Leveraging Trusted Advisors as Your GPS

Transcript

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, I guarantee a super interesting conversation. We have Mark Brody here, and Mark, you are not only the CEO and founder of Brohawk Solutions, which is a consultancy that you’ve run for a number of years. I’m going to let you talk a little bit more about that.

[00:00:25] Steve MacDonald: Additionally, just as interesting is you work with J.D. Powers. You’re a certified consultant with J.D. Powers. Basically, you help contact centers get to a high performance level, what it means to do that, and how they can do that. So you’re on a regular basis between both positions. You’re consulting with a large number of companies and contact centers to help them make the most of their people and their engagement. We all know that leads to better employee engagement, better engagement with customers, and growth in business.

[00:00:59] Steve MacDonald: But what I’d love to do is maybe have you explain a little bit more, rather than those kind of highlights, before we get started.

[00:01:07] Mark Brody: Steve, I’d be more than happy to. And thank you very much for having me as a guest today. I know we’ve been trying to connect on this for a minute or two, and I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you today. Yeah. So, as you mentioned, I have my own company Brohawk Solutions, which I founded about six and a half years ago, and the focus for Brohawk Solutions is helping companies align their people, products, and technology to create a better employee experience.

[00:01:29] Mark Brody: A couple of ways I do that is I help people with talent optimization. As a certified practitioner for predictive index, I can help companies on the technology side, from curation and being completely agnostic with the technologies that are out there to help them with CKAS, UCAT—whatever the technology needs are that they need, cybersecurity, whatever it is that they need.

[00:01:50] Mark Brody: And then, as you were mentioning, I’m a certified evaluator for J.D. Power in the J.D. Power ecosystem. That’s where some of the operational assessments I do as an independent consultant come into play. And that piece is really interesting because I get to talk to a lot of really great organizations. [00:02:10] Mark Brody: And understand, one, how they got to be as great as they are, but also help them find those gaps, identify the gaps, and how to fill those gaps to make them even higher performing than they already are. And then there are some companies that I get to work with that have some opportunities to help them navigate through those opportunities with different projects.

[00:02:34] Steve MacDonald: So, I think the topic for today is directly related to your experience and background: leveraging trusted advisors as your GPS, like your directional beacon. One of the things you mentioned as you were going through your background was your work with a number of different contact centers over time, learning how they got to be as good as they are, so you’re learning every day, and we’re going to learn from you. That’s one of the things that I know—like doing this podcast, I learn every single time I have a conversation. So, as much gray hair as we have in experience, we’re always learning. And that’s what we want to do today. So, I’m just going to ask you to start us out here. Tell us what you think is behind the role of trusted advisors as the GPS for the contact center, getting the people on, optimizing the talent. Why is that important in your perspective?

[00:03:26] Mark Brody: Yeah. So, great question, Steve. I think the role of the trusted advisor—and we’ve talked a little bit before about it being the GPS for your contact center—so, oftentimes, leaders within contact centers, whether they’re frontline, mid-level, or senior executives, know a lot about what’s going on in their four walls.

[00:03:49] Mark Brody: They don’t have the time to really dedicate to exploring outside without being hit by a lot of salesy information to know what other contact centers are doing. The role of the trusted advisor, from my perspective, is to help navigate what are the right levers to pull within your organization, as opposed to what everybody else is doing. Because, as I tell folks from a technology standpoint, there are a lot of great technologies, but not every technology is going to be great for you.

[00:04:20] Mark Brody: So, understanding your environment, what’s going to be the best fit, not just from a budget perspective but also from a performance and culture perspective—what’s going to have the biggest lift to help you become even more high performing.

[00:04:33] Steve MacDonald: My takeaway from all this is that you’re understanding best practices—all these contact centers have put all kinds of technologies, workflows, processes, and training into the development of their contact centers.

[00:04:46] Steve MacDonald: Each client is a test bed for what’s working and what’s not, what they’ve tried, and what they’ve failed on. Not any one of us can do that on our own. Is that a good takeaway from what you were saying?

[00:04:59] Mark Brody: That’s a great takeaway and the thing that, as a trusted advisor, I always love to hear is “we’ve always done it this way” or “we tried and it didn’t work out that way.” Sometimes, getting the right set of eyes on a problem can help you overcome some of the obstacles that may have occurred before or have been obstacles to allowing an organization to change what they’ve done historically and become even better.

[00:05:27] Mark Brody: A great analogy is with COVID. How many companies out there were saying, “We will never work from home. We have to work in the office. That’s the only way we can be productive.” That proved to be wrong when put into a situation. Companies were able to figure out a way to be productive, to maintain their culture, and have actually become stronger as a result.

[00:05:50] Steve MacDonald: I was thinking about these excuses, like, “We’ve tried that before. It didn’t work.” I hear that from my teenagers every day. Sometimes, it just takes a different perspective.

[00:05:58] Steve MacDonald: But do we try it in this kind of a context, or do we get these kinds of people involved? So, challenging the status quo and being able to draw from successes across the board is one of the most valuable areas that a trusted advisor can bring. That turns into, you put it as this: the right people in the right seats at the right time.

[00:06:20] Steve MacDonald: Obviously, we understand what that means, but tell us what you think that means and why you wanted to talk about that.

[00:06:26] Mark Brody: Yeah, so for me, not every position is the right position for everybody. There are going to be certain intrinsic and extrinsic motivators that people have.

[00:06:36] Mark Brody: For instance, I tend to be a big picture thinker. If you put me in a mode where I have to be very detail-oriented, I’m going to go down rabbit holes, and it’s going to take me longer to figure out a solution. Now, I’ll get to it, but it may take me a little longer than others.

[00:06:51] Mark Brody: So, for me, whenever an organization is going through a change management process, as an example, when they’re bringing on new technology or trying to change a process, there are certain people you have to have involved in those change dynamics that can help push the team, push the organization forward. But you also have to have some folks that are balancing out as the more like the lighthouse of the team.

[00:07:23] Mark Brody: “Hey, we’re going to see these speed bumps or these rocks over here, or we’re not seeing there’s a drunk driver coming from this other direction.” Whatever the case may be. Probably a bad analogy, and I apologize if I offended anybody about that.

[00:07:35] Mark Brody: But you always have to have people who are going to have certain roles in any change management process. And as a result, that’s what I mean by the right people, right place, right time to make sure that you have the big picture thinkers alongside the people who are actually doing the things on a day-to-day basis that are going to be most impacted by any changes that occur.

[00:07:59] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, there’s a lot that goes into change management, but you have to be open to change to begin with. Those leaders, you got to be open to being challenged as those leaders, you got to be open to breaking the status quo. It was those leaders. I’m sure what happens is when you bring in either data or stories from other contact centers and said, here’s where this is really working.

[00:08:21] Steve MacDonald: That we’re not doing at all here, or maybe we’re not doing right, that’s a door opener. That’s not an opinion; trusted advisors don’t bring in just opinions. They bring in facts, they bring in case studies, they bring in instances where massive improvements have been made. So I have to ask you, if you were to look back at all the advice you’ve done across all these different contact centers.

[00:08:46] Steve MacDonald: If you said, here’s the three keys, Steve, let’s write a book on this: the three keys to a successful contact center. What would be the things that you would put at the top of that list?

[00:08:55] Mark Brody: Oh man, that’s a great question as well, you’re just full of great questions today, Steve.

[00:09:00] Mark Brody: For the first question that I have is why does the contact center even exist? What is our reason? And that has to be, for me, the foundational question that needs to be asked. If you’re working for a service organization, your why is going to be different than that of a retail organization.

[00:09:19] Mark Brody: So why does your contact center exist? The second thing is, what are your customer expectations? Why do your customers think you exist? And thirdly, once you know the answers to those questions, what are you equipping your front lines with in order to be successful so they can match the customer expectations? Going back to what my three-legged stool is, optimizing people, processes, and technology. So if you understand your why, your customers’ why, and then you can support them with the tools and resources that they need, that’s exactly where every contact center needs to be focused.

[00:09:59] Steve MacDonald: Oh, I love that in terms of the why, because that could be a question that often seems so obvious that you don’t ask it. But you’re right, different contact centers have very different whys, some things that are going to be the same. But would one of the whys be this, just curious, why do we have a contact center? Because we want the voice of the customer to influence every aspect of what we do as a business?

[00:10:23] Steve MacDonald: Why is that important? That is a question of why that most companies don’t ever ask. In fact, when you look at the contact center as a cost center, which here we are in this day and age, it still happens more often than not.

[00:10:36] Steve MacDonald: So why? It’s not just to answer questions like, make sure that we’re satisfying people that have some questions and are upset; it’s, why should be, how is this an accelerant, a fuel for growth in the entire organization? That changes things. Then all of a sudden average handle time KPIs are driving the business and the decision making, and the training and the materials and everything. All right. So I’m gonna ask the question, I’m gonna cover 180 degrees. So you’re consulting, whether it’s Brohawk or J.D. Power all the time. What are the top three biggest mistakes that you see contact centers making these days?

[00:11:17] Mark Brody: The first one is resistance to change. We’ve always done it that way. So we’re going to continue to do it this way. Yeah, probably not a good idea. Unless you’re in a highly regulated industry. And even then there’s opportunities to change and to improve. The number two thing is, we want to do AI, great. What is it about AI that you want to do? I don’t know, we just got to do something. Okay. So tell me what your use cases are. We have to be able to answer our customers’ questions faster. Okay, there’s a use case. So what is it about, how do you want to do it? What is your environment? What does your CRM look like?

[00:11:59] Mark Brody: What is your knowledge base? What does your telephony platform look like? And how can we go ahead and leverage the technology that you already have to get there? So that’s a big mistake I see a lot of organizations making right now, they’re not clearly defining what their AI journey needs to be, or it should look like. The third one is a combination of that and companies are putting out solutions that there are no problems for.

[00:12:28] Mark Brody: We want to go ahead and put an AI self-service, I’m just using this as an example. We want to put a self-service tool out in front of our IVR, our customers hate it because they can’t get back to us. The companies will go ahead and put together a solution saying, okay, we got this great thing that can cut 10 cans in half and julienne fries and all this other stuff.

[00:12:50] Mark Brody: But it doesn’t meet the customer’s expectations. It doesn’t help the customer anymore. So you just wasted a whole lot of time putting together a pet project that really had zero impact on a positive customer experience.

[00:13:02] Steve MacDonald: I would not have guessed that, but it makes a ton of sense. It’s like chasing the shiny object, it’s the shiny object is AI, put an AI bot out in front. Everybody else is doing it. We should do it too. So I got one last top three, I want to ask, I had no idea I was going to have three top threes, but when you go in, obviously J.D. Power has a certification program that they’ve thought through to create high-performance contact centers, what are the top three criteria that J.D. Power has established and you’re now evaluating to be designated certified as a high-performing contact center?

[00:13:38] Mark Brody: I would say, I can’t speak on behalf of J.D. Power, so I’ll preface this answer, but the attributes that are going to have the strongest drivers of customer dissatisfaction and that can actually pull down a customer’s impression of an organization would be, how quickly am I getting my answer to the question that I would call about the reason I called in about?

[00:14:00] Mark Brody: If it’s taking too long, that’s going to cause some dissatisfaction. I already mentioned knowledge as being one of those other drivers. And oddly enough, if your reps aren’t courteous to the people that they’re working with, that’s dissatisfier too. All of those three, they have a lot of subgroups to them, but those are the three things. If you have rude agents, if you have knowledge that’s out of whack, you’re giving bad information out, and if it’s putting more effort on the customer to go ahead and get their problem solved. Those are the three big dissatisfiers right there.

[00:14:35] Steve MacDonald: I love that. So a lot of the high-performance contact centers are the ones that are avoiding some of the biggest sources of dissatisfaction, which makes good sense. So I want to take a slight shift here. And I want to talk about scaling contact centers.

[00:14:50] Steve MacDonald: What are the most important factors that you have to take into consideration when you’re scaling your contact center?

[00:14:58] Mark Brody: Obviously the forecasting piece. So where is the drive? What is the driver of the additional volume coming in from? Is it coming in from a particular channel, voice, chat, web, email, text, carrier pigeon, whatever the case may be, what’s going to be driving it?

[00:15:15] Mark Brody: And is it something that marketing is driving? Or is it just, you got a great product out there and it went viral on TikTok. So now everybody wants it? As an example, a scaling piece, where’s the volume coming from? Why is it going to be occurring? And the things that people are going to be interacting with your contact center in? Are they what I would call tier 1? Type of calls that could be handled through an AI bot, an AI front-ended on an AI agent, basically, or are they things that you don’t have to pay high prices for in the United States to do internally? Can you nearshore or offshore? In some of these markets, for instance, if you try to do everything internally, that’s great, but you have attrition. You have other things to take into account where I’ve worked with contact centers that have had locations, partners in nearshore and offshore locations, and their attrition is a lot lower.

[00:16:15] Mark Brody: And they’re able to get two agents for the price of one. And so, if budget is a consideration, then you really need to look at where am I going to get the biggest bang for my buck? It could be a combination of AI agents aligned with live agents that are nearshore, offshore, and the BPO industry as a whole has historically had a bad rap. People think of BPOs sometimes as being in an offshore location, not giving the greatest customer service, language issues, accent issues, things like that.

[00:16:51] Mark Brody: But in actuality, some of the best customer experiences that people can have are sometimes with these nearshore offshore agents because that agent wants to be there. They’re focused on the job and they want to be part of a great organization that they don’t necessarily have access to in their home country.

[00:17:08] Mark Brody: And so, BPOs, I think, are a great addition to a scaling strategy for an organization that is going to be experiencing some rapid growth. So for me, I think that if a company is anticipating that you’re going to have to increase significantly over the course of the next year or so, take a look at how AI fits into your culture and in what you need to do.

[00:17:35] Mark Brody: And that goes along with change management. I bring an AI agent in, guess what I can do with my existing internal team? I can have them work on more complex issues. I can scale them. So that has to be part of the scaling strategy as well. What am I going to be offloading to either AI or to a BPO partner, either nearshore or offshore?

[00:17:58] Steve MacDonald: So let me reflect in and see if I get this right. I think your point of view is that in scaling organizations, one of the most important things that you can do is think about, because you’re scaling, but you’re managing costs, quality, at the same time. That part of your strategic plan to scale should incorporate a BPO partner. One of the things you said there is they want that job. This job isn’t bare money like it is in the United States. This is their career. I take it very seriously. Also, my question is what we were talking about earlier, this trusted advisor role.

[00:18:37] Steve MacDonald: BPO partners work with lots of organizations. They see and learn best practices. They see what’s working. They learn from their failures. They have insights into the market that you don’t. Is that a takeaway? I’m just trying to think about, are you saying that BPO partners are a strategic part of the scaling and growth plan?

[00:18:58] Mark Brody: Yes, and they have to be. You don’t want your BPO partner to be a vendor, you want them to be a partner. Okay, because they’re going to see things from a voice of the customer perspective that maybe your internal teams aren’t seeing. And so you want them to be a partner plus from a redundancy standpoint.

[00:19:19] Mark Brody: If I had a contact center in a coastal area and there was a high likelihood that I could be knocked out because of, let’s say, a cat 5 hurricane or my agents, would be impacted on in their ability to connect up to the Internet or whatever. Why not have at least a footprint of redundancy in another geographical location?

[00:19:41] Mark Brody: That can support you and your customers, because guess what, your customers are going to continue to call. Your customers are going to continue to have expectations and having, as a scaling strategy, always be looking for geographical improvements that can be made to go ahead and make sure that your customers are always supported.

[00:20:01] Steve MacDonald: So I’m going to ask maybe the same question, but in a little bit different way. If you were to say on a scale of one to 10, the importance of a BPO partner in the scaling strategy of a contact center, one, it’s not important at all. Not important at all. 10, it’s vital to the success of your scaling strategy.

[00:20:22] Steve MacDonald: Where would you put it on that scale?

[00:20:23] Mark Brody: I’ll give you an overall answer, but I’ll give you another answer first. I would say it depends and it depends on the organization and the type of contact center. Why does that contact center exist? I think it has to be on a scale of one to 10, I would probably rate it as a seven to be considered with every scaling discussion that’s had, you should always be looking at how we can do things better, more efficiently and more cost-effective as a contact center.

[00:20:51] Mark Brody: Because at the end of the day, our customers are going to have an expectation of us to deliver when they interact with us.

[00:20:59] Steve MacDonald: I am the shell answer or you’re the shell answer, man. I’m the question guy. I’ve got one last question for you. And that is we’ve talked about a lot here, so if there was one thing that you wanted the contact center leaders and CX leaders that are watching this to take away from today’s conversation, what would that one thing be?

[00:21:17] Mark Brody: Oh my gosh. Focus on your employee experience, and it will resolve any customer experience issues that you have.

[00:21:26] Steve MacDonald: I love the brevity of that. I’m used to getting five-minute answers to one thing. And but if there’s power and simplicity there, that employee engagement is so important. In fact, there’s been many studies that have shown that better employee engagement equals better customer engagement equals more revenue, more growth in the company.

[00:21:45] Steve MacDonald: We all know that, but it’s good to be reminded of that. It’s such a priority for us in our business. Mark. Thank you for coming today. And I know people are going to have additional questions. And if they did, would it be appropriate that we handed out a link to your LinkedIn profile that people could reach you?

[00:22:02] Mark Brody: Most definitely. Feel free to reach out to me. I’m on LinkedIn. If they want to grab some time with me just to have a one on one discussion or an exploratory discussion, you can go to my LinkedIn, my Brohawk Solutions LinkedIn page and or my website, Brohawk Solutions dot com, fill out a form and we’ll go ahead and get connected on some time.

[00:22:22] Mark Brody: I love to chat with people about anything contact center related. I’ll geek out on stuff, but definitely my LinkedIn profile for sure.

[00:22:30] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Thank you again, Mark, for coming on. We really appreciate it.

[00:22:34] Mark Brody: I appreciate you having me, Steve, and everybody out there and Steve, I hope you have an amazing holiday season.