Catching Up with Jay Patel

Summary

On this episode of Catching Up with, the Collab Collective's Craig Durr interviews Jay Patel, SVP and General Manager of Cisco’s Customer Experience Business, at WebexOne 2024. They discuss how AI is transforming customer service, focusing on balancing efficiency with effectiveness and enhancing agent wellness.

Their Discussion Covers:

• Customer Experience Strategy: Jay Patel explains Cisco's unified approach combining contact center and CPaaS technologies.
• AI-Powered Service: Jay Patel discusses the rise of agentic AI for seamless, human-like interactions, including Webex AI agents.
• Effectiveness vs. Efficiency: Craig Durr and Jay Patel delve into redefining KPIs to prioritize customer satisfaction over speed.
• Agent Wellness Tools: Jay Patel highlights AI-driven support tools designed to enhance agent well-being and performance.

Transcript

Craig Durr: Hey, everyone. This is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of The Collab Collective. I'm still here live at WebexOne 2024. This is a great one-on-one conversation I want to share with you with Jay Patel, SVP and General Manager of the Customer Experience Business here at Webex.

Jay, how are you doing?

Jay Patel: Good to see you.

Craig Durr: Hey, that was a mouthful–customer experience. Now, what does that mean in terms of what Cisco's offering? You mentioned two areas coming together. 

Jay Patel: Yeah, so we've brought together what we call the contact center business and the CPaaS business. Fundamentally, we both do quite similar things, which is essentially providing software to help customers improve their customer experience. So that's why we put this umbrella term of customer experience around that. Again, I think if you look at what's going on in the marketplace–I don't think customers care what software is used to service them. They just want good service. 

Craig Durr: That’s exactly right. Now, this is a new role for you, as well. And this all started in August. Is that right? 

Jay Patel: Yeah, on the first of August, so the start of the financial year. 

Craig Durr: Yeah, fantastic. So as you're settling into this new world right now, you actually have a history with Cisco because you had a previous business. 

Jay Patel: Yeah. So I was a CEO of IMImobile PLC, which got bought by Cisco around three years ago. And I've been running and growing the CPaaS business within Cisco. One of our pillars in the collaboration group is to reimagine CX. And by putting these two businesses together, my charter is to reimagine CX and deliver a solution for our customers that helps them deliver that next generation of great customer experiences. 

Craig Durr: Perfect.

So Jay, the thing that I really like about this right now is getting to meet the people behind the products because I have this belief that when we're talking to the same IT decision makers, people buy from people, people trust people, I get to understand that. You said this is actually an interesting twist of how you've been talking to your product management team, your product development team, to think in terms of this element. 

Jay Patel: Well, I think one thing which I've wanted to avoid in taking on the new role is to focus on vision function. So it's more around, “What are our guiding principles?” Ultimately, our guiding principles are to help our customers build trusted relationships with their customers. And we believe that the trust can be built by helping them be more thoughtful in their communication, more effective in their communication, and more human in their communication.

And so by having these pillars of thoughtfulness, effectiveness, and being more human. That enables our product management teams to actually think about, “How am I going to help my customer do that?” And it also helps with explaining our story to customers to say, “It's not about the real world and the next feature, it's about the direction of travel.” And the direction of travel is ultimately to help you create great, trusted relationships with your customers. Because at the end of all this, just like people buy from people–customers want to trust the brands they work with.

Craig Durr: That’s true.

Let's talk about this from two angles. Let's go down the customer path. I love what you're saying about the customer experience taking place here. You've actually debuted some really interesting solutions here, leveraging the power of AI, but there's been this idea that it's actually creating this, almost removing the barrier of knowing that you might be interacting with an artificial technology, as well, because you've been able to mimic some of these really human experiences. 

Jay Patel: I think ultimately there's no desire to kind of fool a customer or replace humans. What it comes down to is the technology has got so much better than the last couple of years. The investment that's taking place in LLMs and foundational models just means that there is a disruption taking place in how you can use technology tools. And that disruption means that we can now create natural language agents that can talk to you like you were talking to a friend, understand your intent–but not just understand your intent, but also fulfill the intent. 

So there's a phrase that's come out probably only in the last couple of months around agentic AI. So basically, the ability for you to talk to an agent and the agent to carry out some actions on your behalf. The technology has developed so quickly the last couple of years that this is now possible. So we announced the launch of our Webex AI Agent and AI Agent Studio that helps our customers create these experiences. 

Craig Durr: And that was a really great demo that we saw on stage. And you also showed that one as well, too, right? So not only was that AI agent actually in this wonderful interactive dialog with a human, there were things taking place like they were pivoting in the conversation midway.

Jay Patel: For sure, and that's where the technology is caught up because the agents understanding you, you can interrupt it. In this case, the context of the entire conversation, it will dip into databases to kind of get information from you. We also obviously have guard rails around what the virtual agent can and cannot refer to. So yeah, we were able to create incredible experiences for our customers. And as always, there’s always an option for the consumer to say, “Hey look, can I speak to a human agent?” But this is where we see technology go in, and the biggest advantage we think is this is gonna help take some of the load off contact centers. And by taking the load off contact centers, this is gonna free up contact centers to be more human in their approach.

Craig Durr: That’s right.

Actually, it goes to one of your key ideas. One of the pillars you just spoke about using, was effectiveness. And you and I had this really wonderful debate about this idea. We talked about the customer’s side, now let’s talk about the agent’s side. The person servicing these customers. And you had this really great idea about the difference between effectiveness and efficiency.

Jay Patel: The contact center industry, in fact, a lot in the customer service industry are full of KPIs. And I think, one of the challenges that I see is in the drive for efficiency, we've actually reduced customer satisfaction. So you see, customer satisfaction has been declining in the last few years despite incredible investments in CX. And I think that's partly because, for example, just answering a call quickly doesn't necessarily solve the customer problem. If you wait on hold for 30 minutes or five minutes, but at the end of that conversation, you still can't get what you want done. So you're more efficient in handling the call, but you haven't fulfilled the intent.

Similarly, in a call center, agents are handling 20 calls in an hour rather than ten–they're more efficient, more productive, then they have less time to spend with customers. So again, the strive for efficiency should not be the overriding objective. We think the overriding objective should be to be effective. Can you help the customer achieve what he wants to achieve? And I think there's a phrase I've been using around the fact that, “Efficiency is doing the thing right, whereas effectiveness is doing the right thing.”

Craig Durr: You're right. So it's kind of more of a quality over quantity type. 

Jay Patel: It is quality over quantity. I think that you and I spoke about Taylorism.

Craig Durr: Yeah, this is a great parallel we're going to bring up. Yeah, exactly. 

Jay Patel: And you know the fact that sometimes efficiency drives in the office lead to cubicles. Can you explain it further?

Craig Durr: Yeah, the parallel that was brought up was this: as we had that transition taking place in that industrial revolution time frame, and more people becoming these information centric workers–accountants, receptionists, typists. There was a gentleman by the name of Taylor who actually said, “I think I can really squeeze a lot of effectiveness and efficiency out of that.” And what they wound up doing was actually trying to figure out how you can remove seconds and minutes out of their workflows and their processes by putting people closer together, keeping things together. Taylorism became a driver that created some of those really early office experiences that we now make fun of. 

Jay Patel: Yeah, right–the cubicles. 

Craig Durr: Yeah, exactly. The culture of where everyone had their little spot. They were driven for what they needed to do in the most quickly, timely manner, using the least amount of resources. And the problem was–that employee satisfaction just started plummeting through the course of that.

Jay Patel: And it probably inhibited collaboration and creativity. And I think the same has been slightly true about the drive for efficiency in customer service. It inhibits the desire to be more human, be more empathetic to actually look after the customer. So with AI, which I think will be an incredible driver of productivity, but the extra time can then be spent looking after customers.

Craig Durr: It's interesting because productivity is almost becoming a double-edged word for people. It's one of those cautious things. Yes, you want to be able to create the outcome, the output you want to do, but I think you want to do it in a quality manner, so that you don't get burnt out in the process. 

Jay Patel: And this is where the technology changes are coming so thick and fast. I love the fact that we've launched an agent wellness, AI assistant where you know that at times, how you are performing that day. You've had your fifteenth conversation. Was that the same conversation you had when you had your second conversation? And in real time, an agent can essentially, an AI assistant can look over you and say, “Hey, you know you were a bit more testy with that customer. So just take a break.” So I think there's all sorts of tools that can help with productivity and still be helpful to everybody. It's not a question of getting more work out of anybody. It’s making the work better. 

Craig Durr: I love it. So I love what you guys have done here. First of all, I like how you've kind of combined these two areas of your business under this one umbrella and the appropriate title–customer experience. I also like how you're also thinking about the people working with those products, the employees that are touching with them. What's their level of effectiveness? How can we help them with that? How can we help them with their level of wellness? All good stories. I appreciate it. 

Okay, good. Jay, thank you for your time. I appreciate it. 

Jay Patel: Thank you.

Craig Durr: Everyone, this is Craig Durr with The Collab Collective. We are still here at WebexOne 2024. Take care.

Jay Patel: Thank you.