This episode features an interview with Venu Gooty, SVP of Digital Strategy and Transformation at HGS, a global leader in consumer engagement, digital CX, and business process management. Venu has over 18 years of IT experience. And at HGS, he’s helping global brands optimize their operations so they can give customers a world-class experience. In this episode, Venu discusses how using a fit index in the hiring process improves employee retention, making sure employees have the best tools for the job, and tracking employee sentiment using analytics.
This episode features an interview with Venu Gooty, SVP of Digital Strategy and Transformation at HGS, a global leader in consumer engagement, digital CX, and business process management. Venu has over 18 years of IT experience. And at HGS, he’s helping global brands optimize their operations so they can give customers a world-class experience. In this episode, Venu discusses how using a fit index in the hiring process improves employee retention, making sure employees have the best tools for the job, and tracking employee sentiment using analytics.
Quotes
*”Businesses really need to think about how to support customers in the channels of their preference. Customers are becoming more demanding in terms of how they would like to be responded to and the kind of experiences that they would like to see versus the experiences that you think you would want to provide to them.”
*”Fit index allows us to better understand and engage the candidates on various parameters and criteria. We're also leveraging AI in order to truly identify which are those individuals who have higher likelihood of joining us and not attriting, because attrition is a huge problem within the contact center industry. The technology is enabling us to say a person with this kind of characteristics and these kind of attributes are the right fit based on the past employee behaviors, or based on the characteristics that we've used for previous screening of employees.”
*”The hiring process is extremely challenging and it's also pretty time consuming. So that process is something that we have significantly streamlined using recruit bot application. It allows the applicant to get hired within two hours of their application, if they are interested in streamlining and fastening up that entire process. That also has enabled us to actually reduce the amount of back and forth that happens with the agents because previously, the amount of back and forth that we used to see was almost two to three weeks just from apply to hire time frame. But right now we have cut it down to an average of less than a day and as fast as less than two hours at this point.”
*”How do you capture the tribal knowledge that is there among the employees and bring that knowledge and institutionalize it so that it's not just dependent on one individual who has all of that knowledge, but among that entire team, among the organization, so that anyone can respond to those queries and anyone can refer to the knowledge on a real-time basis and get those right answers during the client conversations?”
Time Stamps
*[0:09] The Case of Leveraging Technology to Improve the Employee and Customer Experience
*[0:31] Introducing Venu Gooty, SVP of Digital Strategy and Transformation at HGS
*[7:30] Evidence #1: High employee churn rate
*[21:20] Evidence #2: Employees are working with disparate tech tools
*[34:27] Evidence #3: Doesn’t know how to measure employee sentiment
*[39:18] Debrief
*[40:24] HGS Pub
Bio
Venu Gooty is a passionate and accomplished executive with over 18 years of IT industry experience. His deep expertise in data-driven marketing, digital transformation, digital customer experience, AI and big data analytics, is helping leading global brands improve customer engagement, optimize their operations, reduce costs and increase revenue.
Thank you to our friends
This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.
Links
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Lyssa Myska Allen: Well, hello! Come right in, we’ve caught a case. A call just came in. Here, I’ll play it for you.
Client: Hi CX Detectives, I’m calling because my customers are unhappy. And that’s because my employees are unhappy. I’ve heard that employees are frustrated with their back end tools, like the databases and apps they currently use. But I’m wondering if there’s more to it than that. It feels like my business is struggling from the inside out. Is this something you can help me with?
Lyssa Myska Allen: Oh yeah, they called the right people. I’m teaming up on this one with Venu Gooty, Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy and Transformation at HGS. Venu has over 18 years of IT experience. And at HGS, he’s helping global brands optimize their operations so they can give customers a world-class experience. Today, Venu and I are cracking the case of leveraging technology to improve the employee and customer experience. Because we are CX Detectives. Real cases, solved. I’m Lyssa Myska Allen, VP and Global Head of Marketing at HGS. Let’s get started.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Venu, I'm so happy to have you on this show. It's so much fun to have a colleague of mine as my co-detective, we're going to crack this case. We've actually spent a lot of time together off the podcast, working on employee experience. So it'll be fun to, uh, to talk through it today.
Veny Gooty: Excited to be part of the show.
Lyssa Myska Allen: It's great. I get to hear some, maybe some history about you that I haven't learned before. So why don't we dive into how did you get started in CX and how did you get into your current role?
Veny Gooty: The term CX has kind of changed a little bit because the customer experience, if you think of it from the standpoint of, uh, the BPO industry, you end up thinking of that as customer interacting or the contact center. Client customers who have been interacting with businesses through a lot of digital channels. And in the last 10 years, actually more than 10 years, about 15 years, I've been on the digital customer experience part of the business, um, Before, uh, elementary solutions I used to work for a company called Virtusa and I was involved pretty heavily on, uh, content management industry and web experience management industry. And that was an interesting start of my career around CX. Post that I, I joined Edmond solutions. And, uh, apart from that, I had also done. Uh, mobile technology startup. And lot of that also was related to how, uh, customers and enterprises, small businesses enterprises could actually use, um, and digital experiences and digital technologies to interact with, um, their clients. So there was a lot of that experience that I had and post that with elements solutions, getting acquired, uh, by HGS, um, I think the combination of digital experience and the human customer experiences kind of getting combined through the latest, um, set of projects that I'm currently working on.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah, and I think there's a third element, too, that we're going to throw in there as we dig into the case around employee experience too. But before we do that, will you define digital customer experience for me?
Veny Gooty: Digital customer experience is, uh, the ways that companies would end up, uh, providing the clients or their customers the ability to interact with them. Right. It could be through websites. It could be through chat interactions. It could be through mobile applications. All of those channels where, um, the, the companies are providing some sort of digital enablement for their customers is what the digital customer experience is all about.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah. And we're starting, I think, to see that definition expand, um, because there's so many touch points for our customers. So they're, they're using all of those channels to interact with a company or a brand, and you're having to capture all of those. So it's, it's kind of like beyond even omni-channel at this point.
Veny Gooty: Yeah. Previously, you know, people would simply go to the stores, stand in line or stand at the, uh, company, office for such a long time to actually meet the support teams. Right. And they would complain about it. And then you have this form channel as a key channel. Uh, but, but that said, the technologies are evolving so much at this point, people would end up posting their consoles on Twitter, on Tiktok on, um, channels that previously you would never think of. And there are new, new, or a newer set of channels that are coming up. So businesses really need to think about how to support customers in the channels of their preference. Right? It's um, customers are becoming more demanding in terms of, you know, how they would like to be, uh, responded to and the kind of experiences that they would like to see versus the experiences that you think you would want to provide to them.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah. And it sounds like from your history that as the definition of digital customer experience has expanded, so has your role, interestingly enough, right. What skills do you think enabled you to sort of grow with the industry/
Veny Gooty: Yeah. I think that over the last few years, working with elements solutions and working on these various digital technologies, but also through the acquisition of elements solutions into HGS, HGS uh, is a BPO company. It has traditionally, over the last 20 years, have hundreds of customers, hundreds of enterprise clients for whom they ended up providing BPO related services. But that industry is changing so much. It's becoming more and more technology enabled. So as we started integrating the two sides of the business, we started realizing there are significant opportunities. And over the last couple of years, I had been involved in a lot of CX optimization projects where we try to implement different types of digital technologies to optimize agent experience and to bring in efficiencies for the contact centers. And I think it was this part of that, that I was able to gain a lot of interesting set of digital as well as, uh, human contact center experiences and how they can co-exist and co-mingle to provide the best solution for the end customer. And I think those sort of experiences have me get to this control.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Alright, we’ve got Venu’s credentials. So let’s take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor. And we’re back. Let’s get into the case. Let’s hear about what exactly is going on with our client.
Client: My company runs a bunch of call centers, and customers are complaining that wait times are horrendously long. Like sometimes they sit on hold for over an hour and have to listen to that song. Then once their call is answered, they get passed from person to person, sometimes talking to more than four people before being taken care of. We’ve gotten feedback from customers that agents sound bored, frustrated and unfriendly. And we have high employee turnover. So maybe we’re not hiring the right people in the first place?
Lyssa Myska Allen: Gotcha. So how does employee experience, human experience contribute to customers?
Veny Gooty: So one of the things that we end up saying is it's the employee experience that leads to a better customer experience. A happy employee means a, you know, you'd end up seeing happy customers. Right. Um, if a customer is unhappy, there is a good probability that, Hey, are you setting the right internal foundation to make sure that all your employees are enabling the customer in the right way? And I think that applies for our business, which is the HGS where a lot of the employees within the HGS are agents who are working closely with our customers, uh, with our clients, customers in order to provide that better experiences during the interactions. So our agents are definitely important element of the employees for whom we need to improve the customer experience, our employee experience. The second part I'd say is just the various functional areas where for instance, our recruitment team hiring the right kind of employees has been such a big challenge within the industry at this point in time because of the kind of attrition that we are seeing because of the kind of, um, you know, the expectations that all the employees have. So how do you end up bringing in the right tools and technologies to, uh, Improve those, uh, employee experiences, whether it is on the agent side, whether it is on the hiring side, whether it is, uh, on the support team side, uh, I think that's going to play a key role on how our business is evolving.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Let's dig into those tools and technologies especially in the environment, the hiring environment right now, where it's such a challenge across industries, you know, a lot of tools, a lot of really cool platforms have sprung up to manage recruitment or employee experience or any of that. How do you know, you know, what will work for your audience?
Veny Gooty: So, there are a lot of tools that have come up. I think the challenge though, is, each of the tool and, providing different, solutions to different challenges. So for recruitment, recruitment is not a pretty straightforward answer, especially at this point in time. What we did is over the last one and a half years, uh, we try to identify what are the, you know, challenges in terms of recruitment, not just in the standpoint of the process, but also once we hire the resources, who are the people who are actually sticking and who are the people who are attriting, I think that plays an important role. And by using AI, We were able to create what is called as a fit index model, which means we are trying to identify which of the employee characteristics is the right fit for our organization. And that is helping us. Identify and screen the right kind of candidates, and basically say that these are the guys whom we should be hiring. And as part of that interview process, as part of the initial screening process, we are able to identify that, Hey, this person, this agent is a higher likelihood of sticking around because of all of these reasons. Um, including, you know, the location of that person, the ability to speak a certain language, uh, the ability to, um, you know, work within a team, the ability to, uh, show a lot more emotional caution compared to other employees. So based on all of those criteria, which are also, um, filtered and factored as part of the AI models, we were able to identify and hire the right kind of candidates.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Do the people have to take like some sort of assessment test or are we able to run those, like the fit index on their existing type of application?
Veny Gooty: What we have done in order to streamline hiring within the organization is we brought in this concept of fit index. Fit index allows us to better understand and engage the candidates on various parameters and criteria, uh, other than that we're also leveraging AI in order to truly identify, which are those individuals who have higher likelihood of joining us and also not attriting, because attrition is a huge problem within the contact center industry. Uh, you know, the technology is enabling us to say a person with this kind of characteristics and these kind of attributes are the right fit based on the past, uh, employee behaviors, or based on the characteristics that we've used for previous screening of employees. So that has been extremely efficient for us.
Lyssa Myska Allen: So, in order for employees to measure up to the fit index, I don't know if that's the right terminology, but do they have to take some sort of separate assessment or are we able to apply that AI to kind of the existing application process?
Veny Gooty: So, what we've done is the existing application process was actually redesigned quite a bit in order to account for, um, capturing the data points that are required from a fit index standpoint. So there were a couple of things that we incorporated. One was asking the right kind of questions, which really would help us identify those different attributes and characteristics of individuals, but also the, the tests that they would previously go through, that was streamlined through a chat bot application called SoFi, uh, which helped the candidate to be able to do those interviews or do those assessments at their leisure. So then they didn't have to necessarily do all of them one after the other. Instead they could do it at their leisure and that sort of streamlined some of that process us.
Lyssa Myska Allen: And then we took that product to market right after using it for ourselves?
Veny Gooty: Yeah, the recruit bot is a great solution that we actually have taken to the market as well. So it's not just us hiring, you know, uh, more than like 10,000 employees on an annual basis. Uh, but you have a lot of other industries who have very similar challenges, right? So your companies that have, um, high-volume hiring needs or seasonal high needs, for instance, when you, you need to get your tax done right now. During this point and time when you have, uh, you need to hire a lot of these kinds of employees, temporary employees, the hiring process is extremely challenging and, uh, it's also pretty time consuming. Right? So, um, That process is something that we have significantly streamlined using recruit bot application. Uh, it allows the applicant to get hired within two hours of their application, if they are interested in streamlining and fastening up that entire process, that also has enabled us to actually reduce the amount of back and forth that happens with the agents because previously, um, the, the amount of back and forth that we used to see was almost two to three weeks of just from apply to hire timeframe. But right now we have cut it down to an average of less than a day and as fast as less than two hours at this point.
Lyssa Myska Allen: That's awesome. So when we go back to how to choose technology and tools in a crowded marketplace, HGS, our company like had this problem that It solved for itself. So are you, is that a good parameter for someone looking for technology what are some other ways that we would know what's the right kind of tools or technologies to choose?
Veny Gooty: It depends on, you know, what the business is trying to do. Right. Um, for employee experience, you got, um, tools such as chat bots, previously, which were focused more on the end customer experience are now actually being used a lot more effectively for internal employee efficiency, as well as internal employee experiences, improving the experiences. So for instance, if you had questions related to your, um, leave policy, if you had questions related to what is my leave balance and what's my salary and all that kind of stuff. Um, You know, instead of sending emails to the, uh, different teams to the HR teams, for instance, um, chatbots are being deployed within teams for instance, or right within the slack itself, uh, which actually it can be used in order to, uh, get a lot of those internal, uh, answers from various systems. Right. And that way it reduces the amount of load from a support perspective and also streamlines the amount of interaction that happens, um, with the backend teams.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Gotcha. Yeah, so we're kind of moving up this pyramid of like foundational recruitment, you know, sort of like a little bit of onboarding training, um, you know, uh, like answering questions and then we get into like the how can technology and tools improve the daily, um, employee experience?
Veny Gooty: I think, you know, the other piece, once the teams are actually onboarded, for instance, uh, what we see is for the agents to be performing their activities on a regular basis. For them to get onboarded, it takes a significant amount of time. Now all the employees go through this sort of, uh, boot camp, uh, exercises or training programs. But if you think about it, those boot camps traditionally would be like a two week or three week sort of a boot camp, the challenge is yes, there is a lot of information that is shared during the bootcamp, but employees don't necessarily get to use all of that information starting day one. Right. They actually get to use that information. Ask for their needs, ask for the kind of interactions that they're having with the customers. Um, so how do you enable them with the right kind of tools to provide responses in context so that they are not kind of scratching their heads and waiting for the team leads, uh, to actually respond to those queries instead? Um, how do you provide knowledge in context or, um, agent assist in context? And, you know, there are some really interesting tools that we have worked on and developed and taken to market.
Lyssa Myska Allen: And you could see that across industries too. So, you know, we're, we're in the contact center space, but you could see that in the seasonal industries or, you know, um, fast food hiring or things like that, where you have an employee that might need some assistance and technology is enabling you to provide that assistance on demand in real time, rather than them having to go in sort of like in an analog way, find a manager and ask a question.
Veny Gooty: Exactly. Yep. The other piece that I've seen, especially related to knowledge base, um, also is even if you provide tools around, let's say knowledge base, you know, the teams end up creating content for the knowledge base, which is done during one period of time. And people don't update it on a frequent basis. Right? So as you have these employees who start to go back and refer to the knowledge repositories or knowledge bases, they would end up noticing that, Hey, the information is getting stale very, very quickly. So the amount of effort that it takes to keep your knowledge bases up to date across various teams, across various platforms is a significant effort. So there is huge opportunity there to bring in the right kind of tools that empowers the employees to contribute that knowledge, the learning that you gained within the organization is significant. How do you capture that tribal knowledge that is there among the employees and bring that knowledge and institutionalize it so that it's not just dependent on one individual who has all of that knowledge, but among that entire team among the organization so that, anyone can respond to those queries and, uh, anyone can refer to, uh, the knowledge on a real-time basis and get those right answers during the client conversations.
Lyssa Myska Allen: I think the fear with that sometimes is that, you know, you could also spread wrong knowledge, right? So, you know, the wrong coupon code or the wrong, um, I don't know. I'm trying to think of another example, but we can use technology to sort of mitigate that problem as well, can't we?
Veny Gooty: Absolutely. Yeah. So you actually are talking about the right things, which is how do you end up, uh, bringing in the right sort of controls so that, it's not just the individuals who have joined newly within the organization, who don't have the context contributing knowledge. You'd want to gain that, or you want someone within the team to be reviewing that knowledge that has been contributed by let's say someone who's relatively new to the organization. Right? So those are the guardrails that we can set using the right tools and technology.
Lyssa Myska Allen: This is all gold, Venu. On that note, I want to get into finding the right tech tools, because that’s something our client mentioned at the top. So let’s check in with them again to get specifics. I want to hear what their process is like when they get a call.
Client: We’ve always liked to have agents be the caller’s first touch point. So a human actually answers the phone. Then they’re working from a few different databases and apps, depending on the customer’s reason for calling. Agents are also split into departments, each with their own siloed information.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Oh man. I’m actually excited for this because I see all the ways we can help our client dial in [wink wink] their call center. I get wanting to have actual human voices on the other end of each call, but I think it’s actually hurting the customer experience because it’s creating these long wait times. And then on top of that, they’re managing disparate tech systems. No wonder they’re frustrated! I think this is a good time to talk about Agent X. Venu, you spent a long time working on this platform. How could it relieve some of these issues?
Veny Gooty: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's one of my favorite topics. Thanks for bringing that up. Um, over the last, uh, couple of yours. We have had a lot of, uh, exciting, uh, projects that we'd worked on in terms of transforming contact centers using technology. And I think a lot of that learning and culmination of, uh, the, the best practices from those transformation initiatives has brought us to create what is called as Agent X. Agent X is a technology solution that we have, which is built on top of Twilio flex platform as well as Twilio segment platform. Segment is a customer data platform. Um, what that allows us to do is provide our agents the right toolset, which helps them be efficient during their customer interactions, but also be very knowledgeable, um, in order to help the customers get the right information at the right time. Many of times you actually look at customers who end up calling up the biggest reason why they would give a five out of five is if they think that they got their questions answered correctly and it got answered fast. And that's exactly what the Agent X helps the agents perform and do.
Lyssa Myska Allen: So one of the things that I think is really interesting about Agent X is, you know, what we were talking about at the beginning where you're focused on the customer experience, but it's really the employee experience that shapes the customer experience. So having all the information available makes things so much easier for the employee, which is in this case, an agent, um, that it, affects attrition. It affects customer satisfaction. It does all those things. How did you figure out the impact employee experience would have on customer experience?
Veny Gooty: So there is a saying within the contact center industry. Um, happy agents equal to happy customers, right. And the reason why they say that is when you are able to provide agents the right kind of tools. And knowledge and make sure that their experience is good, the customers and the agents are motivated to provide the customers the right kind of answers, and to have that friendly conversation that the customers really need during their frustrated moments of, you know, pain working with, you know, a product that is not working as expected, whether it is, you know, fridge having an issue or a television having an issue, the customer is frustrated at that point in time and his anger about the purchase that they've done. How can the agent efficiently solve that problem while being courteous, right? And the way that you do that is by providing the right kind of, uh, platforms for your agents so that they can quickly get to the answers that they need to during the conversations, uh, provide the right kind of coaching and training. By, uh, you know, providing them the right kind of benefits so that they are happy working with the organization, uh, having the right amount of collaboration within the teams, having the right kind of incentives and gamification so that they are excited about their job and the performance that they are providing and provide a meaningful work environment overall. So that's, I think part of it is technology a huge portion of course, is, you know, the, the overall, uh, the team culture and the process that you bring to the organization.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Totally. Is there anything with Agent X or, you know, throughout your, CX EX, uh, career that you tried that just didn't work? Like you were like, this is going to make the agent's life or employee's life so much better and it just didn't?
Veny Gooty: Yeah, I think that there were quite a few moments where, um, what we had done was we ended up deploying, um, various internal, uh, chatbot projects, right? One of the things that, you know, we, we ended up doing from a technology standpoint is we believe that the technology is going to solve the problem. And we deploy technology. In this case, a chat bot, to provide agents and employees the right information, right. But if you do not update it on an ongoing basis, if you don't invest, uh, in managing that technology, so because the needs of an employee keeps changing all the time, how do you end up setting up that, let's say, HR chatbox system? How do you end up setting up, uh, an internal knowledge management system? How do you end up setting up all of these so that it's not taught as a one-time investment and instead it's an investment that is going to be evolving over time. You're bringing in and introducing new technologies as AI is getting evolved. How do you end up identifying the right kind of products and solutions um, so that the, the employees are provided the right information, then the faster way the right using the right channels, uh, I think is going to be very important. And that's where I think we made a few mistakes in terms of taking off some of these projects as one time initiative, instead of an ongoing initiative. And I think we, we learned quite a bit out of those. And I think at this point in time, once we learned that, realized that, our approach towards scoping projects has actually changed significantly. We think of it from a longer term standpoint. We think of it as not just one time deployment, but what's going to actually happen after that deployment. And how do you end up managing changes? Right? Whether within the tools. Uh, how do you, uh, increase the adoption? Adoption becomes extremely important. What are the reasons why people are not adopting? And are we capturing and gathering the right kind of early feedback of the product, of the solution that is deployed so that, you know, we are incorporating the right sort of changes? Uh, I think there is a ton of learning around all of those areas that we got.
Lyssa Myska Allen: That's a perfect segue to, I mean, you're not just talking about then, you know, your technical team doing QA on the solution. You're talking then about user acceptance testing and collaborating with the ops teams and the HR team and a whole bunch of different teams. How do you do that? How do you facilitate that cross-functional work, um, across departments?
Veny Gooty: Yeah, I think that's a great point. I think one of the biggest challenges for IT projects and there's a commonly mentioned term, that four out of five IT projects fail. And the reason why the IT projects have failed is not because, uh, the, the tools don't work. It is primarily because the adoption of a platform has not really happened. Right. Uh, and the reason why adoption has not happened is not because, you know, the, the people do not want to use the tool, but because people were not involved at the right time. Uh, the business keeps changing all the time, if you think about it. There are new tools, new processes, that are being introduced. If IT projects are implemented purely by IT teams, there is a higher probability of failing. Uh, Introducing the operations team upfront, not just during the design and requirements phase, but also understanding what is changing within the, within the operations teams. And how do we stay up to date with some of those changes? And how do you design tools so that the ramp up on those tools are not high for the stakeholders, for employees, right? The more complicated the tool, the more challenging it is going to be. From an adoption standpoint. So how do you, uh, make the tools super dumb and easy to use? It's by no means is it is a derogative by any means. Right? So the more important thing is the employees keep changing. And when you bring a new employees, they don't have the context, they don't have the history. And if a tool is easy for them to use, they'll adopt immediately. Right. And, and we all we got enough cognitive load in personal lives and business lives. Why add more through another tool?
Lyssa Myska Allen: Totally. I love that. It's it's the same as like, you know, it's much harder to write something short than long. It's much harder to dumb something down, then make it complicated and, um, is a good thing in that point.
Veny Gooty: Absolutely. That was good. Less is better. Yeah. is more.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Do you have any advice in terms of making sure the timing is right? Is it always early, um, to involve other teams of projects that you're working on. For instance, if you need to redesign a completely new process, you'd want to be working with the team early on. If it is just an incremental change, you probably don't need to bring in as many teams upfront. Similarly, if you are bringing a product which is a third party product, um, you might end up having different teams doing different rounds of assessment, right? So the business team might end up looking at it from the standpoint of, uh, the utilization of various, uh, feature functionality. But the IT organization might be looking at it from the standpoint of is it meeting our security requirements and goals? Is it meeting our scalability needs? Uh, uh, is it compliant with all the industry regulations that we have got? So different teams might be thinking of, uh, you know, different aspects of building a software or selecting a software and a, you know, IT organizations would be also thinking of, Hey, can we build it ourselves internally, or should we be buying it? Many times, you know, I, I really feel that the IT organizations end up overestimating themselves, um, by assuming that they can build everything internally themselves, but in reality, they are adding so much more stress, uh, by not leveraging experts within the industry. Uh, HGS has a digital team, right? And the digital team has done a lot of Twilio implementations as an example. And out of all of those implementations, we've got this beautiful product, Agent X, built on top of it. So if would a customer want to leverage something that's already built on top of Twilio Flex, or they want to have their IT team build the whole thing themselves and do those same kind of mistakes that we have done and learnt out of it from 50 odd implementations. Right? So there's ton of best practices that, you know, companies like us already bring to the table from the learnings that we've had through all of those implementations. So, uh, you know, IT organizations and businesses needs to realize the value that, uh, you know, teams like us and products like Agent X bring to the organization and should be looking at leveraging it instead of building all of that internally within their organization.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah. And some of that goes back to circling all the way around, to employee experience, right? So like the IT team doesn't want to struggle through implementing a new technology they haven't done before either. Like being able to build on something and learn from experts makes an employees experience better, too.
Veny Gooty: That is right. And, you know, the fact is IT team is overloaded most of the times, right? They are getting pulled by various teams to implement something and to manage and support, uh, you know, existing tool sets. So the innovation is usually handled by a different set of team. It's not managed by the IT organization. Um, for an IT organization to be able to bring in, uh, third party tools and, and, uh, introduce innovation, it's best handled when they identify and bring in the right partners who can work with them from a long-term standpoint and bring the right capabilities and skills and products and solutions that can get implemented for that business.
Client: If I’m going to try new systems and apps, how will I know if they’re improving the employee experience? Is there a way to measure how our new initiatives are going?
Veny Gooty: I think that there is a huge opportunity for businesses to, uh, use analytics in order to better understand the employees, uh, performance, the employees, sentiment within the organization. Look at the overall culture. A lot of that can actually now be captured, uh, using data. If you think of the advances that are happening from the standpoint of speech-to-text, as a matter of fact, and the kind of conversations that you actually end up having on Yammer and, uh, the, the sort of sentiment that you can actually capture from those unstructured content, unstructured interactions, whether it is, um, you know, emails or conversations within the teams or, you know, conversations with the clients over the phone, you have the ability to understand and capture the data. And using AI, understand the overall sentiment, and, you know, the, the performance of different teams and team members, um, and areas of frustration as well for employees. How do you end up, using that data to resolve those challenges, which are not necessarily spoken of? I think that's an opportunity for, uh, businesses to, uh, discover using newer set of technologies that are coming up.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Okay. I have two questions about that. One, it sounds incredibly complex and maybe it's not. And two, are there any like sort of privacy concerns around that or not because your company owns your email anyway. And, or the data is anonymized.
Veny Gooty: Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, there are definitely certain aspects that businesses need to be kind of looking at. Whether it is complex or not, I think that with the kind of big data technologies that are available in the market, businesses have started using that. I mean, you already see a lot of companies leverage customer data and in order to personalize the experiences for the customer, right? Um, you are capturing the customer interaction that is happening on the web. You're capturing the customer, uh, interaction on the mobile devices, the emails, uh, clicks and all of that stuff to, uh, focus on creating the right kind of personalized experiences and hyper-personalized experiences, uh, for, for your customers. It's around the thought process that businesses would actually use. And if you want to leverage some of those kinds of technologies to internally enhance the employee experience, then that's an opportunity for businesses to use similar technology is to say that, Hey, this agent had this call with the client, and from a speech to text, we can identify that, you know, they had a bad day. Maybe we should have the team lead have a conversation with the agent to motivate them up and maybe, you know, give them like a half a day off or something like that. If they had continuously had like a three or four really bad calls this morning. Right. So how do you end up leveraging that in a very positive way? Is something that I think it's going to be different for each business. And you've got to identify how best to leverage all these different technologies to improve that experience for employees.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah, that's such an interesting use case because if you think about like a one-to-one manager relationship, you can hyper-personalize that experience, I mean, by definition, right. But when you're looking at a much larger population or managers who are managing a larger population, using that data to personalize their experience in a way that they might not even have been aware of what is going on is a really, really cool thing.
Veny Gooty: That is right. And once you start aggregating all of that information, uh, and provide the appropriate anonymous data to the leadership team, they would have the right kind of knowledge on, you know, the overall organization culture. They would have a better understanding of why there is attrition, so much attrition happenhappening within the organization or within some specific team or within this specific department. Right. And they can take appropriate actions as needed. It might be, you know, nothing to do with the culture. It might be just to do with internal processes when people end up going through, you know, internal process and approval for every small thing, it's a frustrating thing for employees. So, you know, how can you simplify those different steps, uh, to, to empower employees, uh, with the right kind of decision-making and treat them as mature adults, right, instead of having all the blockers and approval processes. So I think there's a lot that can be gained out of insights and analytics.
First, finding the right person to do the job in the first places improves employee satisfaction and retention. Plus they’re more likely to give customers a good experience. So implement a fit index that leverages AI to identify a good match. And make the hiring process as easy as possible by using a chatbot to run the assessments. That way applicants can take the tests on their own time and get hired more quickly.
Second, give employees the right tool for the job. Have the IT team collaborate with operations to identify and adopt the best tech tool for employee needs. And keep it simple. If there are new employees onboarding frequently, the easier the tool is to use, the better.
And third, look at the data. Use analytics to track employee performance, sentiment and your company culture. This will give you a feel for what’s going well, and where there’s room for improvement.
Client: Thank you both so much. We have work to do, but you’ve given me so many ideas on where to start.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Totally! Say, Venu, I think we deserve an ice cold drink after all this detective work. Let’s head to the HGS pub to celebrate cracking the case. What podcasts besides CX detectives are you listening to?
Veny Gooty: So I listened to Motley Fool podcast on how to, how to make money, but I've never made money their that podcast yet. I, I, it's an interesting sort of podcast on how each of the different stocks are performing. They make certain recommendations, I've enlisted, uh, using some of that recommendations. But, uh, my portfolio is down big time so far.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Oh no.
Veny Gooty: Yeah,
Lyssa Myska Allen: Yeah, exactly. Um, what's your most recent splurge item, even though we know you're not getting rich with Motley Fool?
Veny Gooty: Um, so, you know, I ended up spending quite a bit, um, um, ping pong bats, because I love playing ping pong. And, uh, yeah, yeah, so the number that goes on top of ping pong bats, those are, you can't believe it. On each side, it's like a hundred bucks. And I ended up spending a hundred bucks just to buy that number that goes on top of the ping pong bat.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Holy cow. I had no idea.
Veny Gooty: Yup.
Lyssa Myska Allen: I'm floored. What other, um, outrageous hobbies do you have that I don't know about?
Veny Gooty: So I've actually started picking up on gardening.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Oh,
Veny Gooty: this was, uh, this was during COVID. Maybe I should take a photo off my backyard and send it across to you. The, the spring flowers have started actually coming out really well now. So yeah,
Lyssa Myska Allen: doing just flowers? Are you doing vegetables and fruits too? Yeah,
Veny Gooty: Yeah, I kind of started off with vegetables and fruits. Not really fruits. I must say. But vegetables. I've grown interest in them, but flowers, yeah. I'm more of a visual guy, you know. More design focused guy. So I love flowers.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Oh, that's awesome. That's so cool. Venu, you thank you so much for joining me on CX Detectives podcast today. You've been a phenomenal co-detective and I can't wait to play you in ping pong.
Veny Gooty: It was a pleasure on this particular podcast. Thank you so much, Lyssa, appreciate it.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Thank
Veny Gooty: Take care. Bye-bye.
Lyssa Myska Allen: Thank you for listening to CX Detectives, brought to you by HGS. If you liked what you heard today, tell a friend, a colleague, your toughest ping pong opponent, And don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Next time there’s a CX case to be solved, we’ll be there!