All In: Why Half-Measures on AI Are Costing BPOs

Julian McCarty 0:00
There have been around 18 million contact center seats globally. Maybe roughly half of those with BPOs, half of those in-house. You know, that number hasn't changed for 10 years. It's unlikely to change in the next several years. And so what that means is there's a relatively fixed number of conversations. You're not necessarily trying to add incremental new seats. Effectively, what you're trying to do is take seats from someone else. And so it's a much more competitive environment. You do see this bifurcation, particularly in BPOs, ones that are eager to adopt AI and more forward-looking. And then some of the BPOs that are sticking with the tried and true approach of kind of what they've done historically.

Amanda Quinn 0:41
Welcome to the Build the Better BPO podcast. I'm Amanda Quinn, and with me is Milan Batinich. And we are joined by Julian McCarty. Julian is the CEO and co-founder of Mosaic Voice, an AI platform built for contact centers that delivers real-time agent assist, automatic quality assurance, and post-call analytics. Mosaic Voice partners with BPOs of various sizes around the world. They make up roughly 70% of their customer base, as well as hospitals, utility, and insurance companies. Welcome, Julian.

Julian McCarty 1:16
Thank you. No, thank you for for having me.

Amanda Quinn 1:19
Yeah, we're really excited to talk to you today. Um I know AI is a topic that is all over the news, and obviously it's something that every BPO has on their mind, every BPO leader has on their mind. So we're excited to get your perspective because I know you're you're seeing it from a different vantage point.

Julian McCarty 1:39
No, it's I'm I'm happy to talk about it. You know, these are things that for myself and and the team here, we think about all day, every day, and so uh appreciate having the the platform to share some of those perspectives.

Amanda Quinn 1:52
Yeah, one of the things that when we first were talking and kind of meeting up ahead of time to talk about this episode that you shared with me that I thought was really interesting, and I would love if you could maybe start by elaborating on it. Where do you feel like the BPO industry is headed over the next five years or so?

Julian McCarty 2:11
Yeah, certainly. So, you know, and this is this is our view, but it's not necessarily a perspective that we invented, right? So I don't I don't want to take credit for it. But you know, if you look historically, there have been around 18 million contact center seats globally, maybe roughly half of those with BPOs, half of those in-house. You know, that number hasn't changed for 10 years. I think our perspective is it's it's unlikely to change in the next several years. And so what that means is there's a relatively fixed number of conversations taking place globally, annually, between BPOs, in-house contact centers, and and their clients, right? And and the customers that call in. You know, if you think about what that will look like in the future, there will be, our view, roughly the same number of conversations taking place. And so I think with that, the the kind of composite of what that looks like might shift. There might be more human agents, more AI agents, likely more AI agents and some of those workloads shifting there. But ultimately, what that means is that if you're a BPO, you know, and you see the world through this lens, you're not necessarily trying to add incremental new seats. Effectively, what you're trying to do is take seats from someone else. And so it's a much more competitive environment when you kind of view it through that lens. The other side of that, though, is that you know, if it is going to be a competitive environment, now is a good time for that. With AI disrupting so many of the contact center workflows, you do see this bifurcation, particularly in BPOs and ones that are eager to adopt AI and more forward-looking. And then some of the BPOs that are sticking with the tried and true approach of kind of what they've done historically. And what that means is that for those BPOs that are more aggressive in how they adopt AI, now really is a great time to hopefully shift some of the customers from the more legacy human-centric approach to more of an AI-augmented approach. So very competitive environment, but at the same time, lots of opportunities for those that are are willing to act and and do more on the AI front.

Amanda Quinn 4:24
Yeah, and that's what that echoes what I'm hearing as well that um this is kind of a zero-sum game. And the BPOs that are more forward thinking and are implementing new technology are winning business from those that aren't and are just kind of set in their ways of just providing labor. So um I just uh would agree with you on that, on that front. Are you seeing that you talk to BPOs all the time as part of your sale um, you know, sales process and trying to help them use your technology? Are you seeing that AI, those that have leveraged Mosaic Voice or or other platforms are able to really use it to differentiate and to help win new business on their front?

Julian McCarty 5:14
Well, uh the challenge I think for a lot of BPOs is that, you know, this kind of broad topic of AI has now become critical for them in RFPs, right? Maybe not necessarily in their their day-to-day workflows, but they're seeing it more and more come up in RFPs. And so what that translates to is if they don't have those capabilities or those resources to provide some level of AI services, unfortunately, you know, they don't even get the the opportunity to compete. There, you know, there's a million studies showing the benefits of AI, but there's also a million LinkedIn posts talking about the challenges behind AI. And I think all of that is real, right? And so if you're a BPO, you're evaluating a potential AI vendor, it is in many ways kind of a fraught space where there are lots of tools that are expensive that don't have an immediate ROI. And, you know, I think as much as my message is always that AI is the future, it adds a lot of value, it's cost savings, it's automating workflows, it's driving revenue. There needs to be a level of diligence done still by the client as they kind of wade into this space. So it's it's you know, the customers that we see that are adopting AI and kind of going all in with it see real benefits to it. And it is, like I said, it's the workflows are being automated, handle times are coming down 30%. If you look at training, I mean, training is where you see a huge savings, right? So I think a number of our customers are seeing 70% reduction in training time. You're seeing revenues and kind of revenue driving contact centers, those are also up 25 to 35 percent. Because, you know, real-time agent assist is great at understanding context and guiding agents, but it's also just great at reminding agents to ask for the sale, right? Ask for the upsell. A lot of what AI is capable of doing is very complex and it drives, you know, great ROI, but a lot of what it does is also pretty simple. And, you know, those simple wins translate to real ROI as well. And so we do see that those that really go all in with it see great returns, but you have to always do due diligence on any tool, you know, be it a pilot, be it some kind of case study, but because you know, the there are tools out there that that aren't able to necessarily deliver.

Milan Batinich 7:43
Yeah, it definitely makes sense. Julian, do you uh find specifically for BPO type clients that are implementing or phasing in AI uh tools, do you find that they are finding or having better success when they implement an AI tool on specific client basis? So client by client or account by account, or rolling it out enterprise wide, whether it's a pilot or a full rollout for their organization?

Julian McCarty 8:09
The the you know, the it's tough when you just do it client by client, right? And that's not necessarily to say that that approach doesn't work. I think the underlying challenge that we run into with that approach is more so this kind of we're gonna not really fully embrace it, right? And so what ends up happening is you're doing it client by client, but you're still having, you know, if you're if you're using a tool to QA calls, you're still manually QAing them, but then you're having your QA agent log into the platform and also use that to QA two calls a day. Um, and then, you know, it essentially you've taken a tool that's meant to drive efficiency and kind of use it to create double work, right? And I think then there's confusion um on the side of the QA team and the agents about all right, which would I, where should I really be spending my time? Should I fully kind of embrace this new approach, or should I stick with what I'm doing, kind of try to work through my boss wants me to do three calls in here a day, do those three calls. And so, you know, it's really the challenge is you have to fully embrace it, understand it's going to be disruptive to the existing workflows, that there is an ROI that hopefully can come quickly, but you're not necessarily gonna see that until you take advantage of kind of the end-to-end value of the solution. And that often manifests itself in this, you know, one client at a time, one program at a time versus someone that that goes all in with it. And, you know, hopefully they'll both end up in a place where they're gonna realize the full value of the solution. The difference is the the team that that fully adopts it earlier on will see that much more quickly and and with a lot fewer headaches. The team that goes piece by piece, client by client, are kind of setting off on a very long journey that they might not be fully aware of.

Amanda Quinn 10:07
Yeah, that I agree with you. And I'm hearing something similar or very similar when I've talked to both my clients' clients who have been on the receiving end of we have this QA tool, why are we still doing manual QA? Like it makes no sense. And they're like it just leads them to doubt the um analytical ability, the strategic ability of their BPO when they're watching that redundancy happen and it makes no sense. So that's just a word of caution, I would say, to BPOs that are taking that approach. Um, but and I get I want to like empathize like this is this feels so like the idea of just jumping right in and saying, we're gonna just make this the default now, we're gonna completely change the way we were doing this, we're now gonna leverage this technology and not have a human doing this, or the human's gonna be doing something different is scary. And I feel like it goes against the whole like crawl walk run that we're all kind of baked into. It's baked into all of us of just like this is a way to manage risk. But I do agree with you because I've also heard from BPOs that have taken this incremental, we'll go campaign by campaign or client by client and try to do the rollout. That what happens is they don't ever develop the institutional knowledge to actually support the product. And they don't actually know, like they don't have proper training. There's no on like onboarding of like this is how it works, and now you know how to do it. It's like there's all these little silos end up resulting where there are BP, there are teams that know how to use it, but they're not gonna teach other teams, you know, because they don't crop uh collaborate together on as so as others are rolling out, they're all just having to figure it out for themselves. And it's just actually ends up being a lot less efficient and you risk the um client blowback of saying that you support a product that your team doesn't actually know how to support very well, or at least because you're you're taking that really incremental approach.

Julian McCarty 12:06
And I think that's that's exactly right. And I I also think there's, you know, on the part of some of the agents who are actually in there doing the work, and there's some reluctance sometimes. And one of the challenges with selling an AI solution is just the distance between kind of the buyer who might be at the executive level, and then the agent. Um, they're not meeting with the CEO every day, they're not necessarily discussing the longer-term vision, but they're the ones that are being asked to adopt and and implement these tools. There's always kind of a a reluctance in terms of what does this mean for my role and and my job? And so what we've seen is really to drive success, you need to be able to articulate clearly to the agents that this is not a tool designed to replace them. This is a tool designed to augment their capabilities, right? And so whether or not that's true is going to be different for different vendors, right? If if it is meant to replace, then that is what it is. But for us, and with Mosaic Voice and agent assist and QA automation, you know, we think of how can you use AI to empower humans? How can you use artificial intelligence to facilitate more human connection, more robust conversations? And and making sure that that message reaches all the way to the agent so that they know that this is an investment that the company is making to empower them goes a long way. Making sure they don't think it's just there to penalize them, making sure they don't think it's just there to get rid of them, all of that kind of plays into the psyche in terms of how these tools are adopted. And you have to get it all correct, right? Because, you know, to your point, it is kind of a a monumental shift in terms of operations and outlook and you know, especially in an industry that has historically viewed itself as, you know, how can we just throw more people at the problem? You know, now the the question is how can we be smart with those same resources, empower those same resources to drive better outcomes, both on a cost saving side, but also in terms of the quality of the interactions we're having with our clients.

Milan Batinich 14:19
Julian, I love the way you uh just worded that, the way you phrased it, saying that showing the agent or communicating to the agent how they can be empowered. I think a lot of times when changes happen within a contact center, within a BPO, to the agent level, any type of change, agents take it many times as a negative because it isn't positioned as a tool to empower them, to make their jobs easier. So I think that goes a long way by, to your point, the way it's communicated to them, that it's a tool to empower them, to help them in their daily tasks and their job.

Amanda Quinn 14:52
And I'm assuming, I know you said that Mosaic Voice is intended to be a tool to help bring more, you didn't say efficiency, you said more in like intelligence and empowerment to BPOs, but inevitably my guess is that you're going to lose some QA managers, right? There'll be some efficiencies gained from this tool. Are you seeing, and I know for BPOs, there's probably alarm bells, and I know this is a hesitation that they have of that means lost revenue. Do you have any examples or can you share anything to kind of overcome that fear of, you know, what we've seen is that without with a tool like ours, now we're able to um BPOs are able to have a business analyst or somebody else that they're still getting revenue from or able to um to show how this tool is in addition to preventing churn, is helping them on the revenue side.

Julian McCarty 15:50
Yeah, certainly. And so, you know, one of one of the great parts about you know, agent assist, Mosaic Voice, and and all of our competitors as well is now kind of with the the rate of change of AI and where these models have gotten to, we're able to use AI in real time to guide these conversations, right? And so I think one of the benefits of that is it's about understanding the context and the nuance of the conversation that often gets lost by the agent, right? If you're an agent, you have kind of these are the things I need to do on a call. But sometimes you do it so many times in a row that you lose sight of the bigger picture. Tools like ours will tell you, hey, there's a buying signal, right? Someone just said this. That means maybe they're interested in purchasing. Here are some follow-up questions to help explore that. You know, it's often just as easy as reminding the agent that there is an opportunity to sell something here, maybe there's a cross-sell opportunity or an upsell opportunity, and making sure that that message is kind of injected at the right point in the conversation. And, you know, when you're able to do that, you can imagine if you try to upsell something a hundred times a day, it's gonna work a certain percentage of those attempts, right? So just reminding the agent to do what drives revenue. I think for us, one of our utility companies cross-sells a number of different products into households by using Mosaic Voice to remind the agent to explore those cross-sell opportunities, handle the potential objections with the appropriate rebuttals, have all the answers to questions that come up as a result of offering uh another solution. We've seen in that case revenue growth 37%. You know, another example is a BPO who um what they do is they help transfer, they qualify leads and transfer them to onto the end customer. And so what we found is there are certain kind of weird words or phrases that you can use in these calls that are more likely or less likely to drive favorable outcomes. And so in this business where it's much more kind of high, fast paced, you know, we're making several hundred calls a day, trying to convert these opportunities into more qualified leads that we could pass on. You know, if they say, I think the phrase was this is the call you requested versus I'm calling about this, the likelihood of converting that into a qualified lead goes up 42%, right? And it's a trivial kind of wording, just saying, hey, we're calling about something you requested. You know, that has very real impact in terms of how that business is able to convert calls into revenue. Similarly, we had another campaign where it was for kind of a well-loved, everyone knows it, a child's magazine, right, that they're doing outbound phone calls for. We were looking at performance across, you know, maybe there's 50 or so agents and their ability to convert these calls into sales. Before using Mosaic Voice, there's a huge kind of gap in terms of where everyone is at on average, and this one performer named Lorraine, right? So Lorraine was converting literally consistently, month over month, two times more calls than the rest of the team, right? So use Mosaic Voice, you use anecdotes, you use whatever you have to try to understand what's driving that difference in performance. Ultimately, in her case, what it was was she would talk about her own grandkids, and she'd say, you know, I love these magazines because we'll all go to dinner, we'll have the grandkids there, we'll give them the magazines, they'll be coloring, learning, kind of doing their math work in this, having fun while the adults are able to talk, right? That's like an actual kind of talk track that she has. And that resonates with people. You see sentiment going up immediately after she says that. You see these higher sentiment calls are more likely to lead to a conversion. And so there's a very clear path from driving engagement, building a narrative that's going to resonate with the party that you're talking to, using that to drive up sentiment, and then converting that sentiment into a sale. And so all of those are kind of tools or approaches that have been uncovered by these AI solutions that ultimately have not just like meaningful increases in terms of revenue, but really orders of magnitude to higher in terms of conversion. So certainly kind of real revenue driving solutions.

Amanda Quinn 20:29
Wow. Yeah, that's wonderful. Um and I didn't realize that I guess I never really thought about the the outbound use case. I've always thought of the the you know, inbound CX use case of just adhere to the script and make sure you're following this. Um but I can see, and just for those that are listening to this, and I'm sure another thing that you're thinking about is the movement to outcomes-based pricing. I know that's another hot topic that BPOs have on their mind. And I think what Julian just shared with us are the foundations of how you start to get there, right? If you are having tools like this in place where you can feel much more confident that we will hit that outcome, we will generate that much revenue because we know this is truly rinse and repeat, and we have this monitoring and best practices all set up, you might feel more inclined to take those kinds of campaigns, and therefore you can see your margin go up. And so I think that's another thing to be thinking about how tools aren't just there to differentiate you or to win business right now, but they're setting the foundation for truly transforming your BPO into becoming more of a solution provider and not just somebody that's doing the work.

Julian McCarty 21:46
Exactly. And I mean, I think that speaks to the broader bifurcation of the market in terms of which BPOs are able to understand and embrace that. You know, when you think about as a BPO, what is a durable advantage here, right? Is it that you're gonna offer something for less money? Probably not, right? Because there's always somebody that's willing to charge a penny less, and then there's somebody else that's gonna charge a penny less than that, right? And so if if that's how you're hoping to differentiate, that path is kind of well trod at this point, right? The the real opportunity to differentiate as a BPO is how can I offer great customer experiences to those who call into our contact center in a way that that remains affordable, right? And the the way to differentiate on that perspective is really to embrace and adopt AI. And you know, back to kind of the paradigm we discussed earlier of, you know, those who will take share and those who will see their share taken, you know, that's kind of how that in our view will will play out.

Amanda Quinn 22:56
Could you maybe walk us through for BPOs that are hearing this and listening to this and saying, like, this sounds good. I wanna I want to start making moves on this front, but I don't really know where to begin. What advice would you give them?

Julian McCarty 23:10
Yeah, certainly. And and as I touched on earlier, it is like there there's ample reason to be reticent to do this, right? And not only because of all the change, but because we've all heard the stories of, you know, they you they've adopted AI, it costs a lot of money, it didn't work, the demos are great, but what's that mean when you actually put it in? It kind of doesn't deliver. And so, you know, our view is you never just want to jump into a two-year contract, right? You want to at least have a shorter window where you have the opportunity to opt out of a contract with or without cause so that you have the confidence that if this does kind of go haywire, at least I'm not stuck paying for this for you know the rest of my career. But ideally, what you can do is, you know, you always want to do a pilot. The challenge with the pilot for a lot of these tools is it still is a significant step, right? Because you have to do the integration, you have to do the training, you have to take all your scripts, put them in the tool, all the QA scorecards, put them in the tool, calibrate over time. So a pilot is great, it's still a significant amount of work. And so I think what we've done that I would encourage others to do, or for the BPOs out there to ask their kind of prospective vendors to do, is we'll say, you know, just send us a thousand call recordings, right? It's just that easy. We don't need any other data, we don't need to integrate with anything. If you just send us the recordings, let us process those, score all those calls, and then you know, give you back the scored calls and let you kind of understand, sit with your QA team and go through a thousand calls one by one, not all a thousand of them, obviously, but pick some of those calls and audit the effectiveness of the tool, right? Because, you know, if you give someone five calls, they can go in there and make sure that they all did a great job. If you have a thousand calls, you're going to get a realistic view of what that tool's performance is going to be like. And you're able to do that from kind of the BPO side in a very low effort way, right? All you're doing is sending call recordings. From our side, what we do is we get, you know, the thousand calls, we transcribe them, we score them, we use AI to summarize them, we extract the coaching insights, what makes your best agents better, how are why are they outperforming, what are the gaps with your other agents? And we come back to you, you know, in a couple days, a week with a report that says, you know, here's what your team's doing well, here are the opportunities to improve, here's what messaging is working, here's what messaging is not working, this is where you're losing engagement with your customers. And then along with that, all of the QA calls for for the clients to review and kind of truly evaluate the performance of the solution. And I think what's great about that approach is you see the real value on the post-call side of the tool with truly nominal work, right? And we do that for free. We would hope that anyone else would would do that for free as well, because I think we have a lot of confidence that once you see the value, it's kind of a no-brainer, right? So, you know, for us, we're eager to um, you know, have you as a client test our solution because we're confident in in the value that it delivers.

Amanda Quinn 26:32
I feel like that's a no-brainer. I feel like you're about to get hounded by people listening that are gonna want that.

Milan Batinich 26:37
Yeah, well, you the hope so you hope so, but you know, it's such an easy lift by them.

Amanda Quinn 26:44
Yeah.

Milan Batinich 26:44
Such little work.

Julian McCarty 26:46
Yeah. I mean, and you know, the way we we try to talk to clients about it is look, your if you're a BPO, your clients are asking for these capabilities, right? You know, I think when when the three of us spoke previously, we talked about you know, offering automated QA is at this point is something that is is expected in a lot of cases.

Amanda Quinn 27:09
A table stakes.

Julian McCarty 27:10
It's table stakes, right? And it's still, though, not broadly adopted, right? There's still lots of BPOs that that have yet to do it. You're you know, if you're a BPO, you're hearing this need from your customers. This is a great opportunity to just go back to your customer and say, Yeah, how about we send these guys a thousand calls and they give us some insights on you know what your customers are saying about your solution, what our agents are saying about your solution, what's working, what's not working, where the points of frustration are. For a BPO, this is an easy way to get a great presentation to go back to your clients with. And so, you know, the value is beyond just how this can help the BPO. It's how these kind of reports and insights can be used to engage with the customers of the BPO. And so the the value extends to everyone wins, right? So you would hope you would hope it, but we will see.

Milan Batinich 28:07
Sorry, go ahead, Amanda.

Amanda Quinn 28:09
No.

Milan Batinich 28:10
Okay. Uh Julian, what should the listeners of this podcast, what should our listeners be thinking about as they are evaluating a QA tool?

Julian McCarty 28:18
Well, you know, there's they need to think about the types of calls that are trying that they are trying to QA, and also what is realistic for a piece of software that's listening to call transcripts or call audio to accurately score. Excuse me. So for example, you know, we have clients, BPOs who are auditing yes, what happens on the call, but also what kind of information is input into you know, Epic or some other CRM or some analytics tool or what tickets are opened in Zendesk. You need to understand that, you know, there are different types of tools that are going to be able to audit different types of things. If you're trying to audit kind of an end-to-end workflow that's going to require screen recording and then AI to review that screen recording, those are different solutions than what we think about when we look at a solution that's just auditing what is happening kind of on the call itself. So there's that differentiation, but then there's also within kind of that, if you're just looking at the call itself, you have to have a reasonable expectation in terms of what QA solutions are going to be able to do accurately, right? So an example of that is, you know, there's the very, very basic, which is, you know, did they do the appropriate greeting? Did they say hello? They say their name, did they offer assistance, right? Something like that. Very easy for kind of any AI tool to automate. But then you get questions that are more in the world of was the agent able to get to the core of the challenge that the customer is calling about? And again, those are things that AI can handle, but you need to vet the AI solution that you're using, right? Because that's also something where there can be some ambiguity there. And do you, as a BPO, um have either access to the person who's writing these prompts or the ability to kind of modify these prompts yourself? Because those are the kinds of QA questions that need to be refined and trained over time. Um, and then kind of on that spectrum, you can go further where it's like, did we build trust with the customer? And there, you know, you have to ask yourself, is that something that is going to be accurately measured consistently by an AI solution? And our view is, you know, you we try to score everything within 98% accuracy of a human, right? When you get to questions like that, there's naturally going to be a degradation in terms of the accuracy. And so I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's something where you know it speaks to this is why it's AI augmenting humans, not fully replacing them, right? And so if you have a QA agent that's currently overseeing maybe 20 agents, they're QAing calls for 20 different agents. Maybe now they can QA calls for 60 different agents, knowing that a tool like ours or an you know will point you to these are the questions where you'll want to focus on. You see a lot of variability in the AI scoring here. That's a place as a QA agent, you're gonna want to spend time not just checking to make sure that the greeting was done correctly, because AI can automate that piece easily.

Amanda Quinn 31:44
Gotcha. And just to be clear, Mosaic Voice is a tool that's not looking at that whole workflow. If they were in multiple systems and had multiple, you know, screen sharing, it's just on the call, right? If the call portion, is that correct?

Julian McCarty 31:56
That's correct.

Amanda Quinn 31:57
Yeah. Yeah. But that makes sense of probably what you're saying too is as you're evaluating vendors to keep in mind what types of what kinds of interactions are coming your way and how much subjective, how much context does your does the AI need to have, and how good should that it be at presenting, pulling that context from the call versus like just giving us a script and making sure you follow it. Is that right, too?

Julian McCarty 32:26
That's exactly right. And so you should be looking at what are the workflows that my agents are doing, and then what are my QA teams spending time auditing, right? If your QA team is listening to a call and they're scoring it, and then they're going into Zendesk and making sure that the ticket was created, and then they're going into Salesforce to making sure that the kind of call record and the summary is there, that's three different systems, right? And so if they're spending a third of their time in each, then you need to evaluate tools that are going to do the screen recording. They're going to use AI to see what was entered into each kind of system. But if you're focused on and you see your agents spending time reviewing calls and reviewing kind of the audio and spending their time there, then Mosaic Voice or one of our competitors is a well-suited tool for that.

Amanda Quinn 33:18
That makes sense. Um Milan, I'm sure you're curious uh of what this, what does having what have you found, Julian, that having a tool like Mosaic Voice or Agent Assist does for employ uh agent morale?

Julian McCarty 33:33
So, you know, it's it's interesting because maybe a year or two years ago, we worked with some professors from Cornell. I shouldn't say we worked with, I should say we talked to after they did a ton of work and just asked asked questions, who actually study collective bargaining in call centers. And so what that translates to is what are the drivers of morale in a contact center? And so there is interestingly academic research on this topic. What it would tell you is that there are many things that undermine morale, right? And so a big one of those was like technology that doesn't work. I think the average agent in a contact center had over three tools tracking them. So be it, you know, keyboard trackers, be someone listening to calls in real time, be it calls being recorded. And so agents already feel like they are in this kind of heavily critiqued environment and that they're being given tools that don't really work or support them. And so what we found is the messaging in the way that those tools are given to them really matters. And so, you know, ultimately what will dictate the success of a tool like Mosaic Voice is are you able to convince these agents that this is something that's going to support them and empower them rather than a tool that's going to catch every mistake they make and ultimately kind of get them in trouble? We try to encourage users to use our tool to highlight what agents are doing well. When calls do go off the rails and agents take abuse, which happens, making sure that their manager is aware that, hey, you have an agent here who's doing everything that they're supposed to do, but they're still kind of getting yelled at by the customer. Maybe go over to them and tell them they're they're doing a good job. And doing that in real time, right? Not at the end of the day, right after they get off the call. You get a message from your manager. He says, Hey, I saw this one was pretty tough. You did a great job sticking to the script. Don't worry about it. Well we've seen with Mosaic Voice is not only does morale increase, but you know, over a year, retention goes up around 35%, right? So when you're able to convince agents that you're investing in their success with a tool like this, that this is a tool to help them, that this tool is making sure that they're not taking unnecessary abuse. Um and if they are, that it's being tracked and and their managers are aware of not only how hard they're working, but how challenging that environment can be, it can go a long way to to build morale um and and ultimately drive retention.

Milan Batinich 36:20
Got it. Uh Julian, why why does a tool like this uh improve tenure? Do you believe it's uh or do you think it's more of the tool itself or something deeper about how the agency changes and their duties change?

Julian McCarty 36:36
I think it's a little bit of both, right? They're they're doing less of the parts of the job that they don't like, right? They're not taking notes on calls, they're not searching through databases because they're getting this real-time guidance with the appropriate kind of let me tell you what the answer to this question is without having to log into the knowledge base. I think there's that piece of it. Someone told me, and I don't know that it's true, but you know, there's the this phrase of like people don't quit jobs, they quit managers, right? And so the idea being like, look, if you see a tool like this, you're getting notifications from your manager that you know they're seeing how difficult it is. You're seeing that the business that you work for is investing in you and your success. That sends a different message to an agent versus you know, you just hear from your manager at the end of the week who tells you the three things you did wrong this week and says, do it, do it better next week, right? Here it's you know, turning every call into a training exercise, making training much more dynamic, making it clear that the organization cares about not just your success, but your mental health when you're kind of taking these challenging calls. I think ultimately uh workers, agents, whatever, you know, anyone really appreciates that type of more emotional engagement from leadership. And I think that's that's really what drives a lot of the uh the increase in tenure.

Milan Batinich 38:05
Yeah, absolutely. Anything that you can implement inside a contact center that'll help improve that connection with leadership is definitely worthwhile, definitely improves morale.

Amanda Quinn 38:15
And I love the idea or just the the idea of having, you know, using what is currently seen as big brother-ish, right? You're you're constantly being scrutinized. Like the flip side of that is now we can turn it and make it empathy, where it's reaching out to your manager, and your manager knows to that you need some a little bit of breathing room or go take a break, go step off for a second, and you know, it's totally fine. You know, I think that level of humanity is really powerful right now. And I like the fact that something that you wouldn't expect would be able to deliver that can help empower that human-to-human connection.

Julian McCarty 38:53
And you know, the challenge there though is it has to be authentic, right? Like if you want to use a tool like this to get people in trouble, you can use a tool like this to get people in trouble. So much of the kind of morale challenge in the contact center space is cultural to the culture of the contact center, right? It's always been looked at as a cost center. People have always been looked at as replaceable. Um, a tool like Mosaic Voice can do everything we just talked about, but only if it's embraced as such, right? And so the challenge with leadership is understanding that this tool or any other tool isn't just you turn it on and it works. It's a tool, you know. You don't you buy a hammer, you don't buy a house, you use the hammer to build the house, right? You right you buy a tool like this to help enforce a culture that's engaging and human and encouraging and empowering, but the work has to be done on both sides, not just the tool, but but leadership has to understand that they play the most critical role in in kind of transforming that culture.

Amanda Quinn 40:02
100%. And I would love to underline that, uh bold, make it bold, like this has to come from the top down. This moment in time, as as BPOs are evolving from just being providers of labor to really organizations that are delivering solutions, like that's gonna require a systemic culture change. And it has to come from the top. And this is no longer we're setting up an environment where your teams feel empowered, where they feel like they can make decisions, they have more authority, and it's like letting go of the reins, but it's so, so vital to be able to be as agile as your organization needs to be, to be able to come up with really innovative offerings and solutions to your clients, like they're demanding. So, yes, I want to just underscore that this is the executive team's job, and and setting a culture is one of the most setting the the the kind of culture that you want to want to be building towards is so your most important job right now. Certainly. Well, Julian, uh this was wonderful. I'm so happy that you stopped by and shared your valuable time with us. We're really appreciative of it.

Julian McCarty 41:16
No, I I am so kind of happy to be given the opportunity. You know, the BPO world is not well understood or appreciated. I mean, one of the reasons we started Mosaic Voice originally is because you see, you know, all these incredible enterprise sales tools and the software that's being developed for that world and the kind of how those vendors treat their customers. And it's never felt that way in the BPO world, right? And I think spreading the message of the importance of the work that BPOs do, the difficulty and how challenging of a job it can be, and how rewarding it can be when it's done correctly, um, is so important. And so I think myself as as well as the rest of us in this world are so appreciative of what you two do and and the rest of the team and how important it it really is to kind of elevate the profile of the industry, share the challenges because we all live them every day, but they're rarely acknowledged. And so I appreciate the opportunity to be just kind of a small part of that narrative.

Milan Batinich 42:24
Awesome. Well, yes, Julian, again, we thank you. Julian, how can uh people that are listening to this podcast find you, get a hold of you? Where are you?

Julian McCarty 42:33
They can go to mosaicvoice.ai and uh they will find everything they need to know there. But you know, any way that anyone wants to connect to us, really on any topic, we'd love to talk to clients, prospective clients, people that are just interested in the space or have views that align or or disagree with what we say. We're always happy to to speak with whoever. So please, if there's any interest, reach out. Um we'd we'd love to talk.

Milan Batinich 43:01
Perfect. We appreciate it.

Julian McCarty 43:03
Thanks, Jolene. Thank you guys.

Amanda Quinn 43:05
Thank you. Bye.

Julian McCarty 43:06
Bye.