What would happen to your business if your customer service operations went down right now? Do you have the tools and strategies in place to handle a sudden crisis, or would your contact center be scrambling to meet demand?
Today, we’re discussing how AI and cloud-based solutions can help organizations manage crises and enhance customer service operations with John Finch at RingCentral. We’ll explore key strategies for building resilience in customer service, particularly in response to recent IT outages.
About John Finch
John Finch leads product marketing at RingCentral for the customer engagement portfolio, which includes RingCX and RingSense AI, as RingCentral scales and expands its global customer engagement reach. He has held product marketing leadership roles at Zendesk, Dialpad, Serenova (LiveOps), and Genesys, launching Enterprise SaaS contact center solutions into the market.
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Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Greg Kihlstrom:
What would happen to your business if your customer service operations went down right now? Do you have the tools and strategies in place to handle a sudden crisis or would your contact center be scrambling to meet demand? Today, we’re discussing how AI and cloud-based solutions can help organizations manage crises and enhance customer service operations with John Finch, Global Vice President of Product Marketing at RingCentral. We’re going to explore key strategies for building resilience and customer service, particularly in response to recent IT outages. John, welcome to the show.
John Finch: Thanks, Greg. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Looking forward to this. And before we dive in, though, actually, I just wanted to maybe give a little background on yourself and your role at RingCentral.
John Finch: Absolutely. I have been at RingCentral now for my second run. I’m a boomerang for just over a year. Prior to that, I spent time here at RingCentral from 2017 to 2021. I’d also spent some time at Zendesk and a few other contacts that are companies that are pretty well known in the industry over the course of my years. So I’ve got a couple of good decades of product-oriented marketing around all the innovations that have been happening over those years in the contact center and customer service. So I’ve got lots of stories to tell over time. And I’m super happy I’m here at RingCentral. And here at RingCentral, specifically, I’m running our product marketing for our contact center portfolio.
Greg Kihlstrom: Great, great. So yeah, let’s dive in here. And I want to start with, there’s certainly been over the last year, there’s been some pretty high profile global IT outages, lots of effects for lots of businesses in various ways. But I want to talk about the impact of these types of outages on customer service operations. So why don’t we start maybe to just kind of paint the picture. How are these customer service operations affected when there’s a global IT outage?
John Finch: You know it’s it can be devastating in most cases organizations will find a way to deflect calls and to more digital interactions and and sort of drive people to call back activities and things like that to sort of. decrease the amount of stress and difficulties that, you know, passengers or customers in general might be having, you know, airlines, rebooking flights and things like that, you know, there’s an immediate need. So I think a lot of times, these organizations get into damage control kind of modes and figure out the best ways to do that with regards to utilizing web applications, as well as websites to do that and automated booking activities that go on in the background. But In a lot of cases, it’s challenging, right? And so most organizations really need to think through that. You know, that term disaster recovery is real and multimodality and multiple ways that customers can get through to the brand during times of crisis of this nature really is important to be thinking through an overall strategy.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. I mean, what can we learn from organizations that remains maybe either unaffected or relatively unaffected, you know, versus those that experienced some of those more significant disruptions.
John Finch: You know, organizations that have sort of figured out a way to provide a great level of self-service, as I was kind of indicating here, are really the ones that are going to win. And it isn’t necessarily about having live agents pick up a call, but it’s having, in the case of today, AI agents be able to take interactions, both voice and digitally, and those agents are intelligent virtual agents if you will can actually take those interactions and solve the problem for the customer you’re just never gonna be able to know if you need to stop up appropriately there’s never enough people power in any organization today especially in the contact center we don’t have. the contact centers of old, typically in most organizations where you’ve got staffs of people in giant buildings that are answering every type of interaction you can think of. It just doesn’t exist anymore. So you’re doing a lot more with less. And so figuring out ways to leverage technology that will meet your customers where they are in both normal business times, as well as in times of crisis, like outages, etc, will be the way to do that. And that’s really a part of that planning. But I do really see Greg that AI plays a significant role in this. It’s less about modality and more about the availability of tools like AI and the agents that come with the AI to be able to craft that customer experience in a way that makes those customers satisfied and solves their problems.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, that’s a great segue, because I definitely wanted to talk about the AI component of this and how it can alleviate some of the pressure on the humans and also, obviously, from the customer perspective. So there’s AI-driven tools like intelligent virtual agents, automated responses. How do you see managing some of these sudden spikes during a potential crisis?
John Finch: Yeah. I think today’s environment globally has been that most folks are in some way leveraging AI. I mean, even if you’re doing a Google search now and you’re someone that’s not very technology savvy, even the realization that you’re actually using Google’s AI to surface those results that you’re looking for, that’s an AI-centric interaction. And I think the simplicity of that is really one that sort of dovetails into customer service if you will and I see that you know as we’ve evolved from saying hey you know it’s voice and then we’ve gone to omni channel and how many channels do you support and web applications for specific brands and how can you digitally support that via the web app for customer service. We’ve seen that with Uber, as an example, and lots of other companies that are digital-first organizations. That movement has already happened. But I think the AI takes it to the next level, which is like, hey, it doesn’t matter those modalities that you’re coming through to this brand as a customer. You’re going to have that window that you’re going to and asking that specific question for customer service. And it’s either a quick question or it’s a complex rebooking as an example, or a purchase of some sort. Being able to conduct that transaction efficiently and effectively across voice or digitally with the same information on the back and the same connectivity to the systems that are necessary to complete that is really the way that brand should be looking at technology that they’re implementing for customer service. That’s the way you solve it. And so my point and kind of tying that together is us as consumers are used to doing these searches, having this window and solving the problem ourselves as fast as we possibly can. Leveraging AI, it’s leveraging AI to do the same thing for something that you need to rebook. Like going to the website, rebooking it, using the chatbot if you can’t get through effectively in the user interface that exists in the application on the web for rebooking and then being able to actually call in and have that same experience as well that you would with a web chat agent and having that thing all come together for a unified experience. I think that’s really where it is and where it will continue to go. In addition to that, it’s like we’ve all sort of had the bad experiences of the past with regards to interactive voice response units, right? Our IVRs, right? And that’s where you’re hitting zero to exit quickly and get to an agent. It’s like the doom loop, right? It’s the doom loop, exactly. And that’s the piece that really, you know, people are like, ah, you know, the self-service thing doesn’t really work. And we have to overcome that. But I think with AI, you do overcome that. You have a human touch type interaction. The answers are there, the connectivity to the systems. to be able to conduct those transactions is there. You have that great quality experience that the brand has laid out, chosen the right technology vendor to back that up and put and implement that in the cloud, and then be able to augment and enhance and improve performance over time as it’s being used by your customers.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, and so in addition to the customer experience, which you described, there’s also potential to help the agents themselves as well. It’s almost the inverse, right? Can you talk a little bit about AI-powered agent assist tools and how those can help in almost the inverse way?
John Finch: Yeah, I think that’s exactly, you know, it’s a great segue into like, what is that intelligence in the background. So obviously, the data that’s collected during those interactions is part of a knowledge base or other data tools that exist inside the organization that you’re integrated with. And so that same information that’s being used by an intelligent virtual agent, or an agent assist, or it could be used for an agent assist as well. So you think about it, you’re a live agent, it’s listening to the call because the transcription is going on or watching the interaction if it’s a digital interaction, of course. And then it’s actually providing guidance, I would say, to the agent to take under consideration. So that’s pulling from that same knowledge base that an AI agent would be using to interact with a customer. But for the live agent, that same information is there. And it’s the choice, obviously, of the agent to take that information and leverage and utilize that during the interaction. But it does guide, and it does listen, and it does follow. And it’s especially important in certain situations where you’re starting to have quality adherence types of interactions, or you need to say specific things based on different clauses or information that an insurance agency would need to provide, or a financial institution. You need to have these disclosures, be able to be read out loud. And those things can be prompted in that agent assist sort of component. Again, those tools sort of complement each other and come together nicely in the fact that the data and the information and the knowledge base is all feeding either the virtual agent or the live agent in an agent assist sort of scenario.
Greg Kihlstrom: And so to get back a little bit more to the infrastructure side of this, you know, it’s not just a global IT outage that may be the issue. It may just be a surge in demand, right? You know, there could be a number of explanations of why customers are waiting longer or having connectivity issues or things like that. So can you talk a little bit about why cloud and scalable cloud solutions are so key here and how should organizations be preparing using solutions like that to, again, whether it’s a crisis or I guess it could be a good thing if there’s a lot of demand for something as well, but whatever the need, how should they be thinking about cloud to solve for some of that?
John Finch: You know, the promise of cloud is real, right? And I think that organizations like Salesforce, who sort of paved the way for the rest of us as we came off prem and went into the cloud with technologies that provided a multi-tenant environment with unlimited scalability, you know, five nines or greater uptime. and could scale based on demand, those promises have been fulfilled. And I think a lot of organizations that are still using on-premise equipment, in most cases for customers that I’ve talked to, it works. And there’s nothing wrong with it. If there’s basic functionality, it’s either being supported by the vendor who implemented it if they’re still around, Or there’s enough talent within the organization or subsequent relationships with other vendors that they have to be able to maintain that equipment and update software and do the fixes that are necessary within that timeline. That’s fine, like you continue to use those. I think the challenge that people have is how do I implement AI on top of this old legacy system, right? And then do I turn to a point solution from a cloud vendor that does this specific things like I’ll use IBA or interactive virtual agents as an example. Those things like you can do that, right? So there are solutions where you can augment that and bring that technology and on top and it will work, right? The thing that we see with a lot of our customers specifically is that having one solution end-to-end that is riding on one single voice platform, that all the technology is embedded in one area where you have your employee communications and your customer communications all in one solution becomes easier. The data that you’re transcribing and collecting through all of those interactions, both internal and external, provide more intelligence and provide more ability to improve the overall organization by leveraging that one vendor. It also becomes more cost-effective. It also becomes future-proof, which is also another promise of the cloud. So you’re going to get the innovations as those things roll out. It’s going to get the scale and the performance. You don’t need to have the necessary staff. You’re not going to have to have vendors. You’re not going to have special contracts with third-party folks that happen to know that legacy system that can fix it when it goes down. That’s the answer, right? Really, you want to get to that vendor that can provide them all. But there also are steps that you can go through. We’ve done a lot of talks here ring central around how to best deploy a in your contacts and how to look at it you know and every organization is a little different depending upon size and i think that the one thing that we sort of talk a lot about with our customers is that. We’re building an AI solution that is fit to purpose, right? It is for businesses. It’s not this large language model like chat GPT, for example, that’s going out and can write a poem for you, right? You know, what do you need to write a poem for customer service? Like you need to know business nomenclature, you need to know specifically information that is for healthcare or financial services, an example, and to be able to speak that language and even more be more specific for my specific insurance company, or my credit union located in this specific location with this type of customer. So those kinds of things are what we bring to the table. And it’s solving the problem, which is contact center as a service or customer service, or, you know, UCAS, Unified Communications as a service, or employee collaboration and communication. And so at the end of the day, though, all of these things come together for one thing, and it’s to solve revenue problems. How do I make more money? How do I sell more? How do I keep my customers happy and solve customer problems quickly? And how do I continue to innovate on the technology or whatever it is, service, et cetera, that I’m selling into the marketplace so that I can continue to outperform my competition, period. And that’s what we’re trying to provide is that unified solution that does all of that. And that’s what our customers and our case studies will all say. So we’re continuing down that path and we’ll continue to innovate as such. But again, it’s the AI that’s fit to purpose. It’s one solution and you feel good about it, right? And you don’t have multiple vendors and all of those complex things that SaaS doesn’t provide or one vendor doesn’t provide.
Greg Kihlstrom: Well, and, you know, so we’ve we’ve talked about some of the features and definitely from the infrastructure standpoint, you know, a lot of what you’ve mentioned are things that RingCentral does. And so, you know, you work with a lot of CX leaders, contact center leader. How do you work with them on, let’s maybe say the softer side of this, which is, okay, I’m now introducing AI into a process that didn’t have that level of automation for it. How do you work with them to do that in a seamless and scalable way as well? Because I would imagine it doesn’t necessarily happen all at once, right?
John Finch: No, it doesn’t. I mean, there’s a lot of consultation, I would say, right? I mean, most organizations… I was talking to somebody this morning that happens to work at Apple, right? And I was talking to him about, I was going to do this podcast today with you. And we were just kind of riffing on a little bit about what Apple’s doing with AI. And it’s sort of this comment of, you know, look, everybody’s talking about AI. And if folks, especially in businesses, aren’t aware of AI, it would be a pretty rare thing, right? So I think that component that most people, either in their personal lives, because we’ve all got phones, I don’t know what Apple’s market share is, but you know, most cases you have access to AI in some way. We also talked about Google and just Google searches, which most people do as well. across the world. So you’re touching AI, you know about AI, you’re using AI. And I think when you go into a business environment, you’re trying to figure out from the CEO down, the CEO is going to say, hey, look, we need to figure out how to do better with less. We’re all in that environment today. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. And what’s the answer to that? Well, it’s not replacing people necessarily, but it is to augment and enhance the work and the performance of the organization through the people that are using AI. And so how do you do that? And what do you do to do that? So go solve it, says the CEO. Now underneath, what are the areas inside the organization that will be touched and impacted the most? In most cases, it’s customer service, and it’s probably sales, right? Again, revenue based components. What size organization am I? Am I going to go get access to a large language model, or am I going to build my own small language model? Am I investing in building AI in-house? Maybe not right now. Maybe I need to prove it in a certain scenario, a fit-to-purpose scenario like customer service. And who are the vendors that are doing that? Well, there’s a lot of us, right? It’s a very crowded space. So who’s the best? What is the best technology and how do we do this? And then you want to partner with an organization that has done this and can help you think through it. So the expertise lies within the vendor who’s done this for other customers to guide them through and, you know, the loose term is professional services, but consult through that. What do you want your organization’s customer experience to be? What is your journey map today? Have you thought through that? What does this look like today? Where do you see it tomorrow? Having those conversations with a vendor that’s going to provide you with that level of service to then help you make choices on what you need for AI so that your organization will use it and see the value and understand the benefit. Then at the same time, it’s up to us as developing these products to make the AI easy to access, make it discoverable in the product, allow it to showcase itself, the usability, how it’s performing, summarizations to admins or supervisors in the context and on a weekly basis of how they’ve had 10,000 interactions this week. Of these 10,000, this was the KPI performance across the board. And every one of those improved your CSAT by four basis points. That’s a celebration. And then those discoveries lean in further into discovering what else you can do with the AI and where else you can turn it on in that customer journey, just as an example.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I, I like that you use the term augment and, you know, in describing this relationship and, you know, it, it doesn’t mean that there may not be some differences in job roles and all those things over the years ahead, but AI, as, as you’ve, as you’ve said, you know, AI generated transcripts, summaries, things like that can coach agents in doing their jobs better. That’s not AI replacing them. That’s actually AI helping them. Exactly. Because these are high-pressure situations. I’ve been a customer and frustrated before, I’ll admit. I’m sure we all have at some point. It’s like, these people are doing the best that they can and dealing with whatever situations arise. To CX leaders, are they generally kind of getting that idea of the opportunity with augmentation? How can that best be communicated to them?
John Finch: I think they are. Look, I mean, we still have conversations and it’s like, okay, how can we cut costs? Do I need to hire a whole bunch of agents? I have high turnover. This is a problem. I can’t deal with all this. And what we like to talk about isn’t, hey, you can cut 300 agents now that you have AI. That’s not the answer. There is an attrition component. that comes along with agents naturally. And I think when you implement this, it’s going to make agents’ lives better in general. So those agents that enjoy what they’re doing, become more important to the organization, are leaning into their jobs, they become specialists in this area. And instead of answering mundane tasks like password resets or simplified questions and things like that, This is where replacement with an AI agent can do that, right? So then you can up-level some of these agents that do lean in. Some will tread out. There are some savings. But then the other piece of that savings is you’ve got these individuals that are great with customers. And you can have better customer relationships. So more important interactions with a live agent and a customer become, you know, priceless, right? And that’s where more revenue can come from. That’s where upsell, that’s where more proactive service levels come from. Things like that naturally come into play. So we try to coach folks through that and I think they get it. I mean, immediately a CEO is going to be like, how can you save money? And then it’s like, okay, well, we’ll save money. Here’s sort of our plan and saving money. And then, you know, we’re going to have this natural attrition that we’re going to up level the service. But our differentiation in the business and why customers are going to stay with us is because we have different differentiated service levels, we have effortless customer experiences across the board. And our CSAT scores have improved. And we’re seeing this, you know, NPI go up. And and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it just kind of falls down the line. And I think there is that education. And then there is that thinking through that business plan of how you’re going to implement this and what kind of savings you’re going to see. You enter in with specific, like, these are my goals. This is why I’m switching vendors. This is why I’m, you know, having this discussion. And then it’s having that conversation of other areas to look into, then coming back with the customer and understanding where they’ve seen the value and continuing to improve that as the relationship continues.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, John, thanks so much for joining today. I’ve got one last question for you before we wrap up here. I’d like to ask this to everybody. So what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
John Finch: It’s a tough one, man. AI is moving real fast. I think my biggest thing is reading a lot right now. It’s reading everything and it’s playing with the tools. And I think in our day-to-day as a product marketer, I’m writing, I’m talking with folks like yourselves, I’m crafting a story, I’m helping my business craft this story and this narrative. And AI has helped me do that. There’s these tools that are out there as you mentioned, OpenAI, ChatGPT, Claude from Anthropic, there’s lots of others. So at the end of the day, getting access to these, seeing how they can help you, looking at data, transforming it, figuring out what to do. I leaned into AI and I look at AI in the way that we described it today and I think that’s where I keep myself agile and I’m reading a lot because it’s going really fast, what the analysts are saying and especially what customers are saying. And that’s how I’m keeping up with things. But there’s a lot of sleepless nights. It’s a lot of work, but it’s exciting. It’s really exciting.
