Today’s interview is with Jeff Gallino, CTO & Founder, and Conrad Liburd, AI feature engineer, at CallMiner, a provider of speech analytics solutions for improving agent performance and customer intelligence. Jeff and Conrad join me today to talk about bias in data and algorithms, discriminatory and racist calls in contact centres, what most companies do about them, what they should be doing about them and what we should be doing to improve both customer and employee experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The secrets behind tapping into your customer’s imagination – Interview with Chip Bell – and is number 369 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Jeff and Conrad:

• Many people advocate eliminating the bias entirely from our systems and our data.
• That is a mistake.
• Because we have to acknowledge that everything is biased.
• We need to embrace it and recognize it is there and use it as a way to understand how it might be informing our conversations and informing the dialogue we’re having with our customers.
• If we don’t we potentially lose both the opportunity to learn from it and, more importantly, the trust from the people on the receiving end of the racism or the bias.
• Organisations have a responsibility to look after and care for the people that are looking after their customers.
• We have to understand and factor into our practices the impact that these conversations have on our agents, their well-being, real-time performance and, in particular, how they feel about the next call and the one after that.
• The incidence of bias expressed in calls is much higher than people think.
• Management systems should have a featured where an agent can either, physically or digitally, put their hand up to signal that they need a minute because they have just had a rough or discriminatory call.
• Not having that may go some way to explain variances in call switch over times.
• Having agents know that you are looking out for them is huge.
• In many organizations there are policies in place where even if you get an abusive caller, they’re telling you, don’t hang up.
• That in itself is a system of control and many customers know this and call contact centres to do just that…abuse people
• Many organisations recognise that these types of calls are bad and also know that they are also bad for business in a financial sense….reduced performance, increased turnover etc.
• Some organisations have gone further and have identified the responsible customers and have chosen not to do business with them any more.
• Empowering employees to take action based on what they’re confronted with is a huge step in the right direction.
• Assuming that ugly behaviour or negative beliefs are in the minority is a form of delusion.
• This idea of leaning into these incidences and this data has proven controversial with some as they have found it difficult and uncomfortable to talk about.
• Instead of trying to please everybody choose to do the right thing and let that be the thing that pleases the people you care about, which, in this case, is your employees and valued customers.
• The pandemic has not resulted in an uptick in discriminatory calls as people have generally been more empathetic during this time.
• When agents are able to establish rapport with a customer and operate in a less scripted way then they are more able to call out offensive language.
• CallMiner conducted a study recently that found that during the pandemic people were responding either flatly or negatively to automation and that they wanted the human touch. They felt isolated. And, so they wanted that human touch.
• The companies that were deploying automation thought that they were doing a better thing for their customers by making everything more transactional and faster. The customers pushed back on that.
• Did you know that people curse more when using automation than they do when speaking with other people.
• One of the things to look out for is the development of automated scorecards for customers to let them know how they could have done better and gotten more.
• The other thing we will also see is an agent sitting behind an avatar, in video based customer service calls, and how these can be used to influence behaviour.
• There’s a growing disconnect with companies and understanding what world customers are living in. Unfortunately, we’re still in a place where if I call you about a package that’s missing, you have no clue where it is or an ability to resolve or follow up on the situation.
• What people are asking is for organisations to move the automation behind the human and make the human more responsive and more empowered. Make it invisible to me.
• Somebody working in a contact center is, unfortunately, fairly powerless until you make them powerful.
• Imagine how powerful it would be to have all of your people empowered and then you can tap into all these different perspectives.
• People treat the word respect as meaning how you treat a person, but they also mean respect is how you treat someone that has authority. What they are also saying here is that if you don’t respect me, then I won’t respect you meaning if you don’t give me authority, I won’t treat you like a person. That’s wrong.
• However, if organisations give empowerment to their agents, they give them both authority and respect. When the customer recognizes at least one, then they get the other.
• Punk CX words: Miss-matched shoes (Conrad) and Provocative (Jeff)
• Punk CX brands: Starlink/ (Jeff) and Amazon (Conrad)

About Jeff and Conrad

As Chief Technical Officer, Jeff Gallino oversees research, language development, and future product direction. Gallino was President and CEO during CallMiner’s first five years. During that time, he led the company to become an internationally recognized and award winning enterprise software company. Jeff has more than 25 years of experience delivering complex software and hardware solutions to enterprise and government customers. Prior to founding CallMiner, Jeff worked at companies like; ThinkEngine Networks, Grant Thornton Consulting, as well as 11 years in the United States Air Force. He holds a BS degree in computer science from the United States Air Force Academy.

Conrad Liburd is currently a feature engineer with the CallMiner Research Team, where his 10-plus years of call center experience and programming skills are leveraged to help the migration of research projects from research to reality. He is the creator of the CallMiner Chrome extensions and possesses a strong technology background, specializing in business process optimization through the use of web application extensions and various technology suites and frameworks.

To find out more about CallMiner then check out their website, say Hi to the folks at CallMiner as well as Jeff and Conrad on Twitter @CallMiner, @JeffGallino and @clibjr respectively and do connect with Jeff and Conrad on LinkedIn here and here.

Finally, do check out Conrad’s recent article (AI, Racism, and Bias: The Impact on Employees and CX) on the very topic of this podcast on nojitter here.

Image by OpenIcons from Pixabay