Marketing Ops, RevOps: What's VOC Ops?

Transcript

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. And today, I guarantee one thing: we are going to have you think differently about contact centers, the voice of the customer, and their impact on the business, long-term success, and growth. And we’re doing that with Anthony Chang.

[00:00:20] Steve MacDonald: Now, Anthony, you’re the business platform lead for consumer care at Versuni. I’m going to let you explain more about that, but you have such an interesting background. You grew up in the States and are now working for an international company in Europe. You’re a voice of the customer analyst—I guess that’s a good way to put it.

[00:00:41] Steve MacDonald: You’re taking things to another level. And what was interesting about our conversation leading up to this is that you introduced an idea most companies don’t have. Now, we have marketing operations, we have revenue operations—but what about voice of the customer operations? Most companies don’t have that. Yet, we know the voice of the customer is the highest authority in the business.

[00:01:03] Steve MacDonald: It should influence every aspect of the business, but we also know we’re usually not that good at it. So, we’re going to talk a lot about voice of the customer operations. I also want to mention just a couple of personal things about you that I found really interesting. You’re an avid rock climber, so there’s a very active, innovative, and adventurous side to you. You studied finance and international business.

[00:01:25] Steve MacDonald: I’m going to turn it over to you to explain a little more about yourself. Then, we’ll dive right into this idea of voice of the customer operations and what it means.

[00:01:33] Anthony Chang: Perfect. Well, thanks very much, Steve. It’s really a pleasure to be here talking with you. I think it’s a great topic to share more broadly, and it’s not necessarily formalized on my side either—it’s an evolving idea. I love any chance to bounce these ideas back and forth and see where we get.

[00:02:00] Anthony Chang: So, I’m Anthony Chang, working at Versuni. You may not have heard of Versuni, but it is a house of brands, with its biggest brand being Philips.

[00:02:05] Anthony Chang: Within Versuni, we specifically make home appliance products—things like vacuum cleaners, espresso machines, air fryers, and more. These are products that we see as impactful and important to our consumers because they enhance everyday life in meaningful ways.

[00:02:33] Anthony Chang: Many people rely on us for their morning coffee, or they count on us to help keep their homes clean. That leads to an improved quality of life, a greater sense of well-being, and a feeling of comfort in their personal space. In today’s world, particularly post-pandemic, the home has become a true safe space.

[00:02:53] Anthony Chang: So, I’m very happy to be here, especially to discuss the work we’ve been doing at Versuni around voice of the customer insights. We’ve been focused on spreading this concept in a similar way to revenue or marketing operations—connecting different departments, acting as an interdepartmental glue. But instead of working with sales or marketing performance data, we focus on voice of the customer data.

[00:03:32] Anthony Chang: Voice of the customer data can mean many things, and we take the broadest perspective possible to understand what consumers are telling us, what we can improve, and how we can enhance their experiences.

[00:03:51] Steve MacDonald: Great. I want to dive into the voice of the customer data, but first, let’s set some context. Contact centers interact with customers more than any other department in a company. Yet, there’s usually no one specifically responsible for the voice of the customer. This is an opportunity for us to take the lead.

[00:04:00] Steve MacDonald: Contact centers are often still seen as cost centers—one of the highest overhead costs in the business. But today, we’re going to talk about how understanding the voice of the customer can drive revenue.

[00:04:28] Steve MacDonald: I had a recent conversation that underscores this point. It was with Efrat Ravid—a three-time CMO and a Goldman Sachs Value Accelerator advisor. She said, “Steve, I recommend that CMOs spend 20% of their time talking with customers—20%.” That’s a significant commitment for a C-suite executive.

[00:05:00] Steve MacDonald: The key takeaway? We’re sitting on a goldmine—customer insights. If we harness them correctly, we’ll gain a deep understanding of our customers that can serve as a decisive competitive advantage.

[00:05:14] Steve MacDonald: Voice of the customer data isn’t just important—it’s transformative. However, making it usable and actionable within a company is no small task. So, let me ask you this: Why is the voice of the customer data often overlooked? You’ve talked about how companies have vast amounts of data, yet one of our biggest challenges is getting internal teams to recognize the power of customer insights. Why is this happening, and what should we be doing about it?

[00:05:45] Anthony Chang: Well, there are a few reasons. Ultimately, one of the biggest challenges is that it’s simply harder to analyze.

[00:05:53] Anthony Chang: Much of this data is free-text, making it less concrete and more difficult to quantify. Of course, we’re seeing considerable advancements in tooling, like natural language processing and large language models, changing how we handle this data. Maybe these technologies will finally make customer insights more consistently available to teams in a way that wasn’t possible before.

[00:06:54] Anthony Chang: Previously, as a product manager, I wouldn’t have had time to read every product review. But if I could receive a summarized version of all reviews from the past week—generated by an AI model—I would have time to review that.

[00:07:18] Anthony Chang: That’s one of the challenges we’ve seen in distributing customer insights effectively. Analyzing this data is simply more complex and, at times, “fluffier” than hard sales or performance data.

[00:07:39] Anthony Chang: Take product reviews, for example. Suppose we see two or three one-star reviews mentioning a specific issue. The immediate question becomes: Is this a widespread problem? Does it affect enough of our customer base to warrant attention?

[00:07:58] Anthony Chang: And then, of course, there’s another layer—what percentage of customers leave reviews? If only a tiny fraction of dissatisfied customers bother to leave a review, those two or three complaints might be just the tip of the iceberg.

[00:08:00] Anthony Chang: That’s why we’ve been broadening our approach to voice the customer data—looking beyond reviews to capture insights from multiple sources.

[00:08:07] Anthony Chang: As you said, Steve, contact centers have the most direct customer interactions. Instead of waiting for negative reviews to surface, why not track customer calls from day one? If I’m a product manager launching a new product, my first question should be: How many customer service calls did we receive today about my product?

[00:08:17] Anthony Chang: And what were they calling about? I want specifics. I want to know if it was error code E05 or E30 if they didn’t understand the manual or if they didn’t understand an element of the unboxing experience. So, we are starting to leverage more of what may be considered operational data, such as the number of calls and why they were calling.

[00:08:38] Anthony Chang: These kinds of things are how we’ve been trying to answer these difficult questions and make it so that people can recognize more of the value—rather than just relying on individual data sources, like reviews or a survey, they may take.

[00:08:56] Steve MacDonald: And, you know, one of the big things about a call center or contact center is that, yes, they’re taking in lots of questions and identifying where people are having issues and problems, but they’re also a sales organization. They have an opportunity to cross-sell and upsell. They are having way more sales conversations than the sales team, which is at a much different level.

[00:09:18] Steve MacDonald: So, the idea that operationally, sales, marketing, logistics—you can just go down the list regarding the importance of all this data. And the good news is that AI tools are evolving. There seems to be a new AI company popping up to service the contact center industry every day.

[00:09:38] Steve MacDonald: So, doing this should be getting easier. What is your advice for someone listening right now, thinking, “Oh my gosh, yes! I fight every day; I have to advocate every day because one of the key KPIs the board and C-suite are looking at is how we reduce costs?”

[00:09:57] Steve MacDonald: I’m one of the most significant costs in the business. So, I’m fighting for resources. I’m fighting to prove my value to the organization. You’re talking about how to scale value, analyze, and operationalize it—essentially, voice-of-the-customer operations. So, I guess one way to start this conversation now is to ask: How do you think about doing that?

[00:10:20] Steve MacDonald: We want to learn from you. You’re sitting in that chair, doing this for your organization. What do you think about what you do and how you could translate that so we can understand it better?

[00:10:31] Anthony Chang: Yeah, there are two things I would say. The first one may not be possible for everyone.

[00:10:39] Anthony Chang: There’s this idea of: how do we prove the value? How do we shift the conversation from “we need to reduce costs” to “we need to generate value” by bringing on people to analyze this data and generate insights? If we start from the cost-reduction side of things—because very often, as you said, that’s what’s required, that’s what’s asked—I think there are a lot of concrete improvements that can be made.

[00:11:00] Anthony Chang: I’m not necessarily an expert in contact center operations—my background is in analyzing voice-of-the-consumer data. But when we look at the number of calls we receive, for example, there are usually some clear wins. Often, they’re simple things, but they require diving into data beyond just the contact center.

[00:11:31] Anthony Chang: So, as an example, you mentioned the idea of contact center agents being sales agents in a way that helps with pre-purchase questions from consumers. We’ve found that simply looking at the data of incoming calls doesn’t solve the issue. You can answer calls better, train agents on selling, etc. But ultimately, the goal should be to prevent the calls in the first place. That requires looking beyond the traditional scope of consumer care.

[00:12:00] Anthony Chang: Specifically, that means examining marketing product pages on platforms like Amazon for products that generate the most calls. Are we missing key FAQs? What are the top 10 questions we get about the top 10 products? Are those questions covered on the FAQ page on Amazon or our brand website? Do the product images answer common questions—like how many people an air fryer can serve or whether it’s connected?

[00:12:37] Anthony Chang: Are these details clear? These are just random examples, but contact center managers often know which products drive the most calls and the most common questions. The real issue is whether those answers are immediately apparent to consumers—so they don’t need to call in the first place.

[00:13:01] Anthony Chang: That’s a way to reduce costs without making it about the contact center itself. Instead, it’s about looking at the bigger picture. I see this as a kind of voice-of-customer analysis.

[00:13:19] Anthony Chang: I’d say, how do you get people on board with this? How do you show them that this approach generates value and can scale? How do you convince stakeholders to allocate additional resources to this in a dedicated way?

[00:13:39] Anthony Chang: One way is to do it yourself as a starting point—find a way to get it done without relying on anyone else. One of the biggest challenges in change management and transformation is getting people to buy into your vision and be as excited about it as you are. Often, that doesn’t happen until you show them tangible value—something that improves their own role or department.

[00:13:59] Anthony Chang: So, we try to enable this process as much as possible. We create universal tools, democratize data, and train others to access and analyze voice-of-customer data. But ultimately, we start by saying, “Hey, did you know this is something you could do to improve your customer experience?”

[00:14:27] Anthony Chang: “This insight could help shape your next-generation product. It’s based on real data we’ve collected and analyzed. Does this interest you? Is it useful?”

[00:14:47] Anthony Chang: More often than not, they find it valuable and want us to continue the analysis for the next quarter. That’s when we explain, “We’d love to do more, but we only have so many people. However, we’ve enabled this data for you—you can run your analysis this way. Of course, we’re happy to support where we can.”

[00:15:00] Anthony Chang: So, those are the two key points: you can reduce costs by thinking beyond the traditional scope of consumer care, and you can prove value by generating insights yourself—showing people why it matters. Unfortunately, there’s no magic solution beyond that.

[00:15:26] Steve MacDonald: Here’s how I think about this. You just told a great story about applying data in a meaningful way.

[00:15:27] Steve MacDonald: Research shows we remember things 22 times more when told in the form of a story. So, here’s what I was thinking:

[00:15:44] Steve MacDonald: A VP of Operations for a large e-commerce company studied the language customers used to describe products versus the language the product and e-commerce teams used for categorization. Reworking the e-commerce site so people could find products faster led to a 40% drop in bounce rate—people who previously left the site without finding what they needed.

[00:16:15] Steve MacDonald: Think about that. If you reduce your e-commerce site’s bounce rate by 40%, how does that impact revenue?

[00:16:37] Steve MacDonald: So, I love your approach. If you want to advocate for this, go to different departments and say, “Would you be open to hearing a few insights that could help with your product launch?” Or, “I could help get our site visitors to the right products faster—would that interest you?”

[00:16:47] Steve MacDonald: Know your internal customers. Understand their needs. Ultimately, you’re sitting on a gold mine of insights, and you just need to show them how to use it. That’s the way to ask.

[00:16:55] Anthony Chang: Yeah, I think that’s a great way to think about it. And I think that’s also really this idea, or to make the analogy toward marketing ops or revenue ops, it needs to be all about these interdepartmental connections because ultimately that’s where the value is generated—as consumer care.

[00:17:12] Anthony Chang: Of course, we can generate value by selling or cross-selling, but it’s never going to be the kind of value that you get by, as you said, reducing the bounce rate by 40 percent on the websites.

[00:17:23] Steve MacDonald: It’s practical. Connect what we’re doing to very practical things that help our internal customers and other departments become more successful.

[00:17:33] Steve MacDonald: If you’re looked upon as a partner with them, that’s helping them do what they want to do. So, I guess the voice of customer operations, really, if we think about it, is there to support the rest of the company. Why else are we there? So, how do we advocate for ourselves?

[00:17:53] Steve MacDonald: I’m not going to ask you this question, but I’m going to assume you don’t have all the resources that you want in your department. So, what’s one of the best ways to do that? Start showing how you can help. And if I had X, Y, and Z, we could do even more. Because what you said a few minutes ago was really, I thought, insightful.

[00:18:10] Steve MacDonald: Everything you’re saying is insightful. You said, “We’re not staffed to do it for you, but I can show you. Here’s the tool—you can do it on your own.” The best way to do something is actually to do it. I worked in agencies for a lot of my career, and we kind of had this thing where, if we don’t do it for our clients, it’s never going to get done.

[00:18:27] Steve MacDonald: You can make all these recommendations to people who are understaffed in their roles, who have 150 percent of what to do in their roles. So, if you also ask the question, “If we could do this for you, would this be helpful?”

[00:18:41] Steve MacDonald: And so, I think, as much as we need to be thinking about what we are doing in the voice of the customer, we also need to think about how we help ourselves do more. We’ll kind of get onto a different train and track here.

[00:18:52] Anthony Chang: Maybe I can say one more thing. To the point of, like you said, teaching others, I mentioned democratizing the data.

[00:18:57] Anthony Chang: I think it’s important also to note that we don’t just stop at the point where we say, “Here’s the training, here’s the tools, we view you as enabled—please go and do it on your own.” We spend a lot of time on community management and building community—building the voice of the customer community within the organization.

[00:19:18] Anthony Chang: We take that as a severe challenge and an essential part of our day-to-day. So, as the consumer team’s central voice, we plan and host different meetings, maybe monthly or bimonthly, depending on who we’re working with. But we take it upon ourselves to plan and host those sessions with the e-commerce team, the marketing team, or the business teams.

[00:19:47] Anthony Chang: In that way, we build a recurring relationship with them, and as a larger voice of consumer organization—or community, I should say—we try to ensure that everyone is connected and aware of what’s possible and what’s being done. We aren’t looking to silo the insights in any way.

[00:20:06] Anthony Chang: Maybe some people are more interested in certain insights than others, but it’s not about only sharing this kind of insight with one team and another insight with another team. We try to make everything as visible and transparent as possible because you never know when someone may be inspired by something.

[00:20:23] Anthony Chang: “Oh, you did that for this person? I could do the same thing.” Community building is the next step. Once you start doing it yourself to show the value, the next move is to bring that together with an ongoing relationship and a community as much as possible.

[00:20:39] Steve MacDonald: I love that. So now, what you’re doing is adding responsibilities. But that’s good—these are all good things. Because when we come in to get the job done right, we have to say, “Well, here’s what we need to be doing.” Now, if you start building that community, it will start to take off.

[00:20:53] Steve MacDonald: There’s an opportunity to garner more resources to say, “Look, we are the glue.” This is the most critical community that [00:21:00] we have within our company. I love that. There’s this notion that the voice of the customer, coming from the contact center, directly impacts revenue, and you can infer that from many things we’ve already been saying.

[00:21:14] Steve MacDonald: But you talk about having it tied to customer lifetime value, net recurring revenue (NNR), and key KPIs that every vital decision-maker in the company is looking at. So, we can say, “Hey, we’re important. We helped with that product launch. We did this.”

[00:21:34] Steve MacDonald: And so, inferring—well, we’re a couple of steps removed at least. Because, oh, we have the conversations. We translate the conversations. We build that community. We share it. Hopefully, they will do something with it, and then that will impact revenue. So, I’m interested in your thoughts about the connection to customer lifetime value and NNR and how you think about making those connections internally.

[00:21:58] Anthony Chang: I think the way that I think about it is that we are, in some ways, as you said, a few steps removed—but that’s only in the traditional or conservative view of how contact centers operate. They’re often seen as either a post-purchase support organization or a pre-purchase organization.

[00:22:18] Anthony Chang: But what we’ve worked to establish—and I think we’ve done very well—is making the journey as flat as possible. From our end consumer buying the products, the customer journey starts with product development, moves into the launch, marketing, and sales, and then transitions into the post-purchase experience.

[00:22:42] Anthony Chang: We’ve tried to wrap it all back into a circle and ensure there’s a strong feedback loop, no matter where that feedback from the consumer is coming in along the journey. We want it all to be in one place,. And whether you’re a product company like we are—where connecting all voice-of-consumer touchpoints back to a product is natural for us—or a service company, the same principle applies.

[00:23:11] Anthony Chang: There’s always some central point where it makes sense to tie the data or connect it back to the individual customer. Then, you simply have the customer’s data expanded with all of the feedback they provided you. That’s helped us quite a lot to not have this idea of being so far removed.

[00:23:30] Anthony Chang: And there’s always work that can be done to further that. But when it comes to things like customer lifetime value or net recurring revenue in particular, I think that’s also helpful in the sense that by centralizing all of the touchpoints— all the data coming from these touchpoints along the journey— you get into a position where you can start to concretely improve marketing or things that are more traditionally viewed as what might increase customer lifetime value or net recurring revenue. 

[00:24:01] Anthony Chang: Like, let’s market more. Let’s sell more. Let’s personalize. And that’s where you start getting into this, saying, “Okay, well, maybe you could personalize because you want to target consumers between 30 and 40, living in a certain country,” or whatever it may be. But you can start to say things like, “No, actually, we know the reason that the person called us most recently, and we know, based on their survey feedback, that they were very happy with us. 

[00:24:27] Anthony Chang: So let’s do something different for this consumer in the marketing messaging versus the consumer who, unfortunately, had a bad experience or didn’t like the product. Can we understand why they didn’t like the product and offer them something they would like?”

[00:24:56] Anthony Chang: That’s where I think you start to get into this idea of more advanced, true personalization— where we understand not only the customers themselves, like their age, demographics, and so on, but also their feelings towards the brand. We understand the

[00:25:00] Anthony Chang: experiences they’ve had with our products and how we can tailor our messaging to them based on that information. Then, I think, you start seeing that voice of consumer insights directly drives things like customer lifetime value or net recurring revenue.

[00:25:17] Anthony Chang: That’s a different approach than simply showing people research about net promoter score, for example. Everyone knows that the net promoter score is researched and represents companies with the most growth over time.

[00:25:31] Anthony Chang: But does it work for me? Does it work for my company? These kinds of questions are complicated to prove. It requires long-term, consistent surveying and statistical analysis. But it’s much more straightforward to run an A/B test where you compare very personalized messaging versus a more standard message and then just show whether that’s working.

[00:25:57] Anthony Chang: So those are my ideas on how the voice of customer drives these net recurring revenue strategies.

[00:26:04] Steve MacDonald: I love it. Think about our conversation here— market personalization in marketing is enormous. But often, it comes down to, “Oh, I know your geography. I know your age. I might know these demographic things.”

[00:26:15] Steve MacDonald: But their sentiment towards the brand, their recent experiences with it— now you’re talking. If you say, “I can take our marketing personalization from here to here,” everybody will say, “That’s going to impact revenue immediately.”

[00:26:33] Steve MacDonald: So we start discussing things we know. This is about knowing our internal audience and understanding what matters to them. I love that— a way of talking internally to a community, understanding them, and speaking their language. That translates into, “Oh, you’re going to help me do something that increases revenue.”

[00:27:00] Steve MacDonald: Marketing is all about “How do I increase revenue? How do I create leads on the site or wherever? How do I help them to work more? How do I help them bounce less?”

[00:27:14] Steve MacDonald: I’m going to put you on the spot for a second here because we didn’t talk about this at all. If you were in front of a room full of C-suite executives— Chief Customer Officers, Chief Experience Officers, CEOs, CROs, CMOs— and you had to say, “Here’s your missed opportunity. Here’s what I want you to know about what we could do with the voice of the customer,” what would you say to them?

[00:27:35] Anthony Chang: As you said, it’s a bit on the spot, but I would probably say something like this: I struggle with the percentage, but maybe something like 75% of all the questions you have about products, consumers, and markets could be answered with your internal data.

[00:28:00] Anthony Chang: Yet, we rely heavily on third-party research agencies and marketing firms to tell us who our consumers are and what personas we should target. Instead, we could simply look at who they are.

[00:28:07] Anthony Chang: Have we validated that the personas we’re marketing toward are those buying our products? Is the marketing resonating with them? And if we have questions like, “Should we enter one market or another?” Of course, external market research always has a role.

[00:28:26] Anthony Chang: But have we tried looking at the product reviews of competitors already in the market? Are people happy with their products? Are there gaps in the market that we could fill based on these reviews?

[00:28:47] Anthony Chang: There’s a wealth of valuable voice-of-customer data that isn’t always viewed as useful as an external market research study commissioned from a research agency.

[00:29:00] Anthony Chang: The missed opportunity is the gold mine of voice-of-customer data— data that is harder to analyze, takes more time, and requires integration between different datasets and company departments. But ultimately, it’s about your specific customers.

[00:29:27] Anthony Chang: It’s not about some generalized idea of a customer, a persona, or even a country. It’s about the people who are buying your products— the ones you could convert into your most loyal consumers if you genuinely understand what they want, what they struggle with, and how to address those needs.

[00:29:51] Steve MacDonald: That was a brilliant answer. I knew that’s why I asked the question. I knew you’d have a lot of insights there.

[00:30:00] Steve MacDonald: I will ask for an extension on this line of thinking. You operate in over 100 different countries. Your contact center, I assume, isn’t just employees of the company— you’re using BPO partners, outsourced partners covering multiple languages and regions.

[00:30:28] Steve MacDonald: So, the voice of customer data must also be mined across these BPO partners. Many companies hire BPOs mainly for cost savings, time zone coverage, or language support. But I’d imagine BPOs contribute significantly to the voice of customer data.

[00:31:00] Steve MacDonald: So, to the person deciding which BPO partner to hire, what would you say about how they should evaluate these partnerships?

[00:31:07] Anthony Chang: Well, my expertise in evaluating BPOs is not necessarily— others are more experienced. However, I can say that we work very closely with our contact center partners to benefit from voice-of-consumer analytics.

[00:31:27] Anthony Chang: This isn’t something we build internally and keep to ourselves. If we’re developing tools, for example, that summarize survey feedback, we use them to understand not just product experiences or supply chain performance but also agent experiences.

[00:32:00] Anthony Chang: If we’re building tools or leveraging large language models to summarize free-text feedback, we ask, “Are customers happy with the product experience?” “Are they happy with delivery?” and so on.

[00:32:12] Anthony Chang: What do they also like and dislike about the agents? Is it something we could concretely pass back to our BPOs or, even better, enable the supervisors in the same way we allow the product managers to democratize the data in that way? So everyone is using the same capabilities built centrally by a voice of the customer operations team.

[00:32:34] Anthony Chang: If we talk that way, and they’re using them for their benefit. Ultimately, everyone is looking for ways to benefit from something. So the supervisors no longer need to read the feedback that’s coming in manually, or it can help summarize the following kind of training topic that should be given to the agents by the people responsible for the learning and the training in the contact centers because you can start to concretely see trends. This may be more operational. It’s not even the voice of the customer, but basic things like which products have the most handling time, that one’s pretty operational.

[00:33:11] Anthony Chang: So you can start to look at that, but you can also look at things like not handling time, satisfaction, or just a customer effort score. For example, which products have viewed the highest effort score and then take that as an angle that isn’t purely operational?

[00:33:27] Anthony Chang: It’s based on the customer feedback. But to use that to feed back into the sort of prioritization for training. The main thing that I would say about BPOs is to find people who are not just looking at the operational data; find people who are very curious to follow it through to the end, and understand the impact that engagement ultimately had on the consumer.

[00:33:52] Anthony Chang: Whether that’s someone who was happy with the service and maybe ended up converting or it wasn’t and what can we do to improve that together? It’s really someone who will be a partner through and through to the end of whatever that voice of consumer insight ends up being.

[00:34:08] Steve MacDonald: So here’s one of my takeaways that I want to ask, is it the right one from what you’re saying? You said a lot.

[00:34:13] Anthony Chang: Yeah, I said a lot and that’s really not my area of expertise.

[00:34:16] Steve MacDonald: But your area of expertise is using and making sense out of the voice of the customer. So the contact centers is where you get that data.

[00:34:24] Steve MacDonald: If we’re managing BPO partners and we’re taking on new BPO partners just as like with our agent pool, with more and more AI, the easy things are getting handled. So the agents are addressing more complex issues, the training, the requirements, who you’re looking for when you’re hiring an agent is changing because the role that they’re changing, is there an analogy to hiring BPO partners from your perspective? Because if we’re on this gold mine, but there’s, they’re part of the gold mine all over the world. Should we be hiring BPO partners that are more cognizant of, I need to be providing better feedback, I need to be an advocate for this voice with a customer versus I’m going to be a low-cost alternative that hopefully isn’t going to hurt your CSAT score?

[00:35:18] Anthony Chang: That’s a fair point, and the answer, in my view, would be yes. As you said, we see that a lot of our data is reliant on them. And, of course, the more operational data is not so dependent upon the global systems we manage.

[00:35:33] Anthony Chang: But when it comes to things like the summary of the call, for example, we rely on the structures and quality of the agents and the processes we laid out with the BPOs. This ensures we’re tracking the information we need about that call. And, of course, these days, you could just say, feed the whole call transcript into a large language model.

[00:35:58] Anthony Chang: Is that overkill? It won’t be because it’s so easy. But we very much like to work in a way. Our agents and our BPOs help us to understand why people are calling. Having that kind of insight available to our partners makes a big difference because we can very quickly understand.

[00:36:21] Anthony Chang: For example, if there was an increased volume of calls in a particular week, and it was on a specific product, for example, then it’s very easy for us to get a sense of what happened because we’ve asked for these kinds of summaries to be created in a certain way, or these kinds of notes to be taken in a certain way, and it’s clear to both parties that this is important for more than just, let’s say, tracking for bonuses or tracking against a service level agreement. It’s about something more significant. It’s about analyzing the impact that’s being had on the consumer.

[00:36:54] Steve MacDonald: I love it. One last question. Cause we have covered a lot of territory here, and here’s the question. If there was one thing that you wanted executives in the contact center industry who are watching this podcast to take away from our conversation. If there’s one thing to take away, what would that be?

[00:37:14] Steve MacDonald: It’s probably something along the lines of this idea that contact centers are cost centers, and this is the idea that many of us in consumer care are trying to cast off. We’re trying to prove our value and become these profit centers that generate value for the organization.

[00:37:35] Steve MacDonald: I would say to think outside the box as much as possible to achieve that. We’ve talked about different ways to do that, which I’ve found helpful and successful in casting off that impression. But that’s my message. You know, don’t be.

[00:37:55] Steve MacDonald: Reliant on these ideas, we can cross-sell and upsell, and maybe we can sell an extended warranty here or there or whatever it may be. We can go much more significant. We can go much bolder as people in the consumer care industry. We can tell every department in every company. Hey, I have something that could help you and help our consumers to have a better experience and a better perception of our brand. Whatever that is for you, I can’t answer necessarily, but I am sure that there is something in the consumer care space in the voice of customer data that you can find to improve the value of the business.

[00:38:42] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic takeaway. So, here’s one thing I’m going to guarantee. People are going to have questions after this. Is it okay if we provide a link to your LinkedIn profile so that people can reach out to you?

[00:38:53] Anthony Chang: Sure. Yeah. Always happy to have a conversation. That’s no problem. I think. There’s so much to learn from others. It’s always nice to have a conversation and hear a different perspective.

[00:39:05] Steve MacDonald: Well, thank you, Anthony Chang, for coming on. This has been quite inspiring. There’s so much opportunity here for us in this industry that I find it both personally and professionally fascinating. So, thank you for coming on. I enjoyed it.

[00:39:23] Anthony Chang: Well, thanks for having me. It was good fun, and I enjoyed the conversation.