From Cost Centre To Insight Hub - The Contact Centre Revolution Has Begun

In this episode of Breaking the Blueprint, hosts Vinay Parmar and Iqbal Javaid sit down with Xander Freeman, Director at Call Centre Helper, to explore the future of customer experience and how empathy is reshaping leadership.

They unpack why proximity and listening matter more than ever in a hybrid world, how digital intimacy is transforming service delivery, and why true innovation begins with culture. Xander shares practical insights on transforming contact centres from cost centres to growth engines, building empowered teams, and connecting technology with humanity.

This conversation blends strategy, leadership, and emotional intelligence — revealing how brands can create customer relationships that last.

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Transcript

Vinay: 0:05

Hello and welcome to episode 11 of Breaking the Blueprint with Me Vinay Parmar and my co-host.

Iqbal: 0:10

Iqbal Javaid

Vinay: 0:12

today we have a very special guest with us who's sitting here looking quite awkward that we'll introduce you to in a second. but we've, before we jump into to meeting our guest, great episode last time with Sid, right? Yeah.

Iqbal: 0:24

Great conversation. I loved it. I posted on LinkedIn recently, it's like two of my favorite topics, football, sports and cx, how these things come together. So it was really competing around how, what fan loyalty means and what, the whole concept around brand loyalty ties very closely with that. I actually got a little stick last time from some of my friends who were listening, said, look, you've gotta support your team no matter what.'cause I was, we were a bit downbeat because of United, obviously,

Vinay: 0:54

after this weekend.

Iqbal: 0:55

yeah, exactly. So it's been a, it's been quite, it's been a great couple. So since that episode, a lot's changed. So now my loyalty's back, I'm, back in it, you're

Vinay: 1:02

up spending in the shop and buying shirts and,

Iqbal: 1:04

Yeah. No, exactly. but I guess in all honesty, just the, what, I got out of the last episode was all around, you've, these organisations, they have all of the data that they need to be able to figure out what their customers or their fans need, and being able to deliver personalised, services. I think that's really the next phase of what we wanna be seeing as fans. Like I want, more of a personalised service from my club that I support Yeah. That I invest in. I know they have the data. The next step is now I wanna start seeing the fruits of, the, data that they have now.

Vinay: 1:43

Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. I was. I saw a really great post on LinkedIn this morning by a guy who had done an experiment in a coffee shop, and he'd sat and observed people coming in and out. And his experiment was about when do you greet people when they come in through the door or when they get closer to you? Yeah. And he measured, I think 41 customers that came in and out this shop, and he said, when they were just welcomed in, as soon as they opened the door, the barista shouted, welcome. 30, only about 35% of the people actually acknowledged the barista. The rest were caught off guard, but when they got closer in closer proximity and it was a specific communication. It went up to the high seventies to 80%. And it's interesting'cause I think there's this 10 foot theory that, I think Edward T. Hall did around called Proximus. this theory about human, proximity and, how when we're closer to people in closer proximity, there's the ideal distance I think is 10 foot,

Iqbal: 2:41

Okay.

Vinay: 2:42

that creates a better connection. The reason I'm bringing that up is, that there's almost a parallel there, which is going from broadcast as in general messaging and general experience.

Iqbal: 2:52

Yeah.

Vinay: 2:52

to bringing it down to a much more personalised, intimate experience where you learn more about the customer and making it more relevant. So it's almost as if you are within 10 feet rather than you're just shouting from across the coffee

Iqbal: 3:03

It's a good point. Now that's in a physical sense though, isn't it? Yeah. And now we are really, if you are engaging your customers physically, that's fine, but actually you've got people right in front of you on screen. Yeah. And that's where you can deliver these personalised experiences. And I think taking that approach, what you said, that 10 foot, distance, you can, take that across to all of your customer base as long as you've got that, connection into them digitally through Yeah. Through either an app or, your website. Yeah, definitely. So

Vinay: 3:32

episode. If you've not checked it out, please do. hit the subscribe button, hit the bell, whichever platform you're watching on. make sure you check out the episode with Sid Dasai. it is, really, fascinating. Anyway, onto this week or this month even, we have a very special guest with us, somebody that you and I both know pretty well. welcome the pod, Xander Freeman.

Xander Freeman: 3:52

Thank you so much having me. Yeah. It's so nice to see you both again and it's great to finally be on podcast. We've been talking about it for a while.

Iqbal: 3:58

Yeah.

Xander Freeman: 3:58

It's to finally be here.

Vinay: 3:59

Yeah. Yeah. And in, in sunny Birmingham. It's not. So it's not raining, at least, Well,

Iqbal: 4:06

I've got a funny story about before I came. Yes. I, live in London of course. So before coming in, I thought, let me ask Siri what the weather in Birmingham is. And it, told me it's 25 degrees sunny. You know what's happened? It's given me the weather for Birmingham in the us. Now you'd think Siri, my phone would know who, where

Xander Freeman: 4:27

would you really rather be in Alabama though, or would you rather be here? Yeah,

Iqbal: 4:31

of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Xander Freeman: 4:32

I lived in Birmingham for about four and a half years. This is pretty on brand weather for it. Yeah, But still slightly better than Manchester today.

Vinay: 4:40

and, not only that, Xander, as we were talking, I discovered that you met your wife just a few feet away from this very studio.

Xander Freeman: 4:47

Yeah, there is a bar just down the road where I where I met wife a depressing amount of time ago now. But yeah, it was quite nice walking past it again.

Vinay: 4:54

yeah, Because well, look, Iqbal and I both know you, but people listening or watching don't. So who are you and what do you do, Xa?

Xander Freeman: 5:02

So my name is Xander Freeman. I am the director at Call centre Helper. We're, it's always one of those things where sometimes it's quite hard to describe what we are. Sometimes people call as a magazine, sometimes they call it as a publication. In essence, we're one massive website. I always say we're unofficially the largest online community of contact centre professionals. In the world. So it's a global audience of about one and a half million unique readers every year on there. Filled with best practice guides, articles, webinars, research, everything you could want if you were a contact centre professional, looking for some guidance in whatever niche subsect of this industry you're trying to get into. Yeah. Packed with lots of value.

Vinay: 5:40

and sorry, a bit of background. How long have you, how long has Call centre been going? Because I guess, I've been involved in contact centres for 30, almost 30 years. and when you and I were talking, we met a little while ago, but until I've met you, call centre Helper. It wasn't a brand that I recall as, oh, that's really synonymous with contact centres. But you've been out around for a while, right?

Xander Freeman: 5:59

23 years. Just this August passed. So yeah, it's been a, it's been a long time. Yeah. And it's one of those things I always think we do a really good job of engaging with our audience that are on there, but sometimes, one of the reason I'm doing this podcast with you guys now is we put so much effort into some of our resources, like this latest research, and I just feel like off camera I describe it a little bit more harshly and use certain words that I won't use on camera. But we do sometimes do quite a poor job of actually promoting this research once we've gone through all the effort of it. This year is when it's 85 pages packed full, yeah. Of insights and data with expert analysis from 26 different leading, customer contact experts including you, to be fair. Yeah. So it's, yeah, we're an interesting one as a company, but everything we have is free to access. It's basically just we're positioned to try and make people's lives easy and what can be a very stressful environment. Yeah.

Vinay: 6:48

Yeah. And all of us have had a journey in contact centres. you've been enrolled contact? Yeah, just

Iqbal: 6:53

obviously I come from a technical angle, working in technology, working for different vendors in this space. that's where we've come across often. We've done a webinar together as well. So it's, I like what you guys are about in terms of, there's a lot of noise out there from vendors. there's a lot of publications that are just pretty much spitting out what the vendors are saying. Mm-hmm. I think on the ground it's very much different. And we'll obviously, dig into this in our conversation today is actually the reality is a lot more different from what we see in the public domain around what, all these, different types of technologies. Obviously AI is a big part of it, but. People on the ground, customers, they are really struggling to get a handle on what does this mean for us. there's a fear of missing out as well. Like, we see technology advancing so much. Our customers have certain expectations. How do we get there and who do we trust? Who do we listen to? And I think this is where you guys can come in and play a really, important role.

Xander Freeman: 7:51

I think. So I always say it's one of those things where it's, it's all really well and good where you're talking about it in theory and it's not actually on the ground and happening in practice. It's two very different things. Yeah. And that's where I try and help position CH with our audience in the sense of, right, this is what people are saying, this is what we think are at, is actually happening. And then this is what our audience is telling us. We do a ton of stuff by, serving our audience, constantly speaking to our audience as well, going to their contact centres in person as well, and seeing what they're doing, what key things to take away from that and what other people can learn. It's all about. Learning from each other. And I think that's where the community aspect comes in really nicely.

Vinay: 8:30

yeah, definitely. Definitely. so, we talked about research in the headline, and this episode is a deep dive into the world of contact centres because now you know very much like you two, I've been involved in it, as I said, for 30 years. I started my career as an agent taking calls back in the day when, when your supervisor, when they were listening to your call was actually plugged in or worse still, you had a tape recorder plugged into the turret that was recording your call. That's how like, don't let this beard fool you. There's a lot more gray there than the just that guy's doing his drunk. Yeah, So look, let's dive in.'cause I'm, really interested in what the research has found so. From the top. What are the trends that have come out in this year's research?

Xander Freeman: 9:15

So there's a few different directions to go with this. Let's start off with AI because everyone wants to talk about it. This year we're seeing 90% of our audience have either adopted AI or in the process of adopting it as well, which is a big uptick from last year as you would expect. But also if you look at it and you break it down into sort of channel mix, chatbots are up to nearly 50% deployment, which I think is really interesting. That's actually the part of the research that you did the analysis on. I think when we talk about chatbots, it's part of me thinks it's the thing we love to hate. It's a very easy thing to punch down to, but I think when you deploy it in the right way and use it for the right circumstances and set it up correctly, can actually be a very useful tool. Yeah. I also think if you look at, so our audience was, our research was done off our, the leaders within our community. And I often equate it to, you know how you can sometimes get a sort of hypochondriac doctor where they know too much. I say sometimes it's a little bit like that as well. When it comes to chat boxes. You know what it could be you experience it in your day-to-day life. Yeah. As well. I also think at the moment as well, it's one of those things where the bar gets set so high with customer experience these days. By certain brands, you're compared to that rather than your competitors in a lot of different ways because it's, it could be a really challenging environment at the moment. and then to take a step back on the trends, we're seeing more, we've seen a huge surge in searches on our site for sort of face-to-face activities, which I think is a consequence of the sort of return to work hybrid approach that most contact centres are starting to take again, these days. In some ways, it's nice to see some of those searches cycle back. There's some really good advice on CCH h around those things. Yeah. But it's interesting that's come up a lot more in the research. As much as we wanna talk about ai. Yeah. And we wanna talk about tech.

Iqbal: 10:52

but that's the reality, isn't it? I'm, certainly seeing it at the moment. There's a big push to get people back into offices and get offices filled up, but the rationale behind it doesn't quite make sense because actually the technology's enabled us now to be able to have a distributed contact centre environment and actually have more of a global presence as well, very easily. Right. you're not restricted by geography anymore. You're not. but yet we're still seeing, and I'm seeing a real push by senior management to get people back into the office, particularly in call centre environment, where you wanna see people. Why when you've got access to so much insight.

Vinay: 11:27

Yeah. and I think the why is the, important question.'cause I think that if you look at in the simplicity of I can do the role that I do in the office, sat there from home just as effective, that's one part. But I think what we're now starting to better understand is two or three things. One, there's a lot of conversation about culture and the importance of culture In, driving the experience for customers, for employees. And as much as you would like to think you can, it's very difficult to create a, cohesive culture when people are always remote, when there's not any inclusion. So I, I think that, I think the second thing is the purpose of coming to the office for, if they're just coming to the office to do the job they could have done at home, particularly those people in back office That could, grind out reports, do some of their work at home, then you're defeating the object. And actually, but if you get them in and it's more about collaboration. Looking at, working together, solving problems. There's a different purpose to be in the office. I think that's part of the conversation role. But for the contact centre, when I, in the research, I think I talked about this, in the piece that I did with at call centre helper was one of the unspoken, one of the unspoken things is the impact it has mentally on people being at home a lot. Particularly where, talking about chat bots and self-service, where some of those easy calls or most of those easy calls that as an agent you used to get in your day Yeah. Would be spread out through your day. You are now just almost getting a queue of angry customers. Or frustrated customers in complex queries, one after the other. Now, if you are lucky enough to have a dedicated space in your home that you can shut the door off, walk downstairs, or walk into another room, brilliant. You've, got a separate space. But so many agents I see are working in their kids' bedroom, in their bedroom on the dining table. But and the psychological impact of that is it creates a negative anchor. So if you are constantly sitting in this chair dealing with negative customers, Yeah.'cause there's always a problem that becomes an emotional weight. So then when you're having your dinner Or you're in that room for another purpose, that negative emotion. There's no separation couch. There's no separation. Right.

Xander Freeman: 13:38

It's also quite a bit isolating. Yeah. As well. But I also think when you're talking about that sort of thing as well, you've got the demographic shift as well. Right. Look at the average age of a frontline worker in, let's just say customer service in general. You come in on five years now. Well, we are five years. I always forget how long ago. 2020 was five years now from when people really started embracing remote working. Now if we start putting in return to office mXandertes, you've got people that might not have ever actually worked in an office Yes. Before coming in. Yeah. Which comes a whole host of different problems when you have that as well. So there's so many different elements, many taking account and

Vinay: 14:11

overwhelming and people that have relocated and moved to different parts of the country because they they believe they'd be able to continue to work. So, Yeah. that, that's a, there's a whole other podcast here. Yeah. Yeah.

Iqbal: 14:22

just, on that, I, do want to touch on the chatbot, bit that you mentioned there. Yes. Obviously that, you know that from, a chatbot specula, this has been around for years now, right? not much has changed there. I, think what I'm seeing now, speaking to a lot of organisations is yes, there's still, when I look at chatbot, where there's an opportunity to introduce it, but voice bot's just gone crazy. Every vendor Is trying to shove voice bot down every, customer that they have that has a front end voice service. Let's get a voice bot in there. what's your view on that?

Xander Freeman: 14:53

I think it's also voice AI is a really interesting subsection of contact centres at the moment, or let's say customer contact at the moment. From one perspective, it's, a relatively straightforward startup and realistic use case for AI at the moment. If you look at what a company like, let's say, 11 labs, from a voice I perspective, there's so many different things you can do with that. You can create a voice clone of yourself, which I know certain people have done. You've got so many different regional dialects on there do. If you look at some of the empathy they're trying to inject into that, it's quite new and it's exciting. I think it, when it's done right, it could be really useful. I think the key thing there from an end user perspective is getting those escalation protocols, right? Yeah. It's also make it very clear at the beginning of that conversation, look. I am ai,

Iqbal: 15:35

Yeah.

Xander Freeman: 15:36

this. Make it very clear what you can and can't do with it to your audience, and it builds in that level of trust. I think voice AI will become, it'll continue to become more popular. It instantly jumped from nowhere to, I can't remember exactly off the top of my head, somewhere between, five to 10% deployment in this year's survey. Yeah. It's been, it will continue to be so, and I think that's from two fronts, not only from a technology perspective in terms of it will continue to improve, but also from a customer behaviour perspective, how they react to this kind of thing at the moment. You've either got a my might effect of love it or hate it.

Vinay: 16:05

Yeah.

Xander Freeman: 16:06

It again, it's similar with chatbots. It depends how you deploy it.

Vinay: 16:08

Yeah. And, that. That kind of experience that customers have in their own daily lives is important because many of them will have voice assistant Siri, Amazon, if you've managed to get a Google device in your home, one of those. But also you're seeing increasingly people when they're engaging in things like chatGPT Yep. Using voice.

Xander Freeman: 16:26

Yeah.

Vinay: 16:26

And having full blown conversation. So we're getting more and more use to talking to technology or something that's not a real human. the bit that really, is important here is the design and what it's designed from. And it's still, I think, the case that a lot of chatbots are designed for efficiency and internal metrics. And not designed from the perspective of

Iqbal: 16:49

the customer. The customer. Yeah. Yeah.

Vinay: 16:51

And, we are coming on the back on this podcast on the back of the AWS, outage, the day, the global, cloud service. And I'm a big user of Canva. I love Canva and I was trying to use it and down it and I couldn't. So I hit the AI chat bot. This is before I knew about That it was a global thing. I just on there in the morning and I was trying to chat to this chat bot, which beautifully says, hi, I'm here to help You what can I do for you? I can't access my documents. Oh, here's a help article. Like, no, I can't access my documents. Can I speak to a human? Don't understand. Speak to support. Don't understand help desk. Don't understand. Connect me to a human, don't understand, and then I'm there no knowing what's going on and this thing just in this loop of death. And so many of that. and the irony being is that in a world where we were driven to AI and, talking about ai, many of us still have PTSD from really bad chat bot experiences. Yeah. Even when it's presented as an option, we probably wouldn't use it.

Xander Freeman: 17:52

Take it back to the Microsoft paperclip. Oh yeah. It's a lovely sort of first steps of what most people, if you really think about, it's like, oh yeah. That did used to really ag me off. Yeah, Now I think you could call it retro, to be fair. Yeah.

Vinay: 18:06

You would just pop it when you didn't want it and Yeah. Yeah. Just give you advice that didn't help. So, great. So chat bots are, a big point of query we talked about, face-to-face and that anything else that's showing up in your, research that. Useful to surface.

Xander Freeman: 18:23

I think there's a few different routes you could take there. WFM technology, uptake has continued to rise. We've been doing this research now for, I think, 14 years in a row. so if you take it back 10 years, WFM technology adoption was about 30%. Now we're at close to, I think 65 off the top of my head. So it's interesting that that's

Iqbal: 18:40

quite a big number actually. 65. I'm quite surprised. Like, but is that, I guess how, big are we looking in terms of seats, contact centre seats? Is that over a hundred

Xander Freeman: 18:48

It entirely varies with our audience. That's the thing. As much as we filter it by leaders that, it's ultimately, it's such a broad mix of, um, of seat sizes, verticals as well within that. But I do think WFM's Rise is synonymous with what we're talking about today in some cases, which is the sort of power of data as well. This WFMI always think is quite a useful mindset into how to use data internally within your teams Yeah. That better organise'em and all the other benefits that you can talk about with w fm. But then also, obviously later today, we're gonna be talking about how to use that internally within your wider organisation and from a customer perspective. But I think the rise of WFM, you can equate similar levels to the general industry at the moment with AI adoption and use cases that people are trying to deploy at the moment.

Iqbal: 19:38

I think traditionally the problem with W fms being like in traditional contact centres, like every row of agents, you've had somebody at the end of that, that desk managing those agents on a WF FM spreadsheet or whatever, and now you've got AI being able to manage it, people being able to manage their own times. You

Xander Freeman: 19:56

at the advances in sentiment analysis. I did, one of my dissertations was in sentiment analysis and consumer behaviour. Again, depressing amount of time ago now, back at uni, but it's still light years ahead these days of where we were back then. Yeah, that's true. It's, also, like I say, just really quickly circling back to Voice Out and a couple of other components. One of the things I really love at the moment is the language transitions you can have with that kind of thing now makes a world of difference. And the advancements they've made in regional dialect detection, I can have a conversation. So I'm fortunate enough why I can speak English and Portuguese pretty fluently. I can flip mid-sentence into Portuguese and it'll follow the conversation. Yeah. As long as it's been set up to do that. Yes, it will follow it pretty well. Yeah. And if you look at where we were. Two years ago. Yeah. Five years ago. 10 years ago. Yeah. It's light years ahead.

Vinay: 20:44

Yeah. and it's not just the technology and contact centres starting to do that. If you start thinking about like Apple in their latest, set of I AirPods The new version you've got like live, translation. I tried

Iqbal: 20:56

that the other day. It felt miserably. I was actually on a call. with some Spanish people, and I had the Zoom translation on, and I thought, oh, let me try this. So I had the audio output from my laptop, and I tried the airport thing and it just, it was detecting some words, but I can't have a conversation. Like, it's, not, they're, selling this dream and this vision. Maybe I'll get there in a couple of years. Yeah. But that real time translation, it's just,

Xander Freeman: 21:22

it's not quite that. All three of us have relatively difficult to understand names from, from an AI perspective, which is always the litmus test I use and I've continued to use for my entire life when it comes to auto transcriptions. Yeah. iOS device, mine just, a,

Vinay: 21:39

I just think I'm some kind of Italian gangster'cause it just, Vinay references is Vinay, vi. Yeah.

Xander Freeman: 21:44

You do give off that vibe

Iqbal: 21:45

Yeah, it's true. Yeah. Especially when you've got your suit on.

Xander Freeman: 21:48

Ah, my iOS devices at the moment will auto transcribe my name into three different things. One is Santa. Which is not the worst thing in the One is panda, which not too bad. The third one is cancer, which is like, horrific compared to, to, yeah. That's not good. No.

Iqbal: 22:03

We'll stick to Santa, shall we? We Christmas not far now. So it's, something,

Xander Freeman: 22:07

good. Yeah. But it does make my, my team's life a little bit interesting. We're doing the live event coverage and they're having to transcribe it really quickly. There's so much work they have to do. Yeah.

Vinay: 22:17

Yeah. But yeah, so conversational, voice AI is more and more coming to the fore. More and more people using, I guess also from an accessibility perspective, it's easy to talk to something that needing to type, needing to, needed to get access to a keyboard. I imagine even in situations where it's an emergency, having to pull out your phone and tap a message or get through something, just being able to speak to it. Yeah, from across the room even.

Xander Freeman: 22:42

Well look at, let's look at it from a digital channel perspective. There's so much ambiguity in the written word as well relative to what you're detecting when someone's speaking. So if you look at different channels like email, chat, bott, what have you, it's how, do you detect sentiment in that way? And again, we've made some really good advances, but it's also one of the things from our data, which was what are you monitoring there from an agent perspective and communication, empathy came up right near the top of that, which is really nice to see. Obviously compliance is a very easy win there, so that took the top spot there. But it was really interesting to see empathy really come to the foreground there, even in digital channels, which can be a little bit challenging sometimes to really detect that. Yeah.

Vinay: 23:17

Yeah. Now one of the things when we talk about contact centres, that's been a theme probably for the last couple of decades, is there's been this driver contact centre from cost centre to value centre. They're often misunderstood. Yep. In organisations. and there is this, there is, I think there's an opportunity now to actually finally be able to flip that model on its head and really create a value centre. And I know you and I have talked about this, but just on contact centres being misunderstood, are they still misunderstood? Do companies still see them as this? Unfortunate cost of doing business that sits in the corner somewhere. That's the poor relation to the rest of the business. I

Xander Freeman: 23:58

think so. I think some of that stems from the general public at large. Take our name, it's call centre helper, say call centre to someone on the street. And you know what? They're gonna get into their heads. Yeah. And I think you can look at it from the evolution of call centre to contact centre to let's say customer experience there. But I almost think the step beyond that, and I think where we'll eventually end up as an industry is gonna be customer contact. Because I think that is broad enough where it covers a whole scope of digital channels as well as the traditional ones within that. But it also, it's a clean slate. In a lot of ways for the general public. Now, if, I think if you push that back onto the organisation in general, we've spent almost the entirety of the, let's say, contact centre's existence going cap in hand asking for budgets. And I think for the first time that I've certainly been aware of, we're actually in a position of power. Which is really nice. And I, that's as much as we wanna talk about it being a value centre, I always think you go a step further. It's an insight centre. Yes.

Iqbal: 24:50

Yeah.

Xander Freeman: 24:51

Especially if you look at the senior team, they're gonna be under pressure as well to innovate in the right ways. Everyone wants to get involved in AI in some way.'cause it's just the climate at

Iqbal: 24:59

the moment.

Xander Freeman: 25:00

Where does all that data come from? It's the contact centre. Yeah. It's a hundred percent the contact centre. Yeah. Finance don't have that data. Marketing don't have that data. The senior teams, the CSUITE teams don't have that data. You guys do?

Vinay: 25:10

Yeah. I, one of, one of the first speaking gigs I did when I went freelancing I went to, I flew over to Dubai to do, a slight a contact centre conference. There And my bit was all about the gold in your contact centre. It was all about understanding that. the value of the call recordings that you have. all these contact centres start with, your call will be recorded for monitoring and training purposes. Many of them monitoring, yes. Training. I don't know whether they actually do to the degree that they could, but what I was talking about there was that there's so much insight in those conversations because look, when we are, when we're trying to drive in innovation in organisations, often the intelligence for that comes from a survey or some kind of research that is polarising. You either get really great experience or really poor experience. You either get certain segments speaking about it and what, just looking at contact centre and the volume of calls you're getting, if you're getting 30,000 calls a week or something like that versus a one to 2% response rate on a survey, not only are you getting a greater. A greater, sample size, but you're also getting the nuanced conversations.'cause not every conversation is, it was really great. It was really poor. You're getting the nuanced conversations where somebody's just calling to do something quite routine. But within that conversation there are clues and bits of insight that tell you about the next steps down.

Xander Freeman: 26:33

We are in a post, post contact sur survey world Yeah. These days, I think. And that's, quite a key thing. It's, if you look at how we used to do VOC and how we used to get that data, it was always very reactive to stuff. Yeah. And look at who would fill out those surveys. It's like you say, it's, very much either end of the

Iqbal: 26:50

Exactly. You've got AI now doing a lot of CSATs now for, a lot of these organisations. But just going back to the cost centre piece, I think it depends. You can't label all call centres obviously. Right. I working with a, an organisation and they're all sellers For for that business. They're the most important people within that business. They're handling inbound leads, they're doing outbound calling, so they're willing to invest a lot per seat across technology because these guys are the revenue drivers. Right. So that's, a different type of contact centre for me. Right. Yeah.

Vinay: 27:22

I think, yeah. And it's a great, it's a great point because I think traditionally that journey from cost centre to value centre has been how do we generate revenue? Exactly. Is it sales, cross sales upsell, whatever. Yeah. And I think where xus, taken to and what, certainly what I've been talking about a lot is the insight hub, actually the commodity you have as a contact centre mm-hmm. To sell to the rest of the organisation is really great insight that improves decision making across multiple disciplines. Pricing, commercial, Yeah. Marketing as well.

Iqbal: 27:51

Yeah. Marketing

Vinay: 27:52

is such a good use

Xander Freeman: 27:53

case

Vinay: 27:53

for it. And you, it you almost, the opportunity here is to place yourself as the contact centre, the insight hub at the centre of the organisations that's selling to the rest of the organisation. Insight and intelligence that helps

Xander Freeman: 28:07

them

Vinay: 28:08

to make better decisions.

Xander Freeman: 28:09

The key thing is how do you do that? Yeah. And I almost think you need to look at it from a sort of double-ended approach. Yes, you've got to sell it to the C-suites, which I'll get onto in a minute, but you've also gotta sell it to your team members as well. This is why we're doing it. Bring them along in the journey as well. Yeah. We've seen that done to great effect in several contact centres that we I,

Iqbal: 28:27

think what, what's worked really well in certain places where I've seen people create CX councils Across different, disciplines within an organisation. Yeah. So you mentioned all the different areas. You've got leadership across those areas, coming together with the people that are managing the contact centre. Once they start to share some of the pain points and things that are happening in the organisation, they realise actually all the gold is set with the contact centre. And then it's tying those dots together, isn't it?

Vinay: 28:53

It's absolutely that, and that's the role of the CX leader is they are the person who orchestrates that, those relationships. Yeah. Who creates that collaboration. I was talking, to Martin Hill Wilson, who some of you may know, and he and I, we've been chatting about this topic a lot, and we were talking about the team of teams that in the military, there's this thing where you take your best people from certain military and you bring them and you You put them into other teams, or you centralise them having cost collaborative groups where you have representation from different teams. It's cross-pollinating. It's cross-pollinating. the co, the key here is co-location, bringing more people together from disparate parts of the organisation to start to, to, share intelligence, to talk to each other problems, about what they're trying to find out. And then looking at the sources of where you can get that information and data from to improve the decision making.

Xander Freeman: 29:41

across

Vinay: 29:41

different places. Right.

Xander Freeman: 29:42

But the key thing is within that, like we talk a lot about silos within contact centres, but when we talk about that, we're mainly talking team to team within the centre. Yeah. Contact centres themselves are a nasty silo within that. Yes. As we all talk in our own acronyms, we tend to stay within the industry as well. Yeah. Which is nice in some ways, but also from across pollination perspective, it could be, a little bit difficult, but I also think like the role that CX leader is, I've often termed it to be the Rosetta Stone in your organisation, is how do you translate this insight and these terms to the different departments. Yeah. What CFO really cares about your A ht really, I know it makes a difference on that. We're not saying do away with a HD, but translate it to them. If it's a CFO, put it into real pounds or real dollars. Yeah. If it's marketing, put it into something that matters for them. Like, look, sorry.

Vinay: 30:28

Yeah, no, completely. I, sorry, I didn't mean interrupt, but Yeah, exactly that, translate it into what does that really mean? things like. translating that, every 30 seconds, that's additional on a call because the system's not working. Cost this in must have in terms of seats. Or miss sells opportunity or any of those things right through to, a conversion, something broken on a website affects the conversion, therefore you're leaving money on the table'cause customers can't transact. Or, and, but if you're not talking in those terms, you don't get the traction. And I think that too often in our industry and customer experience contact centre or call centre, whatever you call it, there's far too much conversation about, well, it affects customer satisfaction or the NPS will go up and the questions always will, will. So what?

Iqbal: 31:15

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I, think things are improving though. I think now we did the episode around metrics, didn't we? A few, we, a few months ago. And we talked about all of these metrics that the traditional metrics that, that we've always measured success against. Now that we are able to provide data that can impact marketing the way we are, servicing our customers and everything else, we, can now take that to that next level and really help.

Xander Freeman: 31:42

I think so. And I think, like I said, let's focus on marketing for a second'cause it's such an easy use case for it. This sort of thing's been happening to contact centres for decades now. Marketing, let's take it back to the nineties. Marketing would do a traditional, postal mailing and look at the impact that would have on your call. Volumes them not telling you that would screw over your team. Yeah. We has now shifted where the opposite could be happening is in the sense of, look, we've got the data you want, you've got a limited amount of marketing spend. We know where it will be applied better. We know what will resonate. Just have that conversation. Yeah. Cross pollinate it to the other side.

Iqbal: 32:12

I would argue you don't need, you shouldn't need to have a conversation. The data's there. It should surface itself. It should all be automated and it should just present itself to the marketing team. Right. Like, I understand what you're saying. You'll still relying on people to perform that task and generate those reports and make a business case for it.

Xander Freeman: 32:29

But isn't that just the nature of the world though? Like, so much of our stuff, again makes sense in an idyllic contact sense that, but the, practice is, does it actually happen?

Vinay: 32:38

And I don't think it works like that. I think you can have all the pretty dashboards you want in the world. just take, most of us have wearable technology, right? you're measuring your heart rate, your steps rate. How regularly are you actually using that data to make change in your life? It's there, you, look at your activity rings closing. Yeah. You look at how many steps you've taken, take notes of it in the same way the data is just the data. It still needs a storyteller To translate it from data into insight and influence. Yeah. to drive change in your organisation. Yeah. And, that's the thing. How do you take it off the page? Because look, when you're in, when you're in a boardroom and you're sat there and you're thumbing through the pages of a 200 pages board report, and there's a table in there that says these are the five top 10, these are the five calls. Top five calls, top five complaint reasons. You skip through and that's what you think is happening, but it's the nuance beneath that. Yeah. And what's actually happening. That's really Dr. That really should be driving the conversation about, well, so what then? Why are people calling for this reason? That reason is that really the reason and what's driving that? And so I think, but that only happens when you can take it off the page. there's nothing as powerful as playing real calls in front of senior execs. Yeah. when you play it, they not only get the reason for the call, but they feel the emotion and the power Yeah. In when customers calling and if that's one customer You multiply by, by the amount that could be doing that, and suddenly there's a, there should change. The other thing that I was gonna say about, the insight thing as well is I think that there has been, I, the irony about the whole thing is that it's often the contact centre that's tasked with reduce your core volumes. Yeah. The contact volumes of the core volumes aren't being driven By the contact centre. They're

Iqbal: 34:24

not off providing the service,

Vinay: 34:27

They're just dealing with what the business is spitting at. We're an easy punching bag. Yeah.

Xander Freeman: 34:31

Always happen. Yeah. And it's just, this is, in as much as we talk about the sort of AI era, this is the first time that, again, that I'm aware of where we've actually got the capabilities or at least the core resources to actually push back on that. Yeah. A lot more and start to shift that narrative. So,

Vinay: 34:45

so let, talk to me a bit more about that.'cause yeah. that kind of insight moving towards resolution, talking about it in ROI terms, what case studies are you seeing? Who, what examples have you come across in the research, in the, and the people that you're working with that gives you that confidence to say, we're now seeing this for the first time and the powers shifting.

Xander Freeman: 35:05

There's a term we could use there. I'll focus on one, I won't name the company, but let's just say private healthcare provider in the uk. Yeah. And one name usually springs to mind for something like that. What they're doing is really interesting. If you look at some of their outbound stuff, so. They would have a situation where basically they were getting a load of inbound calls coming in, being very active to it. Like, people wanting to cancel their subscription to it or, not wanting to renew, for instance. Now what they're doing is they're deploying AI in a way whereby they're monitoring the warning signs for someone who's at risk of not renewing and then being a bit more proactive with them. It's a more unified approach using their technology and their data in the right way. Now, I appreciate that's a very small sample size and a very small, or very specific example, but ultimately that's the one that always springs to my mind in the sense of this is what you could be doing and it's not a one size fits all situation. No one's asking you to, some people might be, but no one should be asking you to revolutionise everything you're doing in your contact centre today. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Focus on those small wins there.

Vinay: 36:07

And so, yes. there are more and more instances of AI using it in a more proactive way. I think that's certainly a shift that I'm noticing much more of a. At least a desire to be more proactive and less reactive.

Xander Freeman: 36:21

Yeah. And I think like customer retention is such an easy example to give there. Most people will be aware of the old statistic of, it's a lot easier to keep a customer than to gain a new one by X percentage or whatever. But ultimately, I think that's one that will instantly resonate with several different departments in your organisation and instantly prove the value of what you're doing.

Iqbal: 36:38

And I think that shift is now taking that contact centre into a value centre. Is, with the emergence of ai, because that's a great example of something that will reduce churn, drive more revenues. So there's a clear ROI path for ROI, but I think as well as that, and maybe we'll touch on this, is, the whole concept around agents is changing the, way, a lot of organisations, been working with the BPO who now refers to their agents as experts because actually they've got access to a lot of good knowledge now and. The right data to be able to serve your customers the first time. Like they're, they are, adamant on solving that customer's problem on that first call. Like that's the metric that they go by, that they run by. And that's because they've got the experts who have access to everything they need to be able to serve that customer. And that's a combination of AI and, other things.

Xander Freeman: 37:29

the key thing with that is when we're talking about first contact resolution, FCI, it's about making sure, the, you're tracking that metric in the right way in a digital world, right? Some people I've seen will be tracking FCR in the sense of yeah, they went through here, and here, but we ended up selling them. Is that really first contact resolution when it goes through so many different channels to end up eventually an agent who does solve it. In that first instance, you still, and again, like look at the pressure you're putting on the agent there. Imagine how I'm gonna keep this pg emotionally charged. The, the customer would be at that point having been bounced around X, Y, and Xander to eventually get to someone. Yeah. It could be difficult.

Vinay: 38:06

Yeah. And like, and, I think, I do think I. The AI conversation is lace still with a lot of hype and a lot of this is the panacea. This is the beautiful future you could be in. And we'd love to be in a world here where those interactions happen, where first co first contact resolution happens. And for a lot of routine transactional things, that can absolutely be the

Iqbal: 38:26

case. It is, yeah. Yeah.

Vinay: 38:28

But I still think that the power of AI is the empowerment and the enablement of the human to solve problems better

Iqbal: 38:35

Yeah. Right now.

Vinay: 38:36

And I think the other thing, your point earlier about we're not transform, transforming anything. Just look at the amount of change happening in organisations where it just doesn't happen. Yeah. Doesn't get completed. Programs falter. Change doesn't get delivered. There's more and more pressure. So we've got this, we've got this. Stimulus that says, we've got this technology, hey, let's change everything. Yeah. And we can really do great stuff, but our capacity for change. And our ability to change are almost in direct opposition to what's being presented. And I saw a great post by Matt Watkinson who wrote 10 Principles of Customer Experience, really great book. And Matt, on one of the points Matt made in there was talking about, look, if you look in an organisation just raising a po, just getting two or three teams to do something, Uhhuh is so much hard work that actually expecting organisations to see this opportunity in technology and all of a sudden grab it and just in. Put it into everything. that's a fairy tale. I think it will be still gradual adoption. Yeah, and I think there are still hurdles to come and things that we've gotta navigate that we're not even talking about to the level that we need to.

Xander Freeman: 39:45

But that's a key thing though, is it's breaking down into those areas where you can actually see a little bit more of a tangible difference. Right. Now let's take some traditionally static areas of contact centres or niches of contact centres. Let's take QA for instance, something that was seen as very stable. Very, you know what it's gonna be, it's very heavily compliance based. Taking that back three years. Now look at it now when you've got some of the capabilities you can do right now with auto qa. Mm. I will say it's important to get that right in the sense of if you gave someone the option of, right, would you rather have data on 3% of your calls or 99% of your calls, who wouldn't want the 99%? The distinction there is, would you rather have 3% done correctly?

Iqbal: 40:24

by humans?

Xander Freeman: 40:25

Exactly. Or 99% done, eh, it's okay. That's the key distinction to make is don't just try and throw it in for the sake of throwing it in and do it poorly. Take the time to get it right.

Iqbal: 40:35

I think you can blend the two approaches though, can't you? Because whilst that 99% or 90% will give you, a bit of a trend around what's actually going on, you can then drill into specifics. And, one of the thing I was doing a, just a recent, sample exercise around some, QM data and we were looking at top five trends and one of the things that we detected was. Call transfer was being mentioned a lot. Like a lot of conversations were being transferred across different agents and now we're, driven into what the reasons behind that is, but we were easily able to detect, yeah, all the conversations where that was mentioned. Bring up those conversations, get AI to summarise what's going on. Tell me loosely why so many calls are being transferred and a has gi given us an answer to that question? It's given, it is because the intent of the customer wasn't detected well enough to be able to route to the right person. We've gone and solved that and that's fixed that problem very easily. And that's looking at the data across, I think it was about 30,000 calls within a space of five days. So that's the power of it. Traditionally. It would take forever to be able to work that, something like that out.

Vinay: 41:40

looking for a needle in the haystack. You wouldn't get there quick enough. and just on that point,'cause we've moved, we we talked a bit about the CFO conversation and the value centre and, that kind of thing, but just, we're just moving into the kind of world of ai. So, we'll, just circle around there a little bit. When we were talking and just prepping for this podcast, you used a really interesting phrase to me, first movers versus first losers. Yeah. Yeah. Do you wanna just, let's, dive into that because I thought that was a really interesting insight.

Xander Freeman: 42:06

Yeah. I'm someone that likes to stay positive for the most part, but I also think as much as we're looking at the moment where we're at with never tail end of 2025, there's some really interesting use cases at the moment in the sense of, we have a whole host of them on our website in terms of this is what's done well, this is when da, Equally, the other side of that coin is so important and does not get talked about enough.'cause people do not want dwell on those f failures. It's important to learn from them. Take Klarna. Yeah. As a lovely example of their c You going, right, we're doing this, We're firing all these people and then look at what happened with it. Take do I want to term as term him as a First Loser? Take Sam Altman.

Iqbal: 42:45

Yeah.

Xander Freeman: 42:46

With OpenAI. Look at some of the comment he made about customer service in general recently. Like obviously look, it's in his best interest to say those things for his stock price and all. Yeah. However, I think it's, it often gets overlooked of look at what, can go wrong and learn from that as well. It's not just imagine a perfect scenario word, this is how it goes. Right. It's so important to look at what's gone wrong as well. Yeah. And I appreciate, look, it's hard to get people to talk about that. It's something we're trying to do a little bit more at the moment with call centre helper is. Analyse those stories where it's gone wrong. Not naming names in it by any means, but it's a case of Right. This is equally as important as the perfect examples of how it goes. Right? Yeah. It's the other side of that coin that historically just does not get talked about enough.

Vinay: 43:27

Well, exactly. you can go through and experiment yourself and learn from your own failings, but learning from other cases and outside is just equally important. And that, and going back to the change conversation, that's part of the process of how do we really, how do we navigate some of those mistakes that other people have made? and, do that. and I think there is that,'cause instinctively there's al, there's, it's always a. First move is a good place to be. Yeah. You're first in technology, you're first in that, but I think actually in this case, maybe it's not the best place to be, because of, a the pace at which AI is changing And technology's changing. and b we haven't done everything figured out.

Iqbal: 44:06

No, we haven't. I, but I also think that, there, there's, the Kna examples, a great one, right? They've, they've decided to move away from Salesforce saved millions a year.'cause they've, they're adopting more of an AI approach and obviously the people side of things, they're reversing those decisions. You could argue that actually that. Sometimes you've just gotta be the first one, right. To be able to try things and Yes, you fell as long as you are self-aware enough to figure out, actually this hasn't worked, so we're gonna reverse this. But that's okay. Like, so what I mean, at least that they've been brave enough to Yeah.

Xander Freeman: 44:40

it's also going in bite-size steps though, right? As in, that's the key thing I think with the Klarna one is look,

Iqbal: 44:45

yeah,

Xander Freeman: 44:46

you can have that conversation about Right, first one through the breach and all that, but ultimately, I think with someone like Klarin, look at the drastic decision they made immediately, which seemingly came from senior leadership. And look at the consequences I had on that. I

Iqbal: 44:58

I think so. Yeah. I do agree. I've got another example of a, I think I've mentioned this organisation before. It's about a hundred contact centre staff. They decided to go down to five and just adopt a chat bot and a voice bot. and they went very aggressive within a 12 month period. They got rid of their staff and just. Kept it very minimal. they realised the nuance behind a lot of the queries that were coming in. They didn't really look at the data beforehand. and now they're backtracking, they're having to rehire half of their workforce. So there's still that 50% in the end, they went through a lot of pain. The customers felt the pain. you could argue you could have a long-term impact on brand loyalty, all of these things. but they, they, jumped right in quickly realised it's not working, and now they've backtracked. So it, I dunno if there's a right or wrong answer here. No.

Vinay: 45:45

is where things like test and learn and, you just adopting that ab split test mentality. Yeah. Yeah. And trying it out in a small scale, figuring out thing and slowly, like nobody saying what Klarna were proposing wasn't a possibility.

Xander Freeman: 45:58

Yeah.

Vinay: 45:59

Right. But actually by, and I don't know them, I dunno what they did and whether they even did this, but, looking from the outside in, like testing it out in, a small, in a small volume and slowly growing it out. So you gradually get to that point. Yeah. It's not a, it's a marathon, not a sprint.

Xander Freeman: 46:16

Yeah. let's look at another example outside of the contact centre space directly, but look at Duolingo when they started pushing all the AI stuff, and that's a really interesting example actually. I know it's so funny. Yeah. So, but it's a really interesting example because it's, yes, it's slightly outside of customer contact, but if you look at it from a customer loyalty perspective, Duolingo is a brand that had a lot on the surface. If you look at their social strategies, their way to go to market, it's very surface level, very emotively driven with the crazy bird or whatever you wanna call it. Look at the backlash to it there as

Iqbal: 46:46

to it. Well, it's incredible just the employees as well. And this just shows the power of employees. The culture within an organisation. They've built the business with that ethos Around, helping the world learn more languages. And the people that are working for that organisation really believe that. So when the CEO suddenly comes and says, actually, we've gotta start thinking about making money now. it just completely backfired in him. Like he's on, people like stood up against like, what do you mean we have to make, we're not here to make money, we're here to help people. Yeah. And it's like, I'm here to run a business. So, you maybe they shifted that too soon and they should have taken their time, but

Xander Freeman: 47:21

Yeah. It, but again, it's so difficult with something like language as well, as much as we talked about earlier. Like again, with the advances in virtual AI at the moment, again in translation as well. You have to get it right.'cause people again, with something like that, people know what they're on about on the other side of that coin. And you can get called out very quickly if you do it wrong. Yeah, true. I mean,

Vinay: 47:38

catastrophic consequences. imagine you're in some kind of world summit and two world leaders are using AI to translate, like just the, a turn of phrase, the wrong thing translated, and suddenly you can be into some really hot water.

Xander Freeman: 47:50

Well, even in the same quote unquote language, the distinctions between, I'll use a personal example, European, Portuguese and Brazilian. Portuguese, the same word can mean two very different things. Quinta is, farm in one and Thursday in another. It's just small distinctions.

Vinay: 48:08

yeah, exactly. Exactly. So there's a way to go. But I, and, that kind of takes us to like. I was, who was I talking to? I think I was at a conference last week or the week before, a sort of networking event. There was a great presentation about ai and one of the things that came out was AI needs leadership too. You've got to look at agents, AI agents, not as clever tech, but clever team members, experts to your reference. But they need onboarding, they need training, they need guardrails, they need clear job descriptions and all of those things, in order for them to be effective. so just as they do so do agents and real human agents. So, I guess the segue I was taking us towards where just touching on humans And agents working in there. How is that evolving?

Xander Freeman: 48:56

The easiest way I can describe that is probably the terminology that I tend to use these days. It's going from agents to something more akin to advisors. And I think if you look at the role of the modern contact centre advisor, it is vastly different from what it was 20 years ago. The easy example people tend to use, and a lot of the tech vendors will talk about this as well, and a lot of the actual end users, if you go to conferences and see them speak on stage, they'll say similar terminology. The complex tasks are being given to agents or now advisors or what have you. The easy tasks, the A to B is being given through chat bots or self-service or what have you, to digital representatives, not humans. And what does that leave the human with? The emotionally charged ones that are difficult to do and you're losing your, what I used to term, Breathers. Yeah. Like you were saying earlier, the easy ones. Yeah. Like, okay, I know what I'm doing here. This is an easy one. No one's swearing at me. It's nice. It's okay. I can do this. You're losing those. And look at the effect it has on the actual human agent then. And look at, like I said, I mentioned the demographics earlier. Look at your frontline agents. Look, they tend to be on, let's not mince words, on a lower end of the salary spectrum of an organisation. They tend to be either fresh graduates or people coming in or what have you. There's, a lot of pressure to put on those people. And if you don't get your training right as well, that just adds to that the modern agent in the scenario where the easy tasks have all gone or are disappearing, is asked to be a combination of a brand advocate, an advisor. In some cases, when we're talking about heavy compliance. industries a, a therapist as well in a lot of ways. And I think it's important to remember when you're talking about these actual people in a lot of ways, I think sometimes we're asking machines through the job of humans and humans through the job of machines, which is a difficult balance Yeah. To make in a tricky situation. the point

Vinay: 50:50

empathy is huge, and I think empathy is a skill. for years in customer service training, you teach people to smile as you dial. Yeah. Talk, all of this kind of stuff to make them feel good. And for those transactional routine things, how much difference does it make? Arguable, it makes difference. I believe that it does, but actually in those complex situations, the ability to,empathize, to understand, to humanise and connect with an individual is massive. Because,

Iqbal: 51:18

Because,

Vinay: 51:19

from a, again, from the stuff that I talk about and memory and, how that drives it, Those customer experiences. That stand out in your mind from the brands that you deal with often happen when you are in a highly emotive state, either really stressed, really happy They tend to lock into your neural networks.'cause those experiences wire together, you are already in a heightened state of emotion. What happens sticks is recalled. So if you have a disaster in that, for example, say you have a, really bad experience of travel disruption. And you're at a particular airport with a particular airplane, all of that is associated with that memory. Yeah. You will not use that airline. You'll probably wanna avoid that airport, whatever it's, but if they have a really great experience, it's the other way around.'cause in that height, incentive emotion, you're doing it. And so the point about empathy is the ability, in that, in those situations, that empathy skill Yeah. And those soft skills that we call them that are harder to learn. But weirdly we call them soft skills become really They

Iqbal: 52:18

do. But do you think the empathy comes into play because that person dealing with your request hasn't got, isn't able to solve your problem. So they're having to be that therapist, be the person who has got to offer that empathy because they can't actually solve your problem right now. when actually if you give that advisor access to the right tools. Yeah. I actually, just as you connect into me, or as we start to engage, I already, I've got a, I've got a sense of where you are based on your journey with us, your sentiment, the problems you're having, and the second we speak, actually Renee, I know your problem and this is how I'm gonna solve your problem.

Vinay: 52:55

problem. and I think yes and no link to what we said earlier on about data and insight in the same way. You can present all the information you want to the agent, but if they don't have the ability to to translate that Yeah. Conversation'cause at a human level, what we really, what most humans, what we really wanna know is, to know that we matter. That we're being seen, that somebody cares. And, yes, you can pop up all the information and give them all the tools, but they still need the skill to do it. Now, the other side of that coin or the, other, the parallel. Bit that I would add to the, what you said, and you touched on it early on with the clients you're working on, is just remembering as an agent. Sometimes it was like you had the deck of the Starship Enterprise in front of you with the number of screens you had. And then if you've now got another thing flashing up to say, Hey, use me, I've got some insight that's gotta be taken into it.'cause you are asking me to assimilate. All of this information, it's a cognitive load and cognitive load, right? Yeah. To be able to do something with it. So how do we balance the, let's give agents these bits of prompting, but also let's reduce the amount of the other stuff.

Xander Freeman: 53:55

Well, that, that's the thing though. And it comes back to, it's not necessarily a technologically technological issue. There, it mixes in the role of training agent empowerment within that as well. Employee engagement in the result. It's such a complicated mix. Yeah.

Iqbal: 54:10

And knowledge as well. Make sure knowledge is, up to speed. Right.

Xander Freeman: 54:14

I can go on like a 10 minute run on this if you want. It drives me absolutely nuts. Yeah. That so many people wanna talk about AI at the moment, but no one wants to talk about knowledge management.

Iqbal: 54:23

The hard, that's the hardest part.

Xander Freeman: 54:24

know. Well, let's talk about,

Vinay: 54:26

you've teed it up nicely. Let's talk about knowledge management. what's your. What's your soapbox moment, on there?

Xander Freeman: 54:34

I'm not gonna swear here either because I'm gonna keep it pg basically. It dri it absolutely drives me nuts. It's, I appreciate it's not the sexiest topic in the world, right? And it's not something that can just be one and done. It needs constant upkeep. But like you were saying earlier, like around AI treating like a virtual AI or voice ai, what have you as a human agent that needs training but needs upkeep, that needs to be checked in on. It's that kind of approach. And where that starts is knowledge management. You can look at a whole host of different ways that people have tried to deploy AI and got it wrong. A lot of the cases it comes down to, yeah, again, I'll, do the version of this where I don't swear. You put rubbish into an LLM, you're gonna get rubbish out the other end. How, one of the things you should be asking yourself when looking to deploy AI is, what is my knowledge management situation like? Is it up to snuff? Because if it's not, you are setting yourself off on the back foot, you're gonna be behind on deadlines and it's not gonna go the way you want it to. And with something like that as well, you will always have a spotlight on it. And it can end up very badly for you. Yeah. So knowledge management, when we're talking about, right. How do I go about implementing AI in my contact centre? Start with knowledge management. Yeah. A hundred percent of the time.

Vinay: 55:39

Yeah. and there's a bunch of times that I'm, sure you can speak to this more qualified than I am to talk about it, but, there's, a bunch of stuff that's written down That's processed that's probably not been touched for a couple of years. There's the version that's the reality that all the agents are using.'cause they know the process in their head and they've figured out a work around to jig the system and get there. Well, that's not written down. So you've got the internal knowledge of policy process and those things, but then you've got the knowledge of customers and customer data, which is, and I was giving the example to you guys earlier on where we're having coffee that I'm working with a client at the moment, this, that has a traditional travel agent type. Part of their business. And they have an elderly customer base that come in and, will book. book. And the knowledge about that customer, the regular customer who books month in, month out is held in the heads Yeah. Of the agents that are sat at that front. It's not written down anywhere. No. It's not captured anywhere. And we can't expect people to write it down. No. But there's gotta be a way that we can learn to start to extract some of that.

Xander Freeman: 56:37

Well, let's use a football analogy.'cause I think that's always an easy one to resonate with. Let's take the United element with you earlier. How much did United get screwed when both Ferguson and Gil left at the same time? Yeah. So much knowledge left out the door with people that weren't prepared.

Iqbal: 56:51

they were still in the club. That's what really, I won't go into it,

Vinay: 56:55

Yeah. but there are lots of those examples of when somebody leaves. And there's an example like, take another club at Liverpool, somebody's left club's left last year they won the league with the same team. You could argue whatever you want about that. So there can be a false storm that you think, oh, everything's okay.

Xander Freeman: 57:14

Yeah.

Vinay: 57:15

Yeah. And then there's a changing and there's a lack of information or there's a way that people used to do things. And I think you, you have this in organisations, a lot people who have been there a long time have a way of doing things and are stuck in that way of doing things. And, when they leave, yeah. That knowledge, that latent knowledge goes with them.

Xander Freeman: 57:34

Liverpool also, to be fair, I'm not a massive fan of Liverpool. Again, I'm not gonna swear, but, they're a really good example of you how to use data in the right way and be a good first mover on that, especially relative to other Premier League clubs. Yeah. If you look at the sort of heyday under, in the recent era, under club data was behind so much of that that as well.

Vinay: 57:50

Yeah. Yeah. and I think we know, Sid touched on it in the last podcast that we had. nice segue. Thank you. he was talking about the fact that they're using data so much in so many clubs, but you have those first movers. Yeah. Then you have those that, follow and stuff. So you are working a lot in contact centres Yeah. And deploying technology. From your perspective, like the agent role, what are you seeing as the evolution of, of, 18-year-old in Palmer sat in a course and taking a call and having his supervisor plugged in next to him versus to the, world we are in today?

Iqbal: 58:24

I think what we are seeing, particularly with technology is the whole thing around empowering the agent, or the advisor is It's just an expectation of young people these days. It's like they're so familiar, so comfortable with technology that actually you can give them access to a lot of stuff that they can benefit from. the whole thing around QA qm you, why not expose some of that to the individual so they can start to see some, how well are they performing? let them see some charts and things like that is just analysing the way that they perform. So there's a lot around kind of self-improvement, which I'm seeing a lot of young people adopt really, well.

Xander Freeman: 59:03

Gamification comes in really nicely that, especially with a younger generation, generations that grew up playing games like Sims, whatever, break it down into the stats film. We've seen it work really well.

Iqbal: 59:11

Exactly. So I think that element of, it's pretty good. And then, I, think the key thing here is, I, know what you mean by overwhelming an agent with too much data and information, but actually it's about surfacing what's relevant at that moment in time and not just. Bringing everything up. You've got your CRM here and then you've got your knowledge set on a website here, and then you've got knowledge, maybe sat in a document somewhere else. There's a lot of data in all sorts of places and you can genuinely get AI to, to learn from all of those different data touch points. And just surface what's necessary,

Vinay: 59:46

Yeah. Like just simple things that I'm trying to think of who this brand was. And I cannot remember for the life of me, I wish I could.'cause it was a really good example. I had called them and then I called them again. And when I called them again, the agent hi Mr Parmar, I see you called this morning about this issue. Are you calling about this again? I'm like, oh, that's interesting. How'd you get that? Versus you call again and there's no link between your contact and the one you made before when you end up repeating yourself to an agent or they've then gotta go and search for it. So those timely things to just even nudge to go. I was on the phone.

Xander Freeman: 1:00:17

Yeah.

Vinay: 1:00:18

Just he called this morning. You might want to use that in your conversation,

Xander Freeman: 1:00:22

but it's also unifying that across your system. I've had it before where again, I won't name him, but a telecommunications provider in the UK that used to sponsor Arsenal. but basically I had a few issues with them that I, again, I won't go into detail here, but basically they were enabling their core team in the UK to do that, but not the team that got outsourced. Yeah. When I'm navigating the IVR, I shouldn't have to be able to, so I managed to get around it by pretending that I was at risk of leaving. So I knew they would have an escalation protocol, which would go to the UK team. I shouldn't have to do what I do for a living to know how to navigate that situation. And it's just get it right. I

Vinay: 1:00:55

do the same, the little shortcuts that get you through, but it is, and and IVR is another great example of just something that's designed for the organisation, not for the customer. It's just a way of gathering data and stats for what numbers customers press to get where they get. And then trying to I pa'em off, and a lot of the time they get rooted to the same bloody team anyway.

Iqbal: 1:01:14

Honestly, for me, just replace your IVR with a voice bot, but have a very purposeful voice bot that gets you through to the right person, not there. Just having a long blown conversation with you, understand your intent and put you through to the right person. And that's it.

Vinay: 1:01:29

I, I was looking at this back, I think the last project I was involved with when I was at, in 2004 five. we were looking at nuance, open natural language. IVR just, and I think nationwide at the time also had something in the mix that was just tell us what we can do for you. And you tell it and it figures it out. And, but it, never got adopted as widely as I thought it would. Maybe the technology just

Iqbal: 1:01:53

I think the data behind it and, understanding intent one thing, but actually getting, yeah. To deliver a certain outcome is the, probably the hardest part has been

Xander Freeman: 1:02:02

It's the up, it's the upkeep on it as well. Yeah. With someone like that, it's the fact that people deploy and thinking, okay, this will save us money here, da. No, You still need that headcount to actually service that. Yeah. It's just, again, it's a, role that's evolving

Vinay: 1:02:13

and I guess it's the other thing as well. I was chatting to my nephew yesterday. He popped up and we were talking about Sora and this thing that's been released into the world to a million people to create your videos. But I think he said something about those videos cost a pound each to make, so that's not sustainable. and if you think about. Maybe some of the prohibitive stuff was the cost of processing the data and the information get Yeah, it's expensive.

Iqbal: 1:02:37

Yeah,

Vinay: 1:02:37

it's expensive. and then you've got companies that have got ESG responsibilities And then want to have a neutral carbon footprint. And then they're like, well, actually processing power, how much is it gonna use? And it, so you get into all these complicated conflicts within your organisation. that spark a bit, another interesting conversation. for, someone, for someone. It's a For us to do. For someone else to have, for else to have. okay. So agents, ai, we've heard the phrase, it's not coming, it's already here, but we've obviously touched on it's about the deployment, human centred and it being an enabler rather than a replacer at this stage in the journey. Business case we've talked about. and that, that, importance of that conversation and being able to connect, those commercial dots across the different, functions in your team, and really flipping the contact centre to become that insight hub, that place of value where people go to ask the que almost your Google search engine for your organisation Yep.

Iqbal: 1:03:40

I was speaking to a CX leader recently for a, company in Germany. A, very philosophical view on ai, actually. He was very pro ai and, what the way they are as a business, they're leveraging AI to build more human connections. What that means is they're getting AI to automate all the backend stuff, what happens under the hood.

Xander Freeman: 1:04:02

Mm-hmm.

Iqbal: 1:04:03

so that. Whilst people are having connections with one another and their customers, they don't need to go and do the admin afterwards because AI's taken care of it. It's listened to the conversation, it's performed the actions that need to be done so you can actually genuinely focus on building relationships. Yeah. And I think that's the, real power of ai. Yeah.

Xander Freeman: 1:04:22

Reduction in after call, uh, our after call work is probably the easiest example of, right. Look, this is very easy implementation you can do. It's not a hundred percent perfect in the way it obviously transcribes and you do need to actually look at that, but it's a hell of a lot quicker than actually have to type that from scratch for every single agent.

Vinay: 1:04:36

Yeah.

Iqbal: 1:04:37

It's small wins like this.

Vinay: 1:04:37

I dunno about, I mean it small wins. it's Transformed. It's transformed my discovery calls with people. Because you have the AI note taken in the background. I'm now fully focused totally engaged on the conversation.'cause it's not that I wasn't fully focused before. You're trying to be fully focused and make notes. I know about you, but my handwriting is terrible when, but it comes back to

Xander Freeman: 1:04:54

cognitive load.

Vinay: 1:04:55

Yeah. cause I'm trying to make these notes. It looks like my just written a prescription and I can't read it. And then I'm trying to remember what my client told me. But now we're able to have a really great conversation. I know the note takers captured it and I'm able to go back and precisely play back. What was said in the conversation, and we can have a much better discovery call and get to the root of what we agreed faster. We're not going away from the conversation with different memories about what was spoken about and then coming back, well, I think you said this and I said this. Well, that actually, this is what was discussed. So it's really transferred. So even, running a small business, it's had that impact on me. So you scale that as a At a contact centre level. And it goes into your point about qa. qa. yes, great. You transcribe the role of qa, but there's so much more opportunity that it presents. Right.

Xander Freeman: 1:05:39

Look at what you can do with that from a coaching perspective alone is fascinating.

Iqbal: 1:05:43

Yeah, IJ just your example around the elderly having conversations with that travel agency. I'm, I've been speaking to quite a lot of organisations that provided a physical, touch point to their customers. Yeah. that's the bit that's missing in terms of doing qa, so, digitally how you're engaging, when somebody calls in, but what about that physical presence? And, there, there are, some solutions to this now, by the way. There we're looking at

Vinay: 1:06:07

and I'm just, as you're saying, I'm thinking going Well, if you are saying to customers. Calls are recorded for training and monitoring purposes. Well, why isn't that conversation recorded for training and purposes? Yeah.

Iqbal: 1:06:17

Yeah. There, there's, some AI app apps now that can feed into your QM and just have it on your mobile. And you are, you're good to go see

Vinay: 1:06:22

mate, Sam Altman and their little medallion thing they've created and meta glasses and all this stuff coming That's true. That's that's gonna wearables.

Iqbal: 1:06:28

Yeah.

Vinay: 1:06:29

Like we are in a world where it all can be caught transcribed. Yes. You asked permission to go. Is it okay if we record this call? Great. That gives you the insight, the data and ability to capture of those missing data points.

Xander Freeman: 1:06:39

But even that, there's offline purposes for that as well. Like look at, John Lewis is quite a good example actually'cause they're not far from, I thought I was in Manchester then for a second I realised not in Manchester, I'm in Birmingham. So they're not far from me. They've got a contact centre based out Winslow, where they actually overlook the show floor as well, which is really nice. You can see the two worlds combine a little bit there when it comes to approach to sort of customer quality cat, especially with a brand like them that have such importance on loyalty, perceived value, customer engagement. There's so much you can go into there.

Vinay: 1:07:10

Yeah. Well look, we are quickly running out time. We've had a great conversation. So just as a quick wrap up, what's your key takeaway? If you could leave people listening to this podcast, watching it, what would be your key message for them to leave with today? On the back of this,

Xander Freeman: 1:07:28

stopping devaluing yourself and what the role that contact centres provide in your organisation. Like I say, for the first time, the power is in your hands. People want to get involved in this stuff. The data is the way to do it. You own all that data in your contact centre. use it for good, actually put yourself on a pedestal and like I say, leverage that. Leverage

Vinay: 1:07:48

and Xander, if people wanna find you, want to find centre helper, what's the best way of getting in touch with you or get into call centre helper.

Xander Freeman: 1:07:55

Easiest way to do that is ww.callcentrehelper.com. You can download our latest research on there, which is always very nice. We've got a whole series of webinars coming out as well, so feel free to get involved there. Alternatively, we've got very active LinkedIn communities there, 75,000 strong private community where you can ask Q and a, anything you want there and get actual end user support on it. People that have done it. we've got a very active main LinkedIn page as well, and if you wanna reach out to me or any of our other team members, we're all very active as well. So feel free to do it via LinkedIn or through the website.

Vinay: 1:08:23

We'll make sure we put the links in the description so people can. to, tap on it and get through to you. But thank you so much for a great conversation and thanks for making the trip from Manchester to Birmingham. It's all good. look, the sun's out now. Yeah. Know it was, yeah, maybe Sue was right.

Xander Freeman: 1:08:39

Who knows. It could be awful in Alabama right now. Yeah.

Vinay: 1:08:41

Yeah. as always guys, thank you for watching listening. please hit the subscribe, button or bell, whichever platform you're on. your support means everything to us. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. but for now, it's goodbye from me. And goodbye from it. Well, we'll see you on the next one.

Iqbal: 1:08:58

Thank you. Cheers.

Vinay: 1:08:59

Thank you. Cheers.