, Bruce Belfiore. Broadcast monthly, directly over the Internet to your desktop, CallTalk covers hot topics that impact today's call center. CallTalk airs without the participation of vendors so that topics will be free from their influence and guided by the needs of its listeners. If you have a topic you would like us to cover, send it to [email protected]. -
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Chat GPT are invading the minds of contact center managers around the world. But what will they mean for you and your operation? Join Bruce Belfiore and AI futurist Mark Coudray for a CallTalk episode that confronts AI and its implications for contact centers headon. Mark will share his experience and thoughts in an episode all managers should hear - - to be prepared.
About Mark Coudray:
Recognized as a premier thought leader & practical strategist who delivers documented gross margin gains and net profit results in todays highly commoditized, price-driven markets.
His passion is inventing exceptional business models and processes that excel to their fullest potential.
Mark’s work has been published globally more than 500 times. He has also presented at hundreds of industry events over four decades. His work has received multiple international awards for innovation and lifetime achievement.
As a life-long learner and problem-solver, Mark has always used his businesses as a proving ground to develop unique strategies. They are known for their innovation and profitability, which are then syndicated within their respective markets.
His current focus since 2016 is on the use of Artificial Intelligence, accelerated learning, and “The Physics of Profit” to make any business Competitively Unique. This advantage results in double-digit profitability with significantly less effort.
A mandatory requirement is the foundations of his processes be universally applicable. He has worked with companies in the following industries: printing, specialty graphics, apparel decoration, steel fabrication, contact centers, wholistic wellness resorts, contracting, remodeling, and service/professional practices. -
From medical marijuana to recreational marijuana, to when you can test, how you can test and what you can test, the laws vary by jurisdiction, so be extremely careful if you are a multi-state employer who is using a one size fits all drug testing process. I suspect this area will see an increase in litigation as the laws continue to change or are unclear and employers struggle to keep up. There are 51 pending bills at state legislatures related to testing for Marijuana.
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Answering services have been around for 100 years. But times are changing, and today, customers want to text companies. Businesses are text-enabling their business lines every day. But often, they’re too busy to respond to customers themselves. Join Bruce Belfiore as he interviews Gary Pudles about how easy it is to make your business “textable,” as well as being the first answering provider with on-demand live agents to respond to texts and chats when companies can’t.
With Guest Gary Pudles, President & CEO of AnswerNet.
Gary founded AnswerNet in 1998.
He’s a recipient of the prestigious "Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year" award for business service providers, and was named a 2022 “Philadelphia Titan 100,” for CEOs who demonstrate exceptional leadership, vision, passion, and influence in their field.
Also in 2022, Inc. Magazine named AnswerNet a “2022 Inc. Power Partner” in telecommunications. -
Hiring agents has become more difficult and managers are looking for new ideas and approaches to increase success. Join Bruce Belfiore as he interviews Ravin Shah about today's market for contact center agents - and how to win with top candidates using a structured, speedy methodology.
Ravin Shah is the Founder & CEO of Hellohire, a software platform that helps contact centers hire the best agents faster, while reducing recruiting time and costs. Ravin is a serial tech entrepreneur on a mission to expedite and humanize the hiring process -
Join Bruce Belfiore for the first CallTalk episode of 2023, with the theme "Maximizing the Human in the Call Center". He will be interviewing Nicholas MacDonald, director of Customer Experience at C-Lect Consulting. Nicholas will draw from a career in contact center leadership at Machias Savings Bank in Maine, where he put employee culture first, fostering employee engagement and teamwork that empowered his colleagues to provide excellent customer experiences. He is a believer in the power of incremental changes, and will share his approach and results.
Air Date: Wednesday, January 4, 2023
Host: Bruce Belfiore | CEO & Senior Research Analyst | BenchmarkPortal
Guest Speaker: Nicholas MacDonald
Season: 14 | Episode Number: 1
Guest: Nicholas MacDonald
Director of CX at C-Lect consulting, Nicholas MacDonald transferred from a career in contact center leadership for Machias Savings Bank in Maine where he fostered a culture built on employee empowerment and growth, allowing agents to develop exceptional experiences for themselves and for customers. Nicholas will share insights from projects that brought significant efficiency gain and customer experience improvement, including implementing a unified contact center solution, Voice Authentication, and Workforce Management. He is a national public speaker in Customer Experience and coaches leaders to grow their teams He also owns and operates a small goat dairy farm and spends his downtime training his young Quarter Horse. Nicholas holds his B.A. and MBA from Ashford University. -
Join Bruce Belfiore as he interviews industry veteran Mark Brody about getting your center "unstuck" by supporting your front line agents - - and making them stars. Providing the right technology, training and leadership, combined with dedication to data-driven decision making will smooth the path to better performance. You will take away insights into CX, AX, VOC from an expert in contact center transformation." - - or something like that
Guest: Mark Brody
Mark Brody has worked for and with several industry leaders during his 32-year Contact Center career. His consultancy, Brohawk Solutions, LLC, was born out of Mark’s passion to help organizations become more effective and efficient through understanding how their people, processes, and technology impact the employee experience and ultimately the customer experience.
In Mark’s spare time, he currently leads The Austin Contact Center Alliance and works with The United Way of Greater Austin’s Community Impact Council. Mark is a graduate of The University of Kansas and currently resides in Round Rock, TX with his wife, daughter, and two dogs. He is a relatively new hacker in the world of golf and is an avid Jayhawk Basketball and New England sports fan. -
This episode of CallTalk will have Keith Fiveson talk to Bruce Belfiore about boosting your customer experience and employee engagement using leadership techniques he has developed over a lifetime of experience. Use these techniques to empower greater resilience and create positive experiences using breathwork approaches based on science.
CallTalk is a monthly internet radio program for the customer service industry featuring the most innovative managers and thought leaders in the customer contact field, interviewed by BenchmarkPortal CEO, Bruce Belfiore. Broadcast monthly, directly over the Internet to your desktop, CallTalk covers hot topics that impact today's call center. CallTalk airs without the participation of vendors so that topics will be free from their influence and guided by the needs of its listeners. If you have a topic you would like us to cover, send it to [email protected].
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Managing work-at-home agents has moved from pandemic emergency mode to representing a long-term challenge for most contact center managers. This episode of CallTalk will focus on tips and best practices that you can use immediately to improve performance. Bruce Belfiore interviews Marcia Presberry and Shannon Smith of National General for a half hour of valuable insights.
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We have dedicated courses and CallTalk episodes on coaching for agents - an important topic indeed. However, contact center managers need coaching as well - - coaching that may go beyond the training curricula that are in the market. Tune in to this episode of CallTalk for some real insights on how you, as a manager, can benefit from coaching.
Guest: Mitchell Levy | Author, Speaker, Global Credibility Expert
Global Credibility Expert Mitchell Levy is a 2x TEDx speaker and international bestselling author of over 60 books. After interviewing 500 thought leaders on credibility, he created the Credibility Nation community, published a 5-country international bestselling book, delivered a TEDx, created courses, and is working on getting the definition of credibility rewritten in the dictionary. He's an accomplished Entrepreneur who has created twenty businesses in Silicon Valley including four publishing companies that have published over 750 books. He's provided strategic consulting to hundreds of companies and has been the chairman of a board of a NASDAQ-listed company. Mitchell has been happily married for thirty-one years and prior to covid-19, regularly spent four weeks a year in Europe with family and friends.
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A place For Professionals Who Want to Be Seen as Credible
The keys to success and happiness in the global village are credibility and relationships. Since technology has enabled us to connect with more people, how we live and do business can easily be seen. Thus, presenting ourselves as credibly as we can allows others to want to get to know, like, and trust us.
Credibility Nation is The go-to community to learn/grow your credibility with the "right" people on a similar journey.
Imagine coming to a place where you can immediately know, like, and trust
those around you.
Where you can be safe in an environment where others want to support you.
This is Credibility Nation.
All those in Credibility Nation live by the following pledge:
"I pledge to live credibly every day without hate in my life. I strive to be a good human and make this a better planet for myself, my family, and for other people’s families in this generation and the next."
A big part of credibility is clarity.
How do you answer the question when someone asks, “What do you do?”
Does it take you five or ten minutes to answer?
In a world where we're inundated with content, somebody who takes ten or twenty minutes to answer
this simple question may not be considered someone who is likeable or trustworthy.
If this is you, you need CredClarity.
Video Link: Why You Matter as a Customer Service Professional https://youtu.be/CBOALI_98uc -
An experience guarantee goes beyond merely warrantying a product against defects. It encompasses the entire customer journey to promise an experience that never falls short of expectations.
Customer loyalty skyrockets when people trust your brand, product, or service. That trust is earned not by the occasionally wow moment, but by being remarkably consistent.
…And that’s why we wanted to talk more about how to guarantee an amazing customer experience, and we have brought in an expert on the topic for you, Jeff Toister, author of The Guaranteed Customer Experience.
Guest Jeff Toister:
Jeff Toister is an author, consultant, and trainer who helps companies develop customer-focused cultures.
He's written four books including The Guaranteed Customer Experience. Thousands of customer service professionals around the world subscribe to Jeff's Customer Service Tip of the Week email. More than 500,000 people on six continents have taken one of his video-based training courses on LinkedIn Learning.
Jeff has been recognized as a top influencer by many organizations:
Top 30 customer service professional in the world (Global Gurus)Top customer experience influencer (Unymira and Panviva)Top contact center influencer (ICMI and ProcedureFlow) -
The pandemic has intensified many of the challenges facing contact center managers. Join Bruce Belfiore as he interviews Bob Kobek of Mobius SVP for a lively episode of CallTalk centered on issues of worker recruitment and attrition and other remote management challenges in this new age of at-home workforces.
Guest: Robert Kobek | CustomerCount
Prior to forming Mobius Vendor Partners in October of 1999, Mr. Kobek spent more than 30 years in the direct marketing industry and government. Specializing in the design, implementation and marketing of products and services, Bob has designed more than 150 outbound telemarketing, inbound customer service and order processing operations and interactive information systems. In 2007 Bob and Mobius launched CustomerCount℠, a cloud-based survey solution providing intuitive real-time reporting, designed for the contacy center industry. Mr. Kobek is a member of the American Resort Development Association and sits on numerous committees. He is a board member of PACE and serves as the chair of the Government Affairs committee. He attended Holy Cross College at Notre Dame, Indiana and Indiana University. -
Customer service allows for limited face-to-face or physical interaction, making it challenging to provide genuine support and lead generation. Instead, people are focusing on virtual interactions to continue driving growth. On this episode, Bruce will talk with Todd Fisher, CEO and co-founder of CallTrackingMetrics about how companies can leverage text messages for customer service use and help generate leads, nurture and convert leads.
Text message marketing holds massive potential for lead generation, but only if executed correctly. There are ways to maximize the success of SMS marketing. A few tips Todd will discuss in order to maximize SMS marketing and generate, nurture and convert leads are adjusting your strategy to:
1. Meet Customers where they are
2. Determine optimal timing for outreach
3. Avoid cold-texting; Opt for organic list creation
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Join us for a conversation with industry practitioner Patrick Ebrahimian on the processes that impact access and availability of contact center agents. He shares proven ways to improve service levels and the customer experience using creative lean methodologies. You will love his football-themed playbook that transformed his center's performance.
Guest: Patrick Ebrahimian is the Director of Transformation at UnitedLex, driving transformation throughout the entire legal ecosystem. He is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt, and a LEAN Master, with over 18 years of experience. Throughout his career, he has consistently executed process improvement projects within the hospitality, financial, and manufacturing sectors including call center environments as well. He believes that business and process improvement practitioners should not only look for innovative solutions to help improve processes but also teach the business how to utilize the tools and techniques so that will enable them to become successful. In his previous roles he was the Director of Business Improvement and Quality for Wyndham Destinations, and a Master Black Belt at Johnson & Johnson and Bank of America. - もっと表示する
