3598d1a6-aae4-4ea9-8774-ded9f20e9bf8 Ascendo Gen AI Agents for Field Service Management

Explore how customer support can drive business growth, emphasizing the importance of understanding customer needs and utilizing various communication channels in a globalized market. Growth Through Support | Transcription Previous Next Today, so this is pretty good. I think we missed a recording until now. So we do have God. He's so it's what I love about. The two of you are there is a data piece for which there are tools and stuff. And I can imagine corroborating data from many many data sources. What you were talking about more and probably weeks, and How far personal time to even bring out the data or maybe you have encountered other simple ways of doing it and giving that data to substantiate the argument and Ahmad from a change management point. There are tools and mediums and think you use the word medium here. So, mediums that have worked very well for you, and have you picked that based on what the You know about the company culture or have you seen certain things that fit in better? I mean, there are so many dependencies there, right? This is a variable-driven decision, right? A goes, whatever, your Omni-channel structure and model is today, cost capability maturity model where you are in growth. In terms of the organization. There are so many levers there to be had and discussed. What we do know. Fundamentally. You want him, you want to ultimately meet people where they engage you most want to do. You want to optimize That. Wow. Through some of my experiences, you know, we aim to sort of increase the scope of this idea of omnichannel, but yet, we're not meeting the thresholds of performing or optimizing in the channels that the people want to introduce themselves or engage Us in to be given. So it goes back to what I said earlier. A lot of this is kind of cyclical. Let's optimize and win on the basics. And so it depends where you're going, what you're trying to do, but I think it'll be on the culture. Right? And then it's also the willingness to either be Innovative, disruptive or lead the way, or if you're just looking to be status quo. Neither is incorrect, right? You just need an innocent comment upon us. When writing, we're coming up with these ideas and they strap, your stopping points might give me a few tools. If that has worked for you before we listen, we are social media by far today as the biggest reach is everyone using it properly or optimizing numbers. We know if you don't, you have to have that presence, but let's not let us know. And understand there's the good, bad and ugly with that. Because if something goes wrong, it's going to go. Buy something that goes right. They can go by. But if it goes wrong, also, I was just going to say that's so funny because I feel like social media is Full for the direct consumer but it's not that's not the channel for B2B. So it's just really really interesting. Anyway, continue. Yeah. I was going to go down, go down, and go down the path there, and then obviously we know despite what everyone may say and Depends. It depends on where you are global because there are nuances in terms of cultures and geographical locations. Self-service. Is this a huge push, right? Depending on where you are, we know at the end of the day, The phone human contact is so desirable now, right? Because we were locked up for two years, it's still the most costly. So how do you find that balance between human contact? Human touch and automation. This is where a lot of folks are focusing on and then let me then I'll this is a nice dovetail, which I'll pitch to you Mo are talking about B2B a lot of this is creating a Marketplace or a platform for that discussion to happen organically and you'll what you'll find is a lot of the And or challenges will be solved with either. Only You facilitate or handoff and it'll figure out at the very least. You'll know where you have an opportunity for improvement. So, what does that mean? We're talking blogs, right? We're talking in a chat room, we're talking, whatever it may be where you can create this Marketplace for great minds, think alike and by just buying organic and innate nature, we're going to solve things collectively because you're never alone. You're trying to figure something out. So I think that dovetails nicely into what you're talking about. going to be a perspective but no one understands. They are at the 80th percentile, whether it's B2B or b2c solving a problem and people want to get done fast, efficiently, and cheaply. That's the Crux of it. The 20% is the difference between B2B and b2c. Yeah, so I'm just going to go back to channels just briefly and I love what you said about Community because that's like totally. At the top of my mind as well. And it dovetails nicely just into like, kind of the fusion of between like Typical growth channels because like Community is, like, in that marketing realm, right? Like and it's but it's also a help Channel, it coaching Channel and, and one a one-to-many, your support of Coach. Exactly. And it needs to be moderated and needs to be like, discussions need to be facilitated and all this stuff, but I think so, I think channels are really interesting because you have to, and I'm going to also use this to segue into that follow-up question about. Where are you? And how are you collecting this data? Do I agree 100% with what you're saying if you have to meet your customers where they are? And so that channel, what channel that they prefer is going to depend on, like your industry is going depends on your vertical. It's going to depend on. If you have a product LED Growth Company versus to be specifically like product LED Growth Company versus like more of like Enterprise or if you do both like because you have an Enterprise segment and like more product Leche. A segment. And so, like, for example, for us like, we have, we work with Hollywood film studios and people love the phone. So, like, we like people who just love the phone. You have to make the phone a channel that is not typically super popular and customer support for product LED growth companies. The other thing is when you have an Enterprise segment like honestly, most of my day is in coaching calls and face-to-face. Zoom calls, working through problems and helping people, like troubleshooting how to organize their account, or how to, how, to, structure things so that they can accomplish certain workflows. And so it's like for us most people are reaching out by email. We don't have any social media presence at all, but our customers are not there. Like, I mean, honestly, like so many times I try to, like, make friends with my customers on LinkedIn and like, I can't even find them. And so there. It's just not the channel for those types of conversations. However, they all expect to have a Cadence needing they all expect to have, you know, be able to jump on a screen share if they need to work something out. So to go into that data. The question is, how are you? And where are you collecting this data? I think the most important thing for making these sorts of cases is essentially aggregating all of your conversation data, no matter. ER, what channel? It's from if it's on the phone if it's in chat if it's in social media if it's in the email aggregating, all of that into one single source of cosmic, solid interactions. Yes, interactions are conversational truth. You will. And then use that to you. Can. Then going back to what you were saying before about segmentation as well. Customer segmentation is super, super important to segment or use all of that data and segment it by, for example, an operational process. So like we have a high-touch process for Enterprise and then we have a low touch velocity process for, you know, like for lower complexity customers. So we segment it by that and then we segment it by and then we segment it by personalization segmentation. So for example for us, that's a use case like how they're using. The product is going to be personalized. And then also just kind of different. Things for us about their verticals. Like whether or not, they're like reality, or if they are episodic, or if they are, you know, a feature that has some differences to it as well. And then the other quadrant is what it's like like their role in what they're doing because how admins perceive the product is different from how, workspace you know, the collaborators are contributors perceive the process product which is different than how the like viewers perceive the Which is like almost like a different kind of user Persona. So when you can aggregate all of this conversation, all data in one place, then you can segment this data in all of these ways and the piece that's usually missing for the support team. What's so important is revenue. So you need to be able to take this conversational data that you're having of all this, these customer interactions in all these different places. Put that in one place and then put that in a place where you can either pump it into Like some people know it helps get, we use looker at Moxie and we, you know, we have we were a start-up until like just very recently when we required it. So like we were just, you know, putting our cross-dressings are conversational data and HubSpot with the revenue because we were tracking our deals in there because we didn't have, we don't have an automated process around that but just wherever you need to be able to cross-reference this, all of this conversation data, have its Goodbye. Operational segment and also personalization segment and then cross-reference that with revenue. And if you can do that, that's when you can start getting insights into seeing Trends emerge, and it's important to cross-reference your support KPIs and your conversation Trends and all of the data that you do on the support side with how that impacts Revenue because then you can start making those lines, right? Like you can make those lines that when our reply time goes, And we lose money when our satisfaction rate goes down. We lose money. And or like, because people are like, so we need to work on internal enablement to make sure everybody's an expert in knows what they're talking about. We need to properly resource this so that we can staff this because like people expect to have answers within 2 hours or 15 minutes if it's an urgent issue and we need to be able to accommodate that. And if you don't cross reference, that traditional support, KPIs with Revenue, It's like you can't make any of those arguments and so just having a place where that's possible is probably the very first step to yeah, and the other dimension to it is the business model itself, which is what you touched upon where SAS companies come up with freemium models. And actually, that's not just a B2B phenomenon, b2c phenomenon these days, you get salons asking for memberships, right? So and building on top of it. So definitely I think this does This model has an impact on what a CS person does concerning taking on how much responsibility for the cross-sell or the upsell is, providing the value of the product to the End customer Etc. So, I think it would be great to take this and see my bear on the b2c side. How have you seen that? Stolen up. So this kind of SAS model goes into B to C and how you have seen taking care of those customers. Why depends on how it depends on where this vertical sits in the organization? I've been in organizations where it sits on the post-sales side, which is a little more difficult. There are other hurdles to jump across to work closely with sales, but then I've also seen this, you know, there it depends on the structure door where they feel like there is a value there, right? And it's easier to facilitate than the 360 feedback move. If you're on the forward side and work more closely with the market and sales. And so depending on what that is in Australia, I'll give an example. If you're on the second part of that or the first part I should say, it's really about just again delivering on the promise and making sure that there's this whole seamless and frictionless interaction post-sales because that quite frankly is where your network effect begins. And people are going to brag and share with others about their experience and whether it's wrong or indifferent, the product may become. Secondly, there's no, I just had a fantastic experience. Oh, by the way, the product is great. The platform is great. The service is great. But man, they take care of you. That's where that Network effect and where you can contribute to that beyond the product. But if it's only another side, the way to facilitate that is to work very closely with sales, right? And make sure I'm not just sales by the but also your product teams, right? Whether it's the platform or the engineering side and say, Hey, listen, here. We are the voice of the customer here. The things that we're hearing and saying here are some opportunities that we think might be a value-add, and either contributing to or including in anything that's in this product roadmap going forward, right? And so you can only get better and better, but that does get require that one you lead the way and change management to that, second you're very good at building relationships and three, you gain the trust and so, therefore, you have the data and the know-how which is the Art Science resources to facilitate that and they get it because I've been to the day, it's really about making sure that we grow, whether it's the daily, average user weekly, average monthly, average users product, adoption optimization, whatever those metrics are used to measure. The idea is to grow that and that's our contribution. If in fact, we can contribute to that now if you Have done well and established these relationships. You have gained the confidence and the trust of those who are typically quantitatively driven and very technical, right? If you can gain that, that respect, that footing in that relationship. Now, you guess what you've gotten pulled in earlier? In this product roadmap, you get greater visibility, right? And therefore you can prepare and plan better as it pertains to developing workflows and escalation paths and anticipating those things that may occur. When it is lost, what I've seen on the other side of the house is if that hasn't occurred. Remember I said those are larger hurdles. If you're on the other side of that post-sales side. Now you're scrambling at the 11th hour to create that frictionless and seamless and delightful experience and now you bear the brunt of trying to catch up, right? You stress the word, the team, and the vertical out all these other things and then you finally catch up. But guess what? There's another product coming, right? Yeah. Depends on where you structured and how it's structured. Think this is part of, you know, in with us. I think this is part of the challenge for us. Particularly. If you're on that post-sales side, how do you communicate this value proposition? We have a jump start. We've had a springboard called the pandemic, in? Folks, know that experience is important. But now are you going to capitalize leverage that and keep that voice as loud as it is not as loud as it was then today. So that folks will understand and know how to connect those dots and make sure life. Daddy's here. Yeah, mon, before you go on this. Could you say the same thing? What if Matt was talking about this bigger size company? I think it would be wonderful to hear it for much smaller-sized companies and how the same thing can be implemented within a very small size. Well, we are very small. So it will not be so okay. So first of all, I want to say that I love what you said about value-added. Herbs because honestly, I think when people get icky angry about the idea of and cross-selling it's because they feel sleazy like they're selling something that a customer doesn't need. But actually, I would argue that you're the best. When you're in custom-like post-sales customer-facing teams or you were just working closely with the customer. You are in the best position to recognize when something is a value-add. So, you know, when I was at help Scout, for example, you would get into these situations where people would have these messed up situations with how they're using tags, and they were using tags the way that you should be using custom fields, which is on a higher, tier 2 plan. So, it is more of, like recognizing these problem areas. And being like, Oh, actually, I can deliver more value to you. You have an easier time with this product. I'm helping you fix a support problem, but it happens to be something that is more money. Look, it's not, like, I don't Like to think about it as upselling or cross-selling so much is, it's recognizing opportunities that you can increase value for your customers who already are like loving and adapting your product and finding ways that they can, you know, just it's I think of it as like helping them more. Just helping them more. And so the way it's so okay. So we're in a very small team and it's funny because like I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of scaling but or also like Potentially mapping this to how things would work in a large organization because I think it's considerably easier in a small organization because like the way that we're structured is we have so I have a team of six and I'm one of them. So technically we have a high high-value team and a high-velocity team like a high-touch team and a high-velocity team, but my high-touch team is really like one person. Is handling the high-touch enterprise process. Assisted by me as his Superior and like, help-help her helper in ways that I can. And then we have a high-velocity team. Now, the high-velocity team currently has four people that are spread out across time zones and I strategically hired people who are both excellent. Technically and also love coaching and educating and teaching people and helping people solve problems. Because I honestly think education is the new sales and I don't think sales is a skill set so much. It's a strategy. It's all just about putting the people in front of the customers at the time to help them solve a problem. Which to me is like we're this problem-solving team. So as you scale, yes, I agree that some people are going to be more interested in having more customer-facing conversations, and then there's the other kind of people who are going to be more interested in doing things like the Nitty Gritty. Deep dive troubleshooting stuff now because we're strategically placed across time zones to be able to deliver a 24/7 exported support experience. Everybody's a little bit of both. But also, I hired people whom I think can be essentially the heads of these different types of Specialties. So the types of Specialties we break out into our product growth operations and engineering. And So eventually the engineering He will be a little bit closer to like that tier 2 technical type of support, of, like more, like the people who just are like, really good and really into troubleshooting as they will do it, and it's great. And then the people who are on the growth side are going to have more of the customer-facing conversations, but what it is more about for me is unifying tools and processes in a way that you can create a seamless experience and that's hard when you have completely different departments because they use different tools. They have different KPIs. case They have different goals. The differences are just like having different processes. And so when you have that is you fraction all you fractionate fragments. I don't know you break apart all your data and when you break apart all your data and you have all these hurdles and handovers, you also break apart the customer experience and create friction, and it's not like the cut. Is it Because it's like it's all internal friction? But that internal friction. It's like when you're having a bad day and like people can tell and it has nothing to do with them. It's just like customers feel, the internal friction that's happening between these like roadblocks and silos between departments. They feel it. Even if it's like a year, internal teams don't realize that the customer is feeling it. That's when you get things like, I don't know whom I should reach out to, for this. I don't know what it's like. This is, you know, like people who feel shuffled around because they ask their salesperson a question or like, let me get me to support. And then suddenly the person, even though they're in the evaluation stage, wanted to add one more angle. To what you're saying that angle is, you're looking from support out. There is also from other teams in which is, you know, one of the things that I've seen that's been done very successfully and that teams that I have are bringing in And the different teams and have them rotate into support. Hmm, right? So that's a fabulous thing. It's like, yeah, so both it's looking from support out and outside and I think that's exactly what you're bringing up. Absolutely. I'm a huge advocate of whole company support and I honestly want as many people as possible to pay attention, collaborate on, and like reviewing support in the business as much as possible. But like, I'm that's that can be a harder sell but I think, but the nice thing about having these like Liaisons and these arms that go into the other business, is it also creates a nice environment where then like, if you need to, like, if you need to hire a new product manager, that's like, maybe on like on you know, doing a product, you have like an expert who's already been working with this team completely. So it is almost like a support organization. Like I don't say a training ground because Self is so complex since it, I mean, it's viable, like, lifetime goal be like, I mean, that's my lifetime go. Like, I love that work. But it is also for people who are invested in support and have these other interests like marketing or product or engineering. It puts a product expert in all of those existing, like a product and customer expert who already has all of that, internal knowledge of that stuff into those. Parts of the business. So, yeah, it's also just a great way of making sure that you have, like, when you need new Talent, you're recruiting Talent, who are already Experts of your customers, and that's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. This conversation is going so fluidly. They still have two more topics that came up that we needed to cover. Let's see and I think to augment this one. will be great because it's bigger. It's also more. So I'm sure geographies and the globalized nature of companies add a factor to all of this, right. So just by the fact that the company is very Global doesn't mean things have to be decentralized. Our centralized areas cater to the geographies. What is your thought on it? Let me just want to repeat back your question before I was to make sure that I answered properly. And so you're saying there's a thought that things do not need to be catered if they are if you're a global company. Is that what I heard? Do you say? No. No, I was a global company. Is the catering go-to words, a centralized model versus a decentralized model because there are cultural and other nuances that are very specific to geographies, right? So how much of that is important. And versus the culture of the company and a centralized way of doing operations or supporting our support operations. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, grey. Appreciate it. Thanks for reading. Thanks for the clarification. But so, let me start by saying two things can be true at one time. Right? And so it doesn't have to be black and white either or it can be together. Right? So, if you think about a plus sign in the equation, and it's adding to, and so I, what I would say is this, while the company culture and what it stands for, right, that that Ethos right. That mission statement. Those tenants and values that an organization stands for should permeate every factor and every interaction whether it's business or customer B2B or B2C. That being said there is this, there's this profound confirmation, that's in place. Now that you have to find this. Happy medium with personalization and part of personalization. Includes. Right, and stuff, you know, I don't want to be or be perceived or be presumptuous and say, because we're our company when you go to go through my checkout cart, or you go to get help. It's going to be all-English, i.e. King's English, right? And it's going to be in US dollars and I'll leave it up to you to convert, whatever that may be. If you're going to buy some, that's absolutely the wrong take. And so localization means just that now, but you can, let's be very clear. You can still meet the criteria, Right? And the requisition of being scalable, right? Because now you're talking about the 80th percentile of what you do should be replicable, right? And then you use that, twenty percent for those nuances, that I give you a very explicit example when you're talking about support and your help if you're talking about those who are in Asia that she was East Asia in particular. They're very driven by self-service. They're very technically Savvy. And in fact, quite frankly. If we must be honest with ourselves. They're ahead of us when it comes to early adoption. Right? And so, therefore no one's looking to pick up a phone and contact you, right? They want you to make sure that you have enough content, your fa Q's are Stellar, or if at the very most I can reach you by virtual or real chat at best. Let's contrast that with, if you're a truly global company and you go to Latin America, Brazil, very specifically, why Brazil? Because they're the only Portuguese-speaking country, everyone else speaks Spanish, and some shape form, or fashion, which lets, you know, there is a nuance and a differentiation in and of itself. And so, if you go to Brazil, their culture is very concierge, feel White Glove hand holding nothing wrong with that, that just happens to be the way that culture likes to operate. So, therefore you need the opportunity for folks to either contact, someone establishes a voice. Okay, real live chat or a quick turnaround or SLA, whether it's an email or social media. And so the point I'm making here is, if you are truly Global, there is no one-size-fits-all albeit. You do want the pillars and your foundation to permit. All of your interactions. You have to be considerate enough. You have to remove the arrogance that we're going to make people adapt to us. We went downtown. And then you're Going to address and approach each one and each interaction respectively. Now, let me close with this. I think this is a nice cherry on top. If you will, you still have to find this happy medium between human interaction and automation. The right should not be the only driver. It is a variable in a key driver model, but it should not be the end. All to be all because if you're using cost own, You're going to fail in several Mrs. Wright that will offset any W's that you get in other places where you can use that mouth. 100%. So I like, okay, you seem to touch on so many things that I'm like, so on the same page with you and I can't wait to talk about it. So first of all, I frequently say you have to help customers the way they want to be helped. So that means yeah exactly. Like if you need to have an able mint and resources and videos and guides and the like all the in-app stuff for the people who want to be helped that way, which is like I mean like 50 percent of customers like to prefer to have like that sort of help at least from my direct experience. And then if you optimize on that way to be able to help the people that want to be helped that way. Then you can. And then you have time freed up for the people who do need the hell of hand-holding and they do need to jump on the coaching calls and they do need to have like A strategic discussion about how they're going to apply this product to accomplish their goals. So 100%, they're going back to localization though, and also, cultures and everything. Oh my gosh, that's so like I have so many feelings about this. So as you might have mentioned, as I might have mentioned earlier, I have team members that are across time zone and that is A to give Global support, but be the reason I'm so adamant that support in any organization should be remote even if the rest of the organization is not, I mean unless you have like a bajillion dollars and you have offices in like a hundred thousand different countries, is exactly what you're saying in terms of cultural Nuance because when you hire people who are in a geographical region, and of course, there are variances like poor like Brazil. And you know, the rest of Latin America is going to also be different culturally, but if you hire people in geographic regions, they're at least a little bit closer to what the expectations are culturally in handling these conversations. I know I did do a conference in Europe and everyone was like, you're very American. It's a very American approach and I feel that. way but I have Katya and Belarus who is like very like that Eastern Europe, you know Centric and so it's like it's very in love if we hire someone else in you know, and other areas like I have someone in New Zealand we are probably going to get some more film in production work in like Japan. And so that is you know, I'm going to need to hire someone who's Japanese because it is super important to be able to understand those cultural nuances. And no one is going to do that as well as people who are from there. Yeah. It's, you know, the kind I think to squeeze in one more topic. That's thank you for the globalization inside because I think these days every even start-up starts off Global, right? So the customer is our Global. So at all, companies and all business models are Global. I have globalized these days. So that perspective is very helpful. We talked about models. We talked about how to advocate for growth through support. We talked about how the customer experience portion is in the middle and everything else around the companies tying into it. What kind of people do we hire? And what kind of qualities are important? We talked about the compensation that comes in the center. How have you guys seen it? Play from everything from resources to onboarding? Outsourcing Etc. One of you can go first. It's easier to have resourcing conversations if you are tying dollar amounts to like, essentially, if you own a revenue number, like, if you own that retention revenue, or if you own expansions, if you own renewals, if you own for more companies, child a paid conversion. Sometimes it is in that realm of like support but also sits like that sort of customer-facing team, sort of world. If you own one of those numbers, Then you mean that is how you're not perceived as a cost center because you're literally bringing in revenue and you can tie it back to the work that you're doing. I think that's super. That's like that's the first step. Now. I can say personally from a resourcing perspective, our velocity team. Is probably between like 50 and 80 K and then our high-touch team isn't like the 100K range. If it were up to me. The last City the team would also be 80 100 K like purely. But I think I kind of like getting there. I don't I might get in trouble for giving these numbers. I don't know how but I'm trying to slowly make those cases kind of like Bridge those gaps together. A lot of it though does have to do with examples, like the high touch, the high touch team of one, and it's closer to the skill. Sets are closer to account management or Enterprise customer success management. And those salaries from a market perspective, tend to hit a little bit higher like I know everybody whom I hired on my team. They got a relative again. I don't know. I might get in trouble for saying this but got a red, a relatively significant pay increase from where they were coming from. I think that the other thing is too, is like, I again, I don't know. I have no idea if I'm allowed to say any of the stuff that I'm saying, but I'm just making sure that I'm okay. So I was just like, oh my god, do you want to do it? Yeah, bring the public via a yeah, bring up yourself and ask. What do you want to comment on? While most Gather her thoughts and then we do a wrap-up. Sure. going How's that to take you to an adage? My grandfather used to say you get what you pay for? Yeah, that is not and so fundamentally the days of just putting what's in seats. If you're sincere and true about what this customer experience truly means, then you have to incorporate agent experience. Right? And these are the folks who are going to be supporting that experience that you're designing and Energizing and have the vision for. So what does that mean? It means you have to get involved a lot. Earlier in this process, your scope has increased in some roles. I have had vendor management and as a result, it is fantastic. So now I get help deciding, not only, what bpos we partner with, what gets involved up to what that profile should look like for hiring said folks, right? But if you don't own that and you still live, I'll go back to the change management piece, right? You have to have some influence. Most have to gain by and you have to create a narrative and a story on why all of this is important, all the way from deriving or building out that job description. Looks like you're going to get what you pay for. And so if you're talking about having this higher frictionless, seamless multi-channel, real-time meet SL lays kind of experience, then you have to hire the folks that can help you do. This is called an investment. You just need to make sure you're getting a Roi on it. If you're coming from a cost perspective which by the way as finance, major P&L management, and budgeting is everything but you need to just make sure that you have a Roi on that what you're going to expect you'll get it back tenfold whether that's through met for net Network, effect, morality cross-sells, upsells retention and or loyalty. If you invest in all of the folks that are going to help you drive and deliver. The liver that customer experience that you design. So again, I'll close with this. You get what you pay for. I love that. Yeah, you truly get what you pay for yourself. Truly. You also get what you strive for. So, what we are talking about here is that customer support experience can be defined in multiple ways. And we got the strategies that we needed to do more. I was going to close, but you have seen a quick comment if you have a comment. That is not related to directly actually giving numbers out because I probably shouldn't have done that. So everybody just forgets that I said anything but I will say to that point if you get what you pay for it is. Also when support is treated as a cost center, it becomes 1, and here's how if you are not I mean product experts are expensive, empathetic people who are a great problem. Solvers are expensive like people who like and People can solve these problems and building resourcing to create enablement and videos and guides like all of that stuff costs money. And if you are not investing in that, then you get hundreds of support tickets, then if you're like not building those feedback loops and listening to sport. Then you get hundreds of support tickets. If you're sending your emails with no replies and customers are super frustrated because they try to reach out and they have no idea how to because you're guarding your Tech channels then it becomes a cost center because people just drop off and you never see them again. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. I want to do it. I will want to finish quickly. It was excellent to hear your perspectives on the growth through support. I think anyone contemplating the question of should support leaders advocating the Revenue generation portion, have some tips that they could gain take home. So thank you both more. Thanks, agreement. Thank you. I appreciate it. It is a humbling honor. Yeah, it was so wonderful to talk with you. The experience that I will continue with. The next one is going to be Thursday, the 24th. Same time. We will iron out all the glitches, the technical glitches. We had today outside of that. There are some specific newsletters blogs. Stuff that we and we will be transcribing. This discussion also and getting it out to everybody who extended interest and there have been quiet and we will continue the discussions. Both in slack and the LinkedIn channels. Thanks, everyone. Thanks. Bye. Thank you. Bye.

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Explore how Ascendo.ai empowers field service teams with AI-driven automation, predictive insights, and enhanced customer support at Field Service USA Field Service USA April 22–24, 2025 | JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa, located at 74-855 Country Club Drive, Palm Desert, CA 92260 Pre-book a 1:1 Executive Meeting With Us Request a meeting We look forward to meeting you at Field Service USA 2025, taking place April 22–24 at the JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa in Palm Desert, CA. Visit our booth to experience how Ascendo is helping leading field service organizations transform operations with AI-native innovation. Get a live demo of our Field Technician AI Bot — enabling techs with real-time access to manuals, parts directories, and activity history for faster, more accurate resolutions. Learn how advanced context filtering by resolution type and our integration with ServiceNow empowers frontline teams with Generative AI, intent analysis, and sentiment insights. Don’t miss our exclusive sessions featuring EDFR NA’s Chuck Kellen and Melissa Hogan, who will share their success stories with Ascendo in two separate live panels. Book time with our executive team before the event — no sales pitch, just real transformation. Meet Our Speakers Christopher Dickerson Vice President Service Planning & Logistics, Infinera Chuck Kellen Associate Director, Continuous Improvement & Maintenance Digital Product Manager, Asset Optimization, EDFR NA Melissa Hogan Sr. Director, Digital Transformation & Continuous Improvement, Asset Optimization, EDFR NA Trusted by Chris Dickerson VP Service Planning and Logistics Optimized Inventory, Improved SLA We are able to achieve a 95% SLA with hardly any firefighting. We proactively manage and optimize the inventory of 5,000 unique spare parts across 300 depots. Payam Karbassi Global Service Segment Leader MUST HAVE solution for customer support Easy to setup and configure. The game-plan for remote as well as field support prediction results are right-on. Ascendo AI provides excellent support for initial setup and on-going collaboration. We needed an advanced tool to realize labor and material cost savings while maintaining enhanced experience for customers and partners. We are on the path to realize improved benefits across our product portfolio. Kevin Yang Senior Data Scientist Superb models that provides results With Ascendo AI, we are able to enhance patient experience and predict outcomes. The tool also calls out Top trending issues from all of the Voice of the Customer interactions to provide Product Feedback. Ascendo AI helps us to predict patient churn so we can proactively address to improve patient treatment and therapy. Being proactive will enable us to stay as a market leader. Viktor Kehayov VP, Product Engineering SAP FSM Leveraging Enterprise Data: Our SAP FSM with Ascendo AI Our SAP AI-driven FSM solution, alongside partner offering Ascendo AI, is well-equipped for finding reliable solutions using existing data in SAP and other knowledge content. Brenda Guardado Senior Director Customer Success Innovative product offerings and amazing support The Ascendo AI team is extremely pleasant to work with. They are responsive, they show they truly care about your experience with their product, and were quick to iterate on any feedback provided. Ascendo AI has an amazing product offering that integrates well with shared Slack channels and empowers our team to seamlessly support customers effectively and accurately. Cedric Prevost Service Delivery and Infrastructure Leader for Life Care Solution Must have solution finder tool for Field Service Ascendo AI is extremely easy to add new products. We like the design and the easy of use in terms of getting the solutions to customer reported problems. Ascendo ai is helping to support Field engineers doing field and remote support. This is a very useful tool to support new hired field engineer less experience than the others. Alexandra Pham Senior Customer Success Manager Ascendo AI is a must have for CX! Ascendo AI made it so easy to bring Trending issues, Knowledge intelligence, Quality and Voice of the Customer across our support channels. We used Slack as a channel and Ascendo AI helps learn from the interactions. Automatically coming up with Trending issues that we can feed back to the Product team. It is like having Voice of the Customer in our back pockets. Brenda Bernal Vice President AI-Driven Solutions and Knowledge Creation Ascendo AI solves 88% of customer issues immediately and for the rest, guides us by helping to create knowledge. Atad Bronstein Director of Customer Success Transforming Knowledge Dynamics Anjuna’s Product Support team uses Ascendo AI to quickly assimilate knowledge and rapidly resolve new support requests across a variety of customer deployment environments. Our products are highly-technical and always-evolving, and Ascendo AI helped us achieve and even overachieve Support KPIs such as: reducing Time-To-Resolution and increasing the number of Resolution-In-First-Touch. John Heald Global VP, SAP CX SAP and Ascendo AI Partner to Enhance Customer Support Happy to celebrate this news about having Ascendo.ai on our SAP Store. Looking forward to working with them and our great customers, empowering resolution at every point and channel of service. Stacy McQuestion Sr. Logistics Analyst Absolute must for managing customer support SLA Ascendo AI is so easy to get a proactive measure of where we need to stock spare parts to address potential customer demand. We have very stringent and critical SLA requirements and Ascendo AI helps us to take proactive actions. Infinera products are used in mission-critical environments, and it is crucial to provide top-notch customer service while optimizing for cost. Ascendo AI helps us to do just that. Kiet Dam LCS Service VCP & Product Quality Leader Ascendo AI is transforming field service team delivery The tool is very initutive to use and navigate. The tool also constantly improves upon itself as additional data gets uploaded or as users give input. It gives our field team a great gameplan to resolve customer issues based on previous service records. We are trying to improve labor and parts efficiencies along with reducing customer downtime. We have realized labor and material savings year over year. Deovrat Vibhandik Lead Engineer Service Engineering Best Predictor tool for support and troubleshooting for Field Engineers Easy interface that provides the best solution along with guidance on root cause and solution areas. We can also get the best technician to provide guidance on the fix. Ease of troubleshooting and clear gameplan for our field engineers to solve customer issues. We are getting benefits on both labor and material cost. Matt Mitchell Technical Support Principal Engineer From Reactive to Proactive: Ascendo AI Revolutionized Support Ascendo AI has transformed the battleground of technical support, turning what was once a two-week reactive struggle into a one-day proactive plan, ensuring the right solutions (activity and part) are in place before they're needed. Ahmad Azlan Isa Country Senior Engineer Search Resolution Feedback Ascendo AI is helping resolve GE customer devices and systems problems. I appreciate the search engine, which organizes products into distinct groups. Chandrasekar Elongovan Senior Quality Manager Technical Service APAC Deeper insights on the field usage of our equipment We have complex medical devices and we perform varying types of preventative maintenance (PM). Ascendo AI brought out the insights into the cause and effect of such PMs and the trending issues using inference models. These insights are helping us to make proactive steps in the way we provide services. With the recommendation from Ascendo AI we are able to proactively determine PM offerings. James Fitts Director of Service Planning Perfect Solution for Reverse Logistics Spare parts Support Ascendo was Flexible to support our unique business needs. We are able to address our SLA requirements proactively resulting in enhanced Customer Satisfaction and Less Escalation. We are able to predict how much parts we need, where we need it, in time to meet our SLA. With our current Supply Chain Constraints, Planning moves to the forefront of our customer experience. Amitkumar Parihar Customer Success Manager Easy to use and clear prediction results. It is user friendly Easy to connect with CRM data. We can add knowledge enrichment at any point of time. Ascendo AI self learning engine provides best results for customer support team. We introduced new products and also support legacy products, it is so much easier to use Ascendo for new users to ramp up with products. Using Ascendo AI is like Google search for customer support. Amy Waranauskas Service Product Line Manager Easy to use reliable platform with a robust roadmap Ascendo AI has collaboratively worked with us, meeting with us every week to discuss status and collaborate on new ideas. The use case I am involved in is a spares planning application including predictive algorithms. The Ascendo AI application has contributed to significant improvements in SLA compliance for these services. Industry leaders soar with Ascendo.AI It is your turn to elevate with AI agents! What to Expect AI Advisory Lab (Invite-Only) Hear directly from our CCO and real-world customers. The AI Advisory Lab is a closed-door session designed for executives who are curious, cautious, or considering AI. In this invite-only space, we bring together enterprise leaders like EDF to share firsthand how they’ve approached AI transformation. You'll also hear from our Chief Customer Officer — providing strategic insight and front-line perspectives. EDF Panel Spotlights EDF North America’s Chuck Kellen and Melissa Hogan take the stage — separately — to tell their AI story. Chuck Kellen (Associate Director, Continuous Improvement & Maintenance Digital Product Manager, Asset Optimization, EDFR NA) and Melissa Hogan (Sr. Director, Digital Transformation & Continuous Improvement, Asset Optimization, EDFR NA) are two voices you don’t want to miss. In two distinct panels, they’ll share how EDF NA deployed Ascendo.ai to improve frontline responsiveness, optimize cost, and build trust between tech and the field. Melissa is also one of the few senior women leaders in Service today, a powerful and rare perspective on AI, leadership, and workforce empowerment. Nokia Boardroom Join an exclusive, off-floor executive session with Nokia and select Field Service leaders. We’re facilitating a private roundtable between global leaders like Nokia and invited execs considering AI adoption at scale. This isn’t a product pitch, it’s a strategic conversation on how enterprise service organizations are evaluating AI, operationalizing it, and driving success. Booth Demos: AI in Action Real-time, real-world demos of our AI-native platform built for Field Service. Swing by our booth for an interactive experience of how Ascendo.ai helps complex organizations like EDF scale faster. We’ll be showcasing our integration with SAP FSM, delivering fast time-to-value and real automation on day one. Our Messaging: Empowerment > Replacement It’s not about replacing humans. It’s about making them superhuman. Our AI-native platform is designed for automation, frontline empowerment, and cost reduction, with a strong focus on real-world integration. We’re here to differentiate from legacy vendors with a modern, measurable, and people-first approach. Press, PR, and Real Recognition G2’s #1 User-Recommended AI Platform for Field Service and more. We’re not just talking about AI — our users are recommending it. Backed by G2 recognition, strong LinkedIn storytelling, and press coverage tied to real deployments (like EDF), we’re building a brand on results, not just hype. Live Engagement That Goes Deeper Let’s talk live, face-to-face, human-to-human. We’re not sending SDRs. We’re sending our execs, our product leaders, and real customers. Whether it’s a spontaneous chat on the floor or a scheduled 1:1 meeting, we want to understand your challenges and share how others are solving theirs. Awards & Achievements We rely on the power of data, and so can you. All G2 ratings Ascendo is extremely easy to add new products. We like the design and the easy of use in terms of getting the solutions to customer reported problems. Cedric Prevost Service Delivery and Infrastructure Leader for Life Care Solution - Europe & Africa at GE Healthcare Pre-book a 1:1 Executive Meeting With Us Request a meeting

Discover how to transform your customer service into a profit center. Learn about the CX Maturity Model and strategies for making support proactive and revenue-generating. Gain insights on tailoring your pitch to different decision-makers and measuring ROI. Turning Customer Service into Profit Centre | Transcription Previous Next Kay - Welcome to the experience dialogue. In these interactions. We pick a Hot Topic. That doesn't really have a straightforward answer. We then bring in speakers who have been there and seen this but approached it in very different ways. This is a space for healthy disagreements and discussions but in a respectful way. By the nature, of how we have conceived, this, you will see the passionate voice of opinions. Friends having a dialogue and thereby even interrupting each other or finishing each other's sentences. At the end of each dialogue, we want our audience to leave with valuable insights and approaches that you can try at your workplace and continue the discourse on social media channels. A little bit about Ascendo, it is addressing optimization of support to operations within enterprises so that they can serve their customers better. We enable enterprises to optimize workflow for the agents and provide dashboards for insights on risk, churn analysis, and visibility for senior managers. We are revolutionalizing support ops in the same way DevOps and RevOps have transformed other areas of the business. In the last three years, we have created a G2 category and are ranked #1 in user satisfaction. We are very proud to be loved by our users, and now with the topic Turning Customer Service to a Profit Center. For most companies, customer service is still viewed as a cost center and with the increasing and ever-changing customer demands, this perception is further strengthened. However, when utilized correctly, customer service could be one of the biggest revenue generators in your entire organization. Now it’s a pleasure to introduce the speaker, Jonathan Shroyer, Chief Customer Experience Innovation Officer at Arise Virtual Solutions Inc. Arise .has been following a customer experience maturity model that can help you turn your cost-center service team into a profit center. We will be talking about each phase of the maturity model and how to make a support center proactive and profit-oriented. Jonathan, a pleasure to chat with you. Thanks for the opportunity to come on the show. Jonathan - It's really great to be kind of in the catalog of great shows that you have and has the opportunity to share a little bit more about the views of turning customer service into a profit center, so I appreciate the opportunity, Kay. Kay - And, what is interesting about your background, Jonathan, is. You've done various types of companies, from security to, you know, office applications to Autodesk and Kabam fully in the gaming space and now you are in the gaming space. So, it's fabulous to see the entire customer success and how it has been, it's rare to see people who have had decades of customer success experience.so it's wonderful to have you at the show. Jonathan - Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. Kay - So let's start right there. Actually, since having decades of experience, Jonathan, tell me a little bit about how you have seen customer service change over time. Jonathan - Well, I think it's interesting. So when we go back to the 1980s, there was this very kind of brick-and-mortar viewpoint to services. It was in the early times when we started to see the kind of technology morph to where contact centers or call centers, started to come about. Then you go into the nineties and that that infrastructure at the the kind of the boon of the internet at the end of the nineties enabled. That type of capability to be serviced outside of the local country, whatever the local country was, right? I was in the United States and they were fast, quickly. The 2010s in it and, and we went from, Hey, we can contact to, all of a sudden there's text, there's email, there's chat, there's Facebook, etc. I mean, there are all these different ways that customers can access brands, and what changed at that moment was this concept where brands now could hear from their customers more often, understand their customers more and the customers had a lot more information and data to make better choices, and they started to make different choices based of how brands started to treat them and then as we fast forward, you know, up through the 2010s into now, into the 2020s, we're noticing that customers are making choices based off of how brands treat them in their customer experience, and they're making their choices with their feet and with their money. So it's been an interesting transition of where, and how consumers and customers make their business and their brand choices based on how they're treated. Kay - it's fascinating that you brought in the data, and evolution along with the customer service evaluation when you answered this, Jonathan. So one of the things we say is metrics are good, but metrics don't say a story, data does. Do you actually see the way brands are relating to customers and the amount of data that they are using more and more and, how do you see the data transition also over the years? Jonathan - Well, I think what's interesting is, data is like super important to companies. I think consumers don't always think about it in as in that valuable sense, right? They think of, oh, I'm not a member. You know, I'm a person, treat me individually. Customize it for me. But the reality is, for companies to be able to deliver that optimum service, that best-in-class service that drives stickiness, loyalty, and so forth, they have to have the data to understand, what the customers are doing with their product inside their product and so forth. And so I think that over the years, one of the things, you see happen in the early 2010s, this idea of a unique identifier that could identify a customer across an entire company or entire product suite, and the reason why a unique identifier was created partially was for security reasons, to protect the customer, protect the client, the business and so forth. But the other component of it, which people didn't realize at the time, was and enable the company to be able to correlate. Data between different parts of the company. So for example, it allows this correlation between customer experience and profitability as an example, right? Or like adoption and usage and different product suites or different product features that come out. A company can now say, feature X, and based on what all these key clients are telling, Based on using it and loving it or not loving I, that tells us whether the product feature was a good product feature or not, in addition to, anecdotal feedback from the market or from the individual customer. So I think, the transition and maturation of going from very lean to data in the eighties to big data in the 2020s have been just as important in this framework of creating profitability through customer experience as it has. As, the actual activities or the processes that a customer experience team does to drive that profit. Kay - Arise has been actually following a CX maturity model and I would love to understand how you see that model will make support, proactive and how do you see that transition from cost center to profit Center. I know that's two different questions, if you wanna split it and answer, that's fine too. Jonathan - So to give a little context, I invented the maturity model called the Service Tech Maturity Model at the time and trademarked it, but the idea was when I started Officium Labs, I had been working in large enterprises in startups and gaming companies for some time and what I realized was that there wasn't like a simple, easy-to-use framework or model that you could go and join a company and all of a sudden look at like, based of this model and this framework, I have all the features necessary to create profit and to communicate profit, to the power cores of the company in a way, they understood it. And so what I thought I would do is, I said, what if we treated customer experiences if it's a product? So if you create a product, what you tend to do is, create a framework of what the product is going to be. And inside that product framework, you have pillars that we'll call major feature sets. For each of them in your feature sets, you have feature components that build that feature area, right? So for example, if you're building a Microsoft Office product? They have seven or eight different types of feature sets, and then they're like, well, we wanna add this, or we wanna add that, and the same thing with the video game, the same thing with any type of product, right? So I said, let's build a customer experience product or let's at least think that way, right? So change the mindset and say, what are the pillars that we need to have inside of this product? And then what are the features inside the pillars? So for example, workforce management, learning, and development, interactions, products, those types of things, right? Quality, operations, those types of kind of pillars. Okay, so those are the pillars. And then what are the features that need to exist? And, so we build them out and we said, okay, these are the basic feature sets if you wanna run the basic operation. So, when we use that word, basic was a, had a different meaning than it does today. Basic has a very different meaning, The urban definition of it and whatnot. But generally speaking, the next one was, what's the standard look like? What's the next feature set? And then what does best in class look like? And then, you know, what is the next generation look like? So we build it that way for the users, but the idea was that if you build a customer experience with the product mindset and you have these features, then you can help companies understand, where are they at in the maturity model or where are they at in the customer experience product to be able to mature to a state where they can deliver a profit? And the outcome is if you're in the best, if you have the best in class features or the next generation of features of the maturity model, we can 100% show you how to correlate the work you're doing in customer experience. Kay - I love it because suddenly when we treat it like a product, what happens is, it enables the entire company to become a customer-oriented, customer-obsessed, customer-focused company, right? So it's easy for all the teams within the company, within the organization to tune in to the customer very easily because then there is a framework that enables a company to tune to that and say, okay, marketing, this is what I need to do. Sales, this is what I need to do, product, this is what I need to do. So I love that. So, can you summarize the eight pillars, and then we can dive into at least a few of them? Jonathan - them? Yeah, for sure. I mean, so when we look at the pillars, You, you've got, uh, the interactions and interactions really include all of your technology, so it's the non-human facing interaction component, like everything that sits behind that makes the interaction possible, whether it's AI, technology, CRM and so forth, then you have kind of the operations piece, and this is really about all the different processes and how to Interact and engage, you know, with that human being on the other side. Do you use vendors? What are your frameworks of success, your methodologies, and those types of pieces? Then you have the quality piece, which really looks at the overall experience and what type of quality experience you're delivering, whether you look at quality from customer effort, customer satisfaction, NPS, whatever it is, you know, it has that piece. Then you're looking into the learning and development piece, which is how are you training, onboarding, and equipping your people to be able to talk to the customers, engage with the customers, and then be proficient. In that piece, the next one you have is, we call it content management, but it's really looking at your knowledge base, the knowledge that's out there, whether it's through self-service or you know, whether it's through using social channels like Discord or other components and pieces. The next one looks at the product itself, which is like we, we firmly believe that when you design an experience for a customer, you design it at the development table. You don’t. The product's launched service go, make the customers happy like that's old school thinking. So inside of it, we have this whole concept of product liaisons that need to sit as in the experience design piece, design it, and develop it and then you go to beta or alpha, then you go to beta, and then you launch it, right? So there are some key components overall. And then, and then we, then we kind of then look at, you know, what's the rest of, you know, the tech stack that looks that supports the organization, that doesn't really have to do with it. The interactions themselves, cuz there are a lot of techs inside of the experience side, right? And then you look at kind of the pillar with looks at the customer journey, looks at the journey mapping and all of those different components and pieces, so really kind of, it sets up these different overall pillars that which is a little bit more complex for someone that's trying to follow along to what I'm saying now. so we can share a visual of it later. But the most important thing is, what are the features that you have today? So how do you assess against that? And then what are the key features that you want to add over the next 12 months? And so every company's gonna be a little bit different in that, in that component. Some companies wanna invest in interactions or AI, some companies don't have a quality program or WFM program, and they're gonna wanna invest in those things first, right? And so it's gonna be different by company, but the goal is how do I create ROI? How do I create profit? And then once you have the unique identifier set up and you have the correlation capabilities. The maturity model is then doing A/B testing and proving out, what correlative values, and a correlative profit look like for your business, because it's gonna be different for gaming, which is the hat that I'm wearing, right? We have gaming clients, healthcare clients, finance clients, and clients all over the world. Tech clients, it's gonna be a little bit different, like how you drive profitability or correlation of profitability, in what tests you need to do and so forth, so that's doing the assessment, understanding the model, but then actually putting the model into the application and driving it as a business strategy. A business transformation is just as powerful and having the mathematical data to verify and validate the work that you're doing has an impact, that's kind of the soup to nuts. Yeah. Kay - So what is interesting for me is when if you look, you know the model that you're talking about, if you take the interactions, right? So the interactions are actual ones that is there in the system. The second one you talked about is the activity that is happening with the customer and if I tie in with the unique identifier, what are the existing regards with this unique identifier? I know. What are the interactions or the activity that are happening in any channel, that's happening with the customer? And then I can start correlating saying, how is this Piece of interaction that's happening right now with the customer, with quality, with learning and development, with the product and all of that and suddenly you have a nice flushed-out full interaction where you have the intelligence built-in and then you take, you know, thousands or 10 thousands of several of those interactions and then look at the patterns and the anomaly of those interactions, it becomes a beautiful, intelligent player that's more customer first. Did I give the same view of what you mentioned, but more from a data perspective, but does it? Jonathan - Yeah, I mean it totally does and I think the reason why I create the maturity model is cuz what I found is that there's a big disconnect between how people at companies that make funding decisions and the services team themselves and so it was a big frustration and a big tension between the services teams and the power cores as it were at a company that is making these investment decisions and so what I thought was important, how can we talk in a language that will help the power cores in the company understand the importance of investing in the customer experience side? Right? And that's where the money comes down to like that was the simple question. I'm a big believer that simple questions lead to the next generation of innovation. And so that was the simple question, asked me and then I was like, okay, well in order to do that, it's this, and it's the maturity model and the application of the transformation but the most important piece is, then how are you communicating back to the power cores of the company. The impact, and that's what, where one of the biggest things that the power cores have to get over is investing in the unique identifier, because most companies, they'd be like, we've been over for 30 years. A unique identifier across 45 databases is gonna be really hard. Yeah, it's gonna be really hard, but it could also drive 10 to 20 to 30 million of future revenue for you as well and so helping them understand and correlate is super powerful and then demonstrates the impact of like, hey, you gave us a million dollars. We protected, or we created 4 million or 5 million of revenue based on that a million funding that you gave us, and that conversation is just as powerful and important to the overall success of the services team, creating a profit center and communicating then the framework itself too and so I think that's important to note. Kay - I love, how you mentioned the power cores, who make the decisions, so let's talk a little bit about the various people who are making the decisions for this funding and the kind of roles and how it differs from your experience. Jonathan - Well, it's super interesting. So I think there's like four or five cores inside of a company and in any company, it's never the same group of people that have the actual power versus the perceived decision-making and authority and so you look at IT, you look at finance, you look at marketing, you look at sales, and then you kind of look at the executive team and product, so those are kind of the six-ish power cores and in some companies, product drives everything. Like product is the power core, right? And you see this a lot in startup companies. You see this in companies, that are more tech, you know, industrial companies, but then you go into other companies like financial or healthcare companies that have been around for 30 years and I find that oftentimes finance and legal are the power cores in the companies, which is super interesting to me cause it's different than, a product power core company or a finance power core company. I think the most important is to understand here, doing an analysis on who actually makes the decisions in your company, and then what's the decision process that they go through to make decisions, and then how can you speak in that language? And I think that's the most important thing to think about. Like, I was with a gaming client two years back and it was clear that finance was like a power core in their company and so the way that I pitched the maturity model and the value that it could provide was a little bit different than a gaming company where tech was the power core. Right. And so it was much easier to get tech to do the single identifier than finance, and so you had to talk in a different language. Like as example, tech was like, yeah, it makes sense, we should do it. Then we were ready to go and they're like, yeah, let's do BDI, Big Data, and let's do this and they were ready to invest much faster, whereas a finance company or finance power core was like, well actually, what's the ROI? Take me through these five presentations to convince me and prove to me, and then I wanna follow up every week afterward so in one way is not bad or, or right or wrong, but they're just different and so it's important that as you start to think about, how do I talk about profitability. In the customer experience area, you just have to know who your audience is and what's important to them, and then how you can frame the language to help them get value out of it. Kay - there are a lot of people watching this, who are from the support background, and one of the biggest things that they are asking is, how do I take this argument to the decision makers? It's changing a little bit with the chief customer offices themselves making those decisions, but they have to work with the rest of the company, so I think what would be wonderful for this audience is let's take it through these examples that you talked about. Let's talk about stories that are wonderful, Jonathan. For example, this finance, and how did you do it for the finance, with the CX maturity model? Jonathan - Well, I find the easiest way to start with any power core is to start with, its magical word, which I love, it's called a pilot and most power cores are willing to take risks on a pilot, but they might not be able to be willing to take risks enterprise-wide, right? or company-wide and so what I end to find is it's really important for the customer service team to identify a group of customers, whether it's a product, whether it's a delineation of customers inside of a product or, whatever it is. Find a group of customers, you believe, as you have a hypothesis like, Hey, this group of customers will definitely be able to demonstrate a profit. We have a hypothesis in video gaming as an example, a mobile game company that we worked with, the top 2% of their customers generated 80% of their revenue, right? And so for us, let’s focus on doing a pilot for the top 2% of these customers, let's identify, what we're going to change for this 2% of the customers versus the rest of the customer base. You can call that an offering, right? What's the pilot offering going to be? What are the pro processes, the methodologies, and the policies that we need to change for this pilot, and then what's the data that needs to be recorded or adjusted in order for us to be able to demonstrate whether the pilot was a success or not and then, what's the key success measures of that? So you build all that and then you take that presentational proposal to the power core. In this case, it was the finance team and then for the finance team, and it was really important for them to understand how this impacts the bottom line. So we built the entire presentation to do all of that, but then also talk about, like this is going to be an investment of X, but it's gonna deliver an ROI of Y and we're gonna be able to get it. Know that the ROI was delivered within eight weeks or 10 weeks, right? You give them a timeframe. And then you set up the meeting to talk about this, the success or the non, the findings of the pilot, and then from there, you know, the findings statistically significant enough to scale it, or do you need to elongate the pilot for another six weeks or eight weeks to get that statistic significant? We presented to them and so forth, and in this case, we were able to present it. For the pilot, we scaled it enterprise-wide based on the fact that they saw the ROI, they saw stickiness and retention numbers. They saw the stickiness and increased revenue attribution and so we were able to do it right, but that's the most important thing is to start with the pilot experiment, have a hypothesis, prove your hypothesis, and make sure you think through all of it, the processes, the policies, the methodologies, the data structures, the technologies, all that build up a bit, right? Put it together and then proposes that and then make sure you have your finance number of what you need for funding versus what the output is going to be and then you can attribute what the success of the pilot was or not. Kay - That's, you know, essentially, a full framework for the proof of concept, right? So that's essentially right from the planning all the way to the measurement, the proof of concept too, so in the end, there are no questions about, was this even successful? It is very clear what that success metric would be, so in the end, the decision-makers can participate in saying, yes, this made sense. Now how do I, we go and deploy and in what stages do we deploy? That's very good. Would you like to add anything else with respect to the framework, if it was a different decision-maker? Jonathan - Well, I mean, I think that like, if you're talking to like a technology or product power core, they're interested in the ROI, but they're also interested in what could we change in the product in addition to what you're doing in an experiment in the service? It's like, maybe like after the beta test, we like that, we'll just build it into the product, right? And maybe we'll just become part of the product and it could drive that attribution, so they just, they just have it. It's more of a like, Hey, how can we use this next? Yeah, give us data online, but then let's build in the product so we can scale it and it's not a manual process and then they tend to think, you're a creator as well. I know that you think this way too awesome, but how do we build the product so we don't need so much manual intervention? We retain the customers earlier in the cycle versus later in the cycle, right? So a product like something like that, somebody that's in, from a legal standpoint, but are we getting away? Is there any risk or, like, are we gonna lose all these other customers because we're doing this thing for this customer? or what about the data? Like, is this data, is it gonna be GDPR? Is it those types of things? Right. You have to go through all that for power core, but those are kind of the questions that they'll want to have the answers to. Right? If you talk to an executive, maybe an executive that's more high level, they'll be like, I don't even know about anything. All I wanna know about is what's the service metric, what's the ROI metric and gimme a weekly update. Right? So it will just depend on who the power core is and how invested or interested they are and how you make the sausage versus the sausage being made for lack of a better metaphor versus the sausage, how well it tastes, and how much customers love the sausage and all that jazz. Kay - Yeah. So, essentially in that group of concept, the ROI is the metric for the finance person, and that metric changes if it is a product person, marketing or sales person, or something else, that's kind of how the metrics tie back to the profitability of it, so at this point, you don't know anything about your customer experience of the product, but here it is, when you tie all of this together, you have real-time feedback on how customers view the product and what changes you need to make to the product and that is the driving force for turning it into a profit center. So, the CCO drives who the decision-maker is, and what is the metric that's going to resonate with that decision-maker? Jonathan - I think that as you do that, create that decision maker and help them become a sponsor and that will be the next powerful thing, you have these conversations cuz if you have a sponsor, you're good, that's outside of CS. If you can get an executive sponsor that has influence in the company, then we're not only gonna be able to try this first pilot, you're gonna be able to do other experiments. There's, a Nelson Mandela quote I love, “I never lose, I only win or learn.” that's a very iterative way of thinking, which is like, either I won or I learned something and now I'm gonna go try something new and I'm gonna win at that which tends to be more stereotypical of a product or, or a tech power core, but in essence, I think any company that wants to be successful, they have to try this. Long ago, the waterfall was the way that we did project management. Hopefully, that's gone because it doesn't allow for iteration. It assumes that you're having, this is the product and we're delivering the product. Let's see what customers think. You know, it's a very risky way to do it in my viewpoint, but it's an iterative way and I think that if you can get a sponsor and they'll be okay, what's the project that we're gonna do? what's the next experiment that we're gonna do to drive stickiness and retention? and then what you'll find is once you prove that pilot out, you'll get another PowerPoint. Be like, wait a second. Like how are you doing that? Oh, wait a minute. I wanna know how can you help me think about that for marketing. Or how can you help me think about that for sales? You know, how do we drive that same mentality? Maybe the framework is different, but in the customer journey, how do we drive a mentality of experience, design, and retention proactively rather than just reactively? so then you look, then you start to give this interest across the entire customer journey. Kay - Yeah. I know we are running out of time. I wanna squeeze just one little thing into the conversation. How do you create urgency? The easiest is to create that urgency to make this happen. Jonathan - You show the amount of money that is being lost because of it, like that's the other important piece is like you when you look at the industry data and you know, I have industry data, I could share that. Maybe each particular customer experience person has their own data, but essentially I always like to do an analysis, a simple analysis to do this is all open source, right? Give it away. So, but a simple analysis, what is the revenue generation of customers that never contact support versus the revenue generation of customers that do contact support, do that analysis and full stop. 99% of the time, what you'll find is that customer service or customers that contact support is stickier. They drive greater revenue, and they have more of an impact on your future and so that revenue difference is saying, hey, all these customers that never contact support, they just left. They don't have a good experience, they don't care about the brand, and they don't care about the product. That's money that's on the table, that's lost. That's how you create a sense of urgency. Usually, in large companies, that's millions of dollars. And that starts to speak. Kay - people. Yeah and then you can start showing urgency on what are the brief thoughts, right? So then you need to get to it now, to make it important and I like that metric. Anything else that you would like to add that add to it? Jonathan - I mean, I think that as you think about it from a high-level standpoint, I always think about two words. How are you protecting your customer, but how are you optimizing the experience? And so that's, that's those two words are kind of what helped us build the maturity model because different pillars in the maturity will protect the experience. Different features and other features will optimize the experience. I think as an example, like, protecting the experiences is really understanding who the customers are, and how they want to be engaged. Meeting them where they are, as an example versus where you want them to be, but optimizing is looking at, how does AI help my customer have a better experience versus human-to-human engagement? Encourage better experience. so those are just very simple examples of how you protect and optimize. But as we built out the framework and we built out the maturity model, that's how we thought. Kay - Excellent! Protecting the customer versus optimizing the customer's understanding, how to create the urgency around, how many you know, revenue generated with customers who reach out to support versus not, and then building out that, a framework for the proof concept to make it a reality and then driving from the proof of concept into the entire deployment to make this a customer-wide phenomenon, so thank you very, very, very much, Jonathan. I think you have given a full framework. It feels like there is a lot we covered in a short time and it feels like there's still more we will certainly bring you in for a further conversation, but I really appreciate the time that you took today. Thank you. Jonathan - No, thanks for the opportunity. If anyone has any questions about it, they can reach out to me on LinkedIn or you can find me. I'm a Chief CX Officer on TikTok on the instant, a variety of other places, and YouTube. So, thank you so much, Kay for the time, to share my thoughts and add to all the wisdom that you know, that your podcast and your life have. Thanks for the opportunity. .

Speaker - Charlotte Ward Using proactive metrics for support operations Speaker - Charlotte Ward December 1, 2022 Previous Item Next Item Using proactive metrics for support operations When: 9 AM PST, 1st December 2022 Where: Linkedin Live @Ascendo AI Speaker - Charlotte Ward In these interactions, we pick a hard topic that doesn’t really have a straightforward answer. We then bring in speakers who have been there, and seen this but approached it in very different ways. This is a space for healthy disagreements and discussions but in a respectful way. Just by the nature of how we have conceived this, you will see passionate voices of opinions, friends having a dialogue, and thereby even interrupting each other or finishing each other’s sentences. At the end of each dialogue, we want you and our audience to leave with valuable insights and approaches that you can try at your workplace - and continue the discourse in our social media channels! Introduction to the topic “Support today reacts to external metrics rather than proactively creating and using data” Our speaker Charlotte will be taking us through a framework on how to look at support operations data from the eye of proactive support. She will be taking us through which support metrics matter, which ones need to be retired, which ones to evolve. She will be sharing a practical example on how she and her team are transitioning to proactive metrics. We will discuss – What works in the proactive realm and what needs to change and why? What are the key proactive metrics? How to look at support operations data from the eye of proactive support? We are going to bring many more informative points, to learn more Join Ascendo AI for this Experience Dialogue on Using proactive metrics for support operations. We bring such interesting discussions that will gain an insight into how Charlotte Ward Head of Support, at Snowplowr, manages it. At the end of each dialogue, we want you and our audience to leave with valuable insights and approaches that you can try at your workplace - and continue the discourse in our social media channels! Introduction to the speakers Charlotte is also known for building relationships with customers that stand the test of time. She spent nearly 25 years delivering, defining, and leading exceptional customer care and support experiences. She builds global teams of experts and coaches them to focus on the customer. She has worked on the front line in a heated call center environment. She led remote, highly technical teams working on deeply bespoke implementations, and love it.

Learn how to attract and hire diverse talent with insights from industry experts and research on evolving employee expectations, inclusive job descriptions, and best practices for building a diverse workforce. How to Attract and Hire Diverse Talent | Transcription Previous Next Kay - An introduction to our experience dialog here, in these interactions. We just picked a HotTopic.We don't have a straightforward answer and then we bring in speakers. So being there seeing this product, I broached it in very different ways. This is a space for healthy, disagreements and discussions, but in a very respectful way, just by the nature of how we have conceived this, we will see passionate voices of opinions from friends. Having a dialogue and thereby even interrupting each of their finishing. At the end of this, we want our audience to leave with approaches that you can try in the workplace and we continue the dialogue in our slank and Linkedin channels. There are three different slack channels and around eleven. Different LinkedIn groups where the questions are coming in. So as we start with it, we will start with some pride questions, but feel free to have the interactions and we'll bring those questions in and make that or comments and make that. As part of the discussion, I want to introduce us to the topic for today. Teams want to encourage diversity in all forms, including socioeconomic education, thinking, gender, race, age, and culture. The topic is very large. And with the brake Tobias team this year with the international women's day, we planned a three part series and the part that we are discussing is how to attract and hire diverse talent. Attracting and hiring diverse talent entails everything from the job description. That caters to diverse candidates. By the interviewers, the interviewing Styles, communication culture of the company onboarding, and so forth. It is my honor and privilege to announce the speakers here today. David is the chairman and president of women and technology international and they are a Global organization. They founded in 1989, and they have around 160,000 members and 300 plus corporate partners,87 percent female,and32%in leadership positions, the interesting thing, That I learned recently is participated in a glass door, sealing research in1995 that they are redoing as a 2.0, research coming up and we would be. It would be wonderful to hear a lot of insights from that research today. The other speaker we have is HarryConnick. Arica is the spp of the executive programs at witty and she's also a techie. So she has written a book for cybersecurity for project managers, she has both corporate and nonprofit experience and it will be honored to have her as a leader. But the few questions today as we are talking about the research and as we are bringing up all of these discussions, we may pop in a slide or two here but other than that it's going to be pretty much a dialogue. You could have called David pleasure, welcome. Yeah, thank you. Let me start with the first question. Why? Why is it important to even have diversity? And what benefits does it bring to the organization? David - Sure. Look, I think there's a lot of data out there. Some of which will have and I'll share a little bit more about the kernel research, we're doing, and let me go back, one of the Inspirations of witty starting back in the 80s and the mid-80s one of our big clients wasHP Labs over up in your neck of the woods. And we worked with their technology Group. And when you'd walk through the halls of labs, they have it. All these focus groups focus group rooms have doctors and lawyers. People of different genders, ethnicities, and colors. All Just looking at how technology can improve their lives and that's really when they did their work looking 10 years out on their technology. Roadmaps that reallybecametheinspirationforwitty once we decided to start it in 1989. So there's just and there's unlimited Data about just how different opinions and how do you know? Different people? Use technology differently, right? So I think it's Money Employee Engagement and serving the people. Niharika - that's great. David and I'll start with I kind of don't like to date myself. But 25 years ago, when I started my career, I was the only woman in a switchboard manufacturing plant that was way back in l&t, India, and kind of, I thought what is it? I mean, is it really kind of rocket science why it's designed by their women, not there and then I came to the U.S. in the u.s. I was managing infrastructure projects and they're also I felt myself being the Only Woman at the table and when I look back, I see that there had been diverse diversity at Time. Maybe the things that were designed would have been different because ultimately our business users are not just men. They are diverse people of all colors, races, and gender, and whatever we are doing, in terms of our business and products has to cater to all our users. Kay - I would love for you to bring in some of the topics that you have seen in the research process and witty and we can continue the conversation that way we have questions about teaching, but let's continue with the topics that you guys have researched and have a lot of data to substantiate with police. Niharika - Sure, it sounds good. So, David, you talked about witty starting in 1989, if you could share with the audience, how did we start? And where did it come from? David - Sure. So, one of the things that prompted the start of witi and my mom and I had a company called Criterion research that I started working with her in, in 1987. And what we did with Criterion research, we worked with Silicon Valley companies, and then the few companies down in, l.a. identifying people with core competencies in different areas of tech. And then we give them a report and they'd hire them from their companies. That type thing in 89, there was an article that came out of their coin, the term glass ceiling. And at the time, the conversation was about women approaching 50% of the workforce but still only four to five percent in upper management positions. So the first President Bush and then shortly thereafter, Wonder President Clinton is what our Administration started to study about. out to look at this we wanted what my mom's idea was she had been, I was very young at the time, but she was in, more interfacing with our It's that we're sharing just some of the challenges they were having and these were amazing women that were PhDs in physics mathematics those types of things. They weren't necessarily getting upset and angry about it. Groups were protesting and they had every right to do that, but they were just more disappointed because the more Junior people would go golf with the director and then they would get overlooked. So we wanted to start with witty, as people are just starting to use email and it's like how can we create this network? That's very proactive. Business Centric and supportive to help our members get any connection resource piece of information. They need to get to the next level, how we can include men in the conversation because we want them and many of them. And most of them were holding the executive roles so we wanted them to have an open book and see our amazing community. And then on the company side, just educate. Why is this beneficial to the business? Not just to check a box or try to look good or that type of thing and that's how we evolved back in 89. Things have changed a little bit since then Kay - David, it would be wonderful to hear about the glass ceiling research in itself. Could you just speak a little bit about it before? , the hurricane goes too deep into it. David - Yeah, definitely. And I had, that time in 89 I landed this company Borland that's over in Scotts Valley as a client and worked with them to grow bored with Philippe to grow Borland. Witty grew, Grassroots. And then in 1995, we had our first women in technology conference and everybody said, oh, you'll get a couple we had 2,500 of hundred people, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, so, is exciting and that word started about what we were doing, we had then been contacted by a woman named Renee Redwood and who was the executive director of the glass ceiling commission. And then you know, it's and she was, she was she had headed up this four-year research project. So they came to us and said, hey, could you help share this information with technology companies and a lot of the research had to do with, what are some of the systemic issues that are preventing women and underrepresented minorities from getting to the next level in all companies. And what can they do to not lose this opportunity? Because again, all this stuff is about the growth of the business company engagement making the shareholders happy. So we had Renee and our second conference. If you go into the conference archives on our site and think there's even a If she talked, we had, I think 40 companies in Silicon Valley, listened to technology companies, listened to the research. So, that's how we initially got involved in it. So, yeah, that's why, why 2.0, and why now, sure. So, what we were looking at is, you know, all of us have been affected by the pandemic and I think just leaving up to the pandemic. You know, we just saw a lot of Changes our members would constantly give us feedback about challenges. They were continuing to just get fed up when they got to certain levels and companies and left. And then we had talked about one of our first virtual conferences in 2020 because of the pandemic and Renee was on a panel talking about some of the things that she had implemented. Because after leaving the glass ceiling commission. She just wanted to do Consulting and was brought into companies that needed support in these areas. Now, a lot of times, the two big ones that I will talk about were Texaco and Coca-Cola. There were lawsuits racial and gender discrimination lawsuits. That prompted them to bring Renee and to look at the organization and what they were doing, she had been brought in. There's a guy named Cyrus Meter. Who's also famous for putting the Rooney Rule into the NFL and Renee was brought in, and implemented? Many of them think about the learnings from the glass ceiling report and things she had learned since and worked with the companies to shift their environments. And now we've got six or seven years of data. Texaco Coca-Cola prophets through the roof. These are staying, they're engaged stockholders are happy and David, is that segues into the question, which we are getting is whom all participated in this research. So yeah and that's so anyways. Okay, that's why I said well let's update the glass ceiling report and we're going to call a glass ceiling report 2.0. We're not 100% sure. That'll be the name that comes out right now. The pandemic I think what we've seen over the last three years now is that everything's a fast-forwarded digital transformation. How we're dealing and serving our customers is so different from how we're all working. So we thought It would be a great opportunity. Now to push this forward, take a lot of the good things and promote that from the first glass ceiling report and update. So we did. So we had about 1,000 people fill out this hour-long survey so far. We're doing many interviews, it's going to be based on qualitative and quantitative research. Niharika - Yeah, so we're getting some exciting information that I think is going to make it a better place for everybody. David - Great. Yeah. So that answers that question in the chat that it was our members and we also reached out to some leaders of the organizations to get insights. Yes, right. So I take, yeah. And Intel's one of our lead Partners on that. So they had about 200 about 20% of the people were Intel and then the rest of them were we're qualified witty members, that worked at larger organizations, either in technology companies or technology organizations within tech companies. Yeah, and I'll add here is that one of the insights they got is that 31 percent of the respondents changed their jobs last year, the great resignation here. Great. Niharika - So David we talked about that. It is so important to have diversity, but something is missing. Even if we are talking about diversity, people want to attract diverse talent, but hiring is not diverse. As we have spoken to our members, they say that they go, they apply but they are not getting a response. So what are the challenges of hiring? Managers and candidates are facing now. David - Sure. And I can speak to where I'm coming from and what I hear and speak to a lot of people every week but just being in the search business for many years kind of before starting witi, I think it's there's wait, there's a lot of automation. I think that makes it easier for certain roles and these 80s systems and just the overwhelming of just overwhelming. I think for many of the companies I think right now joining communities tail. you've created either with several other buildings. Those relationships are just key. So I'd say, if you're a person looking for your next opportunity or if you're a company that wants to engage people, I just think the days of just posting jobs and going to Career Fairs and stuff like that for most positions or over, I think it's really about, a connecting with the people and Intentionally building your network so that you're going to be exposed to jobs. And I'd say probably when I my search business, maybe 60% of the jobs. There was never a wreck. It was more. Oh, this person's available. Let's open a rack. This is an opportunity that's one and then I think n ber two is just getting your brand out there and writing a contribution. There are so many great platforms now and we are seeking support. So many of my friends and I have friends from the technology industry that I might have placed or just worked with 33 years ago that I'll still speak to once a month. So I think it's for those of you that might be watching this, that are maybe a little younger than may not have been born when he started. This is a small world, would you agree with that Kay? I think so. Right. Kay - Yeah, most definitely and, we, it's interesting. We have a lot of people who interface with customers here in what you are talking about. Things have changed, it has and I think the pandemic has brought a little bit more Dynamic into all of this. It would be wonderful to see and hear from both of you. What do you see in? The research has changed just in the pandemic times, for example. We can speak a lot about customer support. Customer success and customer experience are areas where people are not able to go even people who are servicing hospitals. We're not able to go and they have to do things remotely, education has changed considerably. As we know SAAS's business changed considerably, trying to do everything from support to Enterprise support. So I would love to hear from both of you here, how have you seen the employee expectations change during this pandemic? Give me, give us some data exhaust. Niharika - So as for those, with the report, which we did the survey, which we did. So we have some loud change demands like 49 percent of the respondents had dependent children, 22% were primary caregivers to an elder or dependent and 33% were providing financial support for extended family members. Now, these are the demands of the employees and if the companies don't understand and empathize with this, it will be very difficult for them to understand what the diverse employees need. And another thing, which we figured out, was that there was a burnout. There was a requirement in the supply chain area. So 32 percent reported burnout, and 29 percent supported work from home. Working from home during the pandemic was working out for them. So now the understanding that a working parent, a mom or dad has to be in the daycare by 4:00 to pick up the kids if companies and the hiring managers and the managers understand this, it will be easy for them to provide that flexibility, which is needed by all kinds of employees. Kay - David, it will be great to hear your, on the same question. On the plan to make, have you seen what changes have you seen from a cultural standpoint? I envy no hybrid is coming up quite a bit and to address the same data that Niharika shared: people getting burnt out, people taking care of somebody else and people living working from home. How have you, what have you seen amongst the members concerning culture change? David - Yeah. Well, first of all, I just feel like the generation coming up wants to work for companies that align with their, with their core values, right? The Earth, the planet, what's going on in society? You know, I think, when we had incidents like mine and what happened to George Floyd, and a lot of companies will say they're doing things and some authentically want to do things, some it's just stayed there trying to say the right thing. So I think companies are people going to look a little deeper. We're in kind of an open world now, right? Employees, at people laid in, you can find people, back in the day, it was just hard to find names of the people. I was trying to bring Borland Scotts Valley. So now it's like, okay, people they can leave if they want. So what are we going to do as a company? What are the important things to keep them there? You know I think the family type environment as Niharika mentioned is flexible work, Jules when she ran, she when she stated some of those numbers, most of pretty much all of the people that we surveyed were women. So the rights of women do have, you know, need maybe more flexibility. schedules are supporting Elders, kids, and whatever else they have going on, how can companies want to engage women and have more women work for them. Should be the job description and way. They're working. Look like. like, for people like me, because all the people Like me created a corporate structure for how we work and compete. You guys weren't involved yet right now. Fast forward to more than 50% of the workforce and I know that you and I might look at the same problem, you may have one way of having a solution. I may have another way but they both work, right? If companies can offer us a way we could be fully authentic and how we're working. The company's going to harness unbelievable power. They've never experienced it before and yeah. So some good things are happening now. I feel that again I think the fact that I think what happened in the past two to three years of the pandemic is now just fast-forwarded to the conversation so we can look at this right? These original Promises of the internet or finally here. Now one slot on one side Joe was just kind of a before covid. It was the right nine percent of the people who would work at home. Sorry about nine percent would work at home, 11% unlimited limited office 41%, mainly office. And the rest of 39% office, only, where, you know, then it went to 65% of the people who had to work at home. Only in the next 12 months for seeing as 20% worked from home, only 52% limited office for maybe they'll go in for a meeting or two offices. Only now has it been reduced to six percent. I think, as we move forward, it's like, what do we want, as he does? Do we want to spend our time in traffic, right? For those of us that work in Tech if we're working in customer success. Abort. Do we have to be sitting in an office? I don't know if it is right and how can companies leverage the technology to serve their companies, serve their customers more effectively. Number two, make sure they have engaged happy employees because that's just going to lead to the success of the company. Right. And I think a lot of this stuff without all the traffic and everything else is going to see some great numbers. Hopefully, coming out on the planet and how we're going to. Save our planet as well, you know. Kay - Yeah, it's, it's important, that thing that you're bringing up or even sharing some of that information with the attendees. Some of those beautiful graphs that have come up with the research and some of the information that came from the research. So it definitely Dynamics the burnout. The people working from home. Finding Talent has changed before covid to right now. Absolutely. And we are seeing that even when companies do the propaganda of looking, doing remote work or hybrid, even if they bring in some of the flexible work schedules, even if they bring in the language that's needed in the job description and also the ability to do interviews in multiple different ways. There are two ways of attracting diverse talent. So why is hiring not that diversion, , what challenges in addition to what we talked about so far bubble up for either of you? David - yeah, I feel it's, I think a lot of them, as I said earlier, Many of the racks, never get open till there's somebody they want to talk to. So they are kind of reaching out to their Network. There are a lot of opportunities now to expand your network to leverage places, like a sin, do what you guys are doing. Witty, there are tons of them out of different verticals. How do you make sure that the pipeline? , I think the company's approaches have diverse recruiters. I guess those people are going and looking for names of women or underrepresented people or something. Some things confuse me, what they're doing. I think it's, I think it's just making sure that and I think we can do this for the people that both of us serve to have them hone in, where did they want to go? What companies align with their values, and who are the people they'd be working with, they'd be working for in the next couple of years, in the next 10 years. Let's help them. And build those relationships because this is all just relationship driven, right? It's not a, it's not my tits and then they're going in, I've been single school, right? And I'm thinking, like, some of these, subspecies, several members. It's like a 20-year architect job at IBM. They're getting interviewed by a very Junior person on Facebook. I'm like, Why is this person interviewing you asking you technical questions when they should be rolling out the red carpet? Carpet for you, right? And I feel, so I just feel like that piece is out of whack and that's something. We're in the process of fixing now because I'm not, we're not going for that many more, right? Niharika - And I'll add here, as David said, that ways of hiring are still old and until we innovate until we think out of the box. So in one of the health insurance companies, I was managing the development and we wanted a tech lead, and when we first opened the wreck all the off. Res es was All on men, but we had to kind of go out of the way to make sure that we got not only the hiring person. But also, we had to post on LinkedIn to get responses from diverse candidates. So again, it's until, and unless we think out of the box until we innovate in this area, it will be very difficult to reach out to the candidates. We need it. Kay - Yeah, I would love to share. I'm sharing one of your graphs it shows a, it's this one carry it, captures the employee expectations, we talked about the employer expectations, and while this graph is here, it'll be great to understand what you guys see from a mismatch of employee expectations and the hiring manager expectations or even company culture. Any mismatch that you see is for sure. David - I think it looks right. There are some of the French shaders, who pay work-life balance supportive management, right? I think some of those are things people want, but you know, anybody can offer more money, maybe have some similar things, you know, where we see some of the opportunities is in this. I'm moving my mouse, but I realized no one can see that, but in the upper left under opportunities, right? You know, how can there be opportunities for going, we're going in. Into we're going to be going and this is what I hear from some very in the know people is that in June, it's going to be the great resignation 2.0, that's going to be much bigger than the first one, right? So, flexibility and schedule. We're getting, we're getting so much, so many comments of people, white men, white women. They want to work with diverse teams. They get it. How important this is. Is. And then I'm speaking to many of our members that might be black women or women of color and you know that we have unbelievable experiences. But when they're getting hired by some of these companies, they make it a mandate to recruit a woman for every time they are having well, that's what might seem like a good thing to do from a PR standpoint. I guess, but then it's like many of the women. They're going into these interviews where the people are half listening to them. they do get hired, they feel like they're seen as I get a token higher, so then they're not getting the props and respect that they deserve, because many of these people that have commented to me. I look at their backgrounds and I'm like, oh my God. And I see, they know people that I know from way back in the day so I can get like, so I think it's horrible. What a lot of these things have created. , when I can, but hopefully we're coming out on the other side of it, right? There's a new ISO standard now on h a capital and eei, right. We're working with some investor groups on the east, on Wall Street. That controls trillions of dollars in Revenue, right? They want to look at an investment. They want to look at what companies are doing for diversity. Is this just let's check the box. Let's, you know, try to look good when there's an incident, or did they get the business impact of these things and are putting in programs to have people be included in the solution and contribute? Because we will see so much more Innovation, which we have seen with some of the companies that get it, right? And just happier employees that want to work give 110% and can do that within the environment, right? Niharika - And the quadrant in which you shared one thing, which stood out was the opportunity. career advancement. So, women and other diverse candidates, are not just looking for flexibility in schedule or work-life balance, they want to grow, they want to learn and that's a key thing that if companies can provide that will help them attract and develop diverse talent and when we surveyed the members, also they mentioned that they are looking to learn technology. Like they want to learn technology in a short amount of time and like they don't want to spend 8 hours learning something, Sayegh, Computing. They want to just know, what does that Computing do? What are the use cases in 30 minutes also, they are looking for professional development? So, these programs provided by the companies will help them meet the objective of their career growth and advancement, Kay - So learning it's one of those things. Companies used to invest a lot into learning and building Talent from within the company and that kind of fizzled away and it was left to the individuals themselves and it feels like it's all coming back and investing in the people growing them. Teaching them new skills, giving them new opportunities But maybe, in a much faster way. Pace. Did I summarize this, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, there is a question, we are 35 minutes. There is a, there are, we'll go through some questions that come in from the social media channels, and then we can go back to some of the research once. So one is, how do you create a job description? That breaks the buyers and attracts diverse Talent. David - Okay, I'll get this one. Have you prayed for a job description? Kay - So interestingly I know of a few startups that are doing and in this area, I should probably bring some of them in one act. One looks at multiple colors from a candidate and puts out. This is a personality from the psychology of this and how they would fit in and how diverse thoughts and ideas are. They would Bring it into the team, I'm sure utilizing AI. So there are things like that that are coming up in the market. That helps hiring managers look at diverse talent, and I also know certain verbiage in certain kinds of language that need to be utilized to bring in diverse talent to. Those are the That come to my mind, David, Niharika, David - yeah. Well, I think, you know, I think to look, I think some things right. There are job descriptions and at, right? And they call Headhunters, and I was like, being called a head on her. That's what I would do when I worked in that business. You have to hunt if you're fishing right now, the lake is empty. So job descriptions, you know, I think people will use them in different ways. , now that they are using these AI tools, right? So a four-year degree is a four-year degree necessary. , when I was putting together the Quattro pro team, which I'll date myself for Borland. You know, I'd have one guy that went to a community college for a year, but his parents bought a Mac computer when he was eight, he learned to program that way. Another guy, a master in computer science, who was just and equal to the team, John was Right. So I feel like, looking, I'd say to focus on what they've been working on skillswise, you know. I think, you know, I think we see that from several people or I've heard that as far as job descriptions go, just the education and the four-year degree are mandatory. I don't know if that is in a lot of spaces, especially software development, Niharika - That's great, David. And I will add here, that if I'm looking for a job more than the job description, I look at the company culture because that I can find out. So is this company supporting diverse employees? Even if they mention it in one job description. If the culture I will find out from my friends, they are our go to the glass door to see if the culture is supportive of diverse employees. So that will be. I think that should be put in the job description that this is the company and this is the culture they are supporting. Kay - I had one woman tell me, they would go into the website and look at executive teams and see how divergent the executive team is. And that's one way that they assess. If the team, the company culture in itself, promotes diversity, you are right on concerning The culture? David - Yeah, no, I think that's good. And there's so much for us to get this information. I mean, I couldn't believe it. This one company, I work with and this woman CMO, amazing lady. They were like rushing her into sales meetings because the client came in, though those usually, like big governments with two women and two men, they had there for white men. Sitting there looked like rushing her into a seat, at the meeting, she had nothing to do with it. Right? mean I just feel like, and that's it. , this is about the company getting business. I don't know if any diverse departments are involved in that piece of it. , listen. And that's what our goal is with a glass ceiling. 2.0 to move the D EI and departments or Jedi or, you know, from these vertical organizations and companies, these have to be horizontal in the DNA of that company, right? Because it's going to drive sales, it's going to help Employee Engagement. going to help communication with customers better. And just until we do that, which we're going to be doing soon. I feel like an opportunity is being missed. Yeah, it's Brinks since we've had we are talking about the high-level and Leadership roles. Brings up the Biden statement on having diversity in corporate boards and it will be a great thing to understand what kind of executive programs does witty have to enable Leadership women. Sure what we're doing. A few things. I mean, with, with the glass ceiling 2.0 initiative. And then Intel spearheading this thing called The Alliance for Global inclusion and NASDAQ is part of that. So, as we get the results are hope, you know what, we're starting to work on and what I can say, can't say, but is too, work with NASDAQ, right? We did, we did. The letter is on behalf of NASDAQ. When they requested that the SEC approve, their requests to have all NASDAQ listed companies have at least one woman and another diverse person on their board or explain. Why shouldn't it apply to them? Why did NASDAQ ask for this? Because they wanted to help the women know because they want to help the diverse people know because they understood. They want their investors to eat to invest in companies that are going to be here for the long call. You can't do that without diversity of thought. Now a lot of the nest companies weren't ready for that. So, how can we use this data just to help them understand? Right? This isn't like a witch chooses to do, bad blah, blah, blah. It's like, look, the shareholders. Now, we've been able to connect with some groups that control trillions of dollars of investment. Let's help them improve. Let's handle eyes where some of the gaps are where some of the opportunities are and, you know, help their stock goes up. So, everybody's happy, right? I mean, that's what it's all about, right? Niharika - And what does Vicki do for that? So we spoke to the executive women who are in our membership, and we asked them what they are looking for. So they are looking for a leadership development program and based on their feedback, we did a session on the story. Link as storytelling is a key skill. Everyone needs to inspire their teams and communicate the vision. So we started storytelling last week which is going to be ongoing. We have other leadership development programs like emotional intelligence, which is so much as important as regular intelligence and social intelligence, and other than that, what are other things which we are doing is that we have started these industry networks like our agile DevOps No code, no code. Everyone is talking about LocoRoco but what is it? So just come and join our program and then you'll come to know what exactly it is and again cybersecurity. So these are the things which are focusing on technology and leadership development. Kay - We also know Athena Chief they are and women 2020 boats. There are quite a few organizations that enable those. Interestingly when we talk to Corporate women, women say that they want to join boards and startups. And they always ask how do I join the boards of startups and startup Founders? Women and men founders say we have so many people who want to join the boards but they don't know what they are bringing to the table so it's a matter of what you're talking about with leadership development is right on. It's recognizing What can I contribute to what industry, and what kind of segment? How can I, how much am I willing to roll up, my sleeves to expand my experience and my knowledge, and my network to enable another company. And we see that most board advisors are the people who are thinking about this constantly and who know their strengths and What they bring to the people now and we yeah, David - we are starting to answer that question. We are still, we just launched our needed talent management program last week. We're going to have a segment on that specifically to get women on boards and have them board. Ready, we have an amazing group of so far that have participated in it and really, it's like interaction a DD on a They just left, she just left Accenture to take on a role at DCC Technologies runs, huge, huge p&l, we have many women that run, billion dollars, PLL's, that want to support other women and, you know, we're just going to do it, right? I know I've heard about 20, 20, boards, Athena and some of these other things not sure exactly what they're doing. I know a lot of these nonprofits. we started this as a profit, not that, we've been making a big one every or even one with a lot of the stuff going on in the past few years, don't donate to women, right? We have to change the whole mindset. That this is an opportunity for companies when I see when women come to our conference. So this is this multi-billion dollar company. So generous, they let me volunteer in our internal women's Network and then pay me to go to the conference. I'm like, then they've got they're playing. They're sending them to the golf course, Golf Course, memberships, everything else. We have to shift that whole thing, right? And it's, you know, no handouts, don't help the women help yourself, and that's not our official motto yet. No one stands alone as Armada, Kay - I love it. I love it. It's like, most of the business decisions and talks happened with colleagues on a golf course. That's right. The building is much more Network there rather than a 67 thousand-person conference where, you're lost at the right Lyrica time, totally right on you has something to add to it. Niharika - Yeah, that's the point, right? Especially women in sales, they come. And they tell us, that's a problem they face. Because I mean, it makes all these decisions. Taking place on golf courses, then that's a disadvantage. Itís. They have and we have to find other avenues for them to build the same. Same relationships are built at golf courses. Yeah. David - And speaking of women in sales, we have an initiative that's going to start in a couple of months and we've been doing all the data and just the performance of women and Enterprise sales and really within the whole sales ecosystem, from customer success to sales Engineers. There's so much great data on how successful women are in that space, especially in Technology. They're not getting the jobs on opportunity. So we're now creating something because we want to make sure that they're trained, ready to get those roles that we're giving them ongoing coaching throughout. You know, something we haven't talked about 2k today is just looking at a job description. If I'm a guy and I have 50% of it, I'm going to apply to women from the stats. We see. So if it's not E or 95% not going to apply, I can. So one thing we try to do is everything every week. Of course I teach on Friday is like, you know, we are, do you have Tableau experience? All these software programs, they change acronyms this and that give yourself credit for what you know and you know, right. Because you see that K A Lot in your space. Kay - Yeah, yeah. It's an I'm right now, in a dilemma. He has a lot of questions coming in from social media and I'm trying to think which one I should pick and we have 10 minutes. So I think there's a lot of interest, a lot of questions coming in, and a lot of information that's being shared where we are touching the executive program. We were touching the leadership women and we were talking about that specifically and so I'm You're right time and it sits. There are two things here, right? So, what difference do we see with women in Tech, especially since there's a lot of appreciation for the comments that need to be changed? Both covid. There's a lot of appreciation. Just so you both know. So what do we see as a difference for women in Tech versus non-Tech? And I'm struggling with this question because all of us are pretty much Basis, see don't do anything non tech. So I'm not sure where that is, how best to answer that question, but if you have any yes. Niharika - So here, I'll say that. Now, everyone is a woman in Tech because we all use this phone, which is the most amazing piece of technology. So it's kind of, if you are not in Tech, well, going to the resources where technology simplified because it's not that you have to spend a lot of time, just What this technology is and what problem is this solving. So again, and again, answering even to get on board is very important for women, whether they are in Tech or in non tech, to understand what this technology is and what problem is, solving having this idea will help because now everyone has to say even an intact. Kay - I Do some of our great hires in Ascendo, amazing marketing. And Of those experiences has been in non tech. So, we are talking to somebody who's from the film industry and it's, and it brings in a level of diversity. We are talking about David, Do you have anything to add here? David - Yeah, no. I was going to say, kind of similar to what Neha said, it's about being tech savvy, right? You're pretty or higher from the film industry. Like, that's knowledge. They're bringing I know people say they're R not Talk when they have the supercomputer in their pocket and people are intact. That always makes me laugh, right? So it's like, I think it's like leadership being tech savvy software companies have spent trillions of dollars to make things easy and have us not think about technology but just use it to do what we do faster. So yeah, I think it's just owning it being confident speaking to it just you know Don't have a computer science degree, whatever. I learned how I learned about tech. I landed Borland as a client, you know, and I was, I left school because I'm like, oh, this company is growing and I said, oh What's the printer driver? They'd go up on the board and show it to me and, and then I could understand where I needed a hug for my people right. But I just think it's like, I almost think like we have to Rebrand technology, right? Because I think people, Will sometimes get intimidated? Oh, I'm not technology. I've got to go to candidate companies at the company. It's growing up. And so we've got to look at rebranding technology, rebranding stem steam wherever you want to go. Because I feel like yeah, people are more technical than they give themselves credit for in a lot of cases. Kay - You work with 300 and soul, large corporate Partners, one of the questions. That is what you're talking to them about. You go like oh my gosh that's an awesome policy and procedure is a procedure that they have that's a best practice for somebody else. Can you speak a bit about some of those things that you saw? Niharika - I will not name but we have one corporate partner who's like unto they like 50/50 like I mean I'm just taking the women example that they have read communicated that whether it's res es higher. It has to be 50/50 and they have been kind of doing good. They have added some flexibility here and there to make sure. That happens. So again, it's coming from the top down and going and kind of expanding everywhere in the company that everyone has to make sure that the 50-50 things happened. So again until it becomes a mandate until it comes from the top and until it gets ingrained in everyone. In DNA it will not happen but our partners are making that happen. David - Yeah. And I'd probably say yeah, I mean Salesforce we worked with and I'd worked a bit with Our Benioff back when he was at Oracle and he had called me. After I left Borland, I helped him with some things and, now, what we're doing. Now, we have a whole Hub on witty dedicated to helping train our community on Salesforce technology because they want their customers to have a great pool of diverse people to kill into. And then also to, to get out their programs. They have the flexibility and work schedules, more focused. The result rather than how you get there. And I think we'll start seeing a lot of that in some of these people's leadership roles, right? Because I mean, that was, you know, if the history of Salesforce, he used to walk around like the demo conference with like, the no bozos thing for software, right? Because that whole thing, it's in the cloud, the in, back before that, with the internet with 3com, we should be able to do anything from anywhere. And that's I think that just helps us I think, I'm not, especially women, I think men want this stuff too, but companies that can move to this type of environment, we get all the great people. Kay - Yeah. And now, interestingly in product development, when I was in product development core engineering, the number of women was less than the number of women, Founders doing B2B core technology companies were even minuscule. Last statistics that we did the tides less than 1%. B2B companies are owned by females. So we do have a large gap in some areas but areas like for example, customer support and success. As we see a lot of women, we see a lot of diversity of women of people, from the various geographical regions participating in success and experienced roles. So in a way, It is wonderful, so what we would love, we have five minutes, one question, and then we can wrap it up quickly. Women back to work. We have a few organizations and a good friend of mine also doing a women back to work program. So have you seen any of those implemented within your corporate partners and if they, you know, what can the women back to work do? And that amount of world. David - Yeah. Look, I think that we've all learned which can be very agile and how we work now. So, I think it's up to the companies to create roles or just be open to people working at their pace and in their environments. I think people that are so customer-facing. Like many people listening on this call, that should be a direct route to The Boardroom. So I'd like to figure out how we support these people that might be at this stage of their careers. Now, the customer success, customer service role and make sure we work together to get them a path to the executive suites and then to the board, if that's the direction they'd like to go because I just think they're the knowledge they have is unmatched. Kay - So after Yamini from HubSpot CCV, the chief customer officer became the CEO. There is a huge trend going on, like CC was becoming CEOs mix, right? So people are recognizing the people who are talking. The customers are the ones who are in touch with the customers absolutely. Absolutely. I think it 's right on. It's been a pleasure hearing, a lot of the research, the data, and Communications and policies procedures, we touched a lot in the last one n ber we did. And, there are plenty of amazing graphs that we D has done. In glass ceiling 2.0. We will dissipate that to the teams. Any other questions or comments? We will figure out a way to get you guys engaged and participate in those social media discussions. But thank you both for joining today and dissipating your knowledge.

This webinar focuses on what leaders can do to elevate their Customer Support Experience with in their organization. We will touch up on best practices, tips and strategies that are actionable takeaways. Please enter the valid name Submit the form to access the webinar Please enter the valid business email address Submit Please check your email inbox Modern Customer Support Experience This webinar focuses on what leaders can do to elevate their Customer Support Experience with in their organization. We will touch up on best practices, tips and strategies that are actionable takeaways. Product Integrations Resources Blog Standards Why Ascendo AI? Careers Partners Pricing Contact Us Book a demo Event Take a Tour (All) More... Contact Us Discover helpful suggestions below How to unlock the value from every customer interaction with ai This webinar focuses on how AI-powered insights from the entire customer journey can help you be the voice of the customer. You will find that these insights provide proactive rather than reactive support. Watch now Role of support to increase customer engagement and mitigate churn This webinar will share best practices gathered from our research that support teams can use to establish communication and avoid customer churn. Watch now How to make proactive support happen? - Infinera customer support success story with Ascendo.AI Leading customer support organizations are constantly looking for ways to improve their efficiency and adopt a more proactive to resolving customer issues and improving the customer experience Watch now Become an expert in every interaction with Ascendo and slack Slack is emerging as a key collaboration tool, internally and with customers. Learn how to use everyday interactions, to automate creating knowledge, and spreading knowledge to help colleagues and serve customers efficiently. Watch now

Speaker: Anita Ganti Maximizing ROI with AI in Customer Support Team A Guide for Heads of Support Speaker: Anita Ganti April 10, 2024 Previous Item Next Item This video is a must-watch for Heads of Support in medium to large enterprises considering AI tools. Discover expert insights from tech executive Anita on maximizing return on investment (ROI) with AI tools. Anita, with extensive experience in various technology companies, shares invaluable tips for evaluating AI tools, securing funding, and ensuring project success. The key takeaways include: Understanding ROI is critical: Quantify the potential risks and costs associated with AI adoption. Focus on specific use cases: Identify areas where AI can deliver the most value for your support team. Transparency is key: Be upfront about costs, risks, and timelines when presenting to stakeholders. Maintain strong relationships: Build trust with vendors and stakeholders to ensure continued buy-in. By following these steps, you can ensure a successful AI implementation that improves your support operations and delivers a strong return on investment. Anita emphasizes the importance of building strong relationships and handling challenges effectively for project success. Don't miss out on these valuable insights for maximizing ROI on AI tools in your organization. About Speaker : Anita Ganti , an Executive and Independent Board Member at Technology Companies, possesses unparalleled expertise in maximizing Return on Investment (ROI). She served as senior vice president of product engineering services at Wipro Limited, a leading global information technology, consulting, and business process services company. Previously, she held roles as vice president of global technology at Flex Ltd. and Business Unit General Manager at Texas Instruments. Currently serving on the boards of directors of Power Integrations, Inc., Exro Technologies, Inc., and Silvaco, Inc., Anita combines her extensive experience with an MBA (Finance Major) from The Wharton School and an MSEE from Virginia Tech to deliver exceptional value to organizations.

Explore how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can be used to improve customer support. Ramki, co-founder and CTO of Ascendo, discusses the limitations of ChatGPT, which include lack of real-time data and factual accuracy. He contrasts this with Ascendo's LLM, which is trained on enterprise-specific data and leverages human feedback for continuous improvement. ChatGPT and the future of Customer Support | Transcription Previous Next Kay - Welcome to the experience dialogue. In these interactions. We pick a Hot Topic. That doesn't really have a straightforward answer. We then bring in speakers who have been there and seen this but approached it in very different ways. This is a space for healthy disagreements and discussions but in a respectful way. By the nature, of how we have conceived, this, you will see the passionate voice of opinions. Friends having a dialogue and thereby even interrupting each other or finishing each other's sentences. At the end of each dialogue, we want our audience to leave with valuable insights and approaches that you can try at your workplace and continue the discourse on social media channels. A little bit about Ascendo, it is addressing optimization of support to operations within enterprises so that they can serve their customers better. We enable enterprises to optimize workflow for the agents and provide dashboards for insights on risk, churn analysis, and visibility for senior managers. We are revolutionalizing support ops in the same way DevOps and RevOps have transformed other areas of the business. In the last three years, we have created a G2 category and are ranked #1 in user satisfaction. We are very proud to be loved by our users, and now with the topic ChatGPT and the future of customer support. There is excitement on many Tech and business channels on ChatGPT from OpenAI. It had a lot of adoption within the first five days of its getting released. We've been following OpenAI and GPT 3 for some time. We will discuss the technology, explore its impact on customer support experience space, it's possible limitations and opportunities. So join us and bring in your questions to LinkedIn and Slack channels. Now it is a pleasure to introduce the speaker. He is the co-founder and CTO of Ascendo.AI. Ramki comes in with deep data science, and support background.He ran managed services for Oracle Cloud, created a proactive support platform for NetApp's, multimillion-dollar business and is respected for both his mathematical and business thinking and data science. At Ascendo, his mission is to give meaning to each and every customer interaction and elevate the experience of customers and support agents. Welcome, Ramki. Ramki - Thank you Kay, Glad to be here. Kay - So we can start with the basics Ramki. What is actually ChatGPT? Ramki - You know, I create a slide that kind of shows what ChatGPT could be, you know, and I know that it kind of comes from the comic strip but now let's talk about what ChatGPT is. It's essentially a modern variation of a chatbot. We all know and we've been living with chat bots. Typically the chat bots require you to set up the rules, based on a question that the person might ask it basically has rules that match the contents, and the whole thing happens in a coordinated way. The ChatGPT, difference is that instead of only knowing a little bit of whatever it is, for the website that you are on. Essentially, it's kind of a robot ChatGPT knows, just about everything, and it's more articulate than the average human. So it's kind of comes up with- Hey, I've consumed all the internet and I can provide answers in a conversational way. Let's talk about the technicality of it. It's essentially a language model. It's been trained to interact in a conversational way, it's a sibling model to the instructGPT which was trained to follow an instruction on prompt and provide a detailed response. What I mean by that is, essentially it remembers the thread of your dialogue and using the previous questions and answers to inform, what the next responses could be. The answers are essentially derived from the volume of data that got trained on which is what we had on the Internet. So that's kind of the technical answer for it. You can think of it as it understands the conversation, it consumed all of the internet. It knows the history of your dialogue and it can prompt automatically what the next language sentence could be. Kay - So we've been following ChatGPT, GPT3 for quite some time, right? There was GPT 3, and then now ChatGPT, tell me the difference, please. Ramki - Yeah,I said it's a language model, right? So underneath this nothing but it's using the GPT. Its GPT is the Transformer model. What it means is it's predicting what the next words would be based on what it is seeing. The difference is GPT3 uses 175 billion parameters in whereas to instructGPT which is kind of a 1.3 billion parameters. You can look at it as a hundred times fewer and it's still performing quite well because it's the way it got trained but the same time You know, everybody knows that excitement is great but OpenAPI warns, you know, Hey not all the time, the answer may be correct. So you got to be watchful of what you're seeing and you have to inculcate what it is saying and then see in your own form, whether it makes sense or not. Kay - So there are a lot of people who are new to data science, also here Ramki. and when you talk about Transformer model, we are talking about transforming the learning from one to another or transforming the learning. Correct? Would you like to add any other definition for Transformer? Ramki - Transformer was the kind of technical term essentially it was done. You know, you can kind of look at all the words in One Sweep, and the training time is less. So you are essentially looking at the whole sentence or whole information and taking the mass in one set of tokens and understanding the relationship and then you can kind of predict what the next one would be. So it's a combination of doing the training faster and having fewer parameters and doing it with a lot of content and also making some kind of a model that really reinforces the better behavior of which is correct and guarded better. Kay - So a lot of people have interacted with ChatGPT. Right? It's a, you know, they ask a question and they type a piston in and use the content that gives a result and they give feedback and based on how it's trained. So, in a way, it's kind of Google but not Google also. So can you describe a little bit more? Ramki - It's gone, in a way that, we all go to Google and say, hey, I want to know something. Then we go search and we look at the results and we kind of look at them. What makes sense, and put our thoughts into it and make sense out of it, right? The most notable limitation that you're going to find is that this ChatGPT doesn't have access to the Internet. It's basically loaded with the entire content prior to 2021 data-wise. But it can not look at the current image. In fact, OpenAI tells you that. For example, I want to know when my tree train is going to lead, you cannot get it right but you can pretty much ask anything like, Hey, I want to write a poem. I have an issue with this code, does it make sense. Those types of things one can ask and it can be ask it to fix it. In fact, The very first day was out. One of the teammates asked, hey, I want to write a poem on Ascendo and it kind of actually did a pretty decent job. You know. Kay - I would love to see it at the end, so I was playing around with it, and I will share that also in a bit. So, now the adoption of ChatGPT has been pretty exponential, right? So we see millions of people using it. What Are some of the key differences that you would point out in terms of its output? Ramki - Recently, I was listening to several things, one of them being Steven Marsh. He recently, like, even last week, wrote an opinion column in the New York Times in. You also had a podcast before that with the intelligence quiet, a British podcast media. He's been using similar tech for some time. It's not like we just looked at this and said, yeah, you looked at a different variation not opening another company, and then you looked at them as well. He says it in a very succinct way, he says ChatGPT is a great product that he calls, it can provide a filler response by the filler response means it's not junk, it's not a trivia, it leverages on how people are taught to write essays in a structured manner, you know, we have an opening sentence, kind of things like that. The key point that he's bringing up, is the ChatGPT does not have an intention, it's not like an author, you know, I want to, I have a will I want to want to like what when you write an article you're thinking about the point that you want to convey, right? You want to say this, I want to be able to show that to you. I want you to know that, that's not what you're going to be getting. ChatGPT is a kind of a filler, but it gives you a starting point. One can use the starting point and add the rest of the information that are from your Vantage standpoint. We may be entering an era of doing things differently. Like when we started with the internet, right? When the internet came, then Google came, and then, you know, yeah I remember going to some places, where people essentially say, Hey the computer tells me, this is what this must be the truth, kind of thing, so the open source came all of them, right? So that's the same way here. We are going to be entering a different era where you may be asking, and it gives you some responses that use that as a starting point and go from there. Kay- So some could also say that a GPT3 is the base model and ChatGPT is the bot version or the conversational version of using GPT3. That's already indexed and modeled with internet data. As you mentioned, September 2021. Will that be a correct statement? Ramki- It’s kind of you know, Yes and No. I know the GPT is the base, ChatGPT is not using a bot version of GPT3. It's essentially a smaller model, right? It's created by fine-tuning GPT3. In other words leveraging what GPT does it has to offer a mix of its own bot kind to give this whole intelligent conversational experience.Does this make sense. Kay- Yeah, absolutely. So you know, we know RPA came in, right? So that was the first iteration of introducing AI and I Love to equate it to the autonomous driving experience which will also bring up in a sec. So the RPA came in and it became too much rules-based and very cumbersome to maintain, but RPA was very hard and then that got faded away. Then came chatbots, and I remember at one point, we were counting 318 ChatBot companies and they were the chat versions of the RPA, which again was very rule-based and you had to pretty much codify the question and answers and stuff. And they were very well used within the customer service context. So tell me a little bit more about the Bots in the customer service context. Ramki - You know you're right there. A lot of chatbots. In fact people think when we know when you say have a question they always think bot as one of the things but they have a lot of Baggage, you know, companies have tried with limited success to use them, instead, of humans to handle customer service work. There is potential in these bot where you can kind of alleviate the pressure on answering some mundane questions. But the thing is yesterday was like, you know, recently 1700 American sponsored by a company called Ujet whose technology is handling customer contacts. What they saw was very interesting. 72% of the people found Chatbot to be a waste of time that's a very serious thing. You know, the reason is the biggest challenge people want to have is they don't like the feel of having to work with the robot. When I talk to many of our customers you know when they get you to know, yes there is a potential for doing a lot of self-service self answering but the reality is as soon as you give the option to talk to somebody or something, they just click that, you know, that's what people want. The reason is they don't Like to work in a bot-like environment. Kay-They want a answer. Right? Ramki-Exactly. Kay - You know which is like, I'm having an interaction, why can't it be an answer? Why does it have to be a conversation with a machine-like thing which has to be maintained and codified extensively? and on top of it, I don't even want to go in and extend this process ultimately creating a ticket, right? So Yeah, elaborate. Ramki - If you look at the ChatGPT right, on the other hand. It sounds like a human, you know, and it is of one, what you are saying to form the response. It is not pre-coded with a response. It really thinks off what you're saying and that kinda makes the whole discussion and responses more conversational but doesn't make its responses always right. You know, again OpenAI says that. You have to look at the response and make your conclusion. Kay - You also talk about ChatGPT’s initial, audacious claim. So elaborate a little bit more on that. Ramki - I'm going to share one slide on this. You know, it's an interesting lie that you will get a chuck lot of it.In fact, I went and asked this to ChatGPT. Hey, tell me about the customer support kind of thing. So we ask this and first, you can you know, I just put the same response, what I got right on the slide. It first makes a very audacious claim. Hey, it is not capable of making a mistake so that's a big thing but at the same time, it also did admit that it cannot help with real-world tasks. So it's kind of that is essentially what I want the readers to understand. It will appear that it is not making a mistake, it's giving the answers. But at the same time, you have to know that, you know, it may not have the ability at least as of now, to provide customer support or the real-world task, you know, where's my training? What is the issue? Because in a real customer support scenario, things change more normal things that things are going to be relevant now, and it may not have all the answers. So that's where the big difference is, I would see. Kay - There is a question from Shree. He's asking, what is current state of art in ChatGPT integration with KnowledgeGraph enterprise solutions ? continues saying, particularly around Particularly around Explainability for conversational problem solving , in domains that have high compliance bars ( like healthcare or finance )? Ramki - You know you can't just Wing, you know if you look at it right when you and I are having a conversation we're going to use of the knowledge that we have gained and we are going to just tell you and there is no fact-checking. So we got to be conscious of that. So just because you get a response and in fact, the response may look somewhat legit and it doesn't mean that it is right? Especially when there is a complaint kind of a thing as a mod so I would strongly suggest it. In fact, you know about the openAI will in fact concur with this type of thing. You got to, you know, it's giving the answers based on what it had been trained on, but fit is for Real World past and something that you need to do, contact the customers and do contact that particular customer support and get the answers. It's, they're saying, so that's what ChatGPT itself with that, you know it is audacious to say, it will never make a mistake, but it doesn't make a mistake and it also tells you that you have to be at your own. Kay - Yeah, and it's good that the model actually understands its own limitations and claims its limitations, and it's by us too since, you know, I'm just bringing it up because there is the explainability component of it. So absolutely. So, let's now that we talked about Transformer models, we talked about GPT3 and ChatGPT. Tell a little bit about how Ascendo works. Ramki - You know, if you look at Ascendo.AI. At the core it also uses the Transformal model. Well, we essentially developed our model based on the domain expertise that we have, you know, many of our key people come from there, come from customer support or customer service background. So that's a great value because we know how the support model Works. How large companies' technical support organizations should handle even smaller ones as well. And we know the nuances of finding the answer for a customer question and issue. Sometimes, be a simple and elaborately explained to me what it is and what the product test is. Sometimes it is actually an issue. I'm facing, I'm doing this, and I'm facing an issue. What should I do? How can you help me? kind of thing. Our Transformer model essentially looks at the knowledge and the other data point that we have within the company that we are that we have implementing or we are basically providing Ascendo service on top and it's looking at all the content within the company and to evolve, what should be the answer. For example, there may be a new issue blowing, Right? it probably never happened before, but it's coming. There may be new knowledge that got updated. You know, somebody found an answer and the dots or maybe there was a bug that came in, and then somebody answer it, it became a knowledge, all these things are happening as things go by, then maybe these things in some similarity, there are some similarities with ChatGPT because we also use as kind of human feedback to make sure that we can constantly evolve and self-correct self learn, right? That part of it is very similar. We are using actual data and we are also evolving and with actual factual data, not from the entire internet to provide an answer. Kay - Very specific to the Enterprise, very specific to the product, Etc. So the analogy is very similar to the autonomous engine auto driving. Right? So we start with giving the Triggers on predictive actions, escalations impact, risk intended context, and all of that. Then our agents and leaders still make the decision on what they use and when they use it. So in a way, we automate the data aggregation, aspect of humans, maybe I would, I always equate it to what an engineering calculator did for the basic calculations but on an advanced scale so it does help remove the biased. It enhances collaboration, even when people went, whether people are together or remote and it also helps with faster problem-solving. So essentially, we are automating support ops, like, whatever dev-ops and rev-ops are doing. Back to chat GPT.So, the challenges explain a few challenges of ChatGPT, like the media. I kind of alluded to writing. Ramki - One of the biggest issues that we are all going to face. It happened even with the internet, right? When you see something, you may actually believe it. The way we probably get unknowingly got caught by the early days of the Internet, just because something is said multiple times, it appears opinions may drive the truth. The fact-checking asked to be will be on the Forefront. Unknowingly, someone keeps repeating the same thing or, you know, gets Amplified through multiple things. And then information comes on top. People may think that is the truth and it may, you know, actual truth will be hidden, right? That's where we have to be watchful. We have to be careful how these things happen just because it says something so nice and it, you know, feels correct and eloquent. It should not be that, it's always right. And we have to remember but it's a nice way of saying things but it is not the truth to have to do, a fact check. Kay - Yeah, a model is as good as what we feed it in and ChatGPT is fed with internet data and there is a lot of information that needs fact checking whether it is from humans or a machine and it's we at Ascendo we always talk about metrics versus data? Data helps say the story. So from a story standpoint aggregating all of this customer data and bringing out an ability to say, a story is something that models as Ascendo does, But the actual story is told by humans and not by the data itself. So that's where there is this human connection. So Thank you. I think this has been helpful So I was actually asking to ChatGPT to write about holidays in 2022 and it did respond by saying that the day it has stayed only up till September 2021 cannot write about 2022. But you did talk about the poem, it wrote about Ascendo AI, and want to share it, before we end? Ramki - Let me..you know, it's kind of interesting, you know, we basically talked asked it Hey tell me about Ascendo.AI. Like Steven would say it did a pretty decent job, you know, kind of filler information, you can call it. Now you can take it and you can now use this and can just change it the way we want to convey it or whatnot, but here it is, you know, it did a great job. I would say, Kay - I like that so let people read it while we're stopping the Livestream. Thank you very much for tuning in and we want to continue the conversation here on the LinkedIn and slack channel. So, feel free to post your questions and comments. What else can we do to help continue this engagement? Ramki - Thanks. Absolutely.