Can AI Improve Customer Service Without Killing Jobs? Crescendo Thinks So

11:53Corey Noles:otherwise you'd be stuck googling things or looking up youtube videos and maybe there's not

11:58Grant Harvey:enough content for it that's right and just the extension of being able to do these things is

12:03Matt Price:is very different but in order to make that happen under the hood we had to have the ai

12:10Grant Harvey:architected and engineered in a very different way um the first phase of ai uh llm based ai is still very workflow driven or operation procedures you chunk up things and sequence them send them off to the llm and bring them back well in a multimodal world if you've done that But chat, you then have to do the same thing again for every other channel. And the multimodal work because your sequences or flows are different according to those channels. What we've done is we've elevated things up a level further and given more autonomy to the AI. And so the AI, if we tell it up front, you now have access to the device.

12:52Grant Harvey:We don't have to give it any more instructions. It's smart enough now to know. well if i'm asking them to check the device well maybe i should check it myself first right or smart enough to know that if i'm asking somebody to do something with their hands maybe i should flip it to a voice interaction so we're seeing incredible um innovation and learning in combination of the ai figuring stuff out itself and so again this is a big difference we see between first generation llm bots which are bolt-on and then heavily scripted to what we considered to be the next generation that we've built, which is more autonomous and more multimodal.

13:31Corey Noles:That's awesome. So where would the human fit into that specific use case? Or maybe that's a solve that is pre-human and then the humans are doing something else?

13:39Grant Harvey:Yeah, it's a great question. If you think about what a great customer experience looks like, it's very seamless and effortless. So the first thing that's very important when you first deploy

13:51Matt Price:with AI is not to get it to do too much and then make sure that if it's reached its acceptable boundaries of what it's trying to do, it flips to somebody who knows what they're doing.

14:03Grant Harvey:And in this case, not the back of a queue on email to somebody who would have just answered the call. It has to be somebody who is specialized and trained in their life who can do better than that. And that's the first level of reorchestration of where the humans come in. And that's where a lot of people make mistakes. They put the AI in and they drop people back to the old

14:21Matt Price:experience so reorganizing the human what happens then is that part of these forward deployed teams now rather than just being back end receivers of information they're on the front foot with the ai and what they're doing is they're saying i received this could this is something now that if we gave

14:41Grant Harvey:more knowledge to the ai that it could solve next time so you have these tight workflows then between the human end loops that are constantly improving the knowledge of the ai um and we obviously use a lot of our own ai to do the scoring and analysis of that and understand it end to end so learn

15:00Matt Price:very very quickly how to improve things but make sure that you keep that customer experience level

15:06Corey Noles:very high yeah that makes sense uh i've heard i've heard that a similar thing in in a certain vibe or i don't know if it would be vibe coding but people who code with agents they're they're often just trying to figure out how to automate tasks so that they never have to do it again. So like they'll have the AI do it until they code, until they get to something that they have to take over and do it. And then they'll figure out how to get the AI to do it so that they don't have to do that same task again. That kind of sounds similar to what you're talking about.

15:34Grant Harvey:It is. And we've learned a number of things when you take on that responsibility. Again, a bolt-on bot vendor is only interested, they get paid by the resolution. So they'll do everything

15:44Matt Price:and they can to get paid for that resolution rather than necessarily hand off. Because our outcome, whether it's handled by the AI or the human, we only get paid when we solve that outcome,

16:00Grant Harvey:and we never charge a customer if it was a negative customer experience because we can do that now. What that does is it changes behavior within the businesses and where we work. So everybody in the organization is focused on the best end customer outcome in the most efficient way. And so what we're able to do is actually for our clients who are partnering with us, bring forward the benefits of AI so that they're paying us, and they're paying us according to the efficiencies that we can bring. Most of them, their bills go down immediately.

16:32Matt Price:They also get a guaranteed outcome from the other end. So it's important that incentives align end-to-end.

16:39Grant Harvey:And otherwise, you'll start to see the cracks and there becomes a lot of waste.

16:45Corey Noles:That's interesting. I've wondered this about, because that model, what's the word for it? It's pay per successful resolution or something like that?

16:55Grant Harvey:There's so many differences. Outcome-based, pricing, pay per conversation.

16:59Corey Noles:Yeah, yeah. I've always wondered how you track that. How do you decide what is a successful outcome or not? That's interesting.

17:06Matt Price:Yeah, so with our system, what we have is a back-end analysis for every interaction that takes place is analyzed, whether it's the AI.

17:17Grant Harvey:And uniquely, because we look at things end-to-end, the human as well, and what the whole experience was within that process. We use AI to analyze that, and we can do it across a number of vectors, customer sentiment, whether the problem was resolved.

17:32Matt Price:We can also make it custom as well. So we can say if a company is interested in something, was this related to a sales inquiry or not?

17:44Grant Harvey:Or did the customer show intent in buying? Or was the conversation compliant with certain regulations? Every one of those is scanned and analyzed accordingly.

17:56Matt Price:and the way we do it is that if it doesn't meet a certain level of threshold uh of quality measured by a certain level then we will just um not charge a customer for that for that interaction and this is part of a suite of guarantees that we build in we'll also if a

18:16Grant Harvey:custom if our ai is not better than the customer's existing one we won't charge them until it is that's appealing yeah you know i mean but part of this is you know i've worked in tech industries for so long for some amazing companies and a lot a lot of tech is hey buy our tech invest in it and then you'll get great results and here's a theoretical roi that you can get and the company has to invest a lot of time in order to make that happen and guess what there's a lot of waste. There's a lot of seats left on the table unused and the ROI models never work out. So with AI tooling now, both on the front end, but also the calibration, we actually have what we need now to assess what the outcome is and only pay customers for what they need.

19:02Grant Harvey:And it's proven to be incredibly popular. It's one of the reasons we think at least we've been growing so

19:08Matt Price:quickly is because we can provide this unique approach to how we get paid.

19:14Corey Noles:Yeah, no, for sure. I'm sure that's part of it because it benefits everyone. Like you said, the incentives are aligned. I also think another thing that you mentioned is important. So the experience that you described as far as multimodal, technically me as the customer, I could go to Gemini or I could go to ChatGPT and I could ask for help with like, let's say like, let's use the Rasha example again, with this automated sprinkler and try to get it to help me. You know, I could take my phone, and I could film and be chatting with it live. But that's an experience that is very generic. It's relying on web searches.

19:51Corey Noles:It doesn't have all of the integrations and the hookups that the backend version that you've set up does. And it's not through Rasho. Rasho can create a unique relationship with their customers by offering that service directly inside their app. So I think that that's key. It's like, yes, these capabilities exist in regular chatbots, but this is now a service that me as the business owner can white label or provide and provide a deeper relationship with it, which I think is pretty valuable. Yeah.

20:20Grant Harvey:The first wave of AI was really, why would you go to a vendor rather than chat GPT? And firstly, the vendor is almost like quality stamping the responses that are coming out. And one thing, by the way, that we learned real quickly is there's a lot of bad misinformation in the web there's a lot of training material even if you train it on conversations that people have had with customer service agents guess what customer service agents don't always say the right thing and you can almost guarantee that your ai is going to find the one thing that's wrong or the one thing on the website and get that back to the customer so the first thing we noticed was

20:58Matt Price:this curated experience and guaranteed experience is important but then you picked upon the next thing is that behind

21:09Grant Harvey:the closed doors of the organization the ability to connect into different things and curate the experience to the next level can only really be done within a customer's own environment

21:22Matt Price:from guarantees and for security and safety you don't want chap GPT turning on your sprinklers in the middle of the night externally those are the things that are

21:35Grant Harvey:important. And that's why I think a lot of people are seeing a lot of promise for this new generation of AI native CX companies like ourselves. And there are a few others out there as well.

21:46Corey Noles:So how do you decide what AI should handle versus maybe what needs to be hard-coded on the software or what a human needs to do? We talked about this a little bit, like with the expertise side, but I'm just curious from a tech perspective, how you think of it?

21:59Matt Price:The first thing is making sure there are no hallucinations and high quality.

22:04Grant Harvey:So we decide we have very high bar for the quality output. We talked a little bit about how it does that. In fact, across our whole system, we get about 99.5 % accuracy. AI is on its own is typically in the 90s.

22:20Matt Price:Humans are typically in the 90s or low. So that's how we decide in the first one. Second is resilience, is that these systems now are becoming frontline for organizations, concierges into the organization. They have to be available. So if open AI goes down, you can't have customer care going down.

22:46Grant Harvey:For real. We've built an incredibly resilient failover architecture across multiple models. that can flip so we never go down. We can work off many different AIs. And that's also useful from the innovation perspective as well because if we see capabilities improving in some of the base models, then we can flip between them very easily and take advantage of that. So we have this layer of orchestration, which is a multi-LLM model where we can change between them. obviously associated with that there's a lot of tooling we do about quality assurance and you know her benchmarking and and and things like that yeah i have so many i have so many questions related to

23:33Corey Noles:that like in terms of like it like do customers have a preference are they saying i only want gemini like or or do they just never care because they just are looking for the outcomes and then you know how do you make sure that you know maybe open ai's models respond correctly with the right answer every time but maybe you know clods doesn't or maybe gemini doesn't like or vice versa

23:53Grant Harvey:typically they're curious but they trust us to make the decision which is why they typically partner with us they most of our clients have never done this before we've done it hundreds

24:01Matt Price:of times and so that so they trust us to do it um and then yeah i mean a lot of it is you know when when we make changes uh you know we have each model is then tried and tested test tried and trusted or tried and tested um uh to make sure that you know it's quality assured and if we

24:24Grant Harvey:if we move between models it's going to give the expected outcomes and answers right that's good

24:31Corey Noles:and then as far as the hallucinations go i mean you mentioned like 99.8 accuracy responses how do you get an improvement on hallucinations like i like that's amazing i mean i should make

24:45Grant Harvey:clear as well is that that that accuracy level is that there was the you know point that the small decimal points are not hallucinations either you know this is not like you know it's it's making stuff up but i would say it's usually it's an inaccuracy based upon the inaccurate knowledge that's been provided that makes sense yeah so we do it firstly by testing and training we have a lot of tooling that brings in curates knowledge and that's where we can help companies because we have a lot of people who can help do that and help them clean up as well as tooling. So we can move very, very quickly.

25:18Grant Harvey:Typically, we're live within 30 days, you know, from scratch with a customer with an AI system. Wow. The other thing that we do then is constantly calibrate, as I mentioned. Every interaction is looked at and tuned and corrected and scored. So we have people and AI doing that at the same time. So typically, the accuracy continues to improve and increase. the, you know, can we get to 100 %? Possibly if the world doesn't change around us, right? But typically products change and external factors change and new things are being introduced all the time into the system. Totally.

25:57Corey Noles:It's like, it's theoretically possible, but just because things are always changing, it's like it may never actually be practically possible.

26:03Grant Harvey:Don't launch any new products in any new markets and, you know, don't account for external world events that might don't account for things like tariffs or things like that. So, you know, obviously that's where this fine tuning of a system and continuous management is really important because things just don't stay still.

26:25Corey Noles:So do you see that bringing the human back into it? Do you see that as where like the customer experience role like goes in the future? Is it's more of a continuous tuning with the AI as almost like an augmented symbiotic relationship as opposed to like, I'm here for when the AI fails? Or how do you see it? Yeah, it's going to continuously change,

26:49Matt Price:but I can tell you how we do it. Is that our teams, we take customers, many of the times we're actually managing just the labor side things for them and then we upgrade them to our AI Natick contact center. As part of that process, pretty much every role that's involved from the human side gets repurposed and retrained.

27:11Grant Harvey:So a QA manager who would have been traditionally sampling calls and listening to calls and scoring them according to a rubric and putting them into a specialist QA system that you would have had to abide,

27:24Matt Price:but most of their work is automated now because of our system.

27:30Grant Harvey:So they become insights managers. And what they're doing is constantly looking at all the interactions and they will proactively come to our customers and say, do you know what? As a shoe manufacturer, you've got a sizing issue on this line and you're generating these refunds and the AI is helping them there. We recommend that you put a sizing guide on your website. And so their role has changed from being a very functional role to being an advisor on insights.

27:54Corey Noles:That's fascinating. So like you're taking your human context where you can kind of see things at a more, I honestly like the memory. I feel like our ability to kind of take things and feed it into what we already know about the world and is just better than the AI, I think, at this point and will be for a while. So you're able to take that skill set and then say, oh, I can see clearly here that this is an issue. So this is something you should add to the website.

28:21Grant Harvey:That's right. You know, and that's one of six roles that get repurposed and retrained. And it is easier in many cases to think about it as these are now forward deployed resources. We think a lot about AI, but rather than being engineers and AI coding, therefore deploying the use of the AI into many organizations, so helping you take most advantage of the insights that are generated, helping to tune the AI process and knowledge process, helping to restructure the escalation points to such the human there. So we think of it rather than the people being the recipients of the AI fixing it, they're on the front foot and working with the AI and helping customers innovate more quickly.

29:07Corey Noles:I mean, I don't know if you've, I assume you talk about this with your team, but does that make them feel like they have a larger role to play in the company? Do they feel more like they're providing more value? Are they more interested in the work? It seems like that would be interesting to me.

29:21Matt Price:Yeah, you could imagine a BPO company, a labor-based company being bought by an AI company might trigger some questions from the teams there.

29:35Grant Harvey:We've grown our labor base since the acquisition, partly because with AI, obviously we're acquiring a lot more customers, but also the level of engagement goes up. so typically you could expect to see it once people are happy with the service they used to constrain and put the telephone number hidden away or it's hard to get service now what happens is people are putting it front and center and like please ask us more questions yeah yeah exactly and once you start to see is that engagement a lot more of the engagement then is is less about break fix and it's more about how can you do more for me please as a business which become revenue

30:14Matt Price:basis so we're starting to see another rack our um we call them superhumans uh the people involved um shift from being automated break fixed role to being very specialist advisors or revenue advisors or retention helpers as well so that that the shift in that dynamic is changing significantly um so yeah lots of lots of moving parts but when we move when somebody moves into being you know have an ai role they get fully retrained we make sure everybody is um familiar with uh prompting and just really invest a lot in in core ai skills so people feel comfortable with it and the interesting thing there is that it gives them a viewpoint as to where they're special

31:03Grant Harvey:and what ai can't do and it delivers confidence in in their role in an ai future yeah i think

31:10Corey Noles:that's totally true and that's why I think you know Corey and I talk about this a lot like this is why we think people should try out the tools and figure out where what it can do for you that maybe you don't need to spend your time doing and what makes you really unique in your business or your role whatever whatever your uniqueness is match with the AI so that the AI can you know fit in where you're weak or or help you where things you don't want to do so that you can focus on the things you really like to do or that you're uniquely suited to do yeah so i love that

31:40Matt Price:that there's another unique aspect in the world of customer care as well is that you know night

31:45Grant Harvey:a lot of the time we just want our questions answered and we're happy if that's automated you know if it's an ai we were just as happy to do a google search before and find the answers

31:55Matt Price:and walk through it you know self-service but ultimately what what the connection is between a business and the people they serve is ultimately relationship-based.

32:13Grant Harvey:Ken Chenna, who was like the chairman of America Express, the icon of customer service, used to say brands are a connection of two things. There's the logical, which is the service the product offers, which is, hey, I get credit off this business. And then there's the emotional connection. and there's no better place where the emotional gets activated to a brand is within customer care because that's where the human interaction actually takes place and you see it at retail or anywhere you know a restaurant your whole experience okay how well the food is cooked is

32:46Matt Price:good but really how you're made to feel is important um and that's the human touch and what we're starting to see now is that as consumers we actually want to know how much you investing in me as a consumer and obviously ai is an investment but ultimately if i am allowed

33:06Grant Harvey:to speak to a human then i know that that's a costly resource for you and you're really going out of your way to make that connection with me so i think we'll start to see the use of people

33:15Matt Price:as being a signal of a company willing to invest above and beyond other companies because they've

33:23Grant Harvey:made that channel available to you.

33:26Corey Noles:Totally. I guess that makes me wonder, your thoughts on the entire customer experience, customer service industry in general. Is it your belief that the whole industry should go this way? Or is there a use case where maybe we don't need as many call center jobs? What's your take on this industry in general?

33:48Grant Harvey:The first thing is very,

33:49Matt Price:very few companies you know maybe american express and apple side can afford to serve customers in the level that they would want to be um within their current products and

34:01Grant Harvey:offering margins which is why ai is this incredible disruptor in order to do that so you know if you're not open 24 by 7 if you're not speaking the language the customer wants if you're not able to pick up and respond to them within seconds and diagnose the questions, then you're behind already. Because AI can do all of those things.

34:25Matt Price:Anthony at Rasho is ahead because he's doing all these things.

34:31Grant Harvey:Companies like other customers, like Lovepop or Property Company, Damak, all of these companies

34:40Matt Price:and now hit that new level of hygiene. But the next level now is how do you innovate? You know, and it's multimodal is one area of innovating. But what Anton is doing now is saying, actually, what if when somebody first gets our product, that we just connect them immediately to an AI that helps them set it up? So they're moving from a reactive to a proactive, you know, support case.

35:08Corey Noles:Totally. Normally, companies will send you the instruction manual for something, but now it's like they should connect you to an AI to set it up.

35:16Grant Harvey:That's right. And it'll talk you through connecting it. As soon as it's connected, it's got diagnosis that can then help you through. That's the next level of proactive reinvention. We have a beauty company who is doing color matching using AI now. And these all have a business foundation, but they also have a customer foundation. is the biggest reason that cosmetics get returned is the color didn't match some of the skin

35:43Corey Noles:totally just yesterday i was at uh ulta because my sister you know we were seeing each other for thanksgiving and she needed to go in and test the makeup and do everything you know and so

35:54Grant Harvey:what we're starting to see now is this customer care as becoming innovation in customer service being as important as product innovation you know so the beauty company firstly okay they might start with, hey, I want less returns, but actually if I can get color matching, maybe I don't need it as much as a retail presence as I did before.

36:18Grant Harvey:And we believe that innovation in customer care is going to become as important as innovation in product. The challenge for companies to do that is customer care until now has been incredibly complex. There's five or six different tools. You need to hire the people and you need to do everything else. a crescendo we think that's not necessary because we'll do all that for you so you tell us how you want to innovate and we'll implement it and we believe in five years time people will look back and say why did we ever try and do that ourselves why are we spending so much time and time in the week it's a bit like a in anybody that's a mid-market manufacturer now why would we ever set up a production line and tool it ourselves and staff it ourselves when we can design a product and work with a contract manufacturer to deliver it for us.

37:10Grant Harvey:Right, yeah.

37:10Corey Noles:Unless you need the economies of scale such that it's vertically integrated. That's right, yeah.

37:18Grant Harvey:There are always edge cases, but for the 80%, 90%, customer service is not a complicated concept. You answer people's questions, you're there when they need them, and you give them good answers. I mean, it really is as simple as that. But if you can do that, then you can do that right, which you can now. Then you can really start to experience and innovate in different ways. I mean, it's an incredibly exciting time to be a CX leader. For 10, 20, 30 years, they've been downtrodden, budget starved. The only time the board and the leadership wants to talk to them about is when they received a direct complaint as to what's going to happen.

37:57Grant Harvey:There's been these false dawns of new tooling that have come along, and all it is are just another engineering project that they have to manage and their team. AI changes that. This is a new era where CX leaders get back in the boardroom and they get to be innovators.

38:13Corey Noles:That's awesome. I want to talk about the role of the customer service rep just a little bit more because I think there's a lot of people in the U.S. People often think about, oh, companies outsource to other countries to do their customer support, but there's a ton of people in the middle of the country who work in this field, let alone everywhere, working in this industry. And I really wonder what, you know, you mentioned training and reskilling. What do you think are the skills that if I'm working in customer support right now, what should I be learning? What should I be focusing on to be prepared for this?

38:49Corey Noles:It seems like it's a hybrid world we're entering into right now, especially the way you're doing it. What skills should I be learning so that I don't get swept away and automated, but instead I can be proactive in this industry?

39:00Matt Price:That's a great question.

39:02Grant Harvey:I think firstly, anybody who is doing any job becoming AI aware and knowing how to prompt and understand what AI can do and the capabilities is just a foundational skill. It's like learning to type, which we don't have to do now because we have Whisperflow, but You know, it's like the, thank goodness, shout out to Wittsoplo, amazing. Yeah, for real. But foundational skills, you know, I would say behooves everybody to have an understanding. Learn how to prompt. Learn how to get your AI to improve your prompts for you.

39:36Matt Price:But really, and stay current, that's foundational. From a customer care perspective, you know, what's really interesting is that we're starting to, customer care has been a very transitional industry you know um this didn't happen within our company but a lot of uh outsource contact center companies they turn over 40 of their staff every year it's an incredibly transient kind of market what's interesting is is the people who are you're starting to see the development now of a of a of a core group and we're fortunate to have many of them working crescendo of CX professionals or CX leaders who invest time.

40:20Grant Harvey:They're good because they can show empathy. They listen to customers. They're diligent about the work and the follow-up. And they're not just sitting there copying and pasting from Nugpad into a chat window to answer questions.

40:33Matt Price:So I would say continue to focus on those things, you know, empathy, understanding. What AI is really good at doing is complementing now in other areas. So you could be an amazing, I don't know, electronics expert, but not speak English very well, which means that the capacity for you to serve is limited.

40:59Grant Harvey:or the way you speak English is not great or something. Now AI can bring your skills to everybody. And so I'm excited about AI being an amazing democratizer that removes the language barrier and allows people to connect with other people who have the skills that they need.

41:19Corey Noles:Totally. Yeah, you're totally right about that. Like, for instance, you could use the technology available today to be speaking in your native language. And I don't know if any system does this yet, but automatically translates it into the language of the listener. And then, you know, maybe with a little bit of latency, there's no, you know, hopefully not a lot of information lost.

41:38Grant Harvey:It's, yeah, it's there and there's no latency. I mean, it really is just the adaptation of it. But the, so I think we're going to, I think we're going to see a lot of change, but customer care, people in customer care are amazing people. You know, the best, and I think that's the reason why it's always recommended, you know, if you want to be in business, start working in retail or work in customer care because those are developed skills that you really need to know in order to have to, you know,

42:06Matt Price:progress your career. And now, let's say Love Pop, for example. I'll give you an example. One of our clients, I don't know if you know them, greeting card manufacturer, amazing product. They do these pop-up, beautiful pop-up greeting cards, you know. Oh, I've seen those. Yeah, if you want to press somebody. you do it um so amazing product actually a very very good returns policy if something goes wrong

42:34Grant Harvey:when you're trying to build or ship online they will refund you or reship or something like that the challenge they had was staffing enough people or during peak times in order to in order to get back to people quickly and by the time that they'd offered them the opportunity of the refund or anything the moment to be missed people were in the emotional moment heck i've got to get my birthday card quick and and this is my solution she's gonna love it or i'm still gonna be uh um the kid that

43:03Matt Price:never sends her the christ with her birthday card again you know but the uh what they did was put in an ai first responder in there and then they still want a human to actually check to see if

43:17Grant Harvey:see if it's a valid return but instead of waiting eight hours now for a human to get back on the email response it's now a few seconds the options are developed there and now those humans are not just sitting there pushing macros out on saying what options do you want they're actually responding to people where all of the information is there now there and they can just come back and say it's it's converted so and they we can now stuff that around the clock for them because uh you know

43:46Matt Price:because those hours are available um but the big difference here was this emotional connection that Can't you not refer to is, and we saw this amazing thing was that all of a sudden they started getting these five-star reviews for LovePop on Trustpilot. And if you Google Trustpilot LovePop, you can read them. And this is all people saying, this is amazing customer service. This is amazing customer service. This is amazing customer service. It took them from a 3.6 on Trustpilot to a 4.6 in as little as a couple of months, which is huge from a conversion perspective. So again, I mean, we're just delighted every day on the business impacts, the impacts on quality of work for the people doing it.

44:38Grant Harvey:But ultimately, how much better it is for consumers of these companies.

44:43Corey Noles:Yeah, I can imagine if you can answer people's questions faster at any time of the day with better accuracy. I mean, what's not to like about that? I feel like that is a net net positive. um i also wonder does your system i mean with with that because that 40 percent um turnover rate is really high i don't know how that benchmarks against other industries but to me that's like whoa um does this do you think that this the way that you're approaching it helps with the turnover problem and do you think the turnover problem was more of a like i just can't can't hang in this industry i can't you know the working with customers sucks you know famously if anyone's worked in retail, there are bad customers.

45:28Corey Noles:So, you know, um, that sometimes that's difficult. Is it a, is it a people management problem or is it the industry problem that led to that high turnover and how are you addressing it?

45:36Grant Harvey:There's, you know, there's a lot of factors, um, uh, quality of work. Definitely. Um, you know, repetitive work is not, is not fulfilling. So if alternatives come along, the other thing is a lot of time, these roles were not long tenured. partly because they were used to handle spikes in demand and Black Friday, we're right in the middle of one.

46:00Corey Noles:We're living through it right now. Exactly.

46:03Grant Harvey:A lot of times people would be hired up and then let go. Obviously what we're seeing now are people moving into more fulfilling work. The things they're being engaged in is a lot better. They're helping to work and train AI rather than just answer questions. So that's one of the big drivers. So we have a lot lower attention, a lot higher attention, a lot lower attrition than most organizations because of that.

46:31Corey Noles:Yeah. And are you going to, I think I read somewhere that you're actually interested in buying more of these organizations, like buying more BPOs. For people who don't know, that's business process outsourcing. Are you more bullish on the AI technology right now or the people part of it? I'm curious.

46:49Grant Harvey:We're interested in partnering with founder-led organizations who share the vision and share this vision. Actually, if they want to provide a future for their customers and for their employees,

47:01Matt Price:then being part of Crescendo offers a much better future for them. Many of these companies, founders rightly know that they've tried to enable tech within their organizations. but you know to be honest hiring the depth of AI expertise that we were able to attract and retain you know it's incredibly difficult if you're a services business many of them have made partnerships with other bot companies but really you're just a third-party vendor and they're bolting on that bot into the process as well so you know for these founders we're very interested in partnering um i think what we're the right right partners for us are organizations that

47:48Grant Harvey:that see value in our combined future and not necessarily quick exit um yeah for move forward

47:54Corey Noles:yeah you want to build you want to build it and especially because this this is like the first wave or one of the first waves of ai hitting industry and there's many many predictions of of customer service layoffs everywhere happening you know i don't i don't know if it's happened at scale yet but it's people feel like it's coming most independent you know bpos are outsourcers and

48:15Grant Harvey:it's funny because you mentioned their business process outsources no it's low-cost labor arbitrage supply there ain't much business process the amount sourced here it's like people are on the

48:27Matt Price:end of the on the end of things but the whereas actually you know of course we like to think we're

48:34Grant Harvey:different it is a whole business process optimization that we're delivering you know as part of this, but they're already seeing slowdown in growth.

48:42Matt Price:You only have to look at the recent Taskus, which is a big vendor in this market. They tried to go private, couldn't, the drop of the share price. We're starting to see, a year or two ago, it was the fear of AI that was creating this.

49:01Grant Harvey:And now we're starting to see the reality of AI

49:03Matt Price:starting to impact some of these businesses as well. but um yeah we like to think that we're providing a great future for these businesses by working

49:12Grant Harvey:with them taking their talent and forward deploying it and upgrading their customers to the new ai native world okay i've got i've got i've got a weird one for you but i just thought

49:22Corey Noles:of it because of the low what was it the low cost labor arbitrage um so recently we covered the 1x technologies robot that you know it's like a household robot that uh you know works in your home and, you know, it can do all these things. Well, it turns out it's not doing it yet. It's actually a teleoperator managing it. And someone brought up on Twitter, they were like, well, they shouldn't have promoted it as an autonomous system. They should have promoted it as a way to arbitrage labor from one geography to another. Would you ever go physical with Crescendo, having customer support folks working with robots in person to help people manually fix stuff like labor bots in person?

50:10Corey Noles:Yeah, absolutely we would. Because the goal here is that how can we improve customer care

50:17Matt Price:and make it more accessible to everybody

50:19Grant Harvey:and how can we help companies implement it?

50:22Matt Price:And if we keep our...

50:24Grant Harvey:AI is just a tool for us to do that. So if that's our vision and our focus, and what motivates us, then why wouldn't we do that? You know, and just, and it does, actually, by the way,

50:36Matt Price:it doesn't necessarily have to be somebody offshore. We have people in the U.S. who are, you know, as we speak, are being the back end on things like, you know, autonomous.

50:50Grant Harvey:I have to be careful about disclosing too much here. But autonomous, being the backstop for autonomous things, machines that are out there. So we do provide that service. Now, it goes back to what we say is that to make AI work and automation work, being incredibly flexible about where you inject people and then continually evolving that is a valuable service.

51:18Corey Noles:especially even just even just the ability to like work from home but but i am helping someone like you know maybe even 500 miles away um physically with a robot like i have the skills of like i have like manual labor skills or you know where i can actually you know control the robot and help the person like fix a machine i don't know if that's where we're going but i

51:40Grant Harvey:could totally see that yeah most cases it's probably i can help the robot get out of trouble seamlessly is where we're at at the moment but then then that should be a close feedback loop right so yeah helped it do this now you can either then train that roma again from multiple multiple reactions or a bit of human insight that says you know it's best to use um i don't know if you're playing scissors paper stone don't try and make the scissors with your uh the thumb and finger and that's just and then that's not that's learned from that point on it was bad advice you

52:15Corey Noles:might give a kindergartner but it's important for robots at this stage exactly you know so it's um

52:22Matt Price:yeah in fact my kindergartner all he wants is a robot right now and he's oh yeah it's it's

52:28Corey Noles:everything he wants you know so oh it would be a fun time to be a kid right now with all of this stuff happening like us humans we're scared because of what it means for our jobs but

52:37Grant Harvey:kids are like this is awesome being bought built into that world yeah and i imagine now i mean the the interface moving away from being a screen in order to being something a lot more interactive and not more teachable or you know i'm sure we have to be careful about the there will be other consequences and human being able to understand and behave and work with humans is obviously going to be continues to be important but uh if all it does is get kids away from screens uh for a while that's going to be a good start.

53:08Corey Noles:Oh, I 100 % think that is going to be one of the net positives of having more AI automation or even, you know, AR, VR, just having more voice interfaces is that you don't have to physically be staring at a box all day in order to, like, we could, I mean, we could already now be having this conversation, you know, just via audio, but. Yeah.

53:31Grant Harvey:I like Guy Gitch has got a Yodo. Have you seen those? that is a new form factor device. No, I haven't seen this. But it's just like, it was really funny. The screen is kind of pixelated, but it's a beautiful design. I mean, I know there's, I'm not sure to what extent there's AI in there, but there's automatically generated language models that tell them what's been going on today in the world and things like this. But yeah, it's very exciting to see the new form factors coming in for devices.

54:03Corey Noles:Well, I'll just, I'll end this here because this has been an amazing conversation. Five years from now, what does Crescendo look like? And, and I guess like the, let's expand it to the larger customer experience industry. Like, are we going to see incredible change in the industry? What's, what's your take?

54:23Grant Harvey:yeah i mean there's going to be there's a new breed of companies that are evolving um uh which are these ai native customer concierge companies and you know our goal and we fully expect to be a category leader uh with within that new space um but we'll have approached it from a different way rather than just being you know a pure tech will have come at it from from the overall solution in five years time as i mentioned i think people will be saying i can't believe what we tried to diy everything ourself and bolt all this stuff together and we are now able to free up time to

55:00Matt Price:be innovators and crescendo can take take care of the rest of it and then from a consumer perspective

55:08Grant Harvey:um really just remember the old days when you couldn't actually get a telephone number or talk to somebody other business remember the old days when even if you did want to get something done you had to escalate through their really bad deflection.

55:20Matt Price:And by the way, a lot of CX companies still talk about deflection. I hate the word.

55:25Grant Harvey:Who wants to be deflected?

55:28Corey Noles:So they actively deflect customers instead of helping them.

55:31Matt Price:There is a term in CX called deflection and containment. Most companies are talking about containment as if consumers are some kind of virus

55:41Grant Harvey:that you can't let near your organization. and we think differently we think about engagement and so that would have changed in five years time

55:51Corey Noles:um i just can't imagine anyone with that mentality being surviving in five years

55:57Grant Harvey:yeah and this is why we believe we will because those words originate in labs people who would not have the human contact when you have thousands of people serving customers every day and understanding the processes then you really start to think about your language and how you think about customer care differently.

56:16Matt Price:In five years' time, if I have my way, that'll be the core culture of our organization as we continually grow.

56:24Corey Noles:It's really important. I love it. I have one addendum for you. Will there be more customer experience jobs in five years or less? There'll be more at Crescendo. Fair enough. Fair enough. Matt where can people go to learn more about Crescendo and what you're building?

56:43Grant Harvey:www.crescendo.ai if somebody wants to email me directly matt.price.crescendo.ai I love talking to people about this

56:53Corey Noles:Awesome thank you so much this has been an amazing conversation for everybody tuning in thank you make sure to please give this video a like and subscribe and make sure to check out the Neuron Daily our daily newsletter with 600 ,000 readers goes out every day Monday through Friday and Sunday thanks everyone thanks for watching Brian thanks a lot