149: Fireside with Steve Bederman

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 149 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today I'd like to welcome Steve Biederman for a fireside chat. I'd like to welcome to the podcast today Steve Biederman. Steve, it's lovely to welcome you to the podcast for the first time. Here today to join me for a fireside. Perhaps first you'd like to introduce yourself.

Steve Bederman: 0:44

Of course, Charlotte, thanks for having me. Well, as you said, I'm Steve Biederman. I am a veteran of uh technology for specifically the contact center industry, where for the last 25 years I've developed software that is uh used by all the agents that call you at home and you blame me for it. And I always say we make the gun, but we don't uh shoot it.

Charlotte Ward: 1:10

Okay, fair enough. I won't hold you too accountable then for those.

Steve Bederman: 1:15

Thank you. That could be a problem.

Charlotte Ward: 1:20

Okay, I'll bear that in mind. Um thanks, Steve. So lovely to meet you. We've had a a chat before, but uh this is um one of the fireside sessions, and it's your first time here. So um, although I have noticed, of course, that we are not by a fire, we are by a piano. But glossing over that for now for the benefit of uh our listeners and uh a little reminder to you, maybe fireside sessions are where my guests bring the topic. So it's not me fielding the question to start the session off today. I have understand you have uh a field you'd like to talk about, a topic you'd like to chat for about 25 minutes about.

Steve Bederman: 1:59

Well, I really do. I'm very passionate about the idea of how do you use technology to communicate in a viable way so that you can reach people at their comfort level and uh from a business level be expeditious and efficient and uh center your activity on really the customer experience. You know, we hear a lot about customer experience these days, and I think everybody's talking CX, but uh the ideal of CX really has to be uh underlined with the ability to do it. How do I communicate with the people I need to reach that are either my customers or even my prospects? So uh, and it's interesting in our company we've taken that vision that I've had and we've implemented it with uh with the development of what we call an omniplus solution that allows uh really any business, but let's specifically talk about more of a contact center environment, to communicate uh on any level at any time in a comfortable fashion. And what does that mean? That really means that you have uh different ways to communicate. So you may be most comfortable communicating, Charlotte, on Facebook. Uh someone else that you know may be comfortable doing email, and someone else may like to go to websites and click and talk to somebody immediately. Or uh oftentimes people want to remain anonymous. So uh you'll see this often in the what we the accounts receivable, the collections industry, to where you know it it's a little uncomfortable to talk about this bill you owe, but you're ready to pay it or at least negotiate a settlement. Uh so how do you do that without having to be confrontational or talk directly with somebody? You can do that through other channels. And all of those channels are the availability that are out there today, but individually, right? So uh the homeowner or the consumer may want a single way to communicate, but if I am reaching a wide range of customers, I need to be able to give them the full experience. So I if if you want to talk to me through Facebook, I can do that, or WhatsApp, I can do that, or on and on and on.

Charlotte Ward: 4:25

So I think it's fair to say that probably most people listening to this podcast will be familiar with the phrase omni-channel as a as a as a an approach to providing support. But you used something right at the start there, which was omniplus, which I'd kind of like you to give a little bit more context to, but but I guess also perhaps just uh um to dial back to what you also said at the beginning, which was interesting, which is it it's about a level of comfort with customers, isn't it? That's how we always think of omnichannel. We think about it it being a kind of convenience for customers and uh get maximizing their opportunity to contact us, but uh but it is comfort as well, isn't it? So maybe maybe you could talk a bit to that, but also explain what omniplus exactly is in that context as well.

Steve Bederman: 5:15

I will uh to the second point you made, uh the comfort. Um if you're really interested and seriously endeavored to really embrace that customer's experience, you want to be able to speak to them in their way instead of the way you demand. Now, the conversation itself may need to go into the business rules that you have, but why not set that consumer, that customer at ease? And to do that, back to my earlier point, you want to give them their way of having comfort, and you need to be able to offer that flexibility. Listen, how many times have you called a very large uh company uh on the internet and or look to call them, or you're unhappy with the order that you have, and there's nobody to talk to? Or the only way you can communicate with them is through email, and then you cross your fingers that within the next week you may hear from them, and that you may or may not notice that it return email even coming to you. Uh, and and to me, that's uh about what a company wants to do for themselves. They want to limit the use of people, they want to limit the drama that goes with all the orders, and they want to not refund money when they don't have to. So my belief is is the alternative to that is to give people the comfort of doing it in any way. And when I talk about OmniPlus, so omni channels are really just the ability to uh well let me back up. You have two types of channel discussions that have gone on in the last decade. One is multi-channel and one is omni-channel. And multi-channel is the ability to use different channels as a business, but an omni experience is is a wrapper of all of those different uh medias we call them that you can communicate to somebody with, but retaining all of that client information in a single repository. So that's what it does. So if I am using a multi-channel environment, I've got different screens coming up. And I have a screen if if I'm in a business or an agent that offers chat, and I have another screen, I know I can do email, I have my email up, and and may have a video connection on another one. But an Omni experience embraces all of those so that I can within the same screen and that same client experience gather and communicate. So I can be looking at your customer information, I can be talking to you uh just voice-wise through a video or a voice connection, and then I can say, look, let me just send this email to you. Uh check your chat because I've just sent you the information and attached it to the chat, and all of that can be drawn back into the customer record so that everything, it doesn't really matter the way I talk to you or communicated, it's all centralized in terms of the data, the communication, and that's what I call the plus side, which is great. I've communicated with you, but if I haven't gathered and and uh remarked on the experience and documented and archived it, then the next time you call, there's gonna be starting at square one again. So it's my responsibility to add the plus to it and say, here, I'm going to bring all of the messaging, all of the media back into a single, easy-to-use uh approach.

Charlotte Ward: 8:59

Which makes it really accessible for anyone in the organization as well, I guess.

Steve Bederman: 9:03

Exactly, exactly. I mean, uh, you know, I was working with a loan company, a national loan company in in the States recently. And uh I was uh I had a mortgage and I was getting another mortgage for a new home that I'm I'm buying. When I I went to it, I I immediately wanted to go and and uh just this is the loan company, I've worked with them before. I gave them a call and I said, you know, I I've worked with you before, uh, I'd like to do this. And they said, Well, who have you worked with? I said, Well, don't you have that record handy? And they're like, Well, I actually don't have the record handy, uh, but I can look up the phone number for you to call that mortgage agent. Well, how what a terrible experience. And they dropped me off the call with a phone number in the hope that I would call that next person. Well, what about if I look at it and I say, hey, I saw that you talked to Bill, I see that you have a loan with us, and I see that you like to communicate through video. So if you're by your laptop, let's do that and let's begin the discussion. That's the difference in an Omni Plus approach and and a normal uh business. And that's the what the customer experience is is so valuable that way.

Charlotte Ward: 10:21

Really builds that connection in that circumstance. You you absolutely got disconnected in every possible sense of the word, but but this is about then can building connections through that level of comfort for your clients.

Steve Bederman: 10:33

It is Charlotte, and I'll tell you one uh odd thing to me. These are major companies, and and these are some of the largest companies, this one in America in their industry. And you say, why don't they have this? It's available. I'm not the only company that manufactures it. There are uh it's available and it's well tested and well used on the market. Uh, and why don't they? Well, that becomes the real issue with implementing things like an omni solution, which is getting a business that's already financially successful and measurable to that success and disrupting their organization by bringing in something new for them where all of a sudden it they have to change behaviors which can uh risk they believe their revenue. Yes, it may have a long-term upside, but how do you find the the ability to carve out time and an approach to doing it? And and the companies such as my own, Noble Biz, we do that. We we have we understand that that's the complex piece. That that large company, mortgage company, should be implementing this, but they don't know how to do that while not disrupting their business. And and so in the practical world, it's not that companies don't want a better customer experience, they don't know how to do it.

Charlotte Ward: 11:56

And I guess the the bigger the company, the the greater the pain in in making that transition, right? I I I've worked for a uh a relatively long time in relatively small organizations, um, which is an environment I really enjoy and very comfortable in right now. And and it does mean you can be really responsive and agile. You can change processes at the drop of a hat when your team is very small. I have also worked for those big organizations back in the day, um, and I know how long it took to kind of change a technology platform.

Steve Bederman: 12:29

You know, one CRM to another was not a small project for a big one and it's sign-offs and sign-offs and acceptance. And in large companies, oftentimes that middle layer of management changes in the middle of it, and you can be working towards something and and it stops in the middle, and uh somebody who comes in has a new idea. And you know, I read an article where the uh Fortune 500 companies in their executive levels have an average of no more than two years per position before somebody moves to the next position. So initiatives begin and stop, but that doesn't happen in the small to medium companies. And interestingly, uh for us, implementing a large company versus a small company, it's technology, it's the same. So the truth is that we get to learn our trade through the small to medium companies, which we've done, prove the concept, and then be available to the larger ones when somehow you know they find the time and the method and the way to do it.

Charlotte Ward: 13:36

Yeah, yeah. I guess another challenge in those big organizations that I've certainly encountered is that they're quite often constructed of say through acquisitions or whatever, they're quite often constructed through a lot of different businesses that have been brought together and have somehow kind of struggled along. Yeah, yeah, but but just kind of managed for quite a while. And then they realize, you know what, we better standardize a bit here. Is that a big challenge for you when it comes to also rolling out the tech, like the technology as well as the business practices? Do you think it's both?

Steve Bederman: 14:15

It's a challenge and it's an opportunity, obviously, to to grow. We had a customer which was a very large uh BPO, uh, and they had been going through a process over the last, I don't know, some years of acquiring competitors. So they went out, and by the time we were invited in to look at what they they had, they had purchased 11 companies. So they had their company and 11 companies, so 12 companies, and they had they were all contact centered, and so they had, I think it was uh 40,000 agents spread out between all these companies. Every single company, every single one, they had a different call center system, they they had a different CRM. So every company they're trying to manage through 12 different things. So why they called us in was simply can you give us a way to connect all of these companies? Well, it's very easy to do. It's just you implement a single CRM and a single call center, contact center system, in our case, an OmniPlus system too, and then you segment the way they choose to segment their business. So now all of a sudden, instead of siloing all their employees to different business uh approaches, they now have a workforce of 40,000 people that is versatile, agile, and can be moved and used in any environment that they choose to do it and segregated when they need to do it too. But yeah, I mean, uh we see this all the time, and it really happens because companies that buy companies uh want an immediate, accretive approach to that. And they need to go to their shareholders and say, look, I bought this company and it has this value and I'm now getting a quick return on it. There's not a slow return model uh for most acquisitions. So it's just look, we bought it, it's making money, let's use it, let's get some synergies by maybe reducing staff where we have overlap, but let's let them keep running for a while. Well, remember, I said every two years you're changing management, and and so the long-term solution or midterm, which is finding this uh this wrapper around them, doesn't ever get implemented. And what was a two-year plan now becomes a five to ten-year plan, and they still have those silos. And uh it's inefficient, it it's unreasonable, and it's oftentimes the way it goes.

Charlotte Ward: 17:02

And at those time kind of time spans, you're also talking about aging technologies, increasing increasingly embedded silos and business practices, which just makes the job harder the longer you leave it.

Steve Bederman: 17:15

You know, you you reminded me in saying that about a large uh public company that was uh they were selling insulin uh for uh Medicare for older patients. And they were all doing manual dialing. They had 700 agents in this huge kind of uh operation, a single operation, and they were all hand dialing. Well, they were making money and successful, and they just simply brought us in to automate what had instead of hand dialing to do predictive dialing and and just voice connections in a more efficient way. All of the 700 people were commissioned, so the more contacts and the more sales they made, obviously that was going to improve with an automated approach. You can do 10, 15 times the amount of contacts. But when we came to implement it, the employees whole holistically were against it. They were we were the antichrist when we walked in there to put in the technology. So the best people absolutely didn't want it. They didn't say if I'm good now, I can be 10 times as good. They didn't say that. They said, Oh my god, change, change is is bad. And uh it took a long time to get them convinced. Eventually, what we did is we just so you know, we put a uh we decided to put it into one team of I think it was 150 agents. We just put it in there, and they started to raise their quad their sales very quickly, and then they set up a uh a practice of saying at the end of every month when activity gets very high, we're gonna give the 150 best agents the ability to call off of this automation, and they used to call it then the money machine, because they knew that if they could get logged into that system, they could make more money. And so we had to internally gamify them into a way that it finally got accepted. Why don't we do this to the whole operation? And eventually we did.

Charlotte Ward: 19:29

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense, making it a success in a small part for a small group of people. Um, that will they effectively become your internal champions then, don't they?

Steve Bederman: 19:39

Yes, they do. Well, I I forgot one point. We took the least productive people in and put them in that 150% team. So the higher production people started to get uh that distance between they and the lower product producers, uh, that gap filled, and they were like, Well, wait a minute. They shouldn't be doing this. We should be, we're the best producers. We should get this.

Charlotte Ward: 20:04

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It's interesting to think about gamifying it at the individual contributor level. Do you have problems with all of those managers, with all of that middle management layer that's there just for two years?

Steve Bederman: 20:21

That's the problem. I mean, I wouldn't say that that's a problem, oh my God, but uh where we really have to finesse it per se is with that middle layer of manager because they are they've learned their job, they've learned how to motivate their work groups to the level of whatever their resources are that they use. And at the end of the day, you're now bringing in something new and they have to learn it. There's new behaviors, there's new measurement, there's new reporting, uh, there's new ways to incentivize and manage your people. And uh, if you add to that something like gamification, as an as we just talked about, they're like, Well, if if if you have to trick us into doing this, why should we do it? Obviously, it should speak for itself. And we say the same thing, it should, but that's up to you. You have to allow it, you have to be willing to go to the effort. And unfortunately, I call it a level of uh corporate uh mid-level mediocrity that can go on in large companies. I know that's kind of harsh, but that level is is moving pieces, but they don't want to take the challenge of changing their own behaviors and doing additional work uh to gain their own success and income. Obviously, that that's that's a broad statement of there are great people and and excellence is going on on every level, or a company wouldn't be successful. But I do see that layer happening.

Charlotte Ward: 21:52

So, so I I guess you know, even even if they are terribly good at what they do, it it's it's still potentially the hardest layer in an organization to sell it to effectively, isn't it? Even if they do make success of it. How do you sell that technology uh and the you know the the change of practices? Because also I guess there's very little opportunity for gamification at that layer, isn't there?

Steve Bederman: 22:18

There is, uh because that's not the layer you're really gaming, right? You're gaming your contact center of those thousands of people uh logging in every day and communicating, the the people that really are making the business the money, having the direct relationship with the customer experience. Uh so uh oftentimes what happens is this you'll get a team that comes in and maybe from the CEO level in medium-sized companies and small to uh just a group that is an innovation group within a large operation. And they'll come in and they'll say, This is the benefit, here's what we want to do. And they contact us and they're highly motivated, they want to implement something new uh for production, for uh the excellence that they see, but they are not the best at getting with that business to figure out how to get everybody else enthusiastic about it. And so they look to us to do that, and they and and really that's a big part of what Noble Biz does is we learn about what their outcomes are that they want. So it's not how do you get to your outcome, it's tell us what your outcome is and and what those pieces that are are critical to your business and that you're looking to improve. And then we can come in and share the strategies that we've seen hundreds of times with other businesses, uh, how they've implemented it successfully in an opportunistic way and and in a way that is inclusive of everyone. And um, I would tell you this we are a technology developer. Uh, we certainly take in today's age Omni Plus is is our driver, it it changes all the time as the years go, you're adding new new technologies, but it's just technology, okay? The real key is how do I integrate that technology into the working environment so they can be successful using it. And you have to love the customer, you have to care about the outcome, and you have to then lead that with caring about what that business model is and what's important to them. So it's not listening to us, it's not just saying, here's how you turn on a machine on, it's saying here's how we use a machine, we'll call it a machine within your environment in the best way for you that gives you some comfort and gives you the outcome you're looking for.

Charlotte Ward: 24:50

And I guess just back to the start also gives your clients that comfort, right? I I guess brings brings us completely full circle. I think this has been I think this has been super interesting. We we started out talking about omnichannel and omniplus, but I feel like we've uh covered everything from you know business structure and practices to gamification to difference between you know huge organizations and startups and and and kind of everything in between. And uh I I I think just to uh finish perhaps considering those differences between large organizations and small organizations, particularly. I know that they'll be there of this is of interest particularly to me, um, having been in both environments, and therefore I hope and assume it will be of interest to our listeners as well. But I feel like I want to ask this question mostly for me. What what um what do you think either side of that coin can learn from the other then when it comes to thinking about the this omnichannel approach?

Steve Bederman: 25:54

Every company was small at one time, and every company became large because they really optimized their customer relationship and that they were versatile and agile. And it's really important for the larger companies to understand what is the organic nature of what they do. Forget my infrastructure, forget my all of my processes. All of those are important, don't get me wrong, but let's go back to the to the basic thing. What makes why did I lose that sale to a small company when I am the largest company in the world doing something? You lost it because you weren't versatile, you weren't intimate with that customer experience. Now, on the other hand, uh you have uh a small company that may in some ways be say we're better than the big company, but the only way they can really implement being better is by implementing processes and approach and formalizing what those large companies are successful at through programs like Six Sigma. Uh so it's this, it's really no one is better than anyone else. Think about the client experience, that's the whole point. Think about the passion that you have and not just the dollar at the end of the game. Do right things right. And whether you're small or large, do it well. Do it as formally but as as intimately as you can using things like Omni Plus, it allows you to communicate easily, gather the data in a central location, and and be more interested in the client experience. Focus on that and and and frankly, I guess the simple summary to that is large, small, or in between, care about the customer and think about what do they need, not what do I need from my customer.

Charlotte Ward: 27:59

That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash one four nine for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.