Summary

• Having good customer service for the satisfaction and loyalty of your customers is a no-brainer. The bigger question is; why do we get frustrating service from the call center of a business?
• In this episode, Wynand Smit, CEO and Founding Partner of Inovo answers the crucial question.
• Inovo is an IT services & product company in South Africa providing cloud-based contact center solutions to large and mid-size companies. In this episode, Wynand reveals the secret to great customer service through your contact or call center is 'personalization'.
• His company has vast experience in optimizing the acquisition, sales, and revenue collection for customers in the telecom, banking, healthcare, and software industries.
• In this episode:
• 
  
  • Why do customers often have frustrating experiences with contact centers?
  • How businesses can use data analytics and artificial intelligence to improve customer service?
  • Potential for chatbots in customer service
  • Why does Wynand advocate using AgilePoint as a 'glue' that enables a superior cross-channel customer experience?
  
  

Key Takeaways

Transcript

Guest Introduction

Sharjeel (00:09):

Customer services is the support a business offers its customers from the moment they first contact the business to the months and years afterward. It's something we all come across every day, whether it's a call to your bank or mobile network provider, we know how awful it gets when you have to provide the same information multiple times, or having to use a channel we don't prefer to use.

To understand why it's difficult to get the customer experience right, we have Wynand Smith, founder and CEO of Inovo.

Inovo is a cloud-based contact center solutions provider headquartered in South Africa with customers like Vodacom, DHL, and Woolworth's Financial Services. Inovo is a one-stop shop for business process automation for contact centers. If you have a new channel to incorporate in your contact center data to import from an application or legacy information lying in a database, Inovo can help do all of that.

As for Inovo’s CEO, Wynand, the thing that I like about him is that instead of relying on buzzwords, he takes a practical approach to customer service. Let's listen and learn.

Hi, Wynand, could you please tell me a little about where you grew up, how did your career progress, and the story behind Inovo?

Wynand Smit (01:27):

Thanks, Sharjeel. Yes. I grew up in South Africa, actually in small towns in South Africa. I ended up studying in electronic engineering at university. And for myself, I ended up selling contact center technology. And back then I thought, hang on, I know a lot about contact centers until I ended up managing one.

So that whole story is very relevant to, I know as well because when I manage the contact center that did customer service, acquisition, sales, and also collections I realized, hang on, I know nothing. What happens in operations and what technology can do is vastly different. There's so much more expectations that customers have. So that's essentially in 2008 when Inovo was born, it was prior to cloud and you know, so first of all we wanted to do subscription models which was new back then, also cloud-based technology. And the most important part was actually employees or people with operational experience that use the technology to get the actual business outcome and not sell based on features and functionality. So mostly sell on return over investment.

Sharjeel (02:31):

So, Inovo primarily serves the contact center industry, telecom and what other verticals?

Wynand Smit (02:44):

I guess the contact center is relevant. But these days we are actually in the customer service industry, so we sell cloud technology, but the best definition is contact center. You know, in the past contact center was voice call. Now it's so many different channels, even video, WhatsApp, these type of channels.

But if we think about customer service it's much wider than contact center. We essentially service customer service in industries as well as acquisition sales, and also the revenue collection. So those three is almost applicable to every single business you can find. If you take the example of an acquisition cycle you can buy a credit card on many different channels, which includes or might not include a contact center channel.

So we are a little bit wider than contact center. We focus on optimizing those three areas in a customer's business. And, you know, those could be extended to self-service chatbots, all types of different ways that a customer expects service.

Contact Center Automation Challenges

Sharjeel (03:44):

Yeah, that gives me an overview. This leads me to the question that for an ordinary customer, or people who are not really familiar with the backend of the technology, what goes behind when they contact a business. So why do we get frustrating service from contact center or businesses?

Wynand Smit (04:04):

Well, that's a very good question. I've been trying to get the answer for that for years, and I still I still am. So I guess my humble opinion is that I think we forgot about the basics. You know, you asked me where I grew up and I grew up in a small town, you know, so if I use an example of back then, the bank manager knew my dad, everything about my dad. He knew his preferences, his behavior. If you owed my dad an answer on a query, you would actually feel accountable because my dad is probably going to run into his mother in town and tell her about it. So if you listen to that story, it's all about knowing things about the customer, knowing context personalizing interactions, feeling accountable when we deliver.

Wynand Smit (04:48):

And, that's always been some of the basics of customer service. And you know I always tell the story that the self-driving car can identify a rock on the highway, but when I phone my bank, they don't know where I am. So I think somewhere along the lines because we try and do it at scale, we've lost a bit of that and those things have never changed. And then the second part of that question is I think tech, technology has been a huge disappointment, and this is my personal opinion, if you think about technologies, I mentioned the identifying me as a customer example.

Technologies have been CRMs, contact center solutions, ticketing systems workflow have been around for many years, in fact, some of them for decades. And the truth is that hasn't actually solved the problem. And that's my view. I think we haven't used technology like it should have, and we forgot about some of the basics that the customers actually expect from us.

Sharjeel (05:42):

That definitely makes sense. If we are at that point, and even a person like you is saying that we haven't used the technology in the right manner. So, how can contact center leaders turn these frustrated, hang-ups into engaging interactions?

Wynand Smit (06:04):

Well I guess the fundamentals of that haven’t changed. So what I do find in engaging with many businesses is that most of the time that we as customers myself get frustrated is maybe not on a single interaction, maybe where I buy the credit card, it's mostly when, when the process moves onto different divisions, different departments that might be on different systems, external parties like courier companies for example. You know, so a credit card acquisition is a great example. You can buy it on many channels. You might get a good experience there. Then there's multiple processes submitting your documentation agreements and finally delivery of the product and the actual customer experience. And also your cost of acquisition in that instance is actually only stops in the end where I have got my credit card and I start swiping it.

Wynand Smit (06:50):

So the basics of managing an interaction like that have never changed. It's always been the same. So I always say first of all, we need to make a promise when we deliver something. And, when you ask me at some point when we discussed as any industry you know, provided good service that I thought was great, and the honest answer is no, but if you think about online purchasing, when you buy something in an online retailer, they make you a promise. They say, this is going to be delivered in next week, Tuesday. And if they, if it's going to be late, they email you and say, it's going to be two days late. And we still perceive that as great experience. Therefore, I say that basics is make a promise, measure whether you are going keep that promise, escalate if you might not, and then communicate if you don't.

Wynand Smit (07:40):

Now that's my view. How leaders in managing customer interactions can actually improve that. They have to bring measurement in, make sure that we can first of all make a promise, measure it, escalate internally if we might not, and take action and then communicate with a customer if we are not going to make our promise. And then I see the latest word is moment of truth.

So, you know, the interaction I described might have 10 different interactions, and that's also an important focus that we must always focus on every single one of them in terms of importance, you know, I know it's sometimes different divisions, but it doesn't matter what the type of interaction is. If it doesn't help, if we provide great customer service, a great sales or acquisitions experience, but when we collect revenue or debt from a customer, we actually break that experience, you know, so every single experience is very important.

Predictive Analytics in Contact Center Automation

Sharjeel (08:33):

That's very pertinent. And a trend that I've seen is like whenever there's something, a process is broken or an industry is not getting the returns that it expects to yield, then there are always new technology vendors or new ways of selling the whole technology. I've been hearing about this AI and ML and that's like now ages. So you mentioned the use of new technologies like AI, ML have a lot of hype in customer service centers. So what's the adoption path customers can take to incrementally add these technologies to their operations, and whether they should.

Wynand Smit (09:18):

I guess when you speak to me; I'm not one for hyper buzzwords. You know, I'm a very big fan of artificial intelligence and machine learning. I just think it's not the solution to the problem if we don't know what the problem is. So, many times when we engage with businesses, there's an absolute drive just to do something with AL and ML just because of the words. But in my view it's excellent technology that's got so many use cases and is going to revolutionize the way we deal with customers, but we need to start with use cases that make sense for our business or the specific business. You know, a great example would be if we cannot identify a customer when they contact us we cannot use any artificial intelligence or machine learning on that interaction, you know but I've seen many use cases where customers have successfully deployed it.

Wynand Smit (10:07):

So I think we mustn't just put it in broadly. We must find use cases in our business where it works. Practical examples would be, I've seen some customers use it as predicting where to send an interaction or to whom, which agent to try and get the best outcome, either a first core resolution or a great service rating. For example, I've seen it in collections you know, try and do predictive models around the probability to collect the revenue. I've seen it in acquisitions similarly from a propensity model around the conversion rate, and maybe also in terms of individuals or channels that would convert this specifically. And then even in retentions where you can do prop churn probability models to actually proactively reach out to customers on digital channels or phone them as an example when they are likely to churn.

Sharjeel (11:00):

And that's maybe more relevant to the telecom industry.

Wynand Smit (11:04):

No, I think it is relevant to every single industry. If you think of the examples, I've spoken about every single industry that does business to consumer business (B2C), and that's all industries that you mentioned. Telecom's, financial services, there's so many that do customer service, you know, and the example I mentioned in terms of a first contact resolution today, the market average is a third of the calls more than 30% or contacts is repeat contacts.

So there's you know, the same with sales and acquisitions. Those are in every single industry.

And also revenue collection is also in every industry. So it's not limited to an industry, but I mentioned some examples of where data analytics and then the next step after that, artificial intelligence or machine learning can add value. So yeah, I guess to shorten my answer or to summarize it, what I'm saying is instead of thinking this is such a massive big project you know complex project to add some of these technologies, there's possibilities to identify one or two or three use cases simpler, easier, faster to implement that can already make an impact in a certain area of a business.

Chats bots for Contact Center Center Automation

Sharjeel (12:18):

That’s a good point. Yeah, so talking about chatbots and self-service, we do hear a lot about them. So do chatbot solutions have potential to address some of these problems that you identify? But we see that like pretty soon they don't live up to the hype. Why is that? Are they not scalable or are they not set up right or again, as you say use case, they should be use case driven, like addressing the right problem. So what is it about chatbots that they don't live up to the hype and why?

Wynand Smit (12:59):

Yeah, I'm also a big fan of chatbots. I do think it's got the potential to either be the best thing that's ever happened to customer service or the worst. And the reason I say the worst is you and me expect the same service from a chatbot and a person, and if we don't get the same service, we're going to reach out to a person or use a different channel, you know? And I think the risk I've seen is there's so many different chatbot solutions or cognitive services, and each of them are built for a specific set of channels and a specific service type or a use case. You know, an example might be if you order, a requirement is to just have frequently asked questions. There's mini chatbot solutions that can do it, but your normal business or most of the businesses in all, most of those industries that you mentioned actually need for a lot more.

Wynand Smit (13:44):

So they need it for frequently asked questions. They need it for customer service, you know, balancing inquiries. They need for proactive communication. When somebody buys from us, they actually need to do acquisitions or for full sales on it.

They need it for the retention campaigns to help retain customers. Also for collections and some supporting processes like the treating documentation. So the use cases, when you actually go think of where can we use self-service and specifically chatbots, it grows exponentially in the business. And that's where the chatbot might start to disappoint, because you will find that you use a specific chatbot solution that works very well for frequently asked questions, but as soon as you try and use it for these other use cases, it runs out of its capability because of you know, first of all, maybe the capability or the channels, but in many cases, because of the interoperability or integration capability to deliver many different use cases. So in my view you know, our focus at least have been to use AgilePoint in this case as the platform where we can invoke or use different services or multiple of these services, even on the same use case to deliver a great experience.

Sharjeel (14:58):

So it primarily points to, you know managing the experience, and keeping that front and center rather than the tech.

Wynand Smit (15:08):

Yes, because if you think a chatbot interaction, it is not a reference interaction that's just going to happen. Somebody ask a frequent ask questions and then nothing happens. You know, it's really part of a journey. So again, I'm going to use the example of buying a credit card. You might buy it on many different channels of which a chatbot can be one.

The second step is you need to go through an agreement documentation process. A lot of businesses that's 10 minutes on the phone type of scenario, you know, there's no reason why a chatbot can't help there. You need to submit your base slips, your bank statements, etc., maybe for financial services products. There's no reason why you can't submit it on WhatsApp to a chatbot rather than email faxing it into somewhere. Now that whole journey needs to first of all be tied together, and that's what I want to get to why we, I think Agile Point will make a significant difference in that.

Wynand Smit (15:58):

But if you think about using a chatbot somewhere in there, for me, one of the first use cases of a chatbot is proactively communicating to a customer where they are in a process, whether this is a sales cycle like we're discussing, or even a customer service cycle. And imagine you get a WhatsApp, for example, if that's the channel that might be relevant and saying, hang on; we've received your documentation. The next step is this. You know, and then you could still interact with it if you've got more information or maybe reschedule the credit card delivery. So in the end, the chatbot will only be as good as how it's used as part of a process and not just standalone. If we end up using five or six different chatbot services, we're not going to be better off than having separate groups of individuals, agents sitting with the specific skill.

Wynand Smit (16:45):

You know, those silos. We're probably creating the same scenario. We're creating silos of information or silo of skills, albeit within different chatbot solutions. A good example is that a chatbot is just like an employee, and in most cases, businesses don't treat a chatbot like that. If you think about it, if you train an employee to just ask frequently, ask questions, there's going to be a lot of overflowing to different types of skills, which the employee, or in this case, the chatbot does not have.

We must treat the chatbot exactly the same with as an employee. First of all, it must have a measurement framework, KPIs, which must continuously improve, and we must teach it additional skills. Now, if you just train a chatbot or an employee in this example, just to answer frequently asked questions, it's going to be good in the beginning, but point on a large percentage of interactions because the customers need additional information. So there's going to be a lot of overflow. So a chatbot needs to be supported just like an employee with very one skill or, or limited skills to service and interaction by being able to transfer to skilled employees or agents using other channels or providing other more advanced services.

Sharjeel (18:01):

That’s an interesting point that you made. And I guess a lot of companies, what they do is they set up the initial chat flows for a chatbot, and then they maybe kind of find it challenging to make good use.

Wynand Smit (18:18):

Of it 100%. So a chatbot will only be as good as the skills it has. And those skills will never be enough. It'll always have to grow. It's the same like employees. There's if the skills was enough in employees, we would consistently get good service, but our business changes, they launch additional products, they launch channels you know apps, all types of different things which generate queries, and therefore if we would need to continuously improve the service that a chatbot gives.

And as long as the chatbot has a subset of the skills to be able to service this, if you leave it in isolation, it's going to disappoint and give bad service. It has to be part of a bigger estate where you can transfer to agents overflow reach out via other channels and automate that service because it's really part of a much, much bigger thing.

AgilePoint and Contact Center of the Future

Sharjeel (19:06):

That's a very good point. So Wynand talk to me about the Inovo Cloud contact center and which organizations are best positioned to benefit from it.

Wynand Smit (19:18):

Well, I guess we're trying to create something that does not exist. So as I mentioned,

Sharjeel (19:23):

Can we call it the contact center of the future?

Wynand Smit (19:26):

We absolutely can. If you think about it, what are we trying to create differently? First of all, it is cloud contact center. It's called all of the channels you can think of. It's got all of the workforce optimization capability and as well as self-service and chatbot, etc. Now, what's different I mentioned right in the beginning of the call is I don't think that CRMs or contact center ticketing systems, all these types of solutions is actually the solution to the problem. Because if they were, we would've had good service by now. Because if you just think about CRM, they've been at a hunt for probably two decades; so I sat in my office thinking, hang on, we are selling all of this technology, you know, some years ago but we're not actually making a difference.

Wynand Smit (20:11):

And I realized the only way you could do that is if you are the glue between a process in different systems and different departments and even different companies. Because I mentioned the experience is not on a single interaction, a single interaction experience is important. It's actually over a bigger journey, and that's applicable to all the scenarios. If you have a customer service inquiry and it goes to the back office and somebody there needs to fulfill it, that's normally where you get disappointed.

So luckily we landed on the AgilePoint and why I say our solution is unique is because we add the process orchestration and the ability to quickly integrate and into many different systems and coordinate these different strategies, whether this is acquisitions across channels, customer service, or even collections or retention strategies.

That's really been the cherry on top in terms of the ability to actually, instead of just providing the technology, actually manage the experience and automate and do that visually, you know, so I felt that way for a long time. And finally, Gartner, about a year or two ago, agreed that the solution to actually solve customer experience doesn't exist. So they intend to create a new category, which hopefully we will have a name for it then.

AgilePoint as a Glue for Contact Center Automation

Sharjeel (21:29):

No, that's great. Exactly. So, you bring AgilePoint in as glue or as a layer to integrate all kind of piece together all of the tech technologies stack that are going on within a contact center. So tell us something about, how you, how Inovo and AgilePoint got together what led <laugh> for both of the firms to, you know, kind of partner around and has it helped your customers in terms of whatever points that you mentioned about the customer experience?

Wynand Smit (22:07):

Absolutely. So I discovered the AgilePoint some years ago in searching for a solution that doesn't exist, basically. And, realizing the missing piece is being the glue between different system and processes. And that's almost the way I see AgilePoint. So firstly, obviously, if you think about the things we've discussed, we need the ability to first of all, use many different channels. We might want to involve agents at certain times self-service. We might just want to automate processes or capture information or data offer web forms as an example for input.

But you know, and then the key to this all is visually drawing this being very fast to do that. And for me, the foundation is really the ability to integrate into many different systems. So if you think about it you're never going to walk into most businesses and I would say 99.9% and replace all the channels, all the systems, even their chatbots, existing chatbots backend systems.

Wynand Smit (23:08):

You're not going to do that to create a good experience. What you need to do is construct that, irrespective of that, therefore interact with the different systems, and construct the experience. Practical example would be is you would think that businesses of got a single source of information about a customer, but most businesses don't. And I think they might never have that, but there's no reason why that should impact the actual customer experience, because whether you are in a flow on an acquisition's flow using AgilePoint and, and our contact technology query a single data source of 10, it mustn't impact the, the actual customer experience. So AgilePoint is fundamental and key to our growth. We see it as one of the primary delivery mechanisms to actually improve the customer experience. And when I say customer experience, I'm not talking just around customer service.

The customer experience is just as important in buying from a business and these type of things and, and what we've seen with our customers, and we've got one of the largest banks going to change all of their customer processes that touch, touch their customers onto the AgilePoint platform. We've seen it as a significant differentiator because customers have had the intent to go and fix these things we've discussed for a long time, but they haven't had the capability to go and do them, and they finally do.

Sharjeel (24:27):

Wynand which areas of your firm are you most excited about and look forward to see unfolding?

Wynand Smit (24:33):

Good question. I'm very excited about Cloud contact Center. We're doing lots of deployments then. I'm really enjoying deploying lot of the digital channels and seeing how that can help customers. On the workforce optimization side. Very interested to see how the speech analytics plays out and all the different use cases that can help us as customers actually get better service.

Also, the chatbots and self-service, I mean, there's so many use cases that our team is deploying so very excited about. But the one that excites me most is in deploying AgilePoint we are doing so many customers with the solution and solving an actual problem, like from start to finish an experience across a process like maybe buying a product and in the end being happy or measuring drop off, you know, the cost of acquisition, acting on it until the product is delivered to the customer, as an example.

So, you know, I'm passionate about that and I love self-service good. I, you know, I'm passionate about that and I love good service, so I'm really excited to see those deployments and the quickly integrating into customer systems dragging and dropping and basically you know, implementing what all of us has been saying for years or wanting to implement for years to improve customer experience.

Sharjeel (25:55):

That's great. It was really nice talking to you and getting some insights from you. It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you.

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