Contact Center Show Amas Tenumah & Bob Furniss

Bob, it has been a while since we have talked to the contact center show audience, and there are some rumors that I want to put to bed. Bob, the word on the street is we got rich and famous and we stopped putting out new show. I've gotten some responses from our fans. Can you put these rumors to bed? What actually happened here?
Bob
Well, as you can see, I'm calling you from my yacht. So the rumors are not true. I don't think anyone who uses the word customer service anywhere in their title has gotten rich from being in customer service. I remember the times I used to work with my budgets and nobody got rich there. Maybe some famous authors got rich writing books about customer service. I don't know why both of us are not in that category, but I do say we had a lot of fun doing that podcast we did. And we want you to follow us to the next podcast we're doing.
Amas
Yes.
Bob
So let's talk a little bit about that.
Amas
Let's talk about that. And we're going to talk about the new show, the customer happiness show. But before we do that, I went back and I looked, and over the course of those years, we put out over 70 episodes. I don't know many people, and they average about 45 minutes each. I don't know many people who can talk for 3 hours about most topics. Why do you love contact centers and customer service? Why have you stayed in it most of your career? What's in it for you?
Bob
Well, first of all, if we put out 70 episodes, then I probably have run out of things to say at this point. So maybe that's the reason why we stopped talking about contact.
Amas
Good point.
Bob
What do I love about customer service? I love that customer service is almost always a human experience. And yes, I know that digital is going to take over the world and call centers are going to go away. And all the pontificating about how much we're not going to have a call center, I don't think those are right. And I love that human interactions are almost always part of the equation. And it's in those times that we walk away from a company more loyal, saying, that was a good experience. That is why I like customer service. What about you? What's your draw to customer service?
Amas
I think, Bob, it's a profession that has allowed me to utilize many parts of my brain and my know, there's a little behavioral economics there, right? How do you get people to do things, whether employees, customers, how do you get them to behave? There's a lot of technologies, technology, and a lot of things. And then there is what we used to call soft skills. And one of our few guests we had on the show taught us there was tough skills. That's a great episode. You guys go check that out. And by tough skills, people used to think about them as just pleases and thank you. There's a little art about how you deliver information, how you listen, how you do that. So you have to learn about those things as well. Then there's data involved, right? You got to measure everything because you're trying to do things efficiently and effectively. And as you know, I tried to go do something else for a little while last year, and I came right back and I'll probably spend the rest of my career doing this, and I can't imagine doing anything else. And so we've stopped putting out. I mean, we'll come occasionally and put out some shows here. The show is still going to be up, guys. You can get it. But we have made this pivot. And I got to tell you the story about how this came of. The name of the show, by the way, is the customer happiness show, but the name of the show, the format of the show, all of this came. I took a trip to Bob lives in Memphis and I live in Oklahoma City, and we go and see each other as often as time, and all of that permits. So I go there. We had a few beers in Memphis. We took that really long walk. I don't know how many miles that thing was. I wanted to see the little river thing. I don't know what you call that body of water, but we took that walk around i

Amas and Bob take a look back a their third season of the Contact Center show. 
 
"I plan to spend the offseason doing nonprofit, keisha Warrior Princess, we aims to educate women on the importance of self exams and of gynological appointments annually."- Bob
I'm increasingly getting feedback from people who are not deep into the contact center, but are contact center adjacent. Whether they be like, people who work in other departments, consumers, what have you. If you're out there again, we want to hear from you. - Amas
"Speech analytics is going to become more important in the contact center. "CCaaS and UcaaS are going to get blended into one." - Bob
- In the next 12 months, are we like to see GPT mainstream in the contact center? I don't think we can move fast enough as an industry to make GPT commonplace. But for it to be part of our mainstream way that we do business, I just don't Think it's been there long enough. - Bob
I will be spending a lot of time on conference calls, but also reading and getting smarter so we can come back and chat with you again. - Amas
 
 
"We'll talk about stuff and then invariably we get off on some tangent about this organization and this industry that we work in and we could hit the record button and publish it, right? Exactly. It's part of our DNA." - Bob
"We're in the midst of a sea change in Contact Center." - Amas

Bob and Amas discuss how you should prepare for CCaas:
 
Three out of four contact centers today have not yet made the move. Every vendor is telling companies to make this move. The improvements are happening in their new cloud system. We're getting close to the point where this would be a baseline requirement.
CCaaS allows agents to use all of their channels in one interface. It adds some user capabilities for the agent. That makes their life a little bit easier. Is this something that's going to change my life at all?
- CCaaS projects thus far has been a little case of over promise under deliver. Lots of people have gone down this road, have said, Gosh, I like the new system, but they don't consider it a success in terms of ROI.
-: The vendors are saying that the ROI is better than it could possibly be. He says a 20% reduction in handle time is just not realistic.
 Your ROI has to get a lot more creative and more thoughtful than that. It's about improving the agent experience and the customer experience.
 
"Data Center. That there is a refrigerator size box or there is a stack of servers. I probably just dated myself with the refrigerator size box."  Bob 
 
"I'm gonna go to an old reliable Seneca today.  This quote is we are more often frightened than hurt and we suffer more in imagination than in reality." - Amas

Amas and Bob tell you how to separate the hype from reality with GPT:
 
- AI will eliminate 75% of call center jobs. AI will even make your bed. These are some of the real headlines about what generative AI things like Chat GPT will do to the contact center.
- I think the next knowledge will be the impact. It's going to affect the way that we write knowledge articles. Marketing is an example of how knowledge is going to be second in the contact center. And then the last step is talking to the agent where generative AI actually talks to the customer.
-  Generative AI is still on the way up in the Gartner Hype cycle. That means that the peak of inflated expectations are not over yet. Greene: It'll make the biggest impact on the agent, not the customer. Companies should be paying attention to it.
- You sound like you have a bias for disrupting and helping the agent as opposed to replacing the agent by putting this thing in front of the customers. Is this one of those kind of, hey, start here because it's safer? I still believe we have a place for an agent.
- What I want to do is help my agent versus replace my agent. Typical contact center probably has four to 500 knowledge articles. Think about having Chat GPT rewrite those articles through the lens of the customer. There's tons of improvement to the experience if you start there.
- Google CEO Sandar Pachaya said Artificial intelligence is one of the most profound things we're working on as humanity. That silence after that is what tells me we've got to understand what this impact is. I hope we helped you guys get smarter this week.
"It you know the demise of the contact center has been going on since since the IVR so. The reality is, is that contact the percentage of contact center jobs in companies have gone up compared to where they were before those technologies came into play." - Bob
" I want to point out to people who you heard me say that the most popular car in the 1890s was an electric car." - Amas
 

Bob and Amas discuss the world of knowledge.
"I'm going to date myself that we had knowledge on paper in binders at every desk." - Bob
"In fact, I believe that if used correctly, knowledge or technical product content in this case is and should be seen as marketing." - Mike
"So we have this issue. There are 1400 page PDFs running out there. How would you think about the problem and and how? How have you advised people to begin to think about solving it?" -Amas
 
Connect with Mike Stock at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikestockactual/

Amas and Bob discuss the role of the CFO in the Contact Center:
"Yeah, there is a the metric but there reason your are measuring FCR, repeat call rates, average call rate, they should lead somewhere." -Amas 
"I gotta be ready to tell the story of the history, the real-time and the future." -Bob