The dangers of a CCaaS monoculture - Interview with Paul Hughes of Mitel

0:00So, welcome to the next edition of the Punk CX Podcast. With me today I have Paul Hughes, who is the head of direct sales for the UKISA. You're going to have to explain to me what that kind of stands for at Mitel. Welcome to the podcast, Paul. How are you doing? I'm really good. What does UKISA stand for? It's a bit of a mouthful, but it's, yeah, the way Mitel split the world up. So our region is the UK, Ireland and South Africa. Okay. And yeah, I am responsible for the direct part of our business. So we have a number of direct customers and we also have a number of indirect. So I look after the direct and also wear the hat of kind of CX specialists, which is something I'll never really relinquish because it's all very close to my heart.

0:45So, yeah, UK, UK, Ireland and South Africa. Perfect. So when I said it, I thought I sort of guessed and I thought there's some sort of like there's an English language sort of like link, I guess, across those things. And then a time zone link as well, I guess. Indeed, indeed. But I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about your background and the work that you kind of do. So we just get a bit of a thumbnail sketch on kind of like Paul. Sure. Okay. So I have been in this industry for approaching 30 years now. I'd been working with Mitel actually for probably 15, 20 of those years as a channel partner of Mitel.

1:24So where I would buy from Mitel and sell to the customer. and now I find myself working for Mitel, which is a fantastic place to be at the minute because we feel we're in a really good spot in the market with our strategy of hybrid communications. But I started selling contact centers. I think one of my very first deals was with a company called Breast Cancer Care, a charity organization. And so for me, being able to sell technology that really delivered against an outcome and made a big difference to people was always was always something that was there right from the start and it's been an industry that's been fascinating and interesting and so fast moving over these last you know decades and continues to do so so yeah a long time in the industry really love what i do and i'm passionate about kind of the cx side of it perfect now there was a couple of things i mean there's no real kind of like there wouldn't have have any real set agenda uh from this other than we had a kind of bit of a conversation in the in the setup and there was a couple of things that you said that in the run-up to this that i thought it'd be worthwhile sort of exploring because it just leads into other other sort of things and one of the things that you said and you just alluded to it then is this idea about hybrid and when you were talking about in the setup you said to me hybrid is the new default, but it's not a compromise.

2:48And I was like, I wanted to ask you, can you explain to me what you mean by that? And what are the implications for brands that want to, as you say, want to deliver those better outcomes to their customers and also to their business? Absolutely, no problem. Well, I think it's an inevitability in the enterprise space that you have to integrate lots of different applications and infrastructures. It's just how businesses have evolved and developed over time. So by having a hybrid strategy from a delivery of technology perspective, you're able to meet that enterprise requirement, be it delivering some on-premise, some from the cloud, some from a different cloud, and being able to wrap a service around all of that where you can actually deliver applications that are consistent across all types of infrastructure.

3:42If I give an example, I mean, we operate in public sector, healthcare, local and central government. And these are big organizations that have an awful lot of different infrastructure to support. So it's just the way of the world, hybrid. And I think enterprise simply must have and does have that hybrid strategy. I mean, because the link to that, you can also say that, I mean, and this is something that feels like, I think you alluded, you used the term monoculture. in the conversation where particularly we're talking about this sort of ccas sort of space everybody's talking about oh i have to go to the cloud and everything's the cloud and all these different sort of things um but actually if you talk about this this hybrid cx is the most important thing and you actually you can do you can deliver enterprise grade flexibility without having to go kind of like kind of down there and the thing that i find it really interesting about there is it runs kind of counter to some of this dominant narrative.

4:44And I think you describe it as this kind of monoculture. I mean, can you help me understand a bit more about that? Well, yeah, certainly. Okay, well, let's dive into hybrid a little bit more and why it works so well. I mean, hybrid, basically in enterprise with mission critical services, you have to have a blend and a mix of architecture and applications that you provide choice and flexibility and compliance to those organizations. Now, part of that might be public cloud. It might be an element linking you to a collaboration tool that might sit in the cloud or even a contact center service, but there'll always be elements that you've got to support that cross borders, that cross sites and cross technologies.

5:29So the hybrid, sorry, the CCAS monoculture or the UCAS monoculture, what I meant when I referred to that is that there is a narrative to say, you know, get everything into the cloud as quickly as possible. We'll manage it all, take all the headache away. And, you know, life is good. But it kind of misses an awful lot of real life scenarios, as I've mentioned, the hybrid answers. And that is, well, hang on a minute. Is the cloud compliant? Can I access from everywhere and provide a consistent service? How about supporting these devices and applications and servers that are absolutely necessary?

6:05They sit on site. Can I integrate with them? And often the answer is no, or you can, but it's extremely expensive. So then this idea of getting into the cloud cheaper, faster, quicker, just doesn't really work. Don't get me wrong, Adrian. I'm not talking, you know, and I'm not anti-cloud at all. It's just about being able to provide the choice with this hybrid infrastructure. Yeah, I mean, I think that's an important point is that ultimately it's about the customer and what the customer wants to do and what the customer's kind of reality kind of is. and also that they kind of the the also reality was a fascinating kind of like stat which says something like 70 of all enterprises still rely on some legacy on premise kind of like infrastructure to run sort of business critical applications and so there's a reality there is like even though everybody's going like a cloud and all this kind of really good stuff is in the cloud i think what's what's emerging is that the particularly were operating in a regulated environment or you're operating kind of cross borders and there's all sorts of regulatory and compliance kind of insecurity and kind of issues kind of there is that the the hybrid solution or a hybrid approach is is is appropriate and it doesn't mean that people miss have to miss out on some of these new features and new functionalities and when you when you build that sort of like hybrids, sort of like architecture.

7:33Absolutely right. You know, cloud is part of the answer for sure, but it isn't always the answer. And particularly in the enterprise space, as you so eloquently described, when you've got highly regulated markets, you have to meet a certain compliance. The way Mitel have kind of bridged the on-premise, some of the legacy on-premise requirements with cloud is that we've built something called Mitel Secure Cloud. And that is a kind of a private cloud, but we can deliver it, which looking like a public cloud, we've got the same types of commercials. If the customer wants to pay subscription, they can.

8:12But it's essentially moving away from this idea of multi-tenant. You know, everything's the same no matter what customer you are, no matter what your requirements. So we can build a bespoke cloud environment for these organizations that enable them to link into their on-premise and remote areas. So that's something really quite unique. And those data center, those cloud environments, we can hand the keys to the customer in its entirety. So if they want total access to the very lowest layer of infrastructure, we can do that. Or we can provide a fully managed service wrap. And they say, right, it's yours.

8:50Just make sure that service is available. So again, just choice, hitting those specific customer outcomes. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think it's important. And to be fair, it's customer-centric as well. Particularly if it's about the organization, the brand, and what they want to do, and acknowledging their preferences and their risk profile and the requirements they need to meet in order to better serve their customers. So I think it's like, it's not forcing them into decision. It's actually saying, you're a journey. You might go 100 % to the cloud at some point, but right now you can do a blend of things that fits with your kind of your strategy and your infrastructure kind of like capabilities and so on and so forth.

9:36And so I think it's an important point. So it's not just like, you're not just here or here, but there are options there. Absolutely. And it'd be difficult for me to, me and my team and our consultant led approach to go into organizations knowing before I even ask the questions that the answer is going to be cloud. You know what I mean? It's kind of like, well, I'm not really listening in that sense. I'm always going to just put you in the cloud. But if I can go in, taking the technology conversation, the infrastructure conversation out of it, because I know I can deliver some cloud on-prem and mix, well, then that means I can focus really deeply on the specific customer requirement, understand things like the culture of the organization how technology is used and makes people feel this this is really an emotive subject if you're putting new tools into the workplace it's gonna create a fight or flight response right and if i can address that directly by saying you know we're here to help specifically what you require and deliver against those requirements you know it doesn't matter it's not always going to be black henry ford you know i don't have to choose one color when it doesn't always have to be public cloud so yeah it gives me a really fresh approach and and you know able to get really close to the customer requirement and that's very important to start building trust yeah and so that i wanted to go move on to another thing that you can like said and it it feels like the um everybody is well inevitably everybody's talking about ai and kind of what AI can kind of do.

11:11And the potential and the promise of some of these new evolutions of the technology is fascinating and brilliant. And I think there's such a great potential kind of there. But you also said that there's, we, feels like everybody feels like it's doing the same thing or there's a lot of AI sameness around and that most of these agents and things that people are talking about just feel just really similar. But you went on to say that you think there's a way to fix that. And I wanted to understand, it was like, oh, fix the sameness or kind of like parse out the kind of the, you know, like see through the fog a little bit.

11:53So kind of what is the best way to fix the sameness, you think? Well, it's interesting. And again, just before hitting on that specific point, I think a general comment around AI deployments, The stats, the data do not lie. I mean, most of the AI deployments have failed to deliver an ROI and it is linked to this sameness. But essentially it's because people were chasing the shiny object, which is basically the narrative walls. And I heard it so many times from AI partners that we use and also the main kind of protagonist building and driving these messages. If you don't get on this train, you will be left behind.

12:32You have to do this. It's, you know, you know, it's now or never. And then here we are many, well, a few years later, people go, well, I bought that stuff and it didn't work. And I've not seen any ROI and I've just kind of lost a load of staff. And, you know, you told me to replace and this, whatever. And that's because essentially they didn't do the discovery properly. Is this required? Why do you need it? What do you think it is, first of all, and why you need it? Do you understand the effect it's going to have on your employees, number one, then your customers and then your business? So people just chased it and bought it So that was the first thing And it was all pretty vanilla Basically because the chatbots or the self-serve functions That initially kind of hit the market They were all built for deflection It was like instead of coming into an expensive perception Expensive contact center Just deflect these calls over here And we'll deal with them automatically And that would work in certain scenarios, depending on what the specific need was, what the customer requirement was.

13:36But what it removed was content, context, I should say, intent, and really the ability to integrate with the human and the employee. And that's so important. So AI has been driven by cost reduction rather than experience outcomes. And I think that's really the bottom line. So, you know, we can fix that by doing deeper discoveries and creating better journeys and forgetting about technology, understanding what the experience that you want to create is. Right. I mean, I think that's an important kind of point to start with the end in mind, as it were, and pick the most appropriate kind of tool. And I think if you do that, then you get a clear, if you like, line of sight to what something you said, which is kind of the ability to demonstrate ROI.

14:28And that seems to be a requirement. I do an annual predictions piece and published a piece. And one of the key themes that came out of that was that there's this increasing pressure to demonstrate ROI, although it does feel like a bit of a perennial problem right now for the CX space. but you kind of talked about how you were kind of approaching that and about linking UC and CX investment to business outcomes and in particular kind of revenue and resilience and well-being and I wanted to ask you to tell me a little bit more about that and how you're doing that because it seems to me that it's a it's an area that the CX domain just struggles to do that A lot of it's people talk about kind of correlative sort of stuff rather than causative stuff, or they're not being bold enough and trying to make those causative kind of links.

15:20And I wanted to better understand how you're going about demonstrating that ROI to build confidence in the solutions that get chosen. Sure. Well, I think first of all, and it's a pretty obvious statement, the best CX and also UC, any technology investment really, the best ones the most successful ones are the ones you tie directly to outcomes um but that really then means that you need to know that you're measuring the right things in terms of you know what you want to achieve what good performance is you know when i i was a call center agent years and years and years ago before i started selling the technology and i still remember now in that inbound environment, the main KPI that we had was an average handling time KPI, two and a half minutes, right?

16:10And if I knew, basically, I ended up being manager of that call center. And so if I knew that and the majority of my agents were on the phone for two and a half minutes, they would get that deal done. It was just the main KPI, average handling time. Well, now that measurement becomes less important if you're deflecting calls to AI and you can handle tens of thousands of calls, but people might be still thinking, well, average handling time is something I need to chase. So really that example just says, let's examine whether we're measuring the right things to understand what good looks like, right?

16:43In this new world. And then how do we tie things down to real business outcomes? So revenue protection, customer retention, resolution time. It could be, you know, that compliance is also something that's absolutely vital if you're if you're dealing if you're working in the financial or banking or insurance sector um so first of all understand whether you're measuring the right things and again it's that um discovery process that really will reveal that we do something with our consultants that gets really under the skin of it all and and starts you know start to measure these things and benchmark against um industry standards and then understand from the c-suite down.

17:26What's the North Star, the whole kind of vision, and then the strategy, you know, do you want to break into this market? Do you need 5 % growth here? Do you need your cost reduction there? And then put those into the modeling around, you know, whether an AI chatbot or engine or a change in workflow is going to help deliver against that. But also the thing you mentioned earlier, Adrian, which I'm really, really keen on including, because I think this gets overlooked all the time, is the well-being, the human experience, the agent, what is the effect on this new technology or a changing workflow to your employees?

18:02That's absolutely vital. Without their buy-in and trust, it doesn't really matter what the technology is or what your North Star is, your strategy. Without that, first of all, being how do we deal with this and improve it and keep it consistent, it's going to fail. So yeah, I think one thing we're doing at the start of our consultancy process because we were very data led and it was like going in and analyzing this is what's happening now we can change it by doing this and that'll give you five percent increase xyz well we're now starting with culture and trust and empathy and understanding of human and customer experience and employee experience that's a really important thing that we're bringing into our our approach and i think it's really important to to note that they these are they are serious dynamics particularly in a contact center sort of like space if you take stats like there's some stats it says that was it's nearly three quarters or just over three quarters of contact center leaders report that their agents are feeling overwhelmed by their amount of systems and kind of information that they have to sort of navigate i mean some i've heard stories that some agents are having to deal with more than 10 different kind of like systems to be handled just the kind of the the set of routine kind of like kind of calls in some cases and that what people call toggle tax being able to kind of go and understand kind of like where they need to go and how they need to go in order to do that is is becomes almost like a grit in their experience and that takes a toll and i think you can directly link that to attrition in a contact center which is the global average right now is around about 52 percent there thereabouts can it can go it's below that in some places in the horror and in you know in others so if you think about how much you know the the impact that it has on operations this idea that you've got this kind of overwhelm, but it might be feeding through to or driving or influencing kind of attrition, then that's a real business, has a real business cost to it, but also a very human cost to it.

20:19Absolutely. It's not that people don't want to come into this and not help people. I think we do. I think the key is that we've got to make sure that we are equipping people with the right sort of tools and the right sort of support and the right sort of environment for them to succeed. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. I think no matter what environment you're in, if there are multiple applications to deal with, you're always going to get agents very concerned with that because it takes their focus away from doing the actual thing they're there for, which is to deliver this customer experience. You know, I've seen contact centers where you're toggling between sort of eight to 10 applications.

20:58It's just crazy. And there are ways to deal with that. And that brings me back to this hybrid environment that I mentioned before. We're not talking just about hybrid infrastructure. We're talking about the ability to integrate multiple tools, perhaps surfacing into one place. You know, this single pane of glass, I think it's a little bit aspirational. I don't think you can ever get to one, to be quite honest. But, you know, if you can start to reduce from 10 to 2 or 3, then, you know, you really are going to improve the agent's experience. That, in turn, improves customer experience. That, in turn, helps the business reach their goal more quickly.

21:38And happier agents equal happier customer equals, you know, growth, essentially. That's the thing there. So, you know, we've got our contact center application. It comes with an agent application and it can either be the thing that everyone connects, everything connects to. But on the flip side, let's say an organization is using Teams, so many are, well, then our staff can sit in the background and integrate into that. So we give real choice in terms of where these applications surface and what the agent experience is going to be. Then, of course, you've got the CRM world. You know, we can link into Salesforce dynamics and all those things as well.

22:17So really practical ways of saying, there's a big problem straight away. Let's solve that. And, and sometimes you, you can solve it very, very cost effectively. You're not talking about huge rip and replace, you know, you're talking about linking things better that already exist. And I think that what's interesting out of all this, cause you talk about, you mentioned earlier about context and about how, and I think the lack of context is that things get passed kind of like over is the kind of bane of people's life i mean like people can listen to the to our chat would be the you know would would share the frustration where somebody asks you can you can you repeat yourself or can you introduce yourself tell me about that or can you tell me about you a bit more about your kind of problem or can you can i just put you on hold before when i look this kind of like stuff up and and i think being very intentional about how you design the agent experience to meet the kind of the customer requirements and what you can do in order to i feel like figure out what that is that hybrid sort of like partnership is between the agents and the and the technology to try and remove all those different sort of like kind of things so you can surface kind of knowledge or you can carry context or you can be proactive with, oh, this person's talking about this policy or they're talking about this kind of thing.

23:42Can you proactively surface it to limit that up and down bit that goes on in many conversations? This is a really good point. I think the fear of AI in the CX world is replaced. Why Asians are worried that their jobs are going to go. Actually, it's like that in many, many industries. The trick to it is how you augment AI capability and resource into the overall journey, whether that is a customer coming in to buy something or, you know, check something or, you know, place an order, whatever it is. If you can implement AI without really, you know, disrupting anything so that while an agent might be speaking to a customer, the AI is listening and surfacing information to an agent and even to the customer.

24:35Almost like, yeah, you're in a collaborative process. That's really powerful. That's really powerful. But also something really exciting that we're involved in at the moment, right at the start of a customer engagement, this ID and verification process, please can I hold your name, Adrian, your telephone number, I just got to go through some security questions, et cetera, et cetera. this is still a major problem because i'll do it with you and then if you need to speak to somebody else in a different area of my business you're going to go across to them you're going to get asked all of that again and we're doing something now which is again sort of our ai driven which is around voice biometrics um and it's really fascinating so two-factor authentication plus voice biometrics to absolutely provide a real secure identification and verification at the point of connection into a business.

25:28That's going to really, I mean, there's big ROI there. If you can save seconds, maybe 30 seconds sometimes of a call, but also improve the customer experience at the same time, because, you know, once you're in the organization having been securely identified, that's, I mean, you must have it as well. You get passed around even the same department, oh, I've just got to send you over here. You've got to say the same information all over again. So that's quite exciting. But yeah, getting back to the point you raised initially, it's just about blending that AI technology in a way that really enhances the experience.

26:04Remove the friction, don't create more. And you need your own data source and knowledge base for that as well. If you connect AI in that scenario to the big worldwide web, that AI can go off and get some crazy information to feed back into this conversation. But if you're controlling the source of data, then you're compliant first of all, and you are surfacing the right information. So that's really important as well, the kind of the organization of data that you're using to underpin your AI resources. Yeah, I think I come back to the kind of the point around, you know, too many people, it feels to me kind of fall into a trap of getting excited about the possibility of kind of these new things that are coming on.

26:47And then they almost kind of procure it and then figure out what they're going to do with it. rather than being to repeat a point i made earlier is like starting with the end in mind almost like but almost like educate yourself about the possibilities of what is what is possible with the technology and then spend more time you talked about the north star earlier but actually the north star is like it's far away right but actually get really clear spend the time envisioning what thing what what it is you would like to achieve what you would tell a story about what the experience should be from both a customer and agents kind of perspective and then when you do that and you get clarity on that then you can start thinking about well what can't we do now what could we do what's possibly a bit more future sort of like related and then you can you can start building yourself a more detailed kind of roadmap about where you are and and how you want to change things or you know going kind of forward rather than taking this big bang approach which is like it's all going to be kind of brilliant but i sometimes think that people need to go slower in order to go further you absolutely agree faster and quicker and you know how many and when i hear a lot it's just not always not always the answer um often we will start with telling or advising, I should say, not telling, advising organizations on how they could improve things with what they've already got.

28:17We've got a huge amount of experience over many, many years dealing with thousands of scenarios. So when you go and see an organization, you can spot these trends and say, actually, this is not a technology or purchase. It's not going to help. Just do things in this way. And then you start to build trust as well. And then actually you can uncover further opportunity and maybe there is a chance to upsell or do something but often it's very much like let's first of all see if we can improve the way you do things from that from a process perspective and often there's really really quick wins you can do on that yeah and and one of the things i wanted one of the final things i wanted to kind of ask you about because you talked about i mean you mentioned it earlier about this kind of like there's a lot of shiny object syndrome kind of going around right now but actually you're trying to not do that at my tell and that you're you're favoring rather than kind of like wow look what we've made and look at what we made and oh here's another thing that we made you're favoring a much more slower sort of disciplined product strategy because you believe that that's what customers truly kind of value tell me about kind of that i mean is that just about going as fast almost traveling with customers rather than wanting to drag them?

29:32Absolutely. Or what else is going on? I just think, you know, if you just take that down to a human level as well, if you're getting dragged along somewhere, you always feel slightly anxious, I think. You know what I mean? Slightly out of control. It can be a great journey and it's exhilarating, but, you know, is it really what you want? I think it's far better to be walking side by side and sort of, you know, going each step together. And look, you know, Mitle have been doing this an awful long time. So if you look at features, for example, there are cloud vendors, the new kids on the block that are catching up with the features that Mitel have had in their platforms for many, many years.

30:06Don't get me wrong. There are things that we're catching up with as well. But, you know, it's not about features at all. It's about back to business outcome. Do not chase the shiny object. They don't want constant disruption. Customers do want reliable and steady service. Simple as that. Um, look, like I say, it's, there's some amazingly exciting things coming out, but innovation, there's a lot of innovation for innovation's sake. You've got to innovate. You've got to do this. You've got to put this in. And you know, if you don't, you'll get left behind. So just keep it simple. That, that's my, that's my message.

30:42Um, when we do AI projects, for example, we'll really look at one or two specific use cases and build something that proves its value. And then you can expand further. That's our general approach. for the deployment of any of our technologies. Awesome. Now, one final thing. I mean, I know that you're kind of deeply immersed in all this sort of stuff. And I know that I produce some predictions and trends kind of like, I produce trends and trends kind of piece. But what sort of things, what sort of trends or things are you expecting to see or emerge in the coming kind of 12 months? What are you seeing on the ground?

31:17Okay, so two things really spring to mind. And again, we've already kind of touched on them. I think we will see less cloud purity. And what I mean by that is just, you know, pure, like jump into the cloud, hook, line and sinker. We're just not going to, we're going to see less and less of that, I think. In the enterprise space, it will be a more pragmatic hybrid approach where enterprise will drive the need and the continual need to integrate multiple things together. So if you've got that capability, then you're going to be at a good place. And also the outcome driven AI deployment. We're way past the hype cycle.

31:56People are saying we've spent too much money on this and it's not delivering. So, you know, agentic AI is the current thing which can now execute tasks. And, you know, the difference is it's not just surfacing information and, you know, perhaps improving a process. It's actually executing tasks to delivery. that's quite scary but also really exciting um but you will have to even more and more prove the outcome so um yeah hybrids here to stay for sure we're going to see more and more of that and much more scrutiny on roi perfect so well that's that's it from my main kind of questions i just wanted to say before i can go into some quickfire was anything else that you want to highlight before we can like go into the quickfire round well i think we have we covered an awful lot there, Adrian, to be honest.

32:48So, you know, I'm interested to get stuck into the quickfire. So yeah, go for it. Perfect. So three quickfire questions. First one is, we talked about, as you said, we talked about a whole bunch of things and I've all, you know, I'm always interested in getting people to boil it down to their best advice. And the way I've been doing that over the longest time now is to ask people to complete this sentence. And the sentence is this, if you want to improve your customer or agent experience, Paul says, do this. Complete that sentence. Okay. Fix friction before you add features and keep the human experience at the heart of your AI decisions.

33:28That's a bit of a mantra of mine, but there you go. Yeah. Perfect. I love that. Fix friction before you can add features. Yep. Friction before features. There you go. Love that. Second one, and it's a punk related one because it has to be punk CX podcast is what company or brand do you think takes a more punk approach to customer experience and why oh okay okay look perhaps i won't be specifically the brand but the brands i admire most are the ones that basically take simple steps rather than over automate they focus on clarity and trust and doing the basics right the things that we spoke about um earlier in the call But yeah, certainly brands that keep it simple.

34:12So yeah, they're the ones I admire the most for sure. Perfect. And one final thing. I think we can all agree. Good news is not necessarily in abundance right now. The world is a bit of a weird place. And so can you give me a good news story so we can enter on a positive or a high note? Well, I did know this question might be coming. So actually I did a bit of prep on this. I follow a number of podcasts. And do you know Jake Humphries and Damien Hughes? Do you know those guys from high performance? So that's one that really interests me. And Jake on LinkedIn the other day, it's about the only social media platform that I'm on, he put a quote up, and the quote was from an American female author called Glennon Doyle.