Staffing Crisis

CF: Why do that? Why go that route rather than, say, both replace and enhance?

ML: There’s a lot of uncertainty in the market right now because of what happened with COVID. Companies are hesitant to do a lot of gigantic system-wide changes. CIOs and CTOs are hesitant to sign their name on something that could completely disrupt the operations of their business. So enhancement is more our approach given the current climate that we’re in. 

Additionally, there’s a staffing crisis that contact centers are having right now. There is a higher degree of agent churn or turnover now than what we have ever seen. Companies are having unprecedented agent turnover, which means for every agent they hire, they lose an agent to churn. They just can’t keep up with that pace. A lot of these customers and these companies are realizing they must implement a virtual agent strategy. They have to implement an AI-controlled natural language processing IVR system to do advanced call routing. CEOs are going to make sure that their customers don’t feel the pain and the strain of losing agents left, right and center. And when you hire a new agent to replace the one you’ve lost, there’s a period where that new agent has to ramp, and that’s going to just inevitably slow down your systems. What’s great about our AI-powered virtual agents is that supervisors can monitor them, can train them, can empower them, without the burnout. They appear on a dashboard just like the human agents do. The supervisors can get in there and tweak those virtual agents straight from their dashboard. So it just becomes a seamless way for the supervisors to continue to do business the way that they do business.

And by us focusing on the enhanced versus the replace conversation, it allows us to be a lot more targeted, and talk to the solutions that the customers are asking for. It also allows us to teach our partners to talk to those solutions that the customers are asking for.