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.
About Josh Feast
Josh Feast is the CEO and Co-Founder of Cogito. He is a serial entrepreneur and thought leader with a passion for creating innovative technology that helps people live more productive lives. Josh has more than a decade of experience as a senior executive and is regularly quoted in Forbes, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal.
He holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management where he was the Platinum-Triangle Fulbright Scholar in Entrepreneurship and a Bachelor of Technology from Massey University in New Zealand.
Resources
Cogito website: https://www.cogitocorp.com
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Overview
AI has the potential to revolutionize customer service into a revenue-generating function, benefiting both customers and organizations. In a podcast episode, Josh Feast, CEO and co-founder of Cogito, emphasized the positive impact of AI on various aspects.
- Customer Experience: AI can elevate customer experience by offering real-time guidance to agents, enabling them to enhance their interactions with customers. By analyzing customer cues and providing prompts, AI ensures that agents are empathetic, understanding, and engaging, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Operational Efficiency: AI tools like Cogito can optimize workflows and improve efficiencies in contact centers. By guiding agents and supervisors, AI promotes consistent behavior across a large agent population, resulting in enhanced performance metrics. This efficiency leads to shorter interactions, quicker issue resolution, and cost savings for the organization.
- Employee Satisfaction: AI can also boost employee satisfaction and job performance. By providing real-time feedback and nudges, AI helps agents improve their skills, learn about new products, and deliver better service. This continuous learning can enhance job satisfaction, reduce turnover rates, and expedite onboarding for new agents.
Overall, integrating AI in customer service not only enhances customer service quality and personalization but also drives revenue through upselling and cross-selling opportunities. The combination of improved customer experience, operational efficiency, and employee satisfaction makes AI a win-win-win solution for transforming customer service into a revenue-generating function.
AI can enhance human qualities like empathy and connection in customer interactions, as discussed in the podcast episode. Josh Feast, CEO and co-founder of Cogito, highlighted how AI can assist customer service agents in delivering a more empathetic and connected experience to customers.
Feast explained that AI tools, like Cogito, can help agents recognize and respond to social signals from customers, even when they may be tired or overwhelmed by the volume of interactions. The AI system can provide real-time cues to agents, such as reminders to display empathy or adjust their pacing during conversations. By assisting agents in understanding and responding appropriately to customer cues, AI can help build stronger connections and improve the overall customer experience.
Furthermore, Feast shared an example where AI nudges prompted an agent to offer a new broadband package to a customer, resulting in a significant cost reduction for the customer. The agent not only made the offer but also took the initiative to learn more about the product, showcasing how AI guidance can empower agents to enhance their knowledge and capabilities in real-time.
Overall, the podcast episode emphasized that AI technology, when integrated effectively, can complement human interactions by providing support in recognizing and responding to emotional cues, ultimately enhancing empathy and connection in customer service interactions.
Leadership buy-in, providing value to all roles, and measuring impact are crucial considerations for the successful integration of AI in customer service, as discussed in the podcast episode with Josh Feast, CEO and co-founder of Cogito.
Leadership Buy-In:
- Josh emphasized the importance of operational leadership in the contact center being champions of AI implementation.
- He highlighted that leadership buy-in and enthusiasm can significantly impact the success of integrating AI into customer service operations.
- Having top-down support ensures that the organization embraces the change and drives the adoption of AI tools effectively.
Providing Value to All Roles:
- Josh mentioned the significance of rolling out AI solutions in a way that all roles within the operation receive value.
- Cogito’s approach includes providing real-time guidance not only to agents but also to supervisors, quality assurance teams, and management.
- Ensuring that every role benefits from the AI tool increases adoption and effectiveness across the organization.
Measuring Impact:
- Josh stressed the importance of being able to measure the improvement in hard dollars and attribute it to the specific AI tool being implemented.
- Cogito’s ability to track the impact of their guidance on key performance indicators (KPIs) allows them to demonstrate the direct influence of AI on outcomes.
- Being able to prove the effectiveness of AI in customer service through tangible results is a standard that all technologies should aim to achieve.
In conclusion, by securing leadership buy-in, providing value to all roles within the organization, and effectively measuring the impact of AI implementation, companies can ensure the successful integration of AI in customer service operations, leading to improved customer experiences, enhanced agent performance, and overall business success.
Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Greg Kihlstrom:
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.
Josh Feast: Hi, great to be here.
Greg Kihlstrom: 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.
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 U.S. 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.
Greg Kihlstrom: 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. You know, 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?
Josh Feast: Yeah, of course. At the highest level, you know, providing human interactions to customers at large scale is an expensive endeavor. I mean, you know, the cost of people to interact with your customers is generally by far the largest expense in many companies. And they’re also very, very precious. These like 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. Um, so they want to use every opportunity they can to, you know, 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 like the, sort of the most fundamental business reason. The other reason is, is that it’s really just a pure customer experience issue. Like, One of the old ways that things used to be done was you’d call in to 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.
Greg Kihlstrom: 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?
Josh Feast: Yeah. So, so the way that they’re doing it is typically like, you can 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 this sort of unification. So the, the core challenges with that is, you know, Or 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, like not all salespeople are going to have the patience for service work. Right. And so that, so that’s really become 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. Um, so training and guidance is really the heart of it.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. So we talk a lot about AI on this show. I think everybody talks about AI a lot everywhere, probably. But, you know, we certainly talk about it a lot. And, you know, 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, you know, I want to look at the role of AI in empowering these customer service agents. And so, can you, 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?
Josh Feast: Well, I think at the outset, I think you’re absolutely bang on. I mean, this application of AI, this application is one of the like real effective, like win, win, win use cases for AI. And we’re all, you know, there’s a lot of investment in this field and we’re all searching for these like, you know, applications where it just makes total sense. And I think this is 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, is that a lot of organizations think like a large telco, for example, the, the, the breadth of products and offers is enormous, absolutely enormous. Right. And, and the chain 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 the customer is doing real, real useful work.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, your your platform, Cogito, is one of those that’s that’s helping here. Could you talk specifically about, you know, how does your platform accomplish that, you know, helping agents identify and capitalize on cross selling upselling opportunities in real time?
Josh Feast: You bet. So we focus on two sort of 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 in an assured way. All these things are embedded in the way people speak to each other. So how they speak, non-verbal 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 a really large telco. And it was a brand new agent, and the agent was just coming out, or somewhat just coming out of their initial training, so they were a new hire. And so in the course of the conversation, so the customer calls in, they are looking to make a change to their product mix. And in the course of making that change, the Cogito system will pop up and say, have you considered offering this broadband package, which was a sort of a new offer and that would basically significantly reduce 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.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. I mean, that’s really interesting. I mean, the AI would actually empower learning on the part of the employee. And I also, 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 want better financial performance, and we want to upsell and cross sell and all those things. But if we lose touch with the customer, we’re not going to get any of that we’re going to lose what we have, let alone, you know, be able to grow. So yeah, I like that focus on you know, building customer relationships as well. You touched on this a little bit, but, you know, building qualities like empathy, understanding, you know, how do you look at AI’s role in really being able to enhance that?
Josh Feast: Well, that’s a great question. This is one of the things I was so fascinated about, about the basic science behind Cogito and one of the motivators of it and the company is what an amazing thing, right? You could use a computer to help with things that we think of as 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, um, it’s really helping you in those situations where you may not recognize the signal of somebody. So it may not, you may, because you’re, you’re tired or you, you’re, um, you may not recognize that somebody is 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. You know, like 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’d be 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 like 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 sort of ability to drive that non-verbal experience, we’ve proven, makes a tremendous difference in how customers perceive the interactions.
Greg Kihlstrom: 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?
Josh Feast: 100%. So, 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 a just let me know that’s what’s going on and maybe you’ll choose to make a change. Right. Or another example is, you know, let’s say you would ask a question right now. And then I, there was this big pause, right? 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, um, a nudge, which says that I’m going on way too much in response to this question. That would be like, you know, it’s very like, um, 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, like 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 thinking about some other option that you may want to offer them. So helping understand those things is what the tool supports.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Wow. 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 a little bit of heartache at the very least. Speaking of performance and making the sale and all that stuff, I want to talk a little bit about the impact on business performance. I mean, 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?
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 the 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’re going to be pitching more and better. So you’re going to get more sales, particularly for product offers that are important for the business in the moment. You’re going to get that. You will also get actually shorter interactions, interestingly enough, because people were getting their stuff solved faster and more effectively. And so that is also really important to 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 contacts in our environment, as you well know, 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 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 say that a new agent will get up to speed many weeks faster if they’re using this type of tool.
Greg Kihlstrom: 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, you know, let’s say intrinsically motivated to learn and grow, you know, Has there been an observed impact on job satisfaction among the agents using AI?
Josh Feast: It’s an excellent question. So a couple of years ago, Cogito made a concerted effort to expand our focus from sort of 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 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. I mean, 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 and sort of 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 the 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 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.
Greg Kihlstrom: 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 how to use AI. So yeah. So being, being on that curve and, and I think that might’ve started maybe higher up in the org with, with those following trends and all that. But I, 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 the last topic I wanted to talk through is just kind of looking ahead and some of the future trends that you’re seeing. What are you seeing? What comes next here as far as incorporating AI within customer service and this service to sales kind of combo?
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 enhanced agent or human capabilities. And 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. Yeah.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And so for those, for those companies, you know, people listening out there that, you know, they, they aren’t doing this yet, but see the, not only see the trends and, and, and read the, the, the trade, so to speak, but, you know, listening here and wanting to do this, what are some key considerations that, uh, they should take into account to, you know, either get started here or just to ensure success as they’re, as they’re transitioning here?
Josh Feast: Yeah. So on one hand, there’s sort of two elements on that. There’s sort of like what you should do to succeed and then what you should rightly ask for. Those are 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, the 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. you know, 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 Cogito, 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 adopt it 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 at 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, it’s a very organic environment. Things are always moving. And so sometimes people will 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. And I think that that’s a standard that all technologies 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.
Greg Kihlstrom: 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?
Josh Feast: I think the big one is, I would love people to just go, woohoo, here’s like a real effective, like win-win-win use case for AI, right? Because again, lots of investment out there. Some of it can be very abstract. Like 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.
