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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#559: The shift from service to sales with Josh Feast, Cogito
00:25:36
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Capella University Narrator
You've never been one to settle, stand down or stand still. You're a lifelong learner, energized by excellence. There's a fire inside you you can't ignore. You've got competition to outrun, momentum to build on, and your own high standards to meet. Stop now. Not a chance. At Capella University, we help you catch what you're chasing because you've always had the drive. Now go earn the degree. Capella University. What can't you do? Visit Capella Edu to learn more.
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Child
Mom, can you tell me a story?
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Mom
Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car.
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Child
Was she brave?
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Mom
She was tired mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required.
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Child
Did you have to fight a dragon?
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Mom
Nope. She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually.
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Child
Was it scary?
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Mom
Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be.
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Child
Did the car have a sunroof?
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Mom
It did, actually.
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Child
Okay, good story.
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Mom
Car buying. You'll want to tell stories about Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.
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Josh Feast
Foreign.
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Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season six of the Agile Brand where we discuss marketing, technology and customer experience, trends, insights and ideas with enterprise and technology platform leaders. We focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make brands successful, scalable, customer focused and sustainable. This is what makes an agile brand. I'm your host, Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, marketing operations and CX, best selling author and speaker. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and Real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com before we get started, I wanted to let you know that my latest book, Priority is Action seven Principles for Better Strategies, Decisions and Outcomes is now available. In it, I give ideas and insights for leaders and teams that need to make meaningful progress on their priorities. After all, our priorities are what we do, not what we say we'd like to do. You can find Priority as Action on Amazon or learn more on my website, greggkilstrom.com now let's get on to the show.
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Podcast Host
Today we're excited to delve into the evolving landscape of customer service and sales. With Josh Feast, CEO and co founder of Cogito. We'll explore how AI is reshaping the roles of customer service agents and enhancing business strategies. Josh, welcome to the show.
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Josh Feast
Hi. Great to be here.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this topic with you. Why don't we get started though, with you giving a little background on yourself and your role at cogito?
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Josh Feast
You bet. So I'm the founder and CEO of cogito. Cogito is a real time AI guidance company which helps agents and supervisors in the moment at large scale contact centers and is designed to improve experience, efficiency and effectiveness. I was originally trained as an engineer in New Zealand. I came to the US a number of years ago to learn technology entrepreneurship. And I started Cogito because I was excited and intrigued at the idea of using AI to improve human connection. And I wanted to really develop that and take something really novel out of the lab and into the world.
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Podcast Host
That's great. That's great. So, yeah, we're going to talk about a few things here, but let's start by talking about the evolving role of customer service agents in businesses and a shift from service to sales. So a shift towards incorporating sales tasks from customer service agents. So we're seeing this shift from purely service oriented roles to more sales focused responsibilities among customer service agents. Can you explain what's driving the shift?
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Josh Feast
Yeah, of course. At the highest level, providing human interactions to customers at large scale is expensive endeavor. The cost of people to interact with your customers is generally by far the largest expense in many companies. They're also very, very precious. These are really important interactions, particularly because markets these days are just more and more competitive. So what companies want to do is they want to really ensure that they're delivering really great experiences that are going to increase the lifetime value of the customer. So they want to use every opportunity they can to look at different ways they can make additional offers that are going to both increase the size and the longevity of that customer relationship. So that's the most fundamental business reason. The other reason is that it's really just a pure customer experience issue. One of the old ways that things used to be done was you'd call into a service and then you maybe get transferred to somebody and then you had to be transferred to somebody who did sales. And so that obviously would just elongate the interactions. And so they want to improve that experience by avoiding those transfers and just getting everything done on the same interaction.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it makes perfect sense. I mean, you know, it's, it's improving the experience by, to your point, not having to transfer to someone to sell you something. Right. It just, I mean even, even just saying it doesn't sound super fun from a, from a customer perspective. But also, you know, you're, you're then asking customer service agents who are trained to, you know, deal with customer issues and, and resolve issues to now all of a sudden become salespeople. So, you know, how are companies managing this transition and you know, what kind of challenges do they face?
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Josh Feast
Yeah, so, so the way that they're doing it is typically like, you think of it like unifying contact centers. So the companies would have had a, maybe a pure sales contact center and a pure service contact center. And now they're kind of bringing them all together to the sort of unification. So the core challenges with that is not all service agents are going to be necessarily comfortable with core sales skills like proposing offers or overcoming objections. And on the other hand, not all salespeople are going to have the patience for service work. Right. And so that really becomes sort of a human capital challenge. How are you going to bring these different people in these different backgrounds together and create the sort of satisfying whole? So training and guidance is really the heart of it.
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Podcast Host
Yeah. So we talk a lot about AI on this show. I think everybody talks about AI a lot everywhere probably, but we certainly talk about it a lot. And there's a lot of different and very interesting and very valuable applications of it. I like this topic of augmenting people and their abilities using AI. I think that's a really powerful way of looking at things. So I want to look at the role of AI in empowering these customer service agents. And so from your perspective, can you describe how is AI being utilized to assist, augment, empower customer service agents in enhancing sales without extensive retraining or hiring new staff altogether?
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Josh Feast
Well, I think the outset, I think you're absolutely bang on. I mean, this application of AI, this application is one of the real effective win, win, win use cases for AI. And we're all, there's a lot of investment in this field and we're all searching for these applications where it just makes total sense. And I think this really is one of them. So generally speaking, what AI is going to do is it's going to help automatically identify opportunities. It's going to potentially provide scripts or ways to introduce those opportunities. And then critically. And many of these, the organizations that are deploying this AI operate in regulated industries. So it's going to ensure and track compliance with regulations and rules. Those are kind of generically what the AI is going to do. And you might say, well, why does it matter? Right. But the fact is that a lot of organizations think like a large telco, for example. The, the breadth of products and offers is enormous. Absolutely enormous. Right. And it's changing, that product mix is changing all the time. So having an AI sort of identify the things that are going to be relevant to this particular customer, hopefully relevant to that particular customer is doing real useful work.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. And so you know your platform cogito is one of those that's, that's helping here. Could you talk specifically about how does your platform accomplish helping agents identify and capitalize on cross selling upselling opportunities in real time?
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Josh Feast
You bet. So we focus on two fundamental outcomes. The first is we want to improve the relationship between the agent and the customer and therefore by extension the customer and the brand. And then we also want to improve the execution of the workflow. So we're looking for both dimensions. The way that we improve the relationship is that we help with the way that an agent comes across to the customer. So you want to come across, you want to be a good listener, you want to deliver the messages in a way that the customer can understand. You want to make sure that the customer recognizes that you're caring and that you're knowledgeable. So you want to come across an assured way. All these things are embedded in the way people speak to each other. So how they speak, nonverbal signals. We also want to make sure that the agent is delivering the right messages in the moment and being aware of what's possible. So if I give a concrete example, so I was sitting at a side by side with an agent, probably not that long ago, maybe six weeks ago, and it was turned out a really large telco and it was a brand new agent. The agent was just coming out or somewhat just coming out of their initial trading. So they were a new hire. And so in the course of the conversation, so the customer calls in, they're looking to make a change to their product mix. And in the course of making that change, the Kogito system will pop up and say, have you considered offering this broadband package which was sort of a new offer and that would basically significantly reduce the, the overall cost to that customer if they could do that bundle. And as a result of getting these nudges, not only did that agent make the offer, but they took it on themselves to go and learn more about that set of products so they could be more knowledgeable for the next interactions. So it's like a way to both guide in the moment and also to sort of encourage and help the agent understand where they should be focusing their attention in order to expand their own capabilities and knowledge.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, I mean that's, that's really interesting. I mean I. The AI would actually empower learning on the on the part of the employee. And I also, you know, I like what you said about looking at this as an opportunity to build better connections. In other words, instead of, you know, going back to. Instead of replacing humans. And sure, we, we want better financial performance and we want to upsell and cross sell and all of those things, but if we lose touch with the customer, we're not going to get any of that or we're going to lose. We have, let alone be able to grow. So I like that focus on building customer relationships as well. You touched on this a little bit, but building qualities like empathy, understanding. How do you look at AI's role in really being able to enhance that?
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Josh Feast
Well, that's a great question. This is one of the things I was so fascinated about. The basic science behind Kogito and one of the big motivators of it, the company, is what an amazing thing, right? You could use a computer to help with things that we think are so incredibly human, like empathy or connection. So what it's going to do. So the way it works is that when we are building relationships with each other, that's something that uses our mental resources. It takes effort to read social signals and respond. And the fact is, people can get tired, and they particularly get tired in a context in our environment where you're doing 30 or 40 interactions a day. And so what the tool is doing is really helping you in those situations where you may not recognize a signal of somebody. So because you're tired, or you may not recognise that somebody's distressed, for example, or you may not think to respond in an appropriate way, you might jump to the next step in your workflow rather than saying, oh, wow, I'm really sorry that happened, or isn't that great that you just got married or something like that, where you get this real opportunity to build that connection. And so what the tool will do is it'll recognize those opportunities and let you know. It'll also help you with your delivery because people make decisions about whether they've been well served from the way they're spoken to. It'll help ensure that your pacing is correct, your level of confidence is appropriate, that you're not leaving really long pauses after somebody speaks, which is going to be a signal that you weren't really listening, et cetera, et cetera. And that ability to drive that nonverbal experience, we've proven, makes a tremendous difference in how customers perceive the interactions.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, I know you shared a previous example. Do you have an example maybe of this, where some of these real Time cues can help sales as well as customer satisfaction 100%.
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Josh Feast
So like, for example, if you're speaking and your pacing is inappropriate, right. So you may be speaking way too fast for that customer, you'll get a nudge that appears on the screen which says speaking quickly, which is just to let you know that's what's going on. And maybe you'll choose to make a change. Right. Or another example is, let's say you were to ask a question right now and then there was this big pause, distracted pause. I'll get a little nudge on the screen saying slow to respond, which reminds me to check back in with that customer. Or I might get a nudge which says that I'm going on way too much in response to this question. That would be very concrete. Examples, you'll also get nudges that say this is a good moment to display empathy. Nudges that show when my energy might be off too flat, for example, for what's appropriate. And so then these nudges combine as well to help with that sale. Because a tool like Cogito's will continuously track the customer's experience on the call in true real time. So you can also look for the right moments. When somebody calls in with a really complex issue, they're going to want that issue addressed before they're going to be receptive to, you know, thinking about some other option that they, that you may want to offer them. So helping understand those things is what the tool supports. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.
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Podcast Host
I, I, I don't do as much sales as I used to, but man, I wish I would have had this about 10 years ago. Probably would have saved me some, a little bit of heartache. At the very least. Speaking of performance and making the sale and all that stuff. Stuff, you know, I want to talk a little bit about the impact on business performance. I mean, you know, some of this is about increasing and maintaining customer satisfaction. The other is, you know, when you're integrating sales into service, certainly we want to see some impacts on business performance. So you know, what have been some observed benefits from businesses that have integrated some AI tools like Cogitos.
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Josh Feast
Yeah. So one of the things that I think we're super proud with about, and I mentioned how this is sort of like a win, win, win type of application, is you're driving two things. With a solution like this, you're going to get consistent behavior across a really large population of agents and you get rapid behavior change. And so one of the cool things about that is that generally Speaking, all your KPIs improve because people are just performing better, right? They're working in partnership with the AI, the output is better. And so you generally see a lift across sort of the breadth of outcomes that you're looking for. So that would include, you'll see improvements in your post call satisfaction surveys or EMPs, which you expect will lead to greater customer longevity and lifetime value. You are going to be pitching more and better. So you're going to get more sales, particularly for product offers that are important for the, for the business in the moment. You're going to get that. You will also get actually shorter interactions, interestingly enough, because people are getting their stuff solved faster and more effectively. And so that is also really important. See above for the cost of some of these interactions. So those are the real big ones. The other one that we also like is what we call speed to proficiency. So a large scale contact center environment, as you well know, has, you know, a lot of, can have quite a lot of agent turnover. People join, they realize that's not the job for them. And you know, so there's this sort of, this consistent sort of turnover that happens. And so getting new agents up to speed as fast as possible is a key element of the success of an operation. And we will generally see that a new agent will get up to speed, speed, speed, many weeks faster if they're using this type of tool.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, well, and along those lines, I mean, you know, definitely there's, and rightfully so, a lot of focus on the customer. But to what you were just saying, as far as getting new agents up to speed, what about the turnover rates themselves or job satisfaction? You mentioned the anecdote. As far as the person that, you know, they learned something from the AI and then took it a step further to educate themselves further. It seems like there's opportunity, at least for those that are, let's say, intrinsically motivated to learn and grow. Has there been an observed impact on job satisfaction among the agents using AI?
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Josh Feast
It's an excellent question. So a couple of years ago, Cogito made a concerted effort to expand our focus from a customer experience focus to a customer and employee experience focus or agent experience focus. So as well as continuously measuring the experience the customer's having during and after every call, we continuously measure the experience the agent is having during and after every call. And why do you do that? Because you're sort of the metaphor is a battery, right? You're trying to maintain the charge and the battery of the agent to make sure that they're not getting exhausted by what's going on. And this can be sort of an emotional exhaustion. We call it compassion fatigue in the industry. And so what that allows you to do is then provide appropriate breaks and sort of get ahead of something before somebody decides this is going to be too challenging for me and I want to choose a different option. So that's been working fantastically well in providing that level of insight. The other big thing we've seen, and this has happened particularly since the start of last year, so when AI really hit the zeitgeist is that interest in people to partner with AI has really, really increased. And I think that's because people are curious about it. They also recognize that a lot of the future of work is going to be human plus AI when the use case makes sense. And so they want to kind of get involved and be proficient and understand what the big deal is all about. So we're seeing a lot of that, particularly in the last 18 months. Even more than we used to see in the past.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's, I mean, and that's just smart to be, try to be ahead of the curve. I mean, you know, someone, what is it someone said, you know, you're not going to be replaced by AI, but you'll be replaced by someone who knows
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Josh Feast
how to use AI. Exactly. Right.
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Podcast Host
So, yeah, so being being on that curve and I think that might have started maybe higher up in the org with, with those following trends and all that, but it sounds like it's, it's either trickling down or just becoming more broadly more broad awareness. And that kind of brings me to last topic I wanted to talk through is just kind of looking ahead and some of the, some of the future trends that you're seeing. What are you saying, you know, what's, what, what comes next here as far as incorporating AI within customer service and this the service to sales kind of combo.
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Josh Feast
I think most people in the industry, and I would fall into this bucket, sees a future where we have continuously improved self service capabilities and continuously harnessed agent or human capabilities. I think that the investment in both arms is going to continue because both of them make sense. There's cases where you want a self service, there's cases when you need to interact with a human who has a model of the world and knows what's going on, can empathize, can sell effectively, but AI can happily enhance both. And this is such a huge part of what enterprises do is interact with customers that it's going to, I think for a Very long time be sort of the forefront of AI investment, which I think it is today.
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Podcast Host
Yeah. And so for those companies, people listening out there that they aren't doing this yet, but not only see the trends and read the trades, so to speak, but listening here and wanting to do this, some key considerations that they should take into account to either get started here or just to ensure success as they're transitioning here.
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Josh Feast
Yeah. So on one hand there's sort of two elements of it. There's sort of like what you should do to succeed and then what you should rightly ask for.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Josh Feast
Those are really the two categories. Right. So I think what you should do to succeed. So what I've seen over the years is that the customer's leadership matters. So the leadership, operational leadership of the contact center, their buy in, their enthusiasm, their willingness to be a sort of a top down champion can make a big difference because these can be significant moments of change for an organization. So that leadership is important as well as that. You really need to roll out the solution such that ideally all the roles within the operation are getting value. So for example, at Kadira, we make sure that we're providing real time guidance to agents, but we also provide real time guidance to supervisors, we provide efficiencies to quality assurance, we provide reports to management. And that's very deliberate because we just learned that if everybody has a stake and everybody's getting value, then the tool is more likely to be adopted effectively as fast as possible. So I think that's one critical element. The second is I think what you should rightly ask for. Right. And I think it's very, very reasonable for organizations to expect that they can measure the improvement in hard dollars. Right. Like when we provide guidance and be able to attribute that improvement to the specific tool that they're rolling out. One of the things about contact centers is all the things are changing all the time. It's like these are. It's a very organic environment. Things are always moving. And so sometimes people look at that as an excuse. Well, the numbers went up, but I don't know if it was because of this, that or that initiative. At Cogito, we are able to know that we've guided somebody. We're able to detect that they've taken advantage of the guidance. So we're always able to map the specific impact of our guidance to the movement in a KPI and say it was due to this. Right. And I think that that's a standard that all technology should be held to. We've got some smart people that can build AI, they should be able to figure out how to prove that it works.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, that's great. Well, one last question before we wrap up here. You've given a lot of great insights and ideas already, but what's a key takeaway that you would want listeners to remember about this role of AI and transforming customer service into a revenue generating function?
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Josh Feast
I think the big one is I would love people to just go, woohoo. Here's a real effective win win win use case for AI. Right? Because again, lots of investment out there. Some of it can be very abstract. This is great for customers because more efficient, more effective interactions. You're getting more out of those calls. It's much better for agents, it's much better for the organizations, saves effort and improves success all around. So I think that's probably the number one. And then I think that the second one is just the fact that it's cool that it's possible. Right. AI can help us with things that we think of as uniquely human, like the ability to interact successfully with each other, to empathize appropriately. And I think that's just a really cool thing.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, I love both of those. I always try to look for the win win as well. So I love that.
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Greg Kilstrom
Well, again I'd like to thank Josh
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Podcast Host
Feast, CEO and co Founder of Cogito, for joining us today and you can learn more about Josh and Cogito by the links in the show Notes.
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Greg Kilstrom
Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.greggkillstrom.com. that's G-R E G K-I H L S T R O M.com While you're there, check out my series of bestselling Agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay Agile.
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Capella University Narrator
The agile brand. There's a fire inside you you can't ignore. Stand still. Not a chance. You're a lifelong learner who's come this far. Now we're here to help you keep going further. Capella University what can't you do? Visit Capella Edu to learn more.
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Geico Representative
I'm here on the job site with Dale, who's a framing contractor.
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Podcast Host
Hey. Good morning.
- [27:01]
Geico Representative
Dale traded up to Geico Commercial Auto Insurance for all his business vehicles. We're here where he needs us most.
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Podcast Host
Yep, they sure are.
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Geico Representative
We make it easy for him to save on all his insurance needs, all in one place with coverage that fits his business and bottom line. Oh, I shouldn't have looked down.
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Podcast Host
It's all right.
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Geico Representative
We're so far up here.
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Podcast Host
Look at me. Take a deep breath.
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Geico Representative
I'm good. So good.
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Josh Feast
Get a commercial auto insurance quote today@geico.com and see how much you could save. It feels good. To Geico.