From Support Function to Growth Driver: Strategic Planning for Contact Centers

Transcript

[00:00:02] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the Contact Center Perspectives Podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we have an expert special guest, Mazen Moustafa. Now, Mazen, what makes you a really unique guest with a very unique perspective, not only have you written the book on AI for contact and support centers, and we’re goFing to get into that in a big way today because we all know in every industry, AI is going to revolutionize what we do, but we don’t always know exactly where to start. So, that’s a big issue that I want to take care of today.

[00:00:33] Steve MacDonald: But also, we’re going to be talking about strategic planning in general, not just AI, but how do we go from a support function to a growth driver? We’re often seen as a cost center, a support center, right? The KPIs that surround us are all about containing versus growing and expanding our impact and our influence on the company overall, because we have more conversations with customers, the highest voice of authority, than anyone else in the organization.

[00:01:04] Steve MacDonald: So, we have the ability to step up and do some amazing things that you’re going to be talking about here today. But what I’d love to do is maybe turn it over to you and have you talk a little bit more about your background and then we’ll get started.

[00:01:20] Mazen Moustafa: Definitely. First of all, I’m quite excited and happy, Steve, for our podcast today with lots of points to discuss. So, looking forward to it.

[00:01:30] Mazen Moustafa: So, just a brief about myself. So, my name is Mazen, just like you mentioned. I have more than 20 years’ worth of experience in the field of customer operations, customer experience, across different verticals, across different markets.

[00:01:43] Mazen Moustafa: I have my own published book. It’s on Kindle. So, it’s called Then AI Happen where it talks about the expected use cases and workflows that we are expecting will be managed by AI tools, whether in the near future or maybe in the next few years.

[00:02:00] Mazen Moustafa: So, yeah, I have my own published game as well. It’s called Mission I.H.I. It’s a game app. You can find it on Android stores and app stores as well. It teaches the young generation how to avoid being hacked or having their personal data leaked against their will. So, this is another thing.

[00:02:18] Mazen Moustafa: I love traveling. I’ve been to so many different places. So, yeah, that’s pretty much everything about myself.

[00:02:24] Steve MacDonald: Well, good. I know it’s not everything, but it’s the highlights. So, here’s what I’d love to do. I’d like to start out with maybe even breaking and tearing down the issues, this empowerment barrier. Those, I think, were words that you used in our last conversation in contact centers and what that means and how we do that.

[00:02:47] Mazen Moustafa: Definitely. So, this is how I perceive it, and again, when I say this is how I perceive it, it happens in majority of cases. I don’t want to say 100%. Otherwise, we would not be able to compare, like for example, a successful business to a non-successful business. But in so many cases, you find that the contact center or the customer service agent, manager, or director, they lack authority, however, they have the knowledge.

[00:03:14] Mazen Moustafa: So, the contact center can see patterns, recurring issues. They maybe even know about competition because they keep on talking to customers every single day and they can hear like, “You know what? But you have a shortfall here. Your competitors are doing so and so.” For example, if they have multiple lines, so I have this line with you, however, my wife, my son, my daughter, they have this telephone number with another provider and they are doing so and so.

[00:03:39] Mazen Moustafa: So, they have like lots and lots of knowledge and know-how and patterns like I was saying before. However, they are not really empowered or authorized to rectify or make the change that they believe is needed, or it will help the business.

[00:03:56] Steve MacDonald: So, it’s interesting because they’re not empowered, they don’t have the authority, but one of the things that we know is in organizations, good ideas, innovative ideas, ideas that move the needle, they raise attention and allow us to have a voice and a place, a seat at the table, and there’s so many opportunities that come out of the contact center.

[00:04:24] Steve MacDonald: In fact, I was reading a study by McKinsey, and they talked about how most companies don’t have a good voice of the customer program. They’re not in touch with the voice of the customer. One of the things they said was that a majority of great ideas and innovations come from the voice of the customer. That’s the power we all have.

[00:04:47] Steve MacDonald: So, when you’re talking about, they’re not empowered, really, we are. It’s our opportunity to take a step in the right direction and take that information and make it incredibly useful for the organization. Why isn’t that happening in your mind more today?

[00:05:07] Mazen Moustafa: Well, I guess multiple reasons. So, one is you have these hierarchical bottlenecks. For some reason, the contact center as a division or a department or unit, it’s not as equal as other divisions within the hierarchy of the company.

[00:05:23] Mazen Moustafa: So, for example, you can have finance, you can have accounting, you can have product, you can have tech, but usually the contact center or the customer service team, maybe it’s because of the label, which is something I will come to later because the contact center is labeled as a supporting function, but usually whenever you have a contact center, when I say it’s not empowered, it’s usually covered with a layer of approvals.

[00:05:47] Mazen Moustafa: So, for example, just like you said, voice of the customer, we have the best ideas. We are in touch with the customer pulse. So, you technically know what the customer needs, what the customer wants, what’s our weakness, where do we have the majority of our shortfalls. However, again, you need lots and lots of approvals, buy-ins from other divisions, just to get your idea pushed through, and again, I don’t want to say like the contact center division or department is the only department that goes through this, but let’s say it’s not as equal as other divisions. Other divisions can go way faster in the approval cycle compared to the contact center.

[00:06:27] Steve MacDonald: So, you know, it’s interesting. I was a part of a big study and talked to just a ton of C-suite executives in asking them what they thought their largest challenges were to creating long-term sustainable growth, and the number one challenge was internal, and we tend to think about our greatest challenges. We point to our competitors. We look at trends and things that are happening in the marketplace, but we don’t point to ourselves, and what I’m taking away from your conversation here so far is that we are our greatest challenge of being seen as a support center, as a cost center.

[00:07:09] Steve MacDonald: If we don’t stand up and take our rightful seat at the table, in terms of representing the customer, and whether that’s feedback on the new product launch, whether it’s sales, the marketing campaign that just rolled out, right pricing, so much we have feedback on, that it’s incumbent upon us. If we don’t look at ourselves as valuable, who else will?

[00:07:34] Steve MacDonald: So, I’d love to hear, how do we stand up? Like proving the contact center value to senior leadership, how should we do that? What are the steps that you would recommend that we take?

[00:07:47] Mazen Moustafa: I love the question. So, I guess, just like you said, it’s the case of rather than the contact center leaders pointing fingers at other divisions, there are several actions that we need to take internally and a change of mindset and direction, in order for us to be able to change the label of supporting function, or the perception that we are a call center, not a revenue center.

[00:08:09] Mazen Moustafa: I guess the number one is revisiting our current KPIs. So, traditional metrics are not enough. Like when you go to a C-suite, just like you said, or a CEO, and you tell them, “You know what? The EHC is going down.” Honestly, they couldn’t care less. If you tell them that the first response time or their SLE is like 99%, “Well, okay, I’m paying a lot of money. Should be 99%.”

[00:08:35] Mazen Moustafa: But again, this is not really what they are interested in hearing. You need to connect your own KPIs and build your own KPIs in a way that you can actually relate them to revenue generation or cost savings with actual numbers, not intuition, not aspiration, but with actual figures.

[00:08:54] Mazen Moustafa: Speaking of studies, there was this one study that was published by Forrester, I guess in 2023. They didn’t publish the name of the company, but they mentioned that for one of the O2 manufacturers in the US, if their NPS score, their customer experience scores, went up by 1%, it equals $1 billion in revenue. They did this exact same study for O2 and a home insurer, and they mentioned that this 1% would equal $370 million.

[00:09:27] Mazen Moustafa: So, it’s not just a matter of, “You know what, I want my customers to be happy,” or “I want my customers just to be satisfied for this.” But it’s because there are lots of dependencies, whether revenue or cost savings or opportunity to upsell and cross-sell, whenever you link your KPIs as a contact center to revenue generation, or mainly revenue generation. I would put it this way.

[00:09:53] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, it’s so important that when your CEO or CRO or anybody in the C-suite is talking, we have to understand their language. We have to understand the KPIs that are important to them.

[00:10:04] Steve MacDonald: When they go to their boss, which is the board, nobody comes in and says, “Hey, how’s that average handle time coming?” They’re looking at how is this quarter’s quota? What does next quarter look like? They want predictable, growing revenue.

[00:10:19] Steve MacDonald: So, I love how you equated that. Just do the research. We have AI. Do the research. Put into AI: “How do I take the KPIs that we usually run inside of a contact center, and how do we correlate those to the KPIs that are important to the C-suite?”

[00:10:37] Steve MacDonald: If we take the initiative, we can do it. And if it means we just have to say things and relate things a little bit differently, report things a little bit differently, that’s okay. As businesses, that’s what we do every day. We translate things for the customer. The internal customer is really the ones that you’re constantly selling to.

[00:10:58] Steve MacDonald: You’ve got to advocate for yourself. You have to put yourself in the position of a salesperson, and you’re selling constantly to get the resources and grow the team and do the kind of things that you’re doing.

[00:11:09] Steve MacDonald: So, I love that. I love that advice, and if you had any more, I don’t want to stop you, but I got just a ton of questions based on what you’ve been saying here.

[00:11:18] Mazen Moustafa: Yeah, maybe just an extra few points because I want to give more context because what I’m saying might sound very theoretical, but we have brands that we use every single day where customer support is part of the package that you actually pay for.

[00:11:34] Mazen Moustafa: So, for example, if you want to take Apple and their customer support, their Genius Bar. It’s like, this is part of what I’m paying for, even if my phone or my laptop or any of Apple’s products do not go wrong throughout the period that I’m using their services.

[00:11:50] Mazen Moustafa: I know I’m getting a perfect, perfect service, and to be honest, it gets tricky because when you have your own business and you think like no company, I guess globally, is incapable of purchasing a specific technology. So, the main differentiator between one company and another is not the technology.

[00:12:12] Mazen Moustafa: You can just purchase it like one or two months ahead of your competitors. But again, in two, in three, in four months, they will have it. But the one thing that would differentiate one service provider or one company versus the other is the quality of support, the quality of service that they are actually providing.

[00:12:30] Mazen Moustafa: And again, it can reflect in so many different studies, but the reason I just don’t want to use too many references is because I want to make sure that we can relate to this from our day-to-day operations. But I remember this one study that I once read, and again, it was published this year. So, it’s recent, and when I say it’s published this year, it is because everyone thinks that the AI and the technology is what people are after. But no.

[00:12:54] Mazen Moustafa: Over 50% of service users are driven by quality, not price and not technology, and 60% make their purchasing decisions based on the quality of service that they are receiving. So, again, it’s not a matter of technology, it’s not a matter of like this product offers so many different services that the other product is not offering. It’s mainly based on this service that I’m receiving, especially the after-sale one. If this makes sense.

[00:13:23] Steve MacDonald: Yep. The service is one of the biggest components of a CX strategy, right? Before we get down that path, because I definitely want to go into the components of how we build basically a plan, and I think that’s a good kind of segue. Your perspective is that you have to build a business plan. That came out of our last conversation.

[00:13:44] Steve MacDonald: Like a CEO builds a business plan for the business itself, you’re talking about creating a business plan for the contact center, and that’s really unique and I love it. But I’d love to hear a little bit more about what you’re thinking and what’s behind that.

[00:13:58] Mazen Moustafa: Definitely. I guess I will refer to what you mentioned earlier, which is we need to start with ourselves. So, right now, one of your main stakeholders is the board or the CEO. Someone with the authority and power to make a decision, approve the budget, and so on and so forth. So, in order for you to be able to get their buy-in, you need simply to think like them, and just like you said, you relate your KPIs to the company’s KPIs. So, things like, you need to have, for your own department, the contact center, your own vision, your own strategy, your own long-term value. What value are you bringing to the table?

[00:14:36] Mazen Moustafa: In other words, you need to treat your contact center as an independent business unit. So, it’s as if it’s a product. So, right now, for example, if I have a contact center, how can I make this contact center generate revenue or save costs? And again, it comes in so many different packages, techniques, workflows.

[00:14:58] Mazen Moustafa: A contact center is where people are reaching out either for something as simple as a quick transaction. So, I want to make a payment. I want to do something very, very, very specific, and it’s transactions, not a complaint or anything, and sometimes you receive complaints, escalations, dissatisfied inquiries, and so on and so forth. But again, it’s a very good opportunity where you can run your own, let’s say, survey questions. You can get the customer insights. You can get their inputs. You can get their pain points.

[00:15:30] Mazen Moustafa: If you even want to launch a new product from scratch, you have a huge pool of users who can actually tell you, “You know what? I would love to buy this because it would help me with that.” “No, I would like to buy this, but you need to do these tweaks here and there.”

[00:15:45] Mazen Moustafa: So, again, treating your contact center as a separate unit where you need to have a budget, the budget is justified with proper staffing, proper technology, proper training, what is the ROI that the business is getting, and how can we measure it. And again, when I say how can we measure it, it’s not the contact center traditional KPIs, but we’re talking about churn. We’re talking about, for example, can we compare the spending habits of satisfied customers versus dissatisfied customers? You need to create your own metrics and KPIs that, again, you can relate what you are doing day-to-day to what the CEO is looking for.

[00:16:28] Steve MacDonald: Do you have some of your own? You mentioned one, but do you have some of those KPIs or metrics that you’ve put into place that you think work well?

[00:16:37] Mazen Moustafa: Definitely. I guess the churn is the best one because a customer can leave for so many different reasons, like whether better offer, bad service. If you manage to minimize the churn and track it, I guess that’s one of the very key KPIs for any company because when you lose a customer, you don’t just lose the customer, but you lose their friends, their family.

[00:17:03] Mazen Moustafa: If they didn’t join from the very first beginning, it’s fine, I’m happy. I’m not going to have everyone as my customer. But if they used to be your customer and then they left, they have a reason, and when they leave, they will take some other customers with them, whether again, their friends, their family members. They might even recommend the new service provider or the new product that they have purchased to others.

[00:17:24] Mazen Moustafa: So, it’s a big deal if you have a problem or a challenge with churn, and if you can minimize your churn, I guess that would be like the cornerstone for your achievement as a contact center leader.

[00:17:36] Steve MacDonald: You know, to accentuate that, I think you’re absolutely right. Every CFO and CEO is going to understand very well, and they track their net recurring revenue.

[00:17:48] Steve MacDonald: I think it was Forrester. You mentioned Forrester came out with a different study in 2003, and they said that 73% of new annual revenue should come from existing clients. So, the idea that you not only have existing revenue there, you have revenue expansion opportunities that are more significant, should be more significant than the new logo development that we’re even doing out of sales.

[00:18:18] Steve MacDonald: So, churn ruins all of that. Churn is the worst impact on NRR. So, those are the kind of things. I love bringing this up and how you’re doing this, because you’re starting to say, “I’m thinking like a businessperson. I’m thinking like a leader of the company that is protecting growing revenue and churn is one of the cancers that does that.”

[00:18:44] Steve MacDonald: Now, part of that is increasing our efficiencies too and getting more done and everybody talks about AI. AI is one of those things that is promised to be a huge efficiency boost, and quality and output boost and we’re serving the clients better, our CSAT or NPS scores, everything should be affected by it.

[00:19:06] Steve MacDonald: But what I loved is you’ve written the book on it, right? You’ve written the book on how do we apply AI in the contact centers, but you mentioned that it’s not the magic solution, but it’s a pretty important solution and I’d just love to get your perspective on that.

[00:19:21] Mazen Moustafa: Definitely. Maybe also when we had our discussion before the podcast when we talked about AI as having this hype and trend where we expected it would do, like magic and resolve all of our problems with zero effort. Again, it’s the same hype or trend that we used to get when we hear a word like automation or digitalization.

[00:19:42] Mazen Moustafa: Again, it’s more or less the same hype and even I remember the example when we talked about the pistachio thing. I’m not sure if you have the same hype that we have here in Egypt versus the US where you have this pistachio added to everything. So, when you add pistachio to anything, it’s just upgraded.

[00:19:58] Mazen Moustafa: So, the chocolate bar could be for $1, for example, and then when you say it’s with pistachio, it can go up to $10 or $20 or a hundred dollars.

[00:20:06] Mazen Moustafa: So, AI is one of those trends. But again, with this being said, I’m not saying that AI is not a game changer. It’s a huge game changer, but it’s not a game changer in the way we think it is because working or using the AI requires the proper, normal infrastructure that you would have in any good contact center anyway.

[00:20:28] Mazen Moustafa: So, in order for you to have a solid working AI agent or AI tool or AI-driven process, you need to have lots and lots of proper infrastructure installed and set up properly in order for you to be able to use the AI. Otherwise, it’ll give you just irrelevant answers. It’ll give you delayed responses or simply it’ll fail. When I say delayed responses, it means it’s working, however, it’s not working properly.

[00:20:55] Mazen Moustafa: I read a report, I guess six months ago, saying that 80% of AI projects fail, like they don’t even go live. But again, it’s because of the hype and everyone is talking about it every single day, and you keep on seeing competition between different countries, between different companies like, “You know what? This AI agent can do so and so, and you can change your photo to look like this celebrity for example.”

[00:21:20] Mazen Moustafa: Again, these are old trends. But the AI itself doesn’t work the way that people or decision-makers or a CEO would think it should work, and in order for us as contact center leaders to be able to use the AI, again, we need to do the basic, the manual, the traditional work properly.

[00:21:40] Mazen Moustafa: So, things like having the proper process mapped, this is a very, very important thing. You need to have your own processes mapped, documented, well designed with edge cases because again, the AI is like a very smart agent, so they need to have a full document that what if this happens, do this. If this happens, do this. If this happens, then do this.

[00:22:04] Mazen Moustafa: Things like the data utilization is a huge thing. In order for you also to be able to use the AI tools or AI agents properly, you need to have your data streamlined properly. You need to have a proper knowledge base in place because again, if I’m asked a question, I need somewhere to check. I will learn over time, but again, from the very first beginning, I need to have one place where I can go, check, validate the information, and come back with an answer.

[00:22:32] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. The best AI tools, if it’s garbage in, it’s garbage out, and one of the big issues, even though the word and the trend in digital transformation has been around for a long time, like Deloitte, years ago, told that the difference between the business of today and tomorrow is digital transformation, how we’re using our data, and AI has just accelerated the need for us to not have fragmented, siloed data, and not well thought through processes because you put AI on top of all of that, and you’re putting it on top of a broken system. Is that a good takeaway from what you said there?

[00:23:10] Mazen Moustafa: Couldn’t be more accurate.

[00:23:12] Steve MacDonald: Okay. So, here’s what I want to do. I want to take everything that we’ve talked about, because we’ve talked about a lot so far, and for the audience, other contact center support, CX leaders all over the world that are tuning into this podcast, if there was one thing that you wanted them to take away from this podcast, what would that one thing be?

[00:23:39] Mazen Moustafa: I guess if I would break it down to only one point, I would say you are important. Very important. You just need to know how to show it, and it all comes down to you.

[00:23:50] Steve MacDonald: Yep. Nobody else is going to do the job. Nobody’s going to go looking to elevate your role, your importance, and grow your team, ask your opinion. We’ve got to stand up, we’ve got to take that. You have to earn it. So, I think that’s an amazing takeaway. Thank you.

[00:24:04] Steve MacDonald: And by the way, here’s one thing I know is going to happen. People are going to have questions. Is it okay if we give a link to your LinkedIn profile so people could reach out to you with questions?

[00:24:14] Mazen Moustafa: Definitely. Anytime.

[00:24:16] Steve MacDonald: Okay, and what is the name of your AI book if anybody wants to go look it up?

[00:24:22] Mazen Moustafa: It’s called Then AI happens.

[00:24:25] Steve MacDonald: Oh, Then AI happens. Okay, fantastic.

[00:24:27] Steve MacDonald: So, here’s what I’d love to do is just say thank you because the goal, the mission of this podcast is to bring together different perspectives, different insights from all of our different experiences, and if we can share them with each other, then it’s like the rising tide that lifts all boats, and I thought you did an amazing job today for being a big part of that rising tide. So, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it.

[00:24:51] Mazen Moustafa: I really appreciate the time. I appreciate the opportunity, Steve, and I really enjoyed our chat. So, wishing you the best of luck with your podcast. Thank you so much.