How to Rebalance Your Contact Center for Success

Transcript

Mike Aoki Podcast Transcript

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, we’ve got a really interesting guest in Mike Aoki, and we’re going to be talking about how do you rebalance your contact centers? How do we find that perfect balance for success so that we’re high performance, we’re doing everything that we need to do.

[00:00:23] Steve MacDonald: Mike’s an expert in this. Mike, you not only have a consulting company that you work with customer support teams and sales teams on a regular basis, you started out as an agent, and then moved into training and now consulting.

[00:00:37] Steve MacDonald: So, you like to talk about it as I’m a native, not a visitor to this island, and you’ve got a really interesting concept called the Morse Code Effect that I’m going to start out with. But before I do that, I’d love to just turn it over to you and maybe have you explain a little bit more about your background so we can get to know you.

[00:00:56] Mike Aoki: Sure. Well, that sounds good. Thanks, Steve. I appreciate that. I’m really focused in terms of helping people just develop their customer service skills or sales skills or coaching skills. It’s all about communication because ultimately that’s what customer service is.

[00:01:10] Mike Aoki: We ask that question, “Why do you even have a customer service team or a contact center?” It’s to help your customers and communicate with them and be able to go and help engage them. So, that’s really what I want to focus on is doing that during this conversation.

[00:01:22] Steve MacDonald: Well, good. Well, let’s start out with this kind of unique mindset and approach you have, the Morse Code Effect. Explain what the Morse Code Effect is and why we need to know what we need to do.

[00:01:32] Mike Aoki: It’s actually funny, but it came up as a joke actually, in the sense that, think about people that are actually typically like Gen Z or in the millennial age range. So, under 30, under 25, digital natives, they have a phone, but they don’t make phone calls on it. They chat, they text, access social media sites, but they’re not actually using that as a telephone.

[00:01:50] Mike Aoki: So, the challenge is, and what really came out in trained groups like this for customer service was the fact that it’s almost like asking people our age to go and use Morse code on a telegraph. It’s an ancient technology. Asking our youngest employees, which typically customer services, our youngest employees, who’s a technology voice over the phone that they typically don’t do and worse yet, we’re asking them to go and do that now with people that are calling in and the groups that are most likely to call in are going to be boomers and Gen Xers. People, 50 plus, 65 plus that grew up talking on the phone. A wired phone attached to a wall.

[00:02:25] Mike Aoki: So, the unfairness is we’re asking the youngest employees that don’t typically talk on the phone to talk on the phone with people that always talk on the phone and are angry or upset. That’s also not fair as well.

[00:02:35] Mike Aoki: So, part of this is the last five years has been training Gen Zs, young millennials, how to use the phone and how to use voice to be able to go and communicate effectively with older customers and customers typically want to talk on the phone.

[00:02:48] Steve MacDonald: It makes perfect sense. We can assume it’s the phone. We don’t have to train anybody to be on the phone, but if it’s not in their comfort zone, just like doing Morse code would not be my comfort zone. I know it’s clicks, and I can see, and I could probably work my way through it, but it wouldn’t be my comfort zone. And not only do they have to be in the comfort zone, but they have to be on top of their game, to your point.

[00:03:09] Steve MacDonald: These are people that are upset. They have problems, they need to be solved, they’re calling in. So, is that part of the changing paradigm in contact centers that we need to understand some of all these things that are affecting factors? If you were to say there, that’s part of it, that’s a big part of this paradigm shift, take us through what you see as the changing paradigm inside of contact centers.

[00:03:34] Mike Aoki: Sure. One of them is a demographic piece, as I mentioned, in terms of younger employees, and I think sometimes when I talk to directors and contact centers, they assume the skills are there because for our age group, it is talking on the phone and they don’t necessarily empathize with what’s going on with the younger employees and the fact that, say, for instance, onboarding the higher training that should be spending more time now being able to go and help younger employees be able to practice their phone skills and voice communication and learning about how to be more fluent on the phone and not just speaking, but also listening.

[00:04:02] Mike Aoki: Do they paraphrase? Can they stick up on emotional cues in the customer’s vocal tone? So, those are challenges there and I think we always run into as well as the idea and if you ask this question to your employees, how many of you want to be on the voice queue? How many would you want to be in the chat queue? Because it’s what we’re used to.

[00:04:19] Mike Aoki: Here’s a challenge though, when it comes to contact centers, we don’t get to choose our customers for the most part. So, unless we’re a brand that appeals only to young people that want to chat, for instance, okay, we’re going to have some customers that don’t want to talk on the phone.

[00:04:34] Mike Aoki: If we’re broad-based, like a bank, an insurance company, or a general consumer product, we’re going to have all age ranges, including people that do want to talk on the phone as their first option. That means that we have to have some employees in the contact center that can help folks over the phone.

[00:04:48] Mike Aoki: So, there’s a basic paradigm shift where we have to be able to deal with those issues and it’s funny because there’s all this talk about being able to help shift things more towards, for instance, the impact of AI. And looking towards that, I think one of the other challenges, the second paradigm shift that I’m seeing is the fact that AI is very good at dealing with straightforward issues right now.

[00:05:08] Mike Aoki: As a virtual voice agent, it’s not as good yet at dealing with more complex issues, more emotional issues and so the challenge there right now is that as AI’s taking over the more transactional inquiry type questions, it’s leaving more of the complex and emotional issues for your tier one agents to handle and so the second paradigm shift is the fact that you’re asking tier one agents now to handle your tier two caliber issues not been trained on how to do that.

[00:05:32] Mike Aoki: What happens is it drives more escalations. The second trend I’ve heard a lot of is, escalations have increased tremendously and now, we have managers, directors, who are spending their time answering escalations for things that never should have been escalated and that’s a challenge as well.

[00:05:45] Steve MacDonald: So, that’s an opportunity for shifting, following this paradigm, and really the way that we think about deploying our agents and the training that we have to do for our agents. You actually have a kind of opinion on how we start balancing this—people and then balancing technology and AI.

[00:06:06] Steve MacDonald: In the paradigm shift that you’re just talking about, those challenges—what does that mean in terms of the balance there? Everybody’s worried that the people are going away, the agents are going away. So, what’s your thought on all this?

[00:06:17] Mike Aoki: Well, it’s funny that with every new technology that comes out, there’s always an overly optimistic viewpoint of what the technology can do. And that’s fine. It’s brand new. Everyone loves brand-new things.

[00:06:27] Mike Aoki: It’s very enthusiastic in this way, “AI would take care of customer service,” and there was a lot of hype around how good it is. And it’s actually quite impressive. It is actually quite good—a lot of applications. But it won’t necessarily replace all human interaction.

[00:06:42] Mike Aoki: You’re still going to have some customers that want to speak to somebody live, that won’t trust an AI, or become upset if it’s an AI. You’ll also have issues. It’ll be complex, but by its very nature, customer service is the exception department. If it were easy, it would have been in the marketing materials. It would be on the self-help website. Customer service is the exception department.

[00:07:02] Mike Aoki: The challenge there is you can’t always, as a programmer, anticipate every exceptional scenario. There’s always going to be somewhere the AI is not in the database, and it has to go to a live agent to help resolve it. So, there’s a challenge there in the sense that there’s going to be that rebalancing, and we’re already seeing that in the second half of the year.

[00:07:21] Mike Aoki: Okay, the first half of the year was all about implementing AI and some people predicted it would take over the contact center—you wouldn’t even need a contact center. It’ll just be AI. Now, the challenges that are there, the exceptional nature of customer service being the exception department, it’s come in enough that people are saying, “No, we’ll have to keep people,” which is a good thing and how they interact with customer support and meet our customers where they are.

[00:07:43] Mike Aoki: I saw one stat, a survey taken by ICMI, the Incoming Calls Management Institute, and they surveyed VPs and directors and found that 87 percent of contact centers are planning to hire more people, or at least replace for attrition next year in 2025. So, right off the bat there, the idea is, no, we need a balance between technology and human capability.

[00:08:04] Steve MacDonald: You really outlined it well too. That might be different a year, two years, five years from now, but the empathy and there’s also a feeling of, “I’m important enough to talk to a real person,” and that I didn’t get pigeonholed into a bot to be handled.

[00:08:21] Steve MacDonald: We all know that we’re being handled automatically by technology. So, there’s a level of just, “You’re important. We want to serve you. We want to make sure you’re taken care of.” So, we’re going to enable this to happen.

[00:08:36] Steve MacDonald: Is that a part of the thinking of maintaining people—not only the escalations, the hard questions, the empathy—but just, “I would never get away with no live agents, because what is that sending as a message to my customers?” Is that a thing?

[00:08:54] Mike Aoki: Definitely it is. I’ll give you an example. This is actually going back long before automation and AI. But I did work in one contact center, which had an outbound sector for outbound and in the outbound one, because customers would have to call back and ask for somebody, they used a code name, and it was a generic name that every rep would use for their outbound calls.

[00:09:08] Mike Aoki:  So, when the customer called back, they would actually just ask for that person. That would be the trigger to transfer them to the outbound team for this issue. The challenge became, though, and in one instance, it became, that just the fact it was a code name—not a real person—actually caused a lot of upset and anger.

[00:09:28] Mike Aoki: So, the whole thing here is the idea that AI can do an awful lot, and as a customer, if it’s a straight-up question, I don’t mind an AI. I just want an answer. I couldn’t find it myself on the website.

[00:09:38] Mike Aoki: I don’t care if it’s an AI. I just want to find out the answer. That’s okay. But there are some issues that will be more emotional and more complex, more demographics where they really want a live person with a real name, where they’re going to want to speak with a live person.

[00:09:51] Mike Aoki: So again, when you think about customer service, meeting your customers where they are, there are going to be legacy customers, exceptional issues, that will need live human interaction in that sense. So, even if efficiently, you can do it all with AI, you’re still going to have some customers that want to speak to a human just because. So, it’ll be an issue that’s there.

[00:10:08] Steve MacDonald: We all talk a lot about training for the agents, but what you’re talking about—a lot of this is training and equipping the leaders to understand these paradigms, make these shifts, and adapt. So, really, there’s a level of training for the leaders.

[00:10:23] Steve MacDonald: How are you equipping leaders for these kinds of conversations, these kinds of paradigms? How do you convince them that they need to think differently, they need to be trained differently—not just the agents themselves?

[00:10:37] Mike Aoki: Well, I think part of it too is the idea about, again, looking at data and looking at the number of escalations and what’s causing them. Looking at the demographics of the customer base and who’s contacting you and then what channel they’re using. How many voices, how many chats, how many emails to go and see what the demand is and then just look at how you match that?

[00:10:52] Mike Aoki: Also, let’s be honest. There’s a question about cost as well, depending on what you sell, what you service, what your branding is, how much you want to invest in each side of the home—technology and people—to offer the best service possible. There are some extreme examples.

[00:11:07] Mike Aoki: An example is Frontier Airlines, and they actually got rid of their voice queue. They made a decision as an economy airline that they could offer a no-frills package to not have people answering the phone anymore. Maybe that fits with how they want to brand and the cost savings and their cost-conscious model.

[00:11:22] Mike Aoki: But again, looking in terms of what is your branding? Are you offering great customer service? Do you pride yourself in elite service? Okay, then you want to maintain a voice presence, meet your customers where they’re at. So again, all those factors come together, and there’s no one right or wrong answer. And again, it depends on your customer base, who you want to reach, how you want to represent yourself, what the brand is.

[00:11:42] Steve MacDonald: You’ve talked about, just as an industry, that there needs to be rebalancing for the contact center—not just the rebalancing of the people versus the technology, but our industry in total. What do you mean by that?

[00:11:57] Mike Aoki: Well, I think part of it too is just the idea of what the customer service department or contact center is. Is it a cost center? Is it a value center? Is it a revenue center? Looking in terms of what it does, and I think one of the drawbacks is there is this perspective of the contact center as a cost center. Almost begrudgingly, we have to do it, as opposed to looking at it as a value center. It’s one of your greatest sources of intelligence out there.

[00:12:22] Mike Aoki: Customers are fair enough to call in and alert you to certain issues, drawbacks, or opportunities. Great feedback there—voice of the customer, voice of your frontline employees. Okay, tremendous knowledge that’s there that you won’t get from a focus group or from a generic survey. Okay, so great value there. Great value in terms of building loyalty with your customer base.

[00:12:40] Mike Aoki: Again, you don’t know how good a provider is until you have a problem. Everyone sounds good in the advertisements. You don’t know for sure you have a problem, how good they are, and therefore how loyal you want to be to them. So, those are all advantages and opportunities that are there. And again, it’s just that mindset shift. But it is challenging, though, because it is viewed, I know, as being constant in many cases.

[00:12:59] Steve MacDonald: I’m not going to ask in terms of stats or survey or anything, but you work with a lot of different contact centers, and this isn’t a new problem—being perceived as a cost center versus a value center. And you’re having thousands of conversations with the voice of highest authority in your business: the customer.

[00:13:17] Steve MacDonald: There’s tremendous value to be translated from that. When you’re talking on a consulting basis with these contact centers, they’re aware of that every single day. They’re all aware of it—this perceptional cost center versus value center.

[00:13:29] Steve MacDonald: What is the degree that they think they really need to do something about that? That they need to be proactive in changing the perceptions inside their own company, even if it’s just to garner more resources, to be able to provide more value, to advocate for themselves. Like how far up is this in the list of priorities? Or is it still something that’s kind of like, it’s not the best, but let’s just keep going forward?

[00:13:55] Mike Aoki: I think it’s actually one of the biggest frustrations that leaders have—trying to make the case for their contact center, for the customer service team, and being able to communicate the value and the need for resources there as well. Because another challenge, as well with the adoption of AI, is a lot of the budget went towards AI, and there are efficiencies that are there, and there are customer service improvements that are there, but it’s been quite a challenge.

[00:14:16] Mike Aoki: So, part of it is, as a VP, as a director, how do you advocate for your department? How do you speak the language that your CFO or your CIO or CTO has, to be able to get those resources and advocate for your team?

[00:14:27] Mike Aoki: That’s a big challenge. So, it’s being able to go and speak that kind of language and being able to translate what you’re seeing in the contact center and what’s being funneled up and being able to translate that to what the C-Suite needs to hear, which is building loyalty, being able to help engage customers, gathering intelligence, and being able to help improve the brand positioning. Those sorts of things that result in revenue.

[00:14:48] Steve MacDonald: So, I’m going to put you on the spot here a little bit, if I haven’t already. But if they know they need to be advocating for themselves, they know they need to be addressing this, where do you start? Do you start by saying, hey, at the board level, cost is not the main KPI? So, therefore, average handle time is not the key KPI, like the bastions of how, like at the most basic level, if we’re a cost center, then we reduce costs. So, the whole mentality is, how do we reduce? Is that the place to start or, like, just head on: we’re not a cost center, so therefore, every KPI that you’re looking at is actually misleading. How do we do this? How do we start this advocacy conversation?

[00:15:35] Mike Aoki: Part of it is just, as with any other kind of sale—because you’re selling ideas—any other kind of sale is knowing your target market. So, what is your corporate culture? Do they view the contact center as a cost center?

[00:15:46] Mike Aoki: The C-Suite themselves—looking at your CEO, your COO, your CFO, CTO—what is their background? How do they view things? Do they come from a background where it’s all about value and building customer experience, or is it a cost-cutting mindset? If it is, know your audience; know where they’re at.

[00:16:02] Mike Aoki: Be careful because the default seems to be it’s a cost center, and therefore, cost-efficiency metrics like AHT tend to take precedence, or it’s all they’ll ask about is AHT or overall payable cost. And you do want to show efficiencies, and there can be efficiencies there, but part of it is also showing value as well.

[00:16:19] Mike Aoki: What is a pain point for the executive? Is it reputational damage from the customer who wasn’t helped properly, escalating on social media? Okay, that’s an opportunity there to argue for better customer service and more resources to avoid that happening—to avoid reputational damage, for instance.

[00:16:35] Mike Aoki: Another issue might be in the sense of building loyalty. Again, depending on what your brand is, being able to help build loyalty by giving great customer service, by answering the phone really quickly or answering chats really quickly, therefore having the resources to do that, whether it’s technical or Google.

[00:16:50] Mike Aoki: So, again, looking here, what’s the value for the brand and for the company, and then how do you back that up? Through what the contact center does, and then shift that conversation from being cost-only to being cost, and then what you get from that cost, what the benefit is. So, just like with any other sales—selling the idea—but what’s the benefit we’re selling here? Is it just cost savings, or is it improving loyalty, improving branding, avoiding reputational risk, avoiding public damage? Okay, changing the tone of the conversation is really important to do.

[00:17:17] Steve MacDonald: What I’d love to add to that is we remember things 22 times more when it’s told to us in the form of a story. So, lots of times when we have folks onto the podcast here, we’ll ask them about certain points they’re talking about in stories.

[00:17:32] Steve MacDonald: One of the goals of this podcast is to be other leaders talking about things—how it impacted their contact center, their business, how they demonstrated that they were a value center, not a cost center, and give more ammunition to advocate.

[00:17:47] Steve MacDonald: So, I’m just going to ask you, what’s the story that, of all the contact centers that you’ve worked with, this is like a shining example of how you’re not a cost center, you’re a tremendous value center?

[00:18:00] Steve MacDonald: How did it impact product development? How did it impact sales? How did it impact operations? How did it impact anything that proved, in your mind, like a shining example of why we’re not a cost center, we’re a value center?

[00:18:14] Mike Aoki: Well, one of the examples is in terms of just appropriate upselling. So, being able to go and, again, engage with customers, help them with an issue, building goodwill, building good loyalty, and then being able to go and point out any ways that the customer can either save money or make better use of a product.

[00:18:28] Mike Aoki: Now, I know upselling has been talked about an awful lot, and one thing I will caution with upselling is, don’t set an arbitrary target because your agents are trying to meet the target by putting customers into things.

[00:18:39] Mike Aoki: There have been examples of that where some companies have had very high lofty revenue targets, and agents have used falsified built accounts, for instance—things like that. So, be careful of that.

[00:18:48] Mike Aoki: But opportunity upselling—opportunity being the opportunity to help people—and then your agents have been able to go and spot opportunities to improve how a customer uses their service or logical add-ons and things that would help them better use that service. A great example of being able to help build revenue.

[00:19:03] Mike Aoki: Then, once you have those revenue numbers, you can show the fact that we’re earning our keep here. We’re actually building revenue with the company and not just being a cost center at all—at least offsetting part of the cost anyway. But again, just be careful not to have too many lofty targets because it can drive the wrong behavior if you do that.

[00:19:21] Steve MacDonald: It’s interesting because you’d mentioned data as an example. Well, here’s an example of how you could use data.

[00:19:28] Steve MacDonald: We’ve had folks come on, and they say, okay, well, we look at people that have had a recent ticket, that have called into the contact center, and then over the next 90 days, what does their purchase profile look like versus those that didn’t have a ticket? And what everybody has found is that, actually, having an interaction with the contact center, when they’re handled correctly the way that they’re trained to, increases loyalty, increases repurchase or cross-sell or upsell.

[00:19:59] Steve MacDonald: So, that’s just an example. Look at your own data. There are so many stories within your own data of how you can advocate for yourself and go to that target audience that is very, very bottom-line-minded. If we’re not making more money by reducing and cutting, then we’re making more money, how?

[00:20:17] Mike Aoki: That’s a key as well. It’s being able to justify it. I’ll give you another example with this, which is that I went through as a customer and contacted a home improvement company, and it was interesting because I got a form letter back, and the form letter actually caused me to actually call the company to go and get it clarified. And when I talked to the customer service person, they actually said, first of all, that the letter itself was out of date and incorrect.

[00:20:39] Mike Aoki: I didn’t need to call at all; it wasn’t an issue. And the way the person said it was such resignation—the way they said, oh yeah, it’s been out there for a year. Don’t worry. It’s out of date. You don’t have to do that at all. It’s okay.

[00:20:51] Mike Aoki: The way they said it, they knew internally it was a problem, but because of a broken chain between most of the customers and marketing, designing these automatic response letters, they’ve never been fixed. So, that actually drove extra call volume. I was one of them excited to call this company. It drove customer frustration, extra call volume or contact volume. It also built disillusionment, though, in the agent—I could hear it in their voice.

[00:21:13] Mike Aoki: So, again, getting back to how much valuable data there is from your front line, you can actually streamline operations—not just in the contact center, but in marketing, shipping, billing, fulfillment, if you have a retail chain. Those things can actually be improved, which builds efficiency and saves money.

[00:21:27] Mike Aoki: The very fact you’ve got an out-of-date letter that all the front line knows about, driving contact volume—which is expensive—is a huge cost-saving opportunity there. Another key in terms of being able to help save money or build more revenue.

[00:21:40] Steve MacDonald: I love it. We’ve covered a lot of territory, and so what I want to ask is, what haven’t we covered? What’s important is that you want to make sure that we know that I haven’t asked a question, or we haven’t gotten to that yet?

[00:21:50] Mike Aoki: I think one of the things that is there is we talk a lot about employee engagement or agent engagement. Turnover in a contact center is really expensive. The cost of having to go and recruit a brand-new person, onboard, train them, and get them up to speed—it costs a lot of money. And when somebody’s new, no matter how well trained they are, as you all know, the first 6 months is all about just building competency, even a year sometimes to get to mastery.

[00:22:12] Mike Aoki: But if we’re turning over 30, 50, 100 percent per year, this is where you’re always in a state where most of your people are not very efficient, let alone cost money. So, part of this is with engagement, and I think something that gets missed in this is the idea that people are engaged if they feel they can do something well.

[00:22:29] Mike Aoki: If they haven’t been trained properly, and they’re constantly getting bombarded by things they can’t handle or feeling bad or incompetent because they can’t do it, they’re going to quit and try to find a job that seems better for them.

[00:22:40] Mike Aoki: So, I think one of the things that gets missed in all the talk about employee engagement and employee attitude is the idea about training people properly and equipping them with the right skills so they can help people out.

[00:22:50] Mike Aoki: And they actually have tools—things they can say and do to make the call go easier and help calm people down as well. And again, I’m coming from a training background, so I’m kind of biased towards that.

[00:23:01] Mike Aoki: Helping people with those tools, though, does help them feel better because then they can do their job well, feel good about it, help people, and not get as frustrated, and that does build a lot more loyalty to the tool itself. And that’s there along with the proper technology tools as well, of course.

[00:23:15] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, they have more satisfaction in their own jobs. They’re going to be happier. They’re going to stay longer. You’re going to attract people because you’re going to create a culture internally that attracts the right kind of people. It snowballs out in its effect.

[00:23:28] Mike Aoki: You’re right about all of that, and so a lot of that is that sort of virtuous circle of having agents that are well motivated, well trained, and have the right tools that can help customers. And be able to help again, build that loyalty, build that branding. So, it really does help with that an awful lot.

[00:23:41] Mike Aoki: The reverse of this is when you have people that feel very frustrated because they’re not getting the training or don’t have the tools. And I know if you sort of frontline aides, but their knowledge base, for instance, or their computer speed or having tool monitors, you’ll get a lot of feedback there, but not feel like they’re getting the right tools.

[00:23:56] Mike Aoki: So, I just want to build that in is just look at your people and help support your frontline people. It’s a tough job. I’ve done it. So, you do want to support your frontline people.

[00:24:05] Steve MacDonald: So, again, we’ve talked about a lot. If there was one thing that you wanted the audience to remember from this podcast, because we’ve talked about a lot of things and our poor human brains can’t retain too much, what do you want us to retain? The one most important thing from our conversation here today.

[00:24:26] Mike Aoki: I’d actually go back to what we first talked about, which is customer service is really a balance between those efficiency metrics, average handle time, things like that, which do have a purpose, but a balance with the efficiency or the effectiveness metrics.

[00:24:38] Mike Aoki: So, looking at CSAT, satisfaction scores, loyalty, et cetera, and the balance between the tech and the people, between the technology and being able to go and help people and what those interactions or conversations are like. And just remember the fact that all the tools in the world, AI, knowledge base, they’re all there to enable your customers and help your customers out as the people are as well.

[00:24:57] Mike Aoki: So, it’s a balance between the two, and I think the balance got a little out of whack this year. On the tech side, it seems like it’s going to circle back a little bit next year, 2025, more towards that balance between people and tech.

[00:25:10] Steve MacDonald: I love it. If people had follow-up questions, would it be appropriate that we gave out a link to your LinkedIn profile that people could reach out to you?

[00:25:17] Mike Aoki: It would be, exactly. So, reach out to LinkedIn, connect with me, follow me. I do post a lot of things, both my own articles and tips as well as ones from other industry experts as well. So, it gives you a really great informational ecosystem there to be able to learn more about how to run your contact center.

[00:25:32] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Well, Mike, thank you so much for coming on and just helping us think differently. I got to tell you, the Morse code effect really sunk in, and it made me think, wow, you’re right. We can’t just assume that every medium, every agent can be completely comfortable, even as much as a phone.

[00:25:51] Steve MacDonald: So, that was one of my major takeaways is that rebalancing that Morse code effect and really thinking about that as we train and manage the operation. So, thank you. Thank you for expanding all of our thinking about what we need to do to be successful.

[00:26:06] Mike Aoki: Well, thank you for having me on the show as well. I appreciate that and appreciate a conversation.