Client & Partner Collaboration: From Startup Innovations to BPO Excellence

Transcript

[00:00:01] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today we have a very special guest: Peter Mullen. Now, Peter, here’s what’s really interesting about your background—I find it just fascinating—you’ve worked at some of the biggest companies, like Comcast.

[00:00:17] Steve MacDonald: You’ve worked with startups; you’ve worked in customer support. You’ve worked on the BPO side as well. You’ve worked with one of the largest BPO partners, so we’re going to talk a lot today about client and partner collaboration and how to make sure that partnership is focused on the right things.

[00:00:35] Steve MacDonald: Even inside our own organizations, we still find perceptions of a cost center versus a value center. That perception then trickles on to our BPO partners as well. We’ll round out that whole conversation today. One of the things I found when you and I were talking earlier is that you went through a really tough time personally: lung cancer, surgery, and then you came back and you competed in three different Ironman competitions.

[00:01:06] Steve MacDonald: I just find that unbelievable—the perseverance it would take to do that. I’d love to hear, before we get started, a little bit more about you and your background, and then we’ll dive right into the subject matter.

[00:01:20] Peter (PH) Mullen: Thank you. I am thrilled to be here, and what a great hook.

[00:01:24] Peter (PH) Mullen: I’m going to challenge you on one word you said. I competed in three Ironmans? No—I got through three Ironmans with a lot of joy. I would never call it competing. My story is interesting, Steve. I came out of college as a journalist. I worked as a journalist for a number of years.

[00:01:40] Peter (PH) Mullen: I was fortunate enough to come to Silicon Valley the month Netscape went public, if you remember. That was the original browser for consumer use. Everything began to change, and I was fortunate enough to take my writing skills and move them into marketing. Over the course of years—as you might call it, a Silicon Valley immigrant with a lot of thoughts and processing about what was happening at an accelerated pace, which today is at lightning speed—

[00:02:07] Peter (PH) Mullen: I found myself very focused on brand and storytelling, and you know, that connects back to part of the personal story. To complete the hook on that, I’m an athlete; I always have been. I swam in college, then I swam afterward as a marathon swimmer. There’s a professional circuit of marathon swimmers; you can normally finish in the top 30 or top 50 because there are only 30 or 50 people doing it.

[00:02:33] Peter (PH) Mullen: But it gave me this really strong sense of myself—my body—of pursuing goals that were pretty singular. I was never at the very top; I finished in the top ten in the mid-nineties in the world championships for the 25K. I was good; I wasn’t outstanding.

[00:02:52] Peter (PH) Mullen: As an athlete, I got a surprise shock: I got a lung cancer diagnosis. Obviously, it was a treatable form—there are many people who don’t get to stand here and talk about this because they have diagnoses very different from mine. I took care of mine by having very aggressive surgery—removed half my lung, removed the area around what I had, which was called a carcinoid.

[00:03:15] Peter (PH) Mullen: Then I went through a multi-year period of asking myself two questions: Am I going to get better? And if I get better, what do I want my life to look like? That formed a lot of my thought process. It happened when I had young kids—many of us can relate to that—and everything in the world was in front of me.

[00:03:32] Peter (PH) Mullen: I had come off being the lead public relations guy for Netflix as we went through the IPO, and everything was in front of me. Then I got this big shock that shaped everything I have done since then.

[00:03:46] Steve MacDonald: It’s a story that’s truly inspiring. Thank you. But I want to move on to a different story today and put two stats on the table that I think just frame our conversation, because our conversation is going to be a lot about CX—customer support and CX. We have more conversations than anyone in the organization; we’re tuned into the needs of customers to the nth degree.

[00:04:18] Steve MacDonald: We’re still looked upon as a support center, often, and you’ve talked a lot about this, right? We don’t necessarily always have that seat at the table. But this, to me, grounds the importance of it. A study came out just over a year ago saying that there are $3.7 trillion in play today because of poor customer support.

[00:04:44] Steve MacDonald: That study says two things, right? One, I better not have my dollars in play—I need CX to be all about practical retention of business. But boy, what a great opportunity is on the table to have really great customer service and win new business—a new business driver.

[00:05:05] Peter (PH) Mullen: It sure is. And you know, that $3.7 trillion against a $10 trillion market—depending on how you measure it—but many of the larger consulting firms will use $10 trillion as what’s at stake in CX—customer experience—globally. That puts us at 37%. Now, we can talk about what the numbers specifically mean, but let’s just say this is a massive moment in time with all the disruption happening.

[00:05:28] Peter (PH) Mullen: As you pointed out, I’ve been somewhat uniquely on all sides of the desk. As someone out of Silicon Valley who made a career marketing innovative ideas, what would always happen is we had to put a premium on getting the customer to understand those ideas and use the products or services in the best way possible.

[00:05:56] Peter (PH) Mullen: Think about the Netflix concept 25 years ago, right? How did you convince somebody to get a DVD in the mail? It didn’t break; it worked; they could send it back; there were no late fees. And then how did you convert that to digital delivery inside your entertainment room when you were still getting YouTube videos? Because the infrastructure wasn’t built out as much.

[00:06:16] Peter (PH) Mullen: That’s just one example of what we in Silicon Valley do. We put new ideas into the world; they’re innovative; they change the way people think; then they change the way people behave; then they change expectations of what will happen next.

[00:06:36] Peter (PH) Mullen: Right now, there are so many different angles to this $3.7 trillion concept, but what it means is, with all the disruptions, a lot is up for grabs. Companies have the opportunity to seize the day by putting investment in the right place. But ultimately, before you get to any tactics or strategies—and how you do that—there needs to be this overarching understanding that over the next five to ten years, CX—customer experience—will be one of the primary drivers of business success. Moving that vision we both want so badly from a cost-center perspective into an investment-center perspective—that’s what’s at stake here.

[00:07:24] Steve MacDonald: There’s backup to that: a McKinsey study done a couple of years ago looked at over 400 companies—B2C and B2B, very profitable companies with huge returns on shareholder value—and they found that the number-one differentiator across the board is CX.

[00:07:43] Steve MacDonald: That’s today, in the largest, most profitable, growing companies. It puts a massive exclamation point on the fact that we can’t look at this as an afterthought. We have to look at it as a primary business driver. We have to think of it as part of the go-to-market strategy that we haven’t before, right?

[00:08:05] Peter (PH) Mullen: It is very fair to say that for most B2C businesses in the world today, the only remaining human touchpoint between your end customer and you is a customer service agent—onshore, nearshore, or offshore. What are you doing, businesses, CEOs, board of directors, to make sure that interactions, whether 20 seconds or 25 minutes, have delight and satisfaction on the back end?

[00:08:35] Peter (PH) Mullen: Because, to your point, if it’s a bad outcome, more and more we’re having personalization when we have other opportunities. You give me a bad outcome when I’m trying to find my luggage; it takes me—and costs me—nothing to trade airlines the next time I fly. And that’s with everything.

[00:08:53] Steve MacDonald: Didn’t you have a story? I thought you usually flew one airline, then you switched because of the customer experience, isn’t that right?

[00:09:02] Peter (PH) Mullen: Yeah, that’s a really good memory, ’cause I know we were chatting about that. I ended up jumping on an airline because I was traveling from the Bay Area to the East Coast every several weeks. I picked an airline that gave me the greatest Wi-Fi coverage: I could get Wi-Fi before the plane took off and after I landed, and it was free. I loved that, and I bragged about it at dinner parties—ultimate for CX guys, right? You have somebody talking about it at a dinner party where wine is flowing. Then, lo and behold, over the following couple of years, the Wi-Fi service degraded to the point where I left the airline because I could no longer count on it. That’s something, ten years ago, we would have never thought of. This is the point of the story: we would have never considered that Wi-Fi needed to be bulletproof from the beginning to the end of a journey. Now it’s built in—we expect it every single time, or we move on.

[00:09:55] Steve MacDonald: That is a perfect example of your dollars. Part of that $3.7 trillion that we’re up for play because of poor customer experience.

[00:10:04] Peter (PH) Mullen: Absolutely. At the last company I was at, we provided a conversational AI solution for contact centers—one of those phone systems that would say, “Hello, Steve, I recognize you by your phone number. How can I help you today?” And this needs to happen every hour of every day. For solutions like this, you need to be counting the seconds of delay: you need AI, with generative AI now moving into predictive AI, moving from automation—which is what we’ve had for the last couple of years—to true orchestration. Every second counts, every engagement counts. We’re going to talk about this in a second, I know, but that flawless experience, which was such a surprise and delight a couple of years ago, is now a baseline expectation.

[00:10:49] Steve MacDonald: So, what if we could move into the world of…what’s the practical advice? You’ve spent a lot of time on both sides of the fence thinking about this in terms of retention in the business and growth in the business, right? Because everything we do—bottom line—we are for-profit organizations. So the best way to do that is to serve the customer. How do we connect this? That’s one of the biggest disconnects: it isn’t connected to retention and growth. How do you practically think about making that synaptic connection?

[00:11:27] Peter (PH) Mullen: You know, I am a big believer in structured revenue architecture for understanding how business life cycles and how customer-client lifecycle experiences extend with joy and delight. I even use the word craveability—an unusual word in customer experience—but when you have it, it’s magic. Nike has had craveability for many years despite some recent stumbles. We need to do a couple of things with revenue architecture and modeling of businesses. Probably in the last four or five years, growth at all costs has vanished.

[00:12:06] Peter (PH) Mullen: It happened during COVID. Most of us did not understand that—like many things, like a recession, you don’t know things have changed until you’re able to look backwards. But what has happened is that business cycles have changed. We’re now in a cycle where disruption is causing a lot of different changes in any business—B2B, B2C, B two, B two C. If we’re not appreciating that, we’re doing what comes naturally: we’re putting more emphasis on new-logo acquisition. You see this everywhere, and I’m inside a lot of companies right now. There is a natural tendency for the CEO, the board, and everyone else to say, “Oh, wow, numbers aren’t what they should be. Let’s hammer the new-logo guys even harder—run faster, everybody lift more.” Instead, what we need to be thinking about, particularly in this business cycle right now, is focusing on the overall lifetime value and lifetime journey that they’re taking and what that looks like, Steve. And I’m going to cite Winning By Design, a group that I’m affiliated with in how they think about all this modeling.

[00:13:10] Peter (PH) Mullen: You take the traditional funnel, which starts with a big circle and moves on down—we all know what that looks like. You turn it on its side, 90 degrees, and that becomes one half of a bow-tie model. The middle of the bow tie is the knot—that’s where a customer or new logo is acquired. But here’s where I think the magic really is: you have another funnel attached to that knot. This one expands bigger and bigger on the other side. This is what it looks like when you get a new client or customer: you start working with them, you make them successful, you make them retained because they’re full of joy working with you, and then you ultimately expand that relationship.

[00:13:48] Peter (PH) Mullen: The model works whether you’re dealing with B2B multi-hundred-million-dollar deals or thinking about an individual customer somewhere in the world who is depending on you. For a simple solution, focus on solving it for that person: more than 70% of your business comes through retention and expansion. The mathematical numbers are much greater if you’re successful with an existing client than if you’re trying to break your back getting four new clients. If we can convince all businesses to think this way, we’re going to deliver better CX, we’re going to deliver a better continuum of care, and ultimately we’re going to deliver happier customers. All that becomes a virtuous cycle.

[00:14:28] Steve MacDonald: How does that story get told to the C-Suite? Because the C-Suite is driving, in many cases, the old perception—that it’s a cost center rather than an investment center—and they’re looking at things you know are direct relationships to cost. Like, “Let’s get average handle times down,” right? We can handle more customer volume with fewer people. How do we translate this in a way that effectively gets the C-Suite’s attention?

[00:15:01] Peter (PH) Mullen: This is a really positive story about a company you might not expect to hear. A story like this: Comcast. I was part of a company that sold a startup into Comcast. It was only a 15-person company, and it was a Wi-Fi personalized solution. Today, that’s pretty commonplace: it enables you to adjust the times when Wi-Fi is available for your family, so you could turn off Wi-Fi at eight o’clock because a kid needs to get ready for bed. You can see who is coming in, connect smart devices, and give them different permissions. However, five or seven years ago, this was radical, and we came into Comcast trying to get them to understand what personalization could look like. This coincided with a massive moment for that company to say, “We have been at the bottom of customer service for nearly a decade.” Perennially, you would see new reports come out: there was Comcast right at the bottom, next to your favorite utility company. Comcast did two things that were just amazing: they said, “This matters more than anything else. We have got to change the perception of what this company is.” To their credit, hundreds of millions of dollars later, every single person from the day they started at the company was thinking about how to delight customers. You could not go into a boardroom in Comcast’s headquarters in Philadelphia without seeing one seat covered in white that said “Customer” on it—you were not allowed to sit there, because every meeting needed to have, spiritually, a customer in the room listening and giving feedback. It was a really neat idea, and it worked. Now, take that concept of a 15-person startup coming into Comcast and delivering personalization at a scale the company had never seen before.

[00:16:54] Peter (PH) Mullen: And you start to see how this stuff maps together. For me, it was quite a meaningful series of years. I reported to the Chief Product Officer, and what we thought about every single day was: how do we get people with this crazy new, innovative technology at the scale of 24 million homes—over 200 million users—to adopt it, to love it, and to even evangelize it outside of that?

[00:17:19] Peter (PH) Mullen: When you start thinking in that mentality, that’s how you get the C-Suite to begin to convert. One last point I’ll make is that I believe many Fortune 500 companies will report their customer satisfaction numbers as one of their leading indicators of future revenue forecasts in the next decade.

[00:17:44] Peter (PH) Mullen: That’s how important it is. When that happens, you are now connecting the board, the CEO, Wall Street, the CFO, all the way back to the SVP of Customer Success, and that’s when the flywheel begins to turn in the right way.

[00:17:57] Steve MacDonald: Wow. I couldn’t agree more with you. It would have to be a leading indicator of earnings if it’s a leading indicator of differentiation in the marketplace. Makes perfect sense. Also, a gentleman came on the podcast a little while ago and said, “I lead my team by designing future press releases. I ask: what do we want five years from now or two years from now? What do we want the press release to say that we’re doing today?”

[00:18:27] Steve MacDonald: Because then we know where our North Star is, and we can work backward. You said things like, “How do we get them not only to adopt, but also to evangelize?” Perhaps that press release would state, “We have an 80% adoption rate and 50% evangelist rate,” or something similar. It sets the tone for what we need to do, allowing us to break it down and complete it.

[00:18:51] Steve MacDonald: As soon as we break it down, then it’s understandable, trackable, reportable—something the C-Suite can understand, and all the teams as well.

[00:19:04] Peter (PH) Mullen: It’s a great technique, and it’s been around, particularly in Silicon Valley, for decades—the concept of manifesting your North Star.

[00:19:15] Peter (PH) Mullen: Look at me using a Gen Z term: Google is very famous for this. Amazon is very famous for this, and other top tech firms. Picture this: you write your press release, you envision yourself—manifest yourself—standing in front of a crowd of 200 people at Googleplex, saying, “I’m so excited to be here today because…” And there you go. It really works, Steve, because that concept is often more potent than regular fireside chats with your CEO by video or small group meetups. All of this is absolutely critical for success in a contact center. Everybody knows this: you have evangelism from the CEO, you have business unit or department-level meetings, you bring it down to small groups or stand-ups so you can get into one-on-ones. It’s a effective process.

[00:19:58] Peter (PH) Mullen: Against that, you know this concept of having a press release—having something you can almost post against your little cubicle. Nowadays, it’s often a second bedroom because there’s so much remote work. It matters because these are the things everybody can resonate with and understand. It’s so much different than saying, “We need to save X amount of dollars,” or “We need to earn Y amount of dollars.” Discuss the vision and the story first, and then everything else will fall into place.

[00:20:37] Steve MacDonald: I think you’ve done a good job talking about what we need to do internally: how to get the C-Suite involved, how to get an action plan started. Right now, we started out with: you’ve had roles in the past on both sides of the fence, right?

[00:20:53] Steve MacDonald: Now you’re a BPO partner. How do you work into that environment? As you’re in the Comcastes of the world, how do you involve your BPO? What’s the BPO’s role in the success of this action plan?

[00:21:11] Peter (PH) Mullen: Yeah. It ties a lot of the things we’ve been discussing all together. I led Global Marketing for approximately two and a half years at VXI Global Solutions—one of the world’s top 10 largest contact center organizations. They do an excellent job worldwide. The best BPOs do it right. You don’t have to be the largest—you can be a boutique BPO in a nearshore environment and put a special emphasis on this white-glove approach.

[00:21:47] Peter (PH) Mullen: Everyone talks about it, but what does it look like when you start to deploy it tactically? A couple of things you want to do: you want to have no daylight between you and the brand you’re supporting. You want a contact center room that resembles an in-house setup at one of these companies. You want people to understand the brand storytelling that the brand team at your company produces every day—the PR releases, the communications—and you want to get the BPO and the thousands of people working on the contract to buy into all of that. That’s high-level, but it’s not theoretical; it’s very pragmatic in terms of learning and development, and pragmatic in how you build things out.

[00:22:27] Peter (PH) Mullen: In Comcast, when our small startup became adopted nationally, that happened all on one day, and it was a massive moment in time. It’s a really good story: it was a campaign exceeding $100 million. For the launch weekend, airplanes flew up and down the Jersey Shore with banners describing the new product. It was called xFi; today it’s Xfinity Wi-Fi. That became a massive moment in time for contact centers, both domestic and abroad, to suddenly get inundated with a crazy amount of phone calls: “What is this? How do I use this? I don’t understand.”

[00:23:09] Peter (PH) Mullen: It took us building extraordinary new things to make that successful. Here are a couple of things we did in our blueprint: we created experiential centers around the country, domestically—rooms where agents, during their breaks, could go in and see how the product worked. There were flat-screen TVs all around that talked about our products. You can press a button to receive a two-minute demo. Some were glitzy, but the ones that really mattered were created by product managers—people like you and me who were talking about the products. In a couple of them, we even had a phone so you could pick it up and call the product manager to chat live or leave a message. They had to get back to you to help explain how the product worked. That was an incredible time commitment — a commitment to getting it right. But the signal of doing something like that in a contact center—no matter how brief—was astounding, because it made everybody inside the contact center ecosystem understand how crucial it was.

[00:24:16] Peter (PH) Mullen: Subsequently, for offshore, there are more limitations on what you can do. We could not create a thousand–square–foot experiential center with LED lights and a popcorn machine—you could do that domestically—but instead, you could create kiosks where folks could go in and understand how a particular product worked.

[00:24:37] Peter (PH) Mullen: This is key: this level of human touch, engagement, and partnership. In this example, I had a solution that also included security features—the Comcast digital home. In nearshore and offshore environments, most of the humans working to solve customer service issues did not have the same infrastructure in their own homes.

[00:25:02] Peter (PH) Mullen: A person answering your security question might not have a home security system and may have never seen one. How do you get all of that—call it empathy, call it practical learning and development—into their brains so it becomes second nature? That’s how we start thinking about all these things.

[00:25:22] Steve MacDonald: The idea of taking customer experience and creating experiences for the agents is brilliant. It’s a way to train, communicate, adopt, and get them excited so it becomes part of their DNA. I love that. I have two questions. It’s actually one question that branches out. You have a unique opportunity here to say: What is your message? What’s the single takeaway you want organizations with customer support departments to know? And then, to the BPO partners that serve them, what’s the one most important thing you want them to know?

[00:26:11] Peter (PH) Mullen: That’s such a big question—so many people are thinking about it and trying to solve it.

[00:26:16] Peter (PH) Mullen: First, the macro world we’re in is driving personalization faster, even for people who think about it every day. I came from a traditional conversational AI company that provided elegant, artistic solutions to some of the world’s best brands.

[00:26:42] Peter (PH) Mullen: Conversational AI requires PhD-level linguistic experts to build communication trees. Almost overnight, that model became outdated: generative/predictive AI can now use small silos of information and give it back to a user in unique ways. We’re still solving how good it is—there are still hallucinations—but one thing to understand is that the first time there’s a hallucination is often the only time that specific hallucination occurs.

[00:27:14] Peter (PH) Mullen: About a year ago, there was a kerfuffle when Google recommended rocks as a pizza topping. I think it even dinged Google’s stock price for a day. But guess what? That has never happened again—it’s gone. There are bigger, deeper issues—implicit bias, demographic or racial bias, gender bias, with some tools—but you don’t hear about those the way you did a year ago. I’m using this as an example to illustrate the rapid pace at which things are changing our brains.

[00:24:16] Peter (PH) Mullen: Subsequently, for offshore, there are more limitations on what you can do. We could not create a thousand–square–foot experiential center with LED lights and a popcorn machine—we did that domestically—but instead, you could develop kiosks where folks could go in and understand how a particular product worked.

[00:24:37] Peter (PH) Mullen: This is key: this level of human touch, engagement, and partnership. In this example, I had a solution that also included security features—the Comcast digital home. In nearshore and offshore environments, most of the people working to solve customer service issues did not have the same infrastructure in their own homes.

[00:25:02] Peter (PH) Mullen: A person answering your security question might not have a home security system and may have never seen one. How do you get all of that—empathy, practical learning, and development—into their brains so it becomes second nature? That’s how we start thinking about all these things.

[00:25:22] Steve MacDonald: The idea of taking customer experience and creating experiences for the agents is brilliant. It’s a way to train, communicate, adopt, and get them excited so it becomes part of their DNA. I love that. I have two questions. It’s one question that branches out. You have a unique opportunity here to say: What is your message? What’s the single takeaway you want organizations with customer support departments to know? And then, to the BPO partners that serve them, what’s the one most important thing you want them to know?

[00:26:11] Peter (PH) Mullen: That’s such a big question—so many people are thinking about it and trying to solve it.

[00:26:16] Peter (PH) Mullen: First, the macro world we’re in is driving personalization faster. Most people recognize, even when they’re in this space thinking about it every day. I came from a traditional conversational AI company that provided elegant, artistic solutions to some of the world’s best brands.

[00:26:42] Peter (PH) Mullen: Conversational AI required PhD-level linguistic experts to build communication trees. Almost overnight, that model became outdated: generative/predictive AI can now use small silos of information and give it back to a user in unique ways. We’re still solving how good it is—there are still hallucinations—but one thing to understand is that the first time there’s a hallucination is often the only time that specific hallucination occurs.

[00:27:14] Peter (PH) Mullen: About a year ago, there was a kerfuffle when Google recommended rocks as a pizza topping. I think it even dinged Google’s stock price for a day. But guess what? That has never happened again—it’s gone. There are bigger, deeper issues—implicit bias, demographic or racial bias, gender bias with some of the tools—but you don’t hear about those the way you did a year ago. I’m using this only as an example to show the speed at which things are changing our brains.

[00:27:54] Peter (PH) Mullen: Programmatically, we cannot process it. In order to manage this, you have to leap ahead a year and then go to the extreme, as far as I’m concerned, and play “what if.” Now, this is imperative for thinking about customer experience—they’re inside the contact center world.

[00:28:11] Peter (PH) Mullen: Robotic Process Automation, RPA, was such a big deal about ten years ago. Then COVID slowed it down—unfortunately, some really good companies stumbled because investment shrank. But now that automation has already moved to the next evolution, which is orchestration.

[00:28:25] Peter (PH) Mullen: Instead of managing a couple of tasks, let’s manage the entire experience. A year ago, Steve, I could go to CX events in Vegas or anywhere else. People were so proud of the agent-supporting tools they had, and they would say, “Look, we can tell when the customer is starting to get testy, and we can provide three- or four-sentence concepts that the agent can use to try to diffuse the situation and get it back on track.”

[00:28:53] Peter (PH) Mullen: Those are really clever: you select B, say it, and it brings the human agent back into the forefront of the equation. Already those things are dated—just another example of how fast this stuff is moving. But when you bundle all that up and you ask, “What does it all mean five or ten years from now?” it’s personalization. You’re going to have a different experience on that airline than I’m going to have. You’re going to care more about one part—your shoelaces—while I care more about the soles of my shoes, and on it goes. You’re going to want someone to talk to you. It’s sweet—nothing’s on the phone or chat. More likely, I’m going to want them to get right to the facts and just give me the answer. This is what personalization means. If you’re the business, you’ve got to move that way. The top BPO in the world is Teleperformance—by size, and I think by revenue as well—and they announced in 2025 that they’re investing over a hundred million dollars in AI partnerships. They’re not trying to build everything themselves, but they’re bringing in what the future is going to look like. That’s going to create a separation between that particular company and many of the others. How do we all catch up? Then you jump over to the other side of the desk where you’re a business trying to evaluate a CX BPO provider.

[00:30:10] Peter (PH) Mullen: I’m thinking about the integrity of your infrastructure, what your people team looks like—which, I know, does not typically come up as one of the first three things. But my experience at VXI Global Solutions and other places taught me that the number-one driver of success is often those amazing people and teams who build evangelism internally and generate enthusiasm—finding the best candidates. Then, as we move forward, the human becomes more crucial for complex problem-solving skills and what they can offer somebody, because automation of AI, which now becomes orchestration of AI, is going to be solving many of your problems and my problems. Gartner estimates—and I believe Capgemini agrees—that this year, about 80% of routine requests are now being answered by AI. If you think about that, it means there’s a smaller workforce of humans ultimately needed to help out.

[00:31:11] Peter (PH) Mullen: But when you are talking to that human, it means something has accelerated. So what are you doing as a BPO to make sure that human is equipped to be incredibly successful—and keep you and me from getting ticked off?

[00:31:27] Steve MacDonald: I think we need a series of podcasts because there’s so much more we could go into and so many questions.

[00:31:35] Steve MacDonald: Peter, if I were to give out a link to your LinkedIn profile, would that be appropriate so people could reach out and ask questions?

[00:31:41] Peter (PH) Mullen: Oh, absolutely. I love this stuff. As I said when we started, I was fortunate enough to be in Silicon Valley as a liberal arts–type person, thinking from day one how this connects to the end user. As the technology became more and more innovative, these questions became bigger and bigger. I love trying to help solve this. I love figuring it out with people because this is—like, I’m pointing at the basket, but I wish you could see it—my basket is a pot of gold. This is the pot of gold for companies to get right, and what a time to pursue this and get it right. So the answer is yes. Absolutely.

[00:32:21] Steve MacDonald: Here’s what I’ll say: the mission of this podcast is to bring really incredible new perspectives and insights from all over the industry together.

[00:32:31] Steve MacDonald: If we do that, it’s like the saying: a rising tide lifts all boats. You were a big part of that rising tide today, and I just want to say thank you very much.

[00:32:40] Peter (PH) Mullen: Thank you. It is always a pleasure to listen to your work—and now to get to engage in it is a treat for me.

[00:32:45] Peter (PH) Mullen: Thanks.