Audio links for original podcast:

· Here, on the dedicated Watch This Space website

· Here, on the Podcast section of my J Arnold & Associates website

========================================================================

Jon Arnold

Welcome to Watch This Space, the podcast about future of work. Every month, we bring you insider perspectives on how digital transformation, emerging tech, and generational change are shaping the future of work. We are two analog guys finding the groove for all of this in today's digital world. I'm Jon Arnold, and these trends are my focus as an independent technology analyst in my company, J Arnold and Associates.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. I'm an advisor and strategist specializing in workplace technology, IoT, and security. My company is Integrative Technologies. Hi, Jon. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Watch This Space. I hope you've had a good month. Jon, I know you've been traveling. You got back to something like your frenzy travel regimen. So what have you been up to?

Jon Arnold

Well, yes, from our last podcast, Chris, I was hobbling around recovering from foot surgery. So there was no travel for me last month, last month being April, for which I had several events I could have gone to. But I had to kind of just, basically say no to all of that to get this once in a lifetime thing done. And I'm glad I did. And I'm much better off now for that. And yes, back to travel. So that's, we all got to do that as analysts to stay in the game. And also over the month of over the month of May, Chris, I actually was away for, as for about two weeks in Israel, and I was more on a personal trip. So I wasn't fully in work mode for most of May.

So from April, without travel, I've been kind of below the radar for quite a while, but that's passed now and I'm here and I had two events to trap that I traveled to during the month of May. They were both the same week, so it was back-to-back. So after... Israel for the better part of two weeks, getting acclimatized to the time zone change there. Then I had these two events to get to and that took us out to May and here we are. So yeah, a couple of reasons to talk about these two events in particular, Chris.

Always learning new stuff, especially from companies that are really being innovative. And these in particular were Zoom and Verint. And the Zoom event was New York, the Verint event was in Dallas. And these are two companies doing interesting things in their spaces. There is some overlap, but they're doing different types of uses of basically, you know, yes, technology, but more importantly, AI. And what I've just coming to realize as we're talking, Chris, what's interesting about these two companies is that they are both kind of all in on what AI brings to the market.

I think more so than most of the companies that we talk to, mainly because they don't have a lot of the legacy baggage that the older vendors have. So they have a clean slate when it comes to cloud. And that's a short jump from cloud to AI these days and what they're betting on. And I want to get to that because I know We're going to talk also, Chris, a little bit about workplace realities that you have been keeping tabs on as well. So before I talk a bit about those two events, I'm just going to pause so everyone knows that there are two people in the room here, Chris.

Chris Fine

Well, thanks, Jon. First of all, you were in New York, and it was such a frenzied schedule that we couldn't even get together, right? We couldn't even go to one of our usual diner haunts and have breakfast or lunch, but we'll catch each other the next time or I'll be in Toronto or whatever. But I'm glad you had a good event.

You know, for me, it's been a pretty busy month, mostly getting ready for HPE Discover, which is a big event they put on for clients and vendors and partners. And I'm giving a couple of speeches there, actually leading a couple of panels. One is on the power of the smart workplace, more of a little technical panel and more on IoT. And then the other one is actually on return to work and how that relates to re-instrumenting the office place and how a smarter office might make the workplace more attractive. So there's a little bit of overlap, but it's two sessions and I think I've got some good panels and ultimately that'll probably get published so folks can see it. But that's basically what I've been up to other than all the usual stuff, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, it's always good to get out. If we're home all day in our little home offices, the world gets pretty small pretty quickly. And we're used to it, of course, but not all workers are. And we're going to get to that a little later. I know the isolation from working and doing so much in our lives virtually. You think you feel good about having a virtual crowd around you 24-7, which seems to be how most millennials and Gen Zs actually function. But face to face is a whole other thing. And I think that's the magic that keeps us sane in this kind of always on world.

And that takes me a little bit to Zoom, Chris, because arguably no company benefited more from the pandemic than Zoom, because they had the right product at the right time to enable virtual working and distributed workforces. So organizations could keep the lights on, and people could keep their jobs, and video became the must-have app - and they just did it better than anybody.

They more or less and captured a big chunk of the market and came, in some ways out of nowhere, even though the company's been around 10 years, they went kind of chugging along and then the hockey stick hit with a pandemic and, sometimes right place, right time. And that's what happened with these guys. And that would be, I would argue, Chris, the way most people think about what Zoom is, wouldn't you say?

Chris Fine

Yeah, and I'm very curious to hear what they think about going forward. Like where's the cutting edge, right? What would they feature? Because I mean, I'm definitely a Zoom fan. I've been using it for years. I think they've done some amazing work. I actually think they were one of the companies that helped people get through the pandemic.

Glad they were successful. Much credit to them for being in the right place at the right time. But I do feel that a lot of Zoom-like functionality as we know it is being commoditized. You can argue whether Teams is better or WebEx is better or Zoom is better or Google Meet is better, whatever it is you use, but a lot of the features overlap now. So I'm very curious to hear what they were talking about is what their vision is going forward.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, so it is definitely grander. The thing people need to know about Zoom is that they are, you know, their founder, Eric Juan, is kind of one of those guys, as soon as you hear him talk, you kind of get a good feeling about him, that he has a vision, he has the creative process and the drive to be successful and to make change. So, he's never really talked about Zoom as a video company. He's always talked about, he has this like shtick about, you know, making happy, right? He wants the world to be a happier place. And he feels that with video, you create that personal one-to-one connection or group connection when you can see people, you can read the body language. And that goes a lot further to that idea of making people happy than just a static phone call or certainly anything, any form of text-based communication. So I think there is something to that.

But they've gone all in with AI, as has just about everybody else, but I think they've really effectively pivoted and transformed their kind of mission around AI in, I think, in a very effective way. The messaging we got throughout the day, the number one takeaway is we are not a video company anymore. We're way past that. And because AI has kind of been in their genes from day one, they feel that they're not interested in just providing a better video experience. They want to help businesses solve bigger problems than just making it easy to have meetings online. It's really about trying to transform everything about the way we work.

So Zoom has evolved way past being a video application to being more of a productivity, platform, right, to compete with the likes of, yes, Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex and Avaya and all the big platform plays. They have a platform called Workplace and it's built all around how we work. The whole mission is to say we're going to run, like rethink the way we work now and build it from the bottom up. In other words, that clean slate approach to saying with today's tools and the AI capabilities we have, we can kind of question and rethink everything about workplace, the nature of work and how technology can drive a lot of that. And that vision seems to be, I think, working pretty well.

They certainly cited enough of the numbers, the success metrics that you would want to see from a public company. Also the reality, Chris, the business side of it, they did cite that UC, UCaaS, Unified Communications as a Service, that platform, those revenues aren't growing in a huge number anymore. I think it was only maybe 3% annual growth. It's not huge because the market's so saturated. They also know they have to get to other things that are going to drive growth.

That's where AI comes into the story where they're trying to AI enable all of the applications to make them more intelligent and to basically pull data from across the organization in ways that will help transform how we work and just do more than just have better meetings. They get into the area of, yes, productivity and collaboration, yes, but they made a recent acquisition of a company called WorkVivo. Their platform is very much about employee experience. So rather than just like collaboration, WorkVivo is focused more on how to make virtual and distributed workforces more engaged, more feeling part of the team, accessible, inclusive, all that stuff.

You can argue it's a lot of the soft stuff, but it is relevant and clearly this more simplistic sounding vision of we want happy, we want a happy workplace, happy people, happy world. Well, you can't be happy unless you feel part of something and valued and all that kind of thing. On that plane, this WorkVivo concept seems to fit nicely into the way they want to be seen as a transformative kind of company that is able to change so much more than just making meetings better. So it's a lot to kind of bite off and kind of get your head around.

But the overall performance of the company is still really strong and they're getting the right kind of traction in the right ways. And probably just as importantly, Chris, they have learned how to sell deeper into organizations because now their platform is more inclusive than just meetings and collaboration. They're becoming a little bit more of an, you know, I wouldn't say a Swiss Army knife, but certainly a more pervasive value proposition. And I should also say this is something that we in our wearing our future work hats would be happy to hear. One of the reasons that they're succeeding on this front and figuring out how to make AI work in the way they go to market - this really stuck with me.

One of their execs, Mahesh Ram, talked about how what they hear from customers is to be successful with AI, you've got to show transparency. You've got to have end users with control over what information they share, what they don't share. So you've got to kind of give them the reins and they get that. But also, Chris, this is what I found so interesting is he says the customers are asking better questions about how to use AI. Like anything else, any market is going to succeed when supply and demand are kind of in balance. Here now on the demand side, you've got the customers starting to come to grips with what AI could possibly do for them. And so now that they're thinking about it a little more, getting more comfortable with it, this idea that they're asking better questions means They want to know more. They want to do more with AI. And that opens the door now, again, to being this AI-driven platform that's gone way beyond video and meetings.

Chris Fine

That sounds interesting. So I'm more confused than I was when you started. And excuse me, I'm just an analog guy. But can you give us an example of some concrete thing that maybe they demonstrated to show you what they thought would be better. You see what I'm getting at? Like, is there an example? Is there something concrete of things that have been, that are past what they traditionally did that include AI and seem to have received positive results?

Jon Arnold

So a good example would be the way they're using AI to provide virtual coaching. Now this applies really both in contact center, which is another space that they're in now, which they have been for a little while now, but also in the workplace where their use of large language models with speech technology, certainly it's getting good with everybody. It's not just them. But they're using it in ways, and they're not the only vendor doing this, by the way, but the idea is that the virtual kind of assistance or coaching applications are being used in a more productive way.

In other words, they can give better guidance to employees about things like, you know, what to say. Say you're writing an email response, and you may be a junior employee and you're writing something that's going to be for someone higher up the food chain than you. You've got to use different language to communicate your message than you would be if you were communicating downward to someone who's below you on the pecking order. And so people may not be comfortable with saying it the right way. This is where a virtual coach would come in and help craft the message for the worker to do.

The same thing would go like in a contact center where, again, the agent may not quite have the vocabulary to communicate something. It might be a specific feature of the product the customer is asking about, but it may also be in a more difficult situation where the customer might be upset or anxious about something and call is running risk of falling off the rails quickly. So the coaching application, this is all AI-driven with large language models that says, okay, well, we know the right phrases to use at the certain times to help, basically remove some ambiguity about trying to explain something.

Because if a customer gets an unclear answer, this is going to make things worse. The idea here, of course, with machine learning is that it may seem simple at first, but the more you use these applications, they learn. So every time you have a virtual coaching session, you can also track how effective it was. And so now machine learning algorithms help make it better each time around. Next time it'll be a little more refined, a little clearer than it was the last time. The idea that you just keep, the intelligence keeps getting stronger the more you use these things. Those are reasonable examples to talk about what we're trying to get to. I have other examples with Verint. We'll get to them in a few minutes. But does that, is that kind of get at what you're looking for?

Chris Fine

Those are some good examples, and I can see how that would prove to be popular, especially you've got a whole group of folks entering the workforce that never had the training. Well, because coming out of the last five years between the pandemic and everything else, and the most crucial up and coming ages and experience levels in the workforce had very little training in the dynamics of this stuff. And so I could see how that might be really helpful. So thank you, that's good.

Jon Arnold

And that's an important point, Chris, by the way, with so many people coming out of the pandemic, they may have only worked virtually. This is again where this WorkVivo acquisition makes more sense because now, okay, we need to make these remote employees feel part of the team and more engaged. So you can also provide them, not just virtual water cooler experiences, but also you build a knowledge base about your organization's culture. And so now you can help, like in training for HR policies, you can guide them a little more intelligently.

What's the mix of our organizational culture here? What kind of varieties of people and backgrounds do we have and ages? And then they may have questions like, well, I'm a 20 something. How do I interact with someone who's, you know, 50 plus? And there might be some knowledge base like articles or explainer videos that they can tap and say, hey, this generation prefers this style of communication. Here are some tips to be more effective. Little things like that make them feel part of it.

And again, the AI piece is what pulls this knowledge together from all these sources and they can have these queries. This is where the conversational AI capability comes in, right? Because it's all automated. right? So they can ask the, ask the application, how do I communicate to an older person? Oh, well, okay, we'll give you some tips along the way. Now, the flip side to this, Chris, I'll just quickly mention one of the things that you get a little worried about where the eyebrow starts to go up is, for example, when talking about WorkVivo in particular, they have this element called the employee listening suite.

In other words, they're trying to pull information from all your conversations that will help basically better understand what your issues are in the course of your workday, how you're working, how you're engaging with other people. But then it starts to get a little darker because now what the organizations are also looking for is, especially for customer facing employees, They may have a certain kind of set of values and aspirations and outlooks of the world that define the culture they're trying to build in the organization. So this sounds a little bit like Big Brother, because now if you're expressing views that might run contrary to that, it's going to pick up on it. So this idea of a listening suite sounds a little scary to me.

Chris Fine

It does, yeah.

Jon Arnold

Right? So all of a sudden, well, this happiness concept only applies by, in the sense of how the employer is defining happiness. You'll be happy as long as you're toeing the party line, so to speak. So, whoa, wait a minute, that's not what I signed up for. As we know, there's things you've got to be mindful of as well, right?

Chris Fine

For sure. Well, I don't want to get dystopic here. So why don't we talk about Verint? But yes, thank you. That must have been an interesting session.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, and I got to tell you too, in terms of market momentum, I mentioned UCaaS growth is kind of flat, but they have been, this is another example of how they're getting it right. Over the past few months, Very recently, there have been two major players have made moves to back out of the market in terms of what they're doing. The first one is Twilio, who had a video SDK kind of capability that was not getting a lot of traction in the market. And Twilio, of course, has gone, has kind of, they hit a wall last year. They had their share of big layoffs and stuff and they've kind of scaled back their focus. They were spread it out too thin. So video is one of the kind of pieces of the pie that they've kind of backed out of. And the beneficiary of this is Zoom.

Twilio, you know, big player in a lot of ways, but now for any Twilio customer who is using their video SDK, it's now switched over to Zoom. So if they want to keep doing that, they have to now Zoom is the default for that application. So one, you know, where one pulls out, someone pulls ahead. And in this case, Zoom has been the beneficiary of that change. But maybe more importantly was a more recent announcement from Meta, which is, you know, Facebook, They have made their kind of moves into the business environment and the workplace. So they had an offering called Workplace, and it's been recently terminated and just abruptly dropped. And guess where that traction is going to?

Chris Fine

They just signed up for Zoom, right?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, so WorkVivo is kind of the equivalent of what Meta Workplace was supposed to be. Didn't get the traction, And guess what now is coming in Zoom's way is this, again, this kind of like exit becomes their entrance. So these are signs, Chris, I think that you know, where the chips are falling, the strong get stronger, so to speak. But when the big names like Meta back out, you know, that potentially opens up a lot of opportunity.

Again, Zoom is getting the traction in ways you might not have expected. So, they acquire WorkVivo. You wonder, well, why is this in the picture? Now they get this little bit of a potential windfall out of this exit. And so good for them. I think these are just more validations that Zoom is kind of getting it right to evolve past being a video player, right?

Chris Fine

Yeah, well, to me, being a video player now or what you might call standard video conferencing, which again, an analog island is amazing, right? Because how many years did we wait for it? But now it really is commoditized. Like any device you get is likely to be able to do it. But I do have one maybe concluding thought on Zoom so we can get to the other stuff.

One thing that I find very interesting about Zoom versus Teams is that Teams - and I'm sure Microsoft would dispute this - but I feel as though Teams is more suited for, not suited, but more entrenched in larger enterprises, because there are not many larger enterprises that aren't paying Microsoft for Office 365. And, you have a site license with Microsoft. It is what it is. You get Teams with it. So you're kind of already there and it's tied into all the other products that you're likely using all the time every day for all kinds of production work, unless you're totally one of the few, relatively few that are totally on like a G suite.

Whereas Zoom to me seems to be much more lightweight. Like I have a Zoom account we use for these, right? We record these on Zoom for, and it's great. It doesn't cost a whole lot. It's super powerful. And so I feel like this whole market that isn't just the Fortune 50 is a gigantic market and Zoom's very well positioned for that if you want something professional, but you don't necessarily want to sign on to all of the stuff with Office 365. Does that make any sense?

Jon Arnold

Well, yeah, And of course, you know, Microsoft Teams has kind of become the dominant productivity suite, especially as you say, in larger enterprises. So certainly, there's an ongoing kind of arms race with these big players to add more and more features to make their platform stickier. So Zoom is certainly, going up against that, but they also, of course, can integrate very well with Microsoft too. So they have this mentality about, Zoom is successful because it just works and they want to apply that same logic to the workplace where the workplace just works.

For that to happen, everything has to be really seamless and very intuitive and user friendly and all this stuff. And that seems to be very much their DNA. And you compare that to Teams; I think it'd be hard pressed to find anybody who says Teams is like that. And you could argue similar for other big platforms as well. So, you know, that simplicity, that user experience thing, Clearly, Zoom has got that part of the equation right. And that's paying off.

Chris Fine

You got to keep running though, because you know how it is with Microsoft. They take like three times to get anything right a lot of the time, but when they get it right, they just completely take over. And so, but I was trying to say that I think there are different market segments, forgetting about which one might be better or not better. I just think there's a lot of markets where Zoom is pretty natural for it. it's just taking on less. it's not like just free Google Meet, let's say, but it's not taking on all suite. And it just works really well. Even if you don't have an IT department, it works really well. It's kind of like Slack. Slack works that way too.

Jon Arnold

Yeah. they did a really good job outlining different buyer personas that they have to sell to and educate. Because if you just think of Zoom as a video platform, you're going to be kind of under selling what's possible. In other words, it's not just about technology, but the business side of how they go to market, how they engage with buyers, how they, how they bring the value also through the channels, right, to educate them about how to get into this kind of value proposition because it's much richer than just selling meetings, you know, that kind of thing.

Chris Fine

Okay.

Jon Arnold

So yeah, you know, interesting. It is, because I think again, a company that has, they're not, it's all in on AI and I think they're executing it pretty well. And I would say it's very similar here for Verint, which is a company that has been around for quite a while. They had their roots in WFM, you know, it's just strictly within the contact center space, but they've kind of retooled their whole offering again, around AI. And now their positioning is this idea of what they call CX automation. So CX is customer experience, and that is the kind of the, it's kind of like the Nirvana state you're trying to get to in the customer service space, where if you have a good customer experience, that's what's going to drive happiness back to Zoom again, but you know, customer satisfaction.

For contact centers, that requires them to do things differently because they have to be much more customer-focused rather than operationally focused. So all of their AI applications, it's all done by bots. So you have to buy in to get the Verint story, you have to buy into the idea that chatbots are an important part of the CX equation. If you can't bring yourself to that, then Verint isn't going to do much for you. So that is kind of one of the, I guess, one of the risks of going all in on AI and in particular this kind of aspect of AI of developing these bots.

So the whole notion is that the more of the customer experience you can automate, the happier the customer is going to be. I don't know if that's 100% true, Chris. I do know the more you can automate, the more efficient your operations will be, and that's a no-brainer. But I don't know yet how well that translates to customer satisfaction. I think that may take a little time to bear itself out. They certainly have their share of customer successes, but the premise of what they're doing, I think, totally makes sense, in that chatbots, again, through machine learning, they're continuously improving, right?

Every time you put a bot into your kind of workflow, it does a specific, every bot that they have has a specific function. Like it only does one thing. It doesn't automate everything. They have specific bots for specific needs. It could be things about transcription of, for call summaries, bots for coaching, like I mentioned, digital assistant earlier to help basically agents get through their calls faster, right? And you have bots about, routing self-service queries to an agent when the self-service guy or the self-service bot can't do anything more for the customer. Now, this may all sound like everyday stuff if you're a contact center vendor, and to a large extent it is.

But what's really interesting is much like a lot of the marketplace still thinks of Zoom as a video company, a lot of the contact center decision makers and buyers still think that the only way that they can improve their customer service is to like, what they say, rip and replace. In other words, to get all, take out all the legacy stuff and make a big mega investment in AI and all the new cloud capabilities. And because that's such a big chasm to cross, they don't do it. And so they just kind of bolt on things to try to like muddle through and that's not really a good way to go. So what they're trying to show these guys is that no, you can deploy these bots, and you can still have a premise-based infrastructure and still get the benefit. And as we heard, that's kind of a revelation for a lot of companies because they're not thinking enough in terms of what AI is about.

Because a lot of people assume that to use AI, you have to be cloud-based and have all the modern stuff in place. And that's not true. So they're another example of a company that's kind of a little ahead of the curve, trying to get the market to see the capabilities. But they have to walk the walk. That's why they view themselves so heavily into AI to deliver what these capabilities are. And then the market's got to kind of catch up and see, oh, that's what you mean by CX automation. I get it. But they're old school enough.

Just one more thing to say, Chris - they're old school enough to say, we need to prove it to you. So they have in their pricing model, their offer to the marketplace is, you have 120 days to see time to value. If you don't get the results that we think you should be getting by then, you don't pay. So they're kind of putting their money where their mouth is. That's how confident they feel in their AI capabilities. And again, you can do this when you're a little ahead of the curve and let the customer deploy and see for themselves what kind of results they get.

Then obviously, because they have enough success stories to share that it's working, once they know, because they know once the customer gets that, they're going to want to try more bots because they have dozens and dozens of them that are all-purpose built for specific things. So you start building up a portfolio of these bots then that cumulative impact of AI starts to really show up.

Chris Fine

It's interesting what you're saying, Jon, because I always listen and think while you're talking. And I think that the world of CX and contact centers is actually quite different and becoming more so than in the sort of regular collaborative workplace. And specifically, I think when you call a contact center, the definition of CX is almost how quickly and how accurately did they solve my question, right? I mean, you certainly don't want to be treated rudely, but the experience is how long did I have to wait? How long did, you know, how much did they hear what I said about my problem is? How little canned spam did I get in response, and how quickly was the problem actually solved?

Does that make sense? Because if that's true, then I look at and I think, I've experienced that bots can actually do the job, right? I was just thinking about two experiences I had not too long ago, one good and one bad, where the bad bot is just insufferable, terrible. They're pumping out the same crap that no matter how you ask a question, they didn't even understand the question. So that is disastrous for that company, whoever owns that bot.

But then on the other hand, I had another experience where I thought, you know what, that really saved me time. I didn't have to wait in line to talk to somebody and I could tell it was a bot and it just understood what I was asking a lot faster than I think most agents would be that were connected to the chat. So that is actually an area that I think has a lot of potential. That's my two cents or five cents there.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, maybe seven.

Chris Fine

Maybe 10?

Jon Arnold

Yeah, well, you know, it's a long-winded way for both of us to talk about what they've just boiled down into two words, CX automation.

Chris Fine

Yes.

Jon Arnold

Right. So I think that's a good branding thing, right? If you can clearly articulate what that means. But again, just like I talked about that listening capability for WorkVivo earlier that, oh, that sounds a little potentially could be creepy. This is all built on the premise that you are ready to use bots and not everybody is, but clearly, they're having enough success that does, you know, they're past that. But also this idea that you feel that the key to success and yeah, customer happiness is automation.

I always feel that to me a good experience is because it feels personalized, right? That whether it's a bot or an agent, you feel like they're listening to you, they know something about you, they're not just giving you off the shelf, you know, lip service. So can you get that from automation? I don't know. And maybe that's part of how we're, our demographic is becoming more and more digital, right?

More and more, that younger generation, that's how they think and relate to things. And maybe for them, that's what automation really is all about. And they're the future. So if that's what's working, that's what's working. But, off the top, maybe for us analog folks, that idea of automating everything in customer service seems a little, sounds a little clinical, right? But if you get the right balance, it can be great.

Chris Fine

Automation has two sides to it, right? Whether it's a factory or a call center or anything, right? There's one side of it that makes you think, well, they're just trying to save money on having more humanized interactions or whatever the more human-oriented version, the more custom quality of building, let's say a car or whatever, right? But the other side of it is if you just want something that is a repetitive process with a little bit of variation on each one, then automation is not necessarily a bad thing. It kind of depends on how you look at it.

And I would take a point of view, let's say, that personalization, I'm just not sure whether it's the main thing with CX. Now, I don't mean that they shouldn't have all your information, right? So if you mean like when you call a pretty high level kind of company and say, like a luxury goods or something and you say, it's me, Jon Arnold, Chris Fine, they're going to know all about what you bought and where you bought it and when you bought it and exactly what it is, and they're going to have a trained agent and all this kind of stuff. So yes, that kind of personalization, but if you could automate that, I'm not sure that has to be a person. I'm not sure.

Jon Arnold

Yeah, I agree. And the more these interactions become normalized - and they are becoming normalized - we won't think twice about it, right? It'll just, that's just going to be the way it is. But the underlying premise to all of this, and Verint does a very good job explaining this, they call it the gym. The idea that bots, again - you can get skeptical if you think bots are static. It's the same experience every time because they're trained to only do one thing.

No, these bots with machine learning, I keep using that phrase, but the bots continuously are trained because the more data you have and collect about the customer and in the contact center, the better you can train that bot to keep improving and getting a little more laser focused and being very situational specific, it understands the context of every scenario better than it did before. Well, okay, so that means that the bots get just like agents who are properly trained and want to learn, they're going to get better and better, just like the agents. So there's no reason why they couldn't deliver a fairly personalized, albeit automated experience. There's absolutely no reason why that couldn't happen.

Chris Fine

Right. And the automation could also help the agent. Like you could be in a situation where you still need that extra little bit of human intuition or whatever else that the agent would give a customer. But the more the agent has at their fingertips from the coaching, from the automation, the better the metrics on the call center, in every direction.

So I'll give an example, okay? There's a company that I deal with all the time to get parking spaces in New York City, which, you know, in a garage, which as you know, is a somewhat challenging thing. They're great. And there's about three companies that do this, but one of them has really good customer service. And when you need it is because when you get to a garage and they tell you they're full - even though they're not, right? Or they are, but they never bother telling anybody who made a reservation. All that kind of stuff just happens all the time. So this company, I'm not sure what they have connected to customer service. You do end up talking to a person, but they know everything, including what to tell you like, okay, here's the next place over. We're going to give you the same price. It's exactly here. We can send you a map. You'll be in there in 2 minutes. It's 5 minutes away.

They just have everything, which is critical when you're behind the wheel of a car and you're in the middle of traffic and all you want to do is what to do. So you could probably take that to any industry. And if you have that combination of the AI and the tools and the trained agents, or in a case where somebody doesn't have to talk to you in person, proper interface of some other kind, I think that really does improve the CX.

Jon Arnold

Good note.

Chris Fine

Yes, I think we have to. We have to.

Jon Arnold

Coming back to Eric Yuan, it's happy.

Chris Fine

Yes.

Jon Arnold

It's a good outcome.

Chris Fine

You know, he's right about that. I mean, we can argue what causes that or what helps to promote that, but I think he's right about that. And I think there are so few interactions one may have with various types of things that one has to accommodate in life that if it is happy, it's differentiated. And you get pretty loyal as a customer.

Jon Arnold

It never gets old. Okay, that takes us to time, folks. Thank you all for listening and hope you enjoyed our podcast and you'll continue as we explore the future of work here on Watch This Space. You can access our episodes if you don't know by now at www.watchthisspace.tech, or wherever you subscribe to your podcasts. And if you like what we're doing here, we'd love it if you leave a review or a rating and comments about how we're doing or topics you want to see in the future. And with that, I am Jon Arnold.

Chris Fine

And I'm Chris Fine. Thank you for staying with us on a bit of a longer discussion than we had planned, but we hope it's helpful to you. Thank you, Jon, as always. And to all, stay tuned next month for another episode of Watch This Space.

Companies mentioned:

Avaya, Cisco, HPE, Microsoft, Twilio, Verint, WorkVivo, Zoom