The Most Annoying Tech Mystery, Solved!

0:00From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

0:22I am about to solve on this episode, one of the most enduring mysteries of modern life. Oh, I am not hyping this at all. But let me tell you something that has always perplexed me. And maybe it perplexes you. I would bet that it does. Okay, so let's say that you need to call your bank, just as a random example. You need to call your bank for some reason. And so you call your bank and you get, of course, the automated voice assistant. And the automated voice assistant asks you a bunch of things. What are you calling about? And so on. And then it also tries to gather some information about you. Maybe it asks you to input your credit card number or your zip code or something.

1:12And then finally, you reach a human being, which is the thing that you actually want. You don't want to engage with this automated voice system. Nobody wants that. It's really annoying. So finally, you get the human. And the first thing that the human does is asks you for exactly the same information that the automated voice assistant just got from you, right? You entered your bank account number or your credit card number or whatever. And then the first thing that the human does is ask for that same information. And it's not because they're somehow confirming that you're the right person. It's because they literally don't have it.

1:46Because the system, the automated system that retrieved this information from you, the thing that you had just engaged with, somehow didn't seem to pass it along to the human. And this is really annoying, but also it just leaves you or certainly leaves me wondering, why not in a world of amazing technology, in a world where we have chat GPT, how does the automated voice assistant not communicate with the human being? What the hell is going on? I just, I wanted to know. Well, actually, I'll be honest. I actually didn't want to know. What I wanted was just to vent, which is what I did. I went out to Twitter and I tweeted some version of this.

2:29But then wouldn't you know it, one of my Twitter followers, and I know it's not called Twitter anymore, but whatever, I'm still calling it Twitter. One of my Twitter followers, Justin Brady, shout out, responded. And he said, hey, I actually work with some people who have the answer to this question. Do you want to talk to them? And of course I said, yes. Can I have you guys introduce yourselves? Yeah, not a problem. My name is Eric Skeens. I'm the CTO and co-founder of 3Tree Tech, where we empower leaders through technology. And my name is Brandon Bird. I'm the VP of business development for the CX practice for 3Tree.

3:04And as you'll learn in a minute, these guys know all about this problem. It's an interesting thing because it frustrates me. Everybody it frustrates. There's not a single person on this earth that doesn't frustrate. Yes, you are speaking my language. But also, interestingly, these guys know the solution. which is very convenient for a podcast called Problem Solvers. But also as I learned, and I did not really expect when I got on the phone with them, that the solution and the thinking behind the solution, the concepts around the solution, go far beyond how to fix just automated phone systems and really go into how we should be thinking about technology and business at all.

3:47So are you ready to know the answer to this incredibly frustrating problem? Because it's all coming up on this episode of Problem Solvers.

4:17Each week, One Thing Better gives you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love. I focus on the things that matter to you. I focus on how you can get focused. I focus on whether or not you should quit something, how to make a major change, how to identify problems. This is the newsletter that people tell me they read more than any other. I am so honored to hear that, and I hope you check it out. One Thing Better. You can find One Thing Better by going to one, that is O-N-E, onethingbetter.email. That is a web address. Just plug it on into the browser, onethingbetter.email, and you will get One Thing Better.

5:05All right, we're back talking with Eric and Brandon from 3TreeTech about this crazy problem that is so frustrating. And the question is, to start at least, why? Why does the automated phone system and the human customer service system not seem to talk to each other? And Eric began by explaining it like this. He says, look, so what you're seeing is the result of a culture and a technology shift. And it kind of looks like this. So in the beginning, there were old customer service phone systems. And these large companies bought these phone systems that basically allowed for one thing, which was for customers to call the company and then be routed to a human being.

5:57But then culture shifted. And suddenly people were interested in more efficiencies. And maybe there's some technologies that can intercept the person who's calling and help them without having to reach a human being, which of course is more efficient. And out of this rose a whole bunch of technology providers, people who created the systems, the automated phone systems, and then went and tried to sell it to the large companies that already had purchased a legacy phone system. And you've got this problem of all these technologies being sold because it's the best thing since sliced bread that's been promised to everybody.

6:38This is going to make your day more efficient. This is going to make your organization be able to communicate with your customers better. But nobody's ever integrated any of the technology. So then you've got these things that are asking you for things that supposedly is going to make yours and my life easier being a customer. but somebody forgot to say, oh, we should probably have these technologies talk to each other. And then you've got these developers, you have all this stuff that's coming into play, but now there's newer technology and we're still fighting that. And as we're continuing to feel it, there's people that are still not integrating everything.

7:12And that's partially on the vendors or the suppliers promising everything to the customer. And then the customer, on the other hand, trying to cut costs. And when the vendor says, hey, you should probably integrate that, they're like, oh yeah, we'll take care of that after. Let's just get it in. And then somebody gets fired, somebody leaves, and somebody forgets, oh, we never integrated those technologies together. And it's just an, oh crap. And now you have customers that are pissed. You have companies that are tanking because you have organizations like Amazon that are continuing to develop and do that.

7:49Not like they're perfect, that customer experience, but they seem to set the trend of what we expect. So like Amazon Prime, I expect my packages within two days and the past two weeks was fine. And I was very gracious about it. And now when I don't get it in two days, I'm like, what's taking it so long? And so that's kind of somewhat of a context component. And Brandon, I'll let you kind of take kind of where you see. So Brandon, one of Brandon's things is he came out of an area called RPA, Robotics Process Automation. It's effectively where customer experience or contact center worlds were leveraging ML, AI, ML.

8:29I always think of AI as a misnomer because of some of the components, and we can talk about that going forward. But the RPA side or robotics process automation was some of that promise of automating and hooking things together. So I'll let you let Brandon kind of touch on it. Do you have any questions on that, Jason? Oh, well, yes. I am a dummy when it comes to enterprise-scale technology. So I only vaguely understand exactly what you're talking about, but I understand the shape of it. And so I just want to state it back to you in my dummy way, which is that let's just use Bank of America just because we need a stand-in.

9:07So Bank of America, if I call Bank of America, I enter my card information to the automated and then I reach the person and they don't know who the hell I am and I got to tell them all over again. Okay. So the reason that that is happening, you are saying is because Bank of America started with one system and that system was that piece of technology facilitated me calling Bank of America and just getting routed to a human being. And that was that. And then Bank of America at some point purchased a separate system from a separate vendor. And that system became the introductory system. So now when I call, the first thing that I hit is this other system.

9:43And this other system moves me through the automation and presumably in theory is designed to solve a whole bunch of my problems so that I don't need to reach a human being. But if I do need to reach a human being, then what is happening is that I am literally just getting transferred to a completely different system, like made by a different company. And these two systems are not talking to each other at all because for whatever reason, nobody actually integrated the two of them. Is that the experience that I'm having? Is that right? In a nutshell, yes. There's little pieces that I could clarify, but in a nutshell, that's effectively what's going on is you have multiple systems that are not talking to each other.

10:20And as a customer, you're getting routed to, you're getting routed through to individuals or systems that aren't talking to each other. And you're the one that's experiencing the pain. The customer service agent that's also working with you also experiences the pain because they know that you entered your information. And the problem is it never went into the system. And so they have to like tail deck between their legs and ask you for that information once more. Right. And just sorry, Brandon, maybe one more thing before you pick it up, which is why the hell didn't the first system simply build out the automated entry point.

11:01Like, I don't understand why Bank of America has two completely separate, and again, Bank of America just hypothetically here, has two completely separate customer service systems that are just kind of like sitting dumbly side by side to each that doesn't make any sense. Why didn't the original provider that just facilitated the I call and get a human create a automated entry point in their own damn system so that Bank of America has one and didn't have to do two. Is it just like a different technology or is it just a completely fragmented industry? Why is that even happening? Yeah, it is a very fragmented.

11:38So you got to think about, so from a technology perspective, you have technology that has to be overhauled. So when you think about this legacy technology, it's been built on old code. It's been built on old systems that are from the eighties, from the nineties. And when you think about how do we, how do you bolt on newer technology or newer types of ways of communicating? There's no easy way to bolt on unless you just scrap the whole thing and start afresh. And then, so when you build up from the ground up, and so you've got these organizations that are trying to figure that out. And I'm not going to pick on too many technologies on, on this, but there are technologies out there that just continue to rest on their laurels.

12:19And they're like, we're resting on a boatload of cash, I'm not about to have to try to overhaul. We're going to one, make our investors pissed. And two, that's just way too much work. We've got to hire new types of developers that had no different styles of code, no algorithms, no machine learning setups or foundational aspects that kind of build on top of that. Whereas in the past, you're built off of Cobalt or you're built off of whatever it is, C, and then you went into C++, all these different coding languages. And now you've got these newer coding languages. And I know that we'll talk about ML and AI a little bit, but that's kind of where that this trajectory is going.

12:59And unfortunately, you can't build, it's effectively trying to build on an old technology platform or foundation. Got it. Okay, Brandon, take us deeper. Yeah, exactly right. I mean, if you peel back fundamentally, it comes down to the pain to change. And there's many organizations that, and also politics, politics gets in the way of many of these logical, what we would think is logical progressions of natural. And when he said politics, business politics, as opposed to the underlying, I just wanted to clarify that. Yeah, no, this is not. And, you know, it's this person that's built their career on building that IVR, as you mentioned, it's their baby and it comes down to an ugly baby.

13:43and many like... Brandon, just clarify, please. So go ahead. Yeah, so when you call in, it's that system that, you know, press one for this, two for that. That's that triage of your call to route that to where the company believes is going to best suit you. Now, that's also another factor. There's so much data on you, especially from your phone, with your phone number, to be able to identify what they call ID and visa, identify and verify you as an individual. All this technology exists and it has for a long time. And if you look at some of the most innovative countries in the world, New Zealand is one of the most innovative countries in the world in relation to this type of service, as well as Australia.

14:22And the reason why is because the technology that's in these countries is actually American. But along from experience, right, I've dealt with a lot of banks, a lot of carriers in Australia and government where because there's less people to say no. The solutions themselves are the innovation, but there's the investment from the legacy is so massive that the pain to change sometimes isn't worth the gain in the eyes of the company. And this also then brings in the politics piece where customers and companies siloed through different channels as channels have evolved from originally was voice and then it was email and it was chat and then it was now social media and other facets.

15:04So they've bolted these on and there's no single view of the customer across these silos of information. So when you call into an organisation, you should know who they should know who you are. Well, the technology exists to do that. So also where I see with large enterprises that when they, and typically when they're in a process of delivering or making change across a customer service or a platform, these platforms are directly, and I ask this question of who cares and who cares about the value that this change is going to actually incur. And where I see the success is when the performance or the KPIs of the senior management reflects on a...

15:48KPIs or KPIs or just making sure I don't. Yeah, no, no. 99 % of acronyms, I will not know. KPI I got though, but good for the audience. Key performance indicator. Yeah, so big fun. So what that enables is, is that if there's no true North Star and the senior management aren't compensated in relation to an increase of what's called net promoter score or a customer satisfaction value, then therefore it can be just fluff. So do they really care and do they really have a North Star that they actually can shoot to? And a lot of the times in large businesses, when they self-report on their own performance, sometimes they don't want to know what's really there because they may expose incompetency.

16:32So it really comes down to when I'm working with my customers across the years, I like to understand the drivers of the management and understand, is this truly something that's important to them or is this just lip service to when the annual report to say they are truly customer focused? So to answer your question... Brandon, what are some telltale signs one way or the other that this is really important to them or it's lip service? Well, you'll see it all on all the annual reports of public companies about their decreasing cost, increasing customer service, decreasing risk, increasing security, all the standard statements.

17:09But when you really pivot it back and pair it back to companies like Amazon, which was mentioned before, they run what's called customer effort score. Now, they have the literally control, the agent when you call, and what's called first call resolution, when you call that agent, they have the power to literally stop some of those product lines, so therefore they can't be sold and create another customer satisfaction issues. And I'm sure you've got many examples of when you called in or had some form of communication with Amazon, that your first call resolution has been high. And that's what their metrics is.

17:47So, you know, that's it's all about how hard you are to do business. And that whole metrics was really brought on. And one of the big differentiators that Amazon actually took to the market. I'm a big advocate of customer effort score. I think it's one of the most the truer metric than other metrics are out there, because a lot of those other metrics can actually be self-reported going back to that ugly baby scenario. OK, so really, really helpful in understanding the technology and the context that it sits in. As a final piece of this, as you think about what is required for a company to be genuinely customer focused and then translate that into how they're building their customer service technology system, what is your advice to people who maybe are listening to this and thinking, am I doing the best job that I should be?

18:38And that's a great question. I've got, I'm pretty passionate about the answer. The tools are there for the companies to, for the operational people to have the visibility into you as a customer. That exists and it has for a long time. It's just where does the responsibility lie to be able to make that change? And there's one organization, very large organization in the pet industry that made this change a long time ago. And it was probably close to seven or eight years ago where the CEO had the vision that they realized that it's all around the customer. And they empowered this organization where the chief customer officer, all the C-level rolled up to the chief customer officer and everything was focused around that customer and all the decisions, the finance, the security, all of the decisions were focused around that customer.

19:31And then that person rolled up to the CEO. Now that's a huge change of paradigm in relation to reporting structure, but they put their money where their mouth was. And also the management had KPIs set to those customer service metrics and being able to measure those customer service metrics and their bonuses were tied to that. So the technology exists, it has for a long time. And now with the cloud, the innovation and the proprietary lock-in of on-prem is being eliminated somewhat. So it's now, it's not the big beating the small, it's the fast beating the slow. So the innovation and the ease of innovation and the pain to change now is a hell of a lot less when it was on-prem.

20:15And so the visibility of these solutions now exists, especially with the likes of ChatGPT, for example, what that's going to do to the industry from a customer service, customer agent service perspective, there's a huge amount of information that's now going to be presented to the humans to be able to digest, to make business decisions and be able to service the customer better. So in short, if we were to bring it back to this problem that everyone experiences when they call their bank or whatever, what the bank needs or the whatever needs to at least bridge this one pain point that is indicative of larger pain points is, is it fair to say two things, buy-in, structural buy-in, a commitment to fix the problem, And then some amount of money that has to be invested in doing it, but you're saying is less money now than it would have been before.

21:09And yes, 100 % cultural alignment for the goal. But secondly, the solutions are out there now that actually reduce your total cost of ownership for the company. The micromanagement of the contact center or the customer service environment has been massive for years down to the second. You know everything about the agent. You know everything about the competency. to understand, you know, even though when they go on breaks, everything about this is popping. And now that level of analytics, there's been organisations that are trying to transpose that into the back office and people are nervous about what they're going to find.

21:43So the technology itself exists. It's just now a matter of the adoption. And also, too, the pain to change, is it worth the gain? And it is. So the innovation now and a lot of the open standards now that are available where you can find innovative-based solutions. And we work in this space where we find solutions that enable, we can bolt on the customer's existing environment to mitigate the pain, to change, to deliver value. So it exists and it's expanding exponentially because of the open environment that's now being created for innovation. So it's all coming down to culture within the business.

22:21And when I, one of the things that I do when I'm working with an organization is to understand that. And sometimes I've stated that you guys aren't ready for this. Your decision-making process, how your structure, who really cares and do they really care about what they're trying to achieve. Once we understand that, sometimes you need to just walk away because it is a problem that really stems from the top of the org structure. Outstanding. Guys, I started with just a thing that annoyed me. And what we got was a brief, but pretty holistic look at what is required to structure an organization for better customer service.

23:00I really appreciate your time. I appreciate it, Jason. We really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks, Jason. Awesome. Thanks. And that's our episode. I would love to hear what you think and maybe even about a problem that you solved. You can find me at my website, jasonpfeiffer.com. J-A-S-O-N-F-E-I-F-E-R.com. Also, I have some more useful stuff for you. I write a newsletter about how to future-proof yourself and become more adaptable and optimistic. I would love for you to sign up. It is at jasonpfeiffer.bulletin.com. Also, check out my other podcast. It's called Build for Tomorrow. In each episode, I take on some belief that we have that holds us back from progress and show you why it is not as bad as you think.

23:45Problem Solvers is a production of Entrepreneur Media and comes out every Monday morning. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. Thanks to Deepa Shah for production. My name is Jason Pfeiffer. See you next week.