Tom Morgan: 0:37

It's time for another ACP, and it's a special one to kick off the new year because we have not one, but two guests with us, but Alex is here as always. Hello, Alex. How are you? Welcome to 2025.

Alex Baker: 0:51

to 2025. Good to see you.

Tom Morgan: 0:54

And we're joined by Eliza Taylor, who is change director at cloud interact. Hello, Eliza coming to us from London.

Eliza Taylor: 1:01

Hampshire this week, but yes,

Tom Morgan: 1:03

Very nice. Very nice. In the the garden of England. And also joined by Nick Seagrave, who is the CTO at Cloud Interact. Who's also from somewhere quite close to there, I think, in the middle of England. Hello, Nick.

Nick Seagrave: 1:15

Hi.

Tom Morgan: 1:15

if that's true. I don't know, my geography of English is

Alex Baker: 1:18

Brilliant geography, Tom.

Nick Seagrave: 1:19

Yes, I'm not sure St Albans is in the middle of England, but anyway, that's fine.

Tom Morgan: 1:23

Never

Nick Seagrave: 1:24

We'll go with that. That's fine.

Tom Morgan: 1:26

I didn't take a career into geography. And so we brought you here today to talk through a couple of big kind of themes really around what we think 2025 will bring in terms of change and the kind of challenges for contact centers. And that kind of experience. So I think in a few words, Eliza, if you could start just by kind of giving us your background, like what you're doing at cloud interact and your kind of expertise in this area. Sure.

Eliza Taylor: 1:51

Yeah, thanks, Tom. And thanks both for having us on. This is, this is fun. This is exciting. So yeah, I joined Cloud Interact almost a year ago now, so coming up to my anniversary. And I've worked in sort of change management, stakeholder engagement and communication in both public and private sectors for the last, oh, I don't even want to put a number of years on it because I think that will age me. But yeah, so I've worked, worked for worked with a lot of tech companies, both in the UK and some in India as well. And most of the transformation that I've seen that I've worked on has been in the tech space because that's really where we're seeing this. The sort of tidal wave of, of change, if you like, and how organizations can handle that and navigate it has, I think, been one of the most pressing issues for the last 10 plus years, really.

Tom Morgan: 2:45

Well, it's really good to have you here. Nick, your turn.

Nick Seagrave: 2:48

Thank you, Tom. So previously to cloud interact, I did sort of been through this journey once before, actually, with a company called modality, as you'll know well, Tom where we started off. And in those days, it was the PBX. So the PBX was very much part of everyone's communication stack. So we went down that route of converting what would be what we would call old school PBX is into what you see today in terms of Microsoft team zoom, that whole UC process of taking people from picking up a phone to then being able to wear a headset, being able to do a video, being able to chat, all that kind of thing. So that process I did for 14 years and actually. Interestingly, from my perspective Simon and the other co founder, he was on the other side of the fence for me. So the modality often worked into the companies, large corporate companies that Simon Simon was delivering his UC transformation in as well. So when that came to an end for me, it was sort of the UC is sort of coming to it's not completion, but certainly it's not as probably interesting for me. Whereas for the customer experience, the front end side of things in terms of how people interact back into businesses. It's hugely somewhere near the start of that process. I think I think there's still a lot of what I don't know, picking up a phone and making a phone call, going through an IVR, all that kind of thing, getting to getting to a human and then completing that task. And there's so much more better ways to do that. And there's so much more. Great technology and great to the stuff that's coming, but it was hugely interesting to me and Simon to sort of start that journey and start that conversion and bringing that capability. So that's really why cloud interact was formed.

Alex Baker: 4:17

interesting hearing Nick's view there. Cause I suppose I've been working in, in contact center technology for quite a while. You're probably right, Nick, in that there's been many years of that, the same sort of IVR, press one for sales, two for service technology, and actually has it really changed a huge amount? It does seem that perhaps it's right for a bit more disruption.

Nick Seagrave: 4:40

Yeah. And I think, I think the disruption that is coming is because of the advancements. In capability in the cloud, in a, in both AI and both natural language. You know, the ability to have somebody speaking that actually isn't a human, but to a lot of people, actually, they probably didn't even realize it. That kind of capability sort of wasn't there. And in the unified comm space, that technology sort of 10 years ago was fine. I think we're now in a very lucky space where those capabilities are there. So that advancement should be happening now. There is no reason for it not to happen now, actually, to tell you the truth. Whereas probably 10 years ago, if you said go down the route of a virtual agent, it might be quite clunky and it might be quite unappealing to your customers.

Tom Morgan: 5:25

I think the customer expectation is there, at least in patches as well, like there's that expectation. But I think there's probably fear as well, like Eliza, I don't know what you're seeing kind of, could you spend more time on the ground, probably talking more than any of us actually talking to real, talk to real people talking to customers, talk to agents about that, that process. So yeah, we, we think the customer expectation is there, but that might not be true. What's that like.

Eliza Taylor: 5:47

No, I think, I think it is. I think that the, the modern customer is so used to convenience. They're so used to being able to get the information that they want when they want it, or do the activities, interact with their products and services. And I think that's part of the challenge as well, that you're not just competing against the last time that the customer contacted you or the last experience they had with you. You're competing with every. experience and interaction they have had across all of the products and services that they consume. But you might be more strongly compared, to certain things in the same industry, if they've got multiple products or services kind of in a tower. But as we know, like, human beings don't tend to think about things in silos like that. They're just like, oh, great, you know, I had a great interaction with this bank or this internet company or, this product owner because I needed help. I really wish XYZ offered that app or that seamless experience or were as polite or as helpful as them.

Nick Seagrave: 6:51

It's interesting, isn't it? It's interesting, social media's got an algorithm, has customer experience got an algorithm, you know, pretty much a lot of customer experience. You're virtually announcing yourself and they're getting to know you every time you come in. There's no sort of, oh, welcome Mr. Seagrave, I see you're this, this, this and this, that algorithm. Hasn't really got into customer experience by the look of it. Some places it has. But certainly like you say, when people expect the algorithm to know who they are, they expect when they call customer experience to know who they are and know what they're after and now have some sort of insight into them, which is the battle, which is what, you know, I think while we exist is to try and make that, make that move, make that happens or get that personalized. Experience.

Alex Baker: 7:31

If I'm a really non technical customer and I have a good customer experience somewhere, why shouldn't I expect that across the board? You know, if, if one company can do it, what difference does it make to me, what vertical they're in or what technology stack they're using?

Tom Morgan: 7:45

Yeah. And in some ways we see, we do actually see that. Out slightly outside of our world, but still in the customer experience world, if you like all returns are kind of like Amazon does returns now, they're not, you know, it used to be 28 days, a fight, a complaint, like multiple phone calls. Now, it's just like, okay, fine. You know it's, it's interesting.

Nick Seagrave: 8:04

Yeah. And you'll always go back to the. The thing that makes it fluid for you, isn't it? I'd say if returns are easy, then you'll probably be a bit more flamboyant in your purchasing because you know, you can return them, you know, as for me, all in the past have been, Oh God, I can't even be bothered. So there's probably lots of things I've bought that I've never returned. So but creating that and creating that customer service is yeah, is potentially how your relationship with your customers will continue.

Tom Morgan: 8:28

And, are there challenges inside the company as well? I'm thinking kind of staffing, but also technology like Eliza, probably you first for staffing, I guess, is, is that a challenge? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Eliza Taylor: 8:53

goes into delivering that. experience and I think where things are less seamless, where they are harder, we absolutely see the impact of that on the agents and the, and the agent teams as well. You know, it's like when you, when you, when you share your screen and you have like a competition with your coworkers is how, who's got the most number of browser tabs open right in the course of their work. And some of the things that I've seen in the contact centers we've worked with, the agents just have. All of these windows open, they're constantly bouncing between these different applications, and it's almost like the customer isn't having a seamless experience because the agent isn't having a seamless experience. And I think it's a lose lose situation on both sides, to be honest.

Tom Morgan: 9:43

Yeah, it's just like patchwork solutions, like one part is over here and one pops over here and the credit card stuff happens over here. And like this poor agent is just trying to hold it all together and deliver what everyone is asking for in terms of improving customer experiences and all the rest of it.

Eliza Taylor: 9:59

And you've got to remember that their performance is probably evaluated on timings and metrics that's built into all of those activities. So if you know that it takes you 30, 40, 50 seconds longer to complete your after call work, because you're going into a separate system, maybe you have to VPN into it, maybe the login isn't single sign on, it's timed you out, that's directly affecting your performance in your schools and even your teams. Evaluation in, in the, in the grand scheme of things, and that can mostly be tied back to that single piece of technology. And so that was one very specific example, but I do think we can see that. And we do see that kind of across the board in a lot of areas where customer experience meets technology.

Tom Morgan: 10:43

So what do we do about it? We've been on this journey for a couple of years. We've got some thoughts. I don't know. Should we talk about the tech first? Maybe

Nick Seagrave: 10:51

Can I just talk about. One thing, Tom, I think is really important in discussion is obviously the commercial side of things. So, you know you know, it's sort of a flippant point about the algorithm as such in terms of social media. But that's, that's selling stuff. Often customer experience is just a defensive play. So it's very difficult to look at that from, oh, let's spend millions on our defensive play. I'm trying to sell that up the senior stack to the senior executives to say we've got to improve because it's, you know, if you say I want to invest in my defensive, my customer service experience stuff like that, they're always going to ask, okay, what does that mean? Well, how's that? Is that going to? Is that going to mean I'm going to maintain 30 percent 40 percent customers? So there is a financial challenge to this in the customer experience space. So it's usually important. And again, it comes down to, as we'll probably talk to, is to how efficiencies can be gained where you can get that customer experience improvement. You can make those advances, but you can also look at it at a very short return on investment phase. You know, if you said, Oh, I'm just going to spend billions, you're not going to get it back, but you're going to get people slightly happier. People aren't going to spend the money. If you say, I'm going to people a lot happier, you're going to get your money back in six months time sort of thing. And then it's going to be. 30 percent cheaper for you going forward. Plus you're going to get a better service offering and better customer experience. Then people are going to buy into that. So there is, you know, there is the, there is the commercial side of it, but unfortunately, while everyone who's involved in customer experience would love to have an endless budget and love to be able to do everything great for their customers. But unfortunately they'll always get asked, well, what is it? What does it ultimately mean for our business? And if you can actually come back and say, well, actually, Do you not worry about that so much, but we can deliver it and we can be, we can get, we can basically start costing less in next period of time. Those, those, those conversations will be very much heard. It is an important part of it while there's the technical, there's the experience side of it. Every business has to be able to run. And so it very much needs to be taken as part of the conversation.

Tom Morgan: 12:51

Hmm. Yeah, that makes sense. And we, obviously we talk a lot about Amazon connect here. And. That's those kind of cloud based solutions. And particularly in our world with Amazon connect, that's made such a big difference in terms of scale and flexibility. And, and in some ways it feels like that's kicked off this process that then obviously the AI layer on top and the other advances in technology kind of made a, made a big difference. I mean, I guess that's the. That's almost job one, isn't it? If you're looking at this appraising the kind of the landscape and be like, right, we need to move forward. If you're, if you're not already in the cloud, do you need to be to move forward like this? Do you think?

Nick Seagrave: 13:29

Yes. Really short answer. Yeah, you do. Some of the early migrations we've done from contact centers, they will not, well, unless those contact center companies reinvest that they're not going to be able to get into the space and provide the capacity, the scalability, the new features, new functions that people are going to want. So you have to be in there. Personally, you have to be in a cloud based solution to be able to start bringing that in, you know, there'll be nothing more frustrating saying great. I've got great customer experience. Oh, yeah, we can't technically quite deliver that for you. And being, and as you know, Tom, in terms of investigating, you know AI platforms and stuff, you know, being at the front of it, you've got to be, you know, it's still new, you know, it's not, it's not, and it's not a cheap thing. So the big clouds are our fun for a reason because they have a lot of money. And if you want to integrate other services into them, they're the ones you've got to be part of in the cloud. I don't think anyone's going to come on with an on prem AI stack of any note. That's going to, it's going to scale to anything that's going to be usable. So, yeah, I think you're right spot on Tom. It's a starting point. It really is. But you, but you need to know that starting point can go whichever way you need to go in terms of what you want to try and achieve.

Alex Baker: 14:41

I guess even if your, if your main core contact center platform is still on prem, people like Amazon are making it easier to use part of their cloud based AI stack with it. But yeah, you're, you're still incorporating cloud services in, into your, your on prem solution.

Nick Seagrave: 14:59

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you can. I mean, you can, yes, you could have a cloud based you know, self service or, you know, generative AI solution in the cloud and then route the call. Onto your on prem contact center. So you can put that there, all that's going to do in terms of capability. Well, one integrations are going to be limited probably in terms of potential opportunities to share data or share some sort of nuance between the systems. And two, you just, you're going to add cost as well. So yes, totally. It might be the first step to give you confidence that you can, you know, you, you can take that step into the sort of more modern cloud based stuff and still route back to your agents on a contact center that you. You trust yourselves. But yeah, I'd say that's a it's a stepping stone. It wouldn't be some sort of state that you'd probably want to stay in for a long period of time. I

Tom Morgan: 15:49

say, you know, you've, you've kind of made the decision. You, yes, you want to get off wherever your legacy thing you want to take upon to solve some of these problems. And Nick sort of already spoken about the sort of the commercial side of things. You, yeah, you've, you've made it make sense. What do you do next? Cause I know that, you know, the, the techie people amongst us, like we'll dive into like the tech, but actually it's about quite a lot more than that, isn't it?

Eliza Taylor: 16:10

Yeah, I think there are some really compelling statistics around transformation and success rates. And I think a lot of that. stems back to how human beings react to change. And I love the fact that sometimes when we put human beings in a company, in our brain, they sort of a switch kind of flips and you think, Oh, they're employees. So employees are innovative and they will embrace change and they want new, exciting things. And a lot of the time they don't. Can I, can I talk a little bit about theory? Just a little bit. I promise it's slightly, it's slightly interesting. I promise. So negativity bias. So the way that the Homo sapiens, our brain has evolved is designed to ensure our survival, which means that it focuses on immediate threats, and it will keep pushing that threat to try and keep us alive. So, you know, if you've gone to a river and you've been attacked by a wolf or a lion or whatever, your brain is going to continuously be saying, you know, what was that noise? This bush isn't safe. Like it's going to be looking for that threat in your immediate environment all the time, rather than focusing on positive information a negativity bias, not a positivity bias. So if we think about that in terms of An employee in a work environment where lions and wolves are slightly more scarce, perhaps, or just in a different format. When you say that you're going to change something that they understand, that maybe doesn't work perfectly, but they have grown very familiar with, comfortable with, they use it in the best way they can. You also have it's sort of expertise anxiety.

Tom Morgan: 17:53

They're the expert in it. They know how it works. Yeah. Silence.

Eliza Taylor: 18:08

into a bit of our self worth as well. So you immediately have Quite a lot of resistance to change just built into our basic psychology and how we feel about ourselves in the workplace and the value that we bring. So organizations really need to think about this when they look to do either small changes or big transformation as well. And I do think it's. It is interesting that when you put people in this category of employee, we somehow stopped thinking of them maybe as we would other people. So if your leaders were going to change something for your customers, that we're going to roll out something new or update something they currently use. or even remove an element of something because it's no longer very good or, or the direction you want to go in. There's going to be a lot of thought that goes into that, right? How you position it with them, how you explain it to them, how you sell the benefits or the reason behind it, and how they can get support so that they keep using your products and services. And I know that we've spoken about how customers are different, they're sort of Bringing in that, that revenue, that profit, et cetera, but without your employees, you may not have a product or a service to sell. So if you applied even a fraction of the thinking that goes into making changes for that external audience to your internal audience, you'll be not just increasing the success or the likelihood of success because. I would say that it's not so much change projects or transformation projects failing, but it's more so that they are delayed, stalled, that large chunks of it are moved out of scope, or whole departments are moved out of scope, and suddenly the benefit, that return on investment, the realization of benefits, has already been undercut before you've even really got going, just because you, you needed to look at the human factor in it. And that's sort of

Tom Morgan: 20:09

Yeah, no, it's totally makes sense. Like, and, and people will, you, you'll never realize the benefits you thought you were going to because people are just fighting against the system rather than really embracing it and understanding it, or trying to take the old process and bang it into the new one and.

Eliza Taylor: 20:25

I promise you that any business case you look at will assume 100 percent adoption. That's what the benefits are based on, 100 percent adoption, right? Because that's what you do, you're like, oh, we've got X number of people, if we reduce this amount of time, or improve this part of the process, we will get X, Y, Z. That assumes that 100 percent of those people are using it at 100 percent efficiency, I don't think that's broadly realistic, and it's certainly not realistic without sufficient thinking, support, and kind of strategies to get them at least partly to that, to that performance level.

Tom Morgan: 20:59

It's something we've seen elsewhere, internal IT often gets a bad rep. Because they, because they know they've got a captive audience. It's not like building an iPhone app where like you're competing against all the other iPhone apps in your category. It's not that they, your employees use what they, you tell them to use. And so like that, that has always been historically that sort of slight issue with quality, but it's, I mean, it's not their fault. It's, you know, they're up against the timescales and the, you know, delivery and all that sort of stuff. But it's, it's just like, there's, there's less competition there. So it's but it's, yeah, it makes such a big difference. I want to spend just a bit of time kind of talking about just some of the things we've been talking about internally as, you know, ways to solve these problems and things, you know, how we can help organizations as well. Kind of without it becoming a massive sales pitch, but I think it's interesting to talk through some of the stuff we've been talking through, especially around Apollo. Which is started off as a project code name and has now become a product name because We thought it was such a good name to start with. We decided to keep it. Yeah, so I feel like this is gonna, this is going to be the thing that we sort of build all of our sort of how we talk about these challenges and how we address them kind of going forward. It will be kind of, Raised in this kind of language, I think, but Nick, can you sort of go into some of the technically some of the innovations that we are using in Apollo and some of the stuff behind it in terms of it's sort of the things it does and, and, and the things that, you know, set it apart.

Nick Seagrave: 22:23

Yeah, I may come back to you, Tom, more deeper technical sort of understanding of it all, but I think it's a really yeah, just what I was talking about in terms of the people, you know, very much the people side of it, but also, I think, I think all people in calendar track, we're very much. Analytical at the start in terms of things, but it's very much a human element. We understand as well. But I'm not. I'm not. And I think a lot of people including to all these people that would just have a whimsical sort of conversation with the business. Think about what you need is this, you know? What you need is to implement this, this, and this, and it will give you exactly what you want. You'll get 30 percent of your, you know, self service and all your, and all your people on the back end as such, all your agents and humans and stuff will be very happy with all the information we're doing. I can't do that and I don't think anyone can interact with it. So the, the, the, the sort of premise for Apollo is to, is to get all the information. So, you know, while we can speak to a lot of people in a business and some people we speak to. Have a lot of information. They'll say, Yeah, I've got disposition codes. I've got information about about everything. I know everything is going on. And to other people will go. I haven't got a clue what's going on in my in my customer experience. So that's sort of different starting points for us. Then we want to delve a lot deeper. We want to actually go into those conversations that people are having with the customers. So the technology now in terms of being able to bring in thousands and thousands of conversations, and it literally is thousands and thousands of conversations and turning that into actual meaningful data. So as I said, you know, we can talk to people about their experience and supervisors think they're fine, that they're great. But then actually, when you actually start delving into the information within the cause, you might find. both from the customer side or from the the agent side. So we're looking at ways what we have done and we're looking at ways and the great technology that's coming in via AWS is obviously bringing that call, initially transcribing it, summarizing it, sentiment within it, other information that we deem really important and part of an algorithm that. is, is, you know, working on constantly changing week by week with the customers that we work with, where we come up and look at each of those interactions, look at actually what happened in those, but then ask that question 10, 000 times. And that's where I'll probably refer to you, Tom, in terms of how you use I think I believe we use bedrock to go. And basically once we've worked out a trend as such, we'll go and see if that trend extends itself to 10, 000 corporations. Now, once we've taken that extremely large data set, and then we've potentially categorized calls, we've understood issues, we can really go back to the business and say, this is pretty much the impact we can make, you know, it's not a, it's not a whimsical you know, we think it's like looking at the last three months worth of information that's come out of your your customer experience platform. We can actually divide this up. Some of it can go to self service. Some of it we can help people with Amazon Q. Some of it we can sort of embellish a bit more and make their life a lot easier from a, from an agent perspective. So it's, you know, bringing all the sort of new technologies into the space. But allowing us to create it and become, you know, convert it back to what will be ultimately a human experience.

Tom Morgan: 25:32

Yeah, it seems like it's become like the perfect amalgamation of, all the things we've been quite good at. You know, we've got very good connect technical capabilities. We've been staying on top of the AI stuff. So we know all of that. We've got a really solid reporting division. But, and actually all the stuff, Eliza, that you do as well, I think allows us to understand what to do with it all.

Nick Seagrave: 25:52

So we are. Yeah. So we're brilliant at all of that, but then there's a, there's always got to be a why to back to the business that's, that's got to make that happen. You know, we can come in and say, we're great. We're going to deal with this and it's great. And it's going to be fabulous, you know, both commercially and other, other reasons in a business that they will have their reasons to do something. And that we need to bring that by in. And I was saying trying to convince people to do it. Without this level of detail, I think it's very difficult, but if you put very much analytical data in front of people and say, this is the effect it will have. You know, we, we know that in terms of we've asked, you've got the AI to ask numerous questions and now each contact has about 15, 20 data points on it. We'll be able to make that a very compelling argument. And then hopefully that argument is that, yep, do this and commercially, you'll be better off in nine months time.

Alex Baker: 26:45

One of the nice things as well, I think, is because we sort of shaped the direction that the product can take. We have a lot more sort of customization over what it is you're trying to find out from the the product. The source of data. So the call data, maybe it's to do with, we, we're interested in putting together a chat bot. So what are the, the interactions that may, what we might want to, to automate? Or equally, maybe it's just something like we don't fully understand what's going on in our queues. Can you do some analysis and give us some broad categories about the type of things that people are talking about?

Nick Seagrave: 27:20

Yeah, yeah, exactly. But it is exposing that isn't it? How many, how many, well I don't even know what a number of terabytes of court recorded data is out in the world that is basically untranscribed and therefore doesn't, they don't understand actually truly what's happening. Um,

Alex Baker: 27:37

For one customer, didn't we? So.

Nick Seagrave: 27:38

exactly, you know, and we can go back and run this information, you know, this process that Tom's pulled together on this and come up with. With very yeah, very exact information on how things are performing, but you're right. The important part is that we're, we're not coming in and saying, here's a great chapel. We're not coming in here saying, here's a great self service. We're coming in and saying, here's a, here's, here's a whole extended level of capabilities. Which one's going to work best for you and we can say this will work best now based on how your customers are interacting. We can say this, this way of doing it, this way of self service, this way of chat, or even video. If you really want to get it you know, we, we can say that from the data that we get out of Apollo, we can say these are, these are, this will translate into a successful both commercial and customer experience way forward.

Eliza Taylor: 28:26

And I think that's what Apollo sort of, why it resonates so much with me is because it feels like a very natural evolution of the story that data can tell. And it's not data in isolation. You know, it's not just, Oh, well, we can pull metrics on average handling time or cool wait time or adherence or after cool work, et cetera, which, you know, you can sort of look at sometimes too much in isolation, our big modern global businesses need to be looking end to end at their, at their customer proposition, at how they offer their products and services and Apollo just surfaces. This next level of story of narrative that's completely data driven and that not just the leaders of the contact center should be interested in and should want to need, but that actually the overall business, because this is, this is a key interaction point with all of your customers. If you're not picking up on that feedback, which you're not, because as we know, the, you know, a lot of the transcripts aren't looked at because of the volumes. That we're talking about. So it's just this absolute gold mine of information that I don't think has been fully explored yet. And that's, that's what Apollo is for me. It's about the story that that data can tell for businesses and the benefits that telling that story can bring to the things they decide to change.

Tom Morgan: 29:54

That's an excellent summary, I think, for probably the whole episode. So I'm not going to try and add to it, it's that strategic thinking about change all over and then to end and, and the importance of doing that. Technologically replacing your contact center. We could talk all day about this. I'm sure. In fact, we do, we have calls where we do talk about this for hours on end. But for this episode, it's time to bring it to an end. Thank you very much, Alex. Thank you, Eliza. And thank you, Nick. And thank you all for listening. Be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you won't miss the next episode. Whilst you're there. We'd love it. If you would rate and review us. And as a new podcast, if you have colleagues that you think would benefit from this content, please let them know. To find out more about how Cloud Interact can help you on your contact center journey, visit cloudinteract. io. We're wrapping this call up now, and we'll connect with you next time.