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October 29, 2024Basketball, false hustle and metrics that matter – Interview with Thomas Laird of Expivia/OttoQA
Today’s interview is with Thomas Laird, founder and CEO of both the Expivia Interaction Marketing Group, a USA BPO omnichannel contact center, and OttoQA, a next-generation solution for automating contact center quality assurance scoring. Thomas is also an author and joins me today to talk about his new book: false hustle: Transforming Customer Experience from Illusion to Impact, what ‘false hustle’ is, how to spot it, the paradox of efficiency and personalization and, if you identify that you have a culture of false hustle, what you should be doing to transform your brand into one that truly values human conversation, insight and connection.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – The five promises of personalization – Interview with Mark Abraham and David Edelman – and is number 520 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.
Here are the highlights of my chat with Thomas:
- Thomas’ family had a contact center when he was eight or nine years old.
- He literally grew up around contact centers and ran 1500-1800 seat contact center in the early to mid 90s with his parents, mostly in financial services.
- Started Expivia in 2011 as a startup contact center BPO in the States.
- I coach high school girls basketball, and there’s a coach that I work with, and he would always talk about false hustle……..which is all about looking busy on the court but having no impact.
- There are so many things we do from a quality or efficiency standpoint, where we hold our agents to certain standards because I think it makes us feel good and it’s easy to track. But when you really look at it, we’re not improving customer experience. We’re not improving the actual interaction between us and the agent. And we’re actually scoring, educating, and training on the wrong things.
- We should score things that matter instead of scoring things that are easy.
- Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target. It ceases to be a good measure.
- The best example of false hustle for me is when we check if the agent did a great job with customer engagement if they said the customer’s name four times in the first two minutes of a call.
- Another is ….we use saying ‘really sorry to hear that’ as a proxy for empathy.
- It’s all performative nonsense.
- I think in the next, say, five to seven years, the customer service agent is going to be one of the highest paid agents in an organization, because of the level of knowledge, skills and capabilities they will need.
- My favorite chapter in the book is dealing with an irate customer.
- There’s a fine line between really driving for efficiency and whether you are really solving customer problems.
- Artificial intelligence (AI) won’t be the differentiator of a company’s experience. Companies that understand how to cultivate genuine human conversation and connection will be.
- I think we’re seeing the story of AI and the story of CX being written by the wrong people.
- Moving away from a culture of false hustle to one that values human conversation and connection, in our experience, starts with the QA form.
- The education of the agent is just as important as the scoring of the call.
- Analytics are evolving rapidly and is something that everyone should be looking at.
- We’re currently testing for a company a no dashboard analytics platform.
- Voice prompts will be a key part of this.
- Thomas’ best advice: Understand that you need process, but start to really look at the outcome of your customer experiences more. Start to look at the intent of the agent much, much more. Don’t look at just training and educating a robot. We already have them. They’re called AI, and they’re going to be great. We don’t need to be the next level of the same exact robot. Let’s actually take the time to do some human interaction.
- Thomas’ Punk XL brand: I love when companies embrace their culture and allow us and expect us to embrace it too, as their partner and with their customers.
About Thomas
Thomas Laird is the founder and CEO of both the Expivia Interaction Marketing Group, a USA BPO omnichannel contact center and OttoQA, a next-generation solution for automating contact center quality assurance scoring.
Expivia is a bridge between a high-quality contact center and a high-tech software company. We have integrated the latest technology (Speech Analytics, AI, WFO, Chatbots, API Integrations, Advanced Routing Techniques) with time-tested education and employee engagement tactics to create what we believe is the new standard in call center outsourcing.
Thomas has 25 years of experience in all facets of contact center operations and, prior to starting Expivia, he was the head of call center operations for a large BPO that specialized in financial services. Having this past know-how has given him the honor of running many services and sales programs for most of the top 15 largest financial institutions in the USA.
He is also the author of the call center operations book “Advice from a Call Center Geek” which can be found on Amazon. He also hosts a weekly podcast by the same name (Advice from a Call center Geek) and it can be found on iTunes, Spotify, Sticher, or Google Play.
Find out more about Expivia Interaction Marketing Group, check out his new book: false hustle: Transforming Customer Experience from Illusion to Impact, say Hi to him on X (Twitter) @tlaird_expivia and feel free to connect with him on LinkledIn here.
Credit: Photo by Kylie Osullivan on Unsplash