How to Clean Your CX Data before moving to the cloud

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Let's get started. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Dare to Reimagine podcast. My name is Jennifer Murphy, Chief Marketing Officer at Five9, and today's podcast features two larger-than-life characters, quite frankly, who I have personally learned a lot from in my past year and a half, nearly two years here at Five9, and I hope that you will too. I have got with me today industry analyst Sheila McGee-Smith and CEO of Blackchair Jason Owen.

And today we are going to talk about, and they're going to help us explore, the path to success when moving your contact center to the cloud. Because yes, folks, believe it or not, according to Sheila, about 70% of agencies are still on premises. What? I hear you say.

That is right. Let's explore that topic. Welcome, Sheila and Jason. Hello, Jennifer.

Good morning. It's a out here in the borderlands between England and Wales, and it's raining. Oh, raining. Of course it is.

Of course it is. And Sheila has been salesforcing this week. We love our salesforce partner. We've been out there at Dreamforce as well.

It has been fantastic. Sheila, have you been having a good time? Absolutely. I love Jeannie.

Yes. I love the new... You know, as you know, Jennifer, you and I have been talking about customer data platform and bringing that together with AI buy and the importance and they are right on the mark in terms of where the market is right now. I love it.

I love it. I love it. I love it. Great sales force.

I love what they're doing. I love our partnership. We have so many joint customers together and hopefully more joint customers who will be able to leverage Genie. So exciting times.

Right. So let's get into it. Sheila, let's start with you. So as I mentioned, and as you would express, there's probably about 70% of agent seats are still on-premises.

So I think we all know the advantages of moving to the cloud, but what are you seeing companies consider when they begin the process? Do they even know where to begin? Why is that number still as high as it is? So I think it depends on how companies are coming to the migration process.

What they know and where they begin depends on that. So some companies find themselves in a crunch, right? Their solution can no longer be upgraded. This is happening more and more as the makers of premises solutions put all of their R&D budgets into some type of cloud solution, right?

Which are often private cloud solutions. So I need to expand my contact center. I need more agents. And I'm told you can't buy those licenses anymore.

You have to do something else. And once companies are put in that position, they say, well, wait a minute, if you're going to make me change, maybe this is a jump ball, right? Maybe it's time to relook at the marketplace and say, do I really want to stay with this horse? Or do I want to look at what's everything that's available in the marketplace?

So companies are in a crunch. They're saying, yeah, I got to do something, but I still need to make a good decision. So there's other companies, though, who come to the migration process with a transformation mindset, right? Typically a top-down digital transformation.

For them, they know they want to innovate, but they often struggle with where to begin. How do I go from old school, you know, voice with everything being overlaid on top of it and lots of different systems? How do I go from there to a true digital transformation mindset? it.

Yeah, it's great. It's great when you have that, you know, the leadership directive, let's do digital transformation. Well, what does that mean? You have to, you have to get practical with it in terms of what steps may be what you take.

So I like that. Okay, so there's the looking at what we've got, maybe reassessing what we want to do, and then making it part of potentially a bigger digital transformation where contact centre is one piece, but there's obviously a larger ecosystem at play as well. So Jason, you know, you work with a lot of customers that do this, that have done this. You've helped a lot of Five9 customers do this as well.

So what and how does Blackchair help? What's your secret success in helping these customers know where to begin, get started and then make it actually happen? Well, Blackchair has been around for a while, 17 years. 17 years we've been doing CX design and operations support and experience across the major vendors.

So we pretty much understand how the premise platforms work in significant detail. We also have a fairly large library of developed software tooling for CX assurance and for migration and that that's given us a fair amount of unique superpowers to look where others cannot in the data and automate the complex process of migration. On migrations to cloud themselves we have a service called Clarity. It uses an audit and transformation platform that runs against the legacy of IA CX, for example.

And within about two to four weeks, we can identify the CX design fitness and look really at any sort of unproductive processes, resources, dead configuration that's within the platform. And that really feeds the enterprise and the CX partner of choice with critical design data that will really change fundamentally the outcome. It also help crush the migration effort I like that And actually I mean you and Sheila both mentioned it This isn just about logo swapping I think this is very much about personalisation looking at the business process finding out what do you want to keep doing What do you want to change?

What do you want to add in new? So, you know, it sounds like that personalisation is really a key part of the process. Yeah, I mean, if you, let's take a bit of a cheesy but old quote from Winston Churchill. Those that fail to learn from history are simply doomed to repeat it.

And I'm afraid that's true in our industry. When we look at normal migration outcomes, and even in some cases, enterprise starts out with the intent for a like-for-like migration. So they walk out the door to the marketplace saying, I definitely want a logo swap. I'm quite happy to spend millions on simply just changing the badge.

And they think that that's actually an easy way forward, but it generates an awful lot of issues, even if that was simple, which it isn't. They're taking one species of technology that they've worked with, and they're then going to try and horseshoe that direct approach and demand from the CCAS provider that it's got to be exactly the same as that. and that causes an awful lot of retrofit problems and mismatches between professional services on the ground and enterprises they're trying to do it but even if you know they they have a transformation mindset they say that when the you know the ccast salesperson comes in and the enterprise rfp they totally agree they're going to have a brand new solution from the ground up they typically the outcome is still near a logo swap as the business really defines its requirements against how it's always flown or driven the current contact center as it is today.

I mean the the issue is that most of the partners and the enterprise don't actually have the data to change the heart of the CX solution. They'll revert to the habits and behavioral systems that they are comfortable with, that they understand as how you run a contact center. And our secret source in the transformation process is in the audit data. What we do is we study the minute by minute CX operational change.

And this is not the management information data. This isn't the key performance indicators this is that show you effectively how effective your CX lap times are as you're trying to meet service it's not that management information this is the information about change behaviors and in transformation what you want to do first is to focus on how the business is driving the CX solution not its lap times not not the performance but how is it cornering? How is it handling that? What manual changes are made every second of every day to meet CX demand?

In that data, this shows the design and process failures that you don't want to repeat, that you specifically want to identify out. And currently, at the moment, when you head into this process as enterprise, you can't see that data. You can't see your behaviors or study it. No, and that's really interesting.

You mentioned that part about the RFP, right? Like with many things, we go into it with good intention, but it's very easy to fall back on habits and behavior. So I've got a bit of a two part for this because you work with a lot of vendors, you work with a lot of CX leaders, a lot of contact center leaders. So how do you encourage them to think differently?

right so for those people who are out there who are like okay i'm either going to be doing a broader digital transformation or i know i need to to move to the cloud and i've got my rfp what can they do to think differently and not fall back into those usual habits as they're going through this process so as you know i recently published an article on no jitter talking about giving your contact center a bath, right? And it's a clarity bath. I liked it. I liked it.

I liked the bath. So what makes a contact center dirty? What makes a CX business solution dirty? So let's think, you know, let's think about a premises vendor with the largest contact center footprint, but we'll use Avaya as an example, because there's just of that 70%, there's a 30, 40% of all contact centers still on Avaya contact center premises equipment.

So if you've been sitting there on Avaya for maybe 10, 15, 20 years, and you look into their rules and how the contact center is being run, you'll find routing rules that are called vectors. Dirty is having built over the course of all those years, hundreds, sometimes thousands of vectors that are not even being used, not even being, not even relevant anymore, but can slow down the system. It can slow down the physical system and it can definitely slow down customer experience.

Dirty is having hundreds and hundreds of agent skill groups defined. And again, often designed for an individual or a one-time project that, again, slowed down administration of the system and ultimately slowed down performance. And my last example of dirty is IVR scripts that have been built and changed and rewritten and now can often be illogical, you know, a convoluted mess. So when I think about how do I encourage a company to think differently, it's that kind of mess that companies are in.

They have to reinvestigate. They have to relook at, you know, this whole notion of like for like. I mean, I remember seeing Drew Krauss, a colleague of mine from Gartner, who runs the MQ for CCAS, making this comment on a stage eight years ago when Companies come to him and say I just want to do a like for like replacement having this discussion about all the reasons not to do that It like technical debt right I mean at the end of the day you know if there any teams out there who build software for a living, I mean, you've always got to think about technical debt.

It builds up, it lurks out there in the corner. And at some point, you've got to do something about it. And I think if you're looking at moving to the cloud, it's a great opportunity to do that. But yeah, I think that notion of, yeah, I love it.

What's dirty in your contact centre? Where have you maybe got a few cobwebs, we'll say, maybe that you need to do a bit of a bit of a cleanup. But I think those practical examples, Sheila, actually make it really relevant because sometimes it can be so overwhelming what maybe potentially technical debt is out there that has built up over the years that you don't know where to start. So look at your vectors, look at your skill groups, look at your IVR scripts.

Why do you have them? Do you still need them? Are they still relevant? I like that.

Practical. I like practical, Sheila. Okay, so Jason, so, you know, Sheila talked about at the beginning, you know, you can sort of do this and you can think about a bigger transformation. So how do you know if a true transformation plan, if you've got a true transformation plan as you move to the cloud, what are some of the practical steps in recognising success that you've seen with customers.

So Sheila gave us some practical tips of what to look out for. What are some of the things that you've seen? You're looking for your partners to show a methodology and capabilities to understand your current business and their processes. You need to get to the point where you're building a transformation strategy document that has significant design out objectives that really identify both business process change and CX solution aspirations and design.

And if you've got the data that drives that information, it will change the way you write your RFP. It will change your human resource budgeting for the next year. It will adjust the way you use IVR. It will identify self-service opportunities and it will reinforce your AI planning.

But above all, what it will do is it will change the relationship between CX operations and the solution itself. Each day in the audit data when we switch on, we sit back with our popcorn and we watch with astonishment as the CX operations team are driving the CX platform by the seat of their pants each day as demand curve comes in. What does that mean practically? That means that the record, Black Chair's record so far, is 65,000 skill changes in a day.

Whoa! You're telling me that 65,000 training courses have happened that day and they need to apply them to the skill sets. There's some people out there that are like, yeah, I can see that. I can see that.

Yeah, that might have happened in my world. I can see that. Honestly, when you look at the way in which CX Operations in today's contact center space engages with the designed platform, it is very manual. They're literally bypassing the point of a routing engine in its central job to manage the relationship between agent and demand.

They're in there right in the middle. They're looking at the wallboard. The lights go slightly a different color. They grab 500 agents out of one particular service area.

They manually say, I, with my omnipresence understanding of this equation, I'm going to lob them into the sales queue. Then they sit back and watch the lights change, panic, grab 420 and swing them back. And so the boat does this. Whoosh, whoosh.

And there is, and they will remain nameless, there are companies with over 40 people dedicated to that task. And so what you've done is you've completely wrecked the whole purpose of the contact centre. And I will tell you now that it is 100%. Every time we switch the audit record on, we find manual intervention.

So transformation is all about understanding the relationship between how the business is operating the platform and the design. And if you get that right, the upside immediately is 20, 30 percent for good design versus, you know, bad design. Before you go on, Jason, I do just want to call out, you know, you keep saying it, and I think it's something people, it's a really good point, actually, the notion of design out, right? We always build RFPs with everything we want.

What don't we want? I think you and Sheila are both iterating that, and that would be a key takeaway when you're thinking about your RFP. What do I want to design out of the system? I really like that.

I want to design out the dirtiness. Yeah, you do. It gets worse. I mean, we see skill definitions and Sheila talked to it.

When you describe the human resource that is the undercurrent of that customer experience and the most expensive asset in the game, when we look at the way in which enterprise defines that individual for the routing engine to go and move to when it sees demand change, we see skill depths that are 60, 120 deep. where they have over time attached a skill that is related to reporting. It shouldn't be there. They've attached a skill that is actually, this makes my blood boil.

They'll attach a contract name. So they'll take the actual contract that they are servicing and they'll bypass routing and attach it directly to the agent. And then all day long they have to move the priorities of what agents are dealing with that contract. that agent's description should be reflective of their actual capability.

Routing should be sat there in the middle on the balls of its feet going, I'm seeing the demand curve move. I'm going to sprinkle in milliseconds 32 agents here, there, there. I've got this. And that how the contact centre should be responding to the demand curve And it isn One thing I do want to point out actually is you know we talking about OK at the end of the day these, you know, contact centre leaders have put a lot of effort into building their contact centre.

And all right, OK, we've built up a bit of technical debt over time. But I think one thing that's really important with any type of project is, I just want just one piece of advice from both you and Sheila. how do you make sure you bring the team along right because I think we've got to respect the effort that contact centre leaders have been putting in for all of these years and the effort they'll do to move forward so what what's just a piece of advice for how you bring people along because sometimes it can feel like wow everything I've just built for the past 10 years you know is being is being pooed by people and that's not the case so yeah just give me give me your one liners, I think, from both of you on that, because that's really important for leadership to think about when you're moving to the cloud, the change management piece.

So I'm going to take it first. Every time I talk to a company that has moved from premises to cloud, the one thing they talk about as the biggest advantage is the empowerment at the business level, that now we can make the changes that we need to make for things like a hurricane or a power outage, that we don't have to go to IT and it's going to take six years to do that. So I'm talking about a different user set maybe than you were asking the question about, but that is such a clear advantage.

You hear it over and over and over. Yeah, I like that. I like that. Empowerment of the team, empowerment of the team and their skills and putting all of their skills and knowledge, now letting them unleash that skills and knowledge in a productive way.

Jason, what's your... Lastly, I mean, for me, it's really important to the CX Ops team that are going to get thrown under the bus when the data is peeled back, that their platform, the dust and dirt, has settled on it in the design. And in some cases, because the platform's been around for a while, it's much worse than dust that's landed on that platform and they need to be motivated to re-imagine they need to understand that you know it's not their fault the platform is a bag of it's a lot to do with the fact that day to day the business has said I need this hit service I want this change and those iterative things that you're going to get done once a week you take that over eight years and this thing's got arms attached on the side of its head it's walking with it's just a complete an utter pickle because no one's gone back and said okay we need a retrospective and we need a we need to design out some of this junk and streamline it that doesn't happen we're on the edge of the wave and we keep so that team needs to understand it's not their fault they need to be made comfortable about transformation that actually they they want to reimagine the solution that they're trying to find the dirt to learn and to change.

And that will, if done with a CX partner in a hand-and-glove approach, it is going to save enterprise millions. And they're not going to swap logos. They're going to actually truly transform the core of their CX platform. And that will make an enormous difference.

And especially in a tightening market, it's going to be competitive advantage. and we're in a tightening market where you've got to make those platforms efficient and they've got to be on the balls of their feet delivering service you can't afford to waste HR resources around your contact centre it's just not available anymore yeah no I like that I think that's a really key thing it's the empowerment of that team it's leveraging their knowledge it's you know also factoring in that hey this was a collective team effort that we got to uh to maybe a little bit of a situation where we've got a contact centre that doesn't quite work for us and now's the time to move.

So before we wrap up, just quickly, we always like to leave our listeners with a little tip of the week. So a fact, a stat, a book, a quote, a thing to think about. So Jason, I'm going to start with you. Sheila, I'm going to ask you to give us our final tip of the week.

Jason, what's your tip of the week? Can your grandma understand your agent skilling naming convention? Is it reflective of their abilities and consistent at cost all lines of business? Because if it isn't, you need to look there.

I love it. I love it. I love it. That's a good one.

I like it. Sheila? Especially for larger companies. Here at Dreamforce this week, I was introduced to the Chief Medical Officer of Salesforce.

As we get into a hybrid world here, companies with hundreds and thousands of agents should be thinking about, do we need a medical professional on staff to help us understand the needs of agents who are home, the needs of agents that are hybrid, and so that we're recognizing, because our staff is our business here in the contact center. I love that. Wow, we could do a whole other podcast on that. Agent wellness, well-being, I love that.

That is fantastic. I really like that. Those are two good tips of the week, two good thoughts and questions to ask yourself. Well, folks, that is a wrap.

I hope you have enjoyed this episode of the Dare to Reimagine podcast, a podcast for CX Innovators. Sheila and Jason, I can't thank you enough. My takeaway is going to be DOD, design out the dirty. That is what we all need to focus on.

So if you haven't already, prep those engines for liftoff and start that move to the cloud. So until the next time, Sheila and Jason, thank you and thank you to all of our listeners. Dare to reimagine customer experience with Five9. For over 20 years, Five9 has been helping companies worldwide chart a path to a reimagined CX.

Learn more at Five9.com. That's F-I-V-E, the number nine, dot com. You've been listening to Dare to Reimagine, a podcast for CX innovators brought to you by Five9.

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