Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / AI Real-Time Translation: How Alliance BPO Unlocks Spanish Agents for English CX
Transcript
- Gina Gibson: Welcome to the Tech Matchmaker, the show where contact center challenges meet their perfect tech match. I'm your host, Gina Gibson, and in just 15 minutes, we serve up the smartest, coolest innovation shaking up the contact center industry. Whether you're searching for your next solution or just love staying ahead of the curve, we've got the insights to keep you in the know. Let's dive in and discover what's next. I promise you it's going to be fun. Thanks for hanging out with us on the Tech Matchmaker. I hope today's spotlight sparked some fresh ideas and real solutions for your contact center. Want to dive deeper into the tech we featured? Hit up the show notes for all the links and extras and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if there's a challenge you want us to tackle, don't be shy, reach out. I'll catch you soon with more innovation, more use cases and more ways to keep your business moving forward. Good morning, everybody. Today we are chatting with JC, who is the co-founder and CEO from Alliance BPO Services. JC, thanks so much for joining us and welcome to the show. Juan Caire: Good morning. Thank you for having me here, Gina. It's an honor. Gina Gibson: Let's start with basics JC. Why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself? Juan Caire: Absolutely. ⁓ Well, Alliance BPO Services is ⁓ established here in Sonora, Mexico, where I was born and raised. And I started off working in this industry almost 20 years ago as an overnight sales agent. I thought it was going to be a summer job. as the years went by, for some reason, I just continue to stay here, met wonderful people, learn more about the insights of the industry. What is it about? And what I learned along the time across all this time is that Gina Gibson: Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. Juan Caire: While it's not for everybody, it's just that not a lot of us understand it until we're in it for a long time. ⁓ That it's a beautiful industry because it's a people's business at the end of the day. While we're going to talk about technology and how that can make it better, ⁓ that's a little bit about me. Married with two kids, regular guy, nothing else to add on that end. Gina Gibson: Love it. And you're right, you're so right about the contact center side because nobody really ever chooses to make it a profession, right? It's one of those things we just kind of fall into. Can you share with me the origin story of Alliance and what inspired its founding mission? Juan Caire: Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. While I do, I'll actually give you a glimpse of our facility and our people so we can follow along together. But many years ago, well, not many years ago, about six years ago, we decided to start at our own company. We were offered a project to support a company in Latin America. They were just getting started on a direct-to-consumer sales basis. He was only paper commission. So because we had a lot of background working for other companies in the industry, we decided to step aside, start our own business. And we started off with 10 agents on a single program. And because we were able to build such a great foundation in terms of the founders coming from being in frontline employees all the way to management and ⁓ understanding what it takes to scale a team and a company, we started off by taking calls ourselves initially. And that's how we built our core team, which started off with 10 agents, then with that 10 client group to 70 agents in less than one year. And then we decided to expand on to other verticals over the past four or five years to a point where we're now almost 300 staff members serving around seven verticals. have 20 different clients. And while we're headquartered here in Sonora, We have a satellite office in South Africa and another one in Ethiopia. And that is to have redundancy and to have overnight coverage because we run 24 seven, three, six five. Gina Gibson: That's incredible. Like that's that's amazing growth in such a short amount of time Congratulations on that and now with your your other ⁓ There's a couple of questions I have to out of that you mentioned seven verticals What industries are you currently seeing the strongest demand from right now? And how how have you kind of seen that evolve over the years? Juan Caire: Thank you. We've seen it evolve more in services and to be very precise, financial services is one of them. Now that ⁓ for a long period of time, everything has been evolving over to digital, but people still requires to get support. And our core competency as a company is direct to consumer support, regardless of the vertical that we're working in. So we're always in the front line for our clients. And one of that vertical for financial services is debt relief. So we get to speak with people that ⁓ need help to ⁓ overcome their consumer debt. So we take them through a qualification process where they can then be enrolled into a program and a payment plan that will allow them to get out of that situation. Another ⁓ vertical that we're seeing ⁓ huge expansion on, and it's not reason, but it's something that's been continuous, I will say for the past 10 years or so, it's legal intake. That could be for personal injury, somebody that had an accident, meets an attorney for representation and reaches out via phone call to the personal injury attorney or firm that they see most convenient. And our job is to qualify them. These are sensitive conversations. Obviously, these are people that just came out of an accident. But nonetheless, there has to be a process where there needs to be a qualification criteria in order for them to move on. with the attorney and continue the process. And we handle all of that for our law firm partners, including signing the retainer. And we automate all that process. We'll talk about that in a second. But I think that services is what's coming up in more demand. And I can talk more about that. But I will say those are the two biggest ones that we're seeing growth in. Gina Gibson: Excellent. And I noticed you mentioned a couple of different locations as well, like different countries that you're in. How do you deal with the accent neutralization or the, you know, the different real-time translation, different languages? Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Juan Caire: Absolutely. So the need started off a little over a year ago when we said there's talent everywhere. It's not like talent is concentrated in a single location. It's just a matter of finding the right fate for the program that we're operating. So for a particular program that we needed to support 24 7 3 6 5, we decided to open up a satellite office with a partner of ours in Durban, South Africa. We started off with 10 seats. We still have them there. And because English is their native language, and although they have a slight accent, it's not an impediment for the program that we're working in, ⁓ we have been able to run that program successfully for over a year. So that is to say, talented people, different places, it's a match. The next one with Ethiopia came about because we started to support health care programs. both from an insurance standpoint to non-clinical follow-up for different clinics. And we learned that there is actually a labor market niche in Ethiopia through another business partner of ours. So we started working together on the project to a point where we said, English is great, people are great, there is talent here. So we decided to start to expand since last summer. And the reason why we're doing that is because for our clients, we don't want to be depending on a single labor market, but we don't just want to say we have multiple locations. We want to have the right locations based on the fit for the program that we're working in. So that's how we came about expanding and doing all of that. Now, in terms of accent neutralization and live translation, what we've been experiencing all this time that we've been working in the industry is. There is talented people that can only speak one language, but they're really good. I mean, if somebody only speaks Spanish, but they do customer care or some other type of work that is direct to consumer and they do it well, if they could only speak English, they will do it just as well as they did. So we invested a lot of time and money and effort over the past year and a half with our team to develop an AI power real-time translation tool, which I'm going to demo in a second. And We rolled it into production about three months ago. And what we started doing was having agents that only speak Spanish to take inbound calls from people that only spoke English. And the reason why we did that is because there was spike of calls that we needed to serve. So we know that we have the people, we just need to give them the right tools. So here's where technology and knowing how to breach that gap comes into place. And the funny thing is that They listen to the conversation live, meaning both agent and client. The agent listens to everything in English. They can read the translation in Spanish almost in real time. And they talk back in Spanish, but the customer only listens to English through a synthesized voice. So the conversation goes back and forth. But the funny thing was that their performance was the same as a bilingual agent. So that proved the point that If the person has the talent and the will and the skill, if you just provide the right tool, the outcome can be the same or even better. So we took it to another level and we started sharing it with our friends. There are many BPO's, we don't see them as competitors, we see them as partners because everybody specializes in something. So one of our friends specializes in tech support and they had a requirement that they could meet because they had this qualified team of five technicians. Gina Gibson: Mm-hmm. Juan Caire: They didn't speak English, so we gave them the tool and now they're using it. And we're in conversations now because we've continued to develop the tool to a point where you can now use 42 different languages. So the reason why we build this is because we don't see technology as a threat and we don't see it as something that will bluntly replace people. We see it as something that will empower people. An example of this is another friend of ours that operates out of Africa. Their market is Europe. Europe has multiple languages. Their client has multiple languages. If they are able to support from one or two locations, all of those languages, everybody wins. Customer wins, the client wins, the people that have a job wins. Everybody is just a matter of bridging technology with talent. Gina Gibson: And. Mm-hmm. Juan Caire: And I'm happy to show you a demo that I recorded here for you, if you allow me to. Gina Gibson: Yeah, fire away. That sounds perfect. Juan Caire: So that was an example of something that we built that is purposeful. Nothing in today's world in technology is perfect. So while you still have a sub-second latency and it's not like a real real-time translation, it still meets the purpose of serving a customer. And over time, it will get better, just like everything in technology history has. You go back to computers 20 years ago, they're way smaller. more affordable today, faster and better than they were because they continue to evolve. The same thing would happen here. The difference on our view is that you just have to take the first step, which is what we did, start using it, start getting feedback, continue to refine and don't get complacent. So this will only get better as time goes on. And here's a funny thing that happened. In order for us to make live translation work, you need to have a background noise cancellation by default. which costs nothing to do. So we released these application for free, meaning background noise cancellation for call center use. And we actually uploaded on a video on LinkedIn, which I'm happy to share with you that post and anybody can just download that application for free. I mean, you don't need to pay anything for it. It's just something that we stumbled across when we were doing this. And it was just a funny thing that happened when you're trying to build something with purpose. These unexpected surprises, which are good, just came across the way. So I'll stop talking for now because I know that I said a lot and I'll turn it over to you for questions. Gina Gibson: No, it was fantastic. you know what, JC, I love your approach on we don't have competitors, we have partners in the industry. I that's it's so refreshing and wonderful. And you've talked about some of your your developments and partnerships and expansions. Is there any other emerging trends that you see right now in the industry that you guys are particularly excited about or that you're preparing for? Juan Caire: Yes, actually now that you mentioned it, partnerships is a big thing. We are not from the mindset of let's go gung ho and build everything ourselves and keep everything for ourselves. We are from the mindset and we are surrounded and we're blessed and fortunate to be surrounded by people that think alike as well. ⁓ That partnerships are the right way to go today because that's how we're working in Ethiopia and South Africa. We're very transparent with our clients. say, That is another BPO, their friend of ours. We know them. We have our management team overseeing the program, but it's just a high leverage way to grow because they already have facilities, technology, certifications in place, qualified staff, processes. All we're doing, we're just leveraging all of that with purpose for our client. And we do the same for them. So it's reciprocal. It's not like it's not a one way street. Gina Gibson: Yeah. Juan Caire: So recently we started working with a client in Europe and that is not something that we're going to be doing by ourselves. Not alone at least. We're going to be leading, we're going to have team and resources involved, but we're also going to be leveraging our partners offshore. so that's another emerging trend that I'm seeing ⁓ because we get to speak with other huge corporations. There are in the BPO, they've been doing this for years and now they are not just with us, but they are now looking to do those type of partnerships rather than doing the traditional go to another geography, build from scratch, hire and all of that because I think times have changed. You need to move swiftly, but also you need to move with some sort of control risk. And this partnership approach helps the clients grow because it's easier to say, I'll get the 30 agents in a month if I do. Gina Gibson: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Juan Caire: 10 in each of the three different locations rather than doing 30 in a single location. Right. So. Gina Gibson: Right. Do you want to share a quick success story with us, do you see one of your clients and kind of where they started, why they came to you, what the problem that you saw for them is and how you helped them? Juan Caire: Absolutely. So we're proud of our team. I will say that number one. ⁓ It's never a one-man show. So everything I'm about to say next, I take no credit for that. It's just me relaying a story of people that I know that I have the pleasure of working with. But all of the clients that we have, all of them, started with two, three agents, probably 20, 30 calls a week. And we had to earn our place at the table. One of them it's it's ⁓ our second longest standing client ecommerce brand came to us They were working with with big guys in the industry. They were paying by the minute and Just cost was just soaring and their product was expensive Back in the days right or I should say premium. It was priced at a premium premium level. So ⁓ when we decided to ⁓ Make an offer we said look we're going to Gina Gibson: Yeah. Juan Caire: ⁓ make you an offer based on performance, so you only pay for what we sell. And we're going to find ways to optimize everything that you're spending in your media right now. So you don't have to spend more in media to generate more. We'll show you how you can generate more. So we started to apply all this ⁓ optimization ⁓ tools for the web traffic, which included exit intent, pop-ins, know. People right now go to websites and they see enter your email. We change that and say, if they want to exit, just have a click to call button, connect them to one of our agents. And that was going to be a lost sale anyway. So it's going to be incremental revenue. And also people that checked out, but dropped the abandoned card without completing the sale, which I know that all of that sounds like it's not new. The thing is that execution and follow up and consistency are key. So we were grinding at that every single day to a point where we helped this client number one be profitable. And out of the three BPO's that they had, we became the only one till today. just without mentioning ⁓ the size of the company and all of that, just by doing those small things that compound on a daily basis, just saving the digital leads and following up on the client cards and all that, we drove for them on the first year, $1 million in incremental revenue. That is a side for everything that they do, right? But that is just the compound effect. And I think that that summarizes how we visualize our partnership with our clients. It's one day at a time. It's not something that we brag about. It's just something that we understand that everything has a compound effect. success is not gonna come from one single thing. It's a cumulative. Gina Gibson: Right. Mm-hmm. Juan Caire: things that you need to do on a daily basis and just stay focused on what else we can do, what else we can integrate for our clients. And we always try to match technology with people so we can make it easier for our clients to scale, or if they're going to stay at that level for them to be profitable. So that was one of the stories. I have a few others, but I think that's the one that represented the best. Gina Gibson: Yeah, absolutely. That's awesome. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you'd like to share with the audience, J.C.? Juan Caire: I don't think so. I'm a pretty normal guy. I don't think I have anything else extraordinary, but I appreciate being here. Gina Gibson: I love it. Now, I have and we appreciate having you. This has been lovely. if you could one last question, like if you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice before starting your company, what would it be? Juan Caire: will be patients and discipline execution because at the beginning, when you start onboarding new business, you get excited and you think about growth and you think about you're already visualizing yourself like a big company and clients are happy. None of that happens if you don't stay focused on the day to day execution. So. Those are the two learnings will say that have different ramifications. One of them is being very, very transparent with my clients. If it's gonna take us this amount of time to get it done, there's gonna be a reason behind it. I would love to get it done sooner, but I'd rather you be successful in the long run than just doing it fast and not getting to the end goal together. So I will say patience and discipline execution will be what I would have told myself. Gina Gibson: Amen. Excellent. Absolutely. And it's part of the process, right? It helps me be stronger as humans as well. And just to wrap up, I've always been a fan of James Lipton. And so to end the podcast, we do some rapid fire questions. So what is your favorite word? Juan Caire: years ago but you need to go through those things to learn. Yeah. Yeah. My favorite word Thank you is the one that I say most often Gina Gibson: Yeah. Love that. What's your least favorite word? Juan Caire: I can't or impossible Gina Gibson: And what excites you? Impossible. That's a good one. What excites you the most? Juan Caire: Honestly, my family and the people that I come to work with every day. Gina Gibson: And JC, if somebody wants more information on Alliance BPO services, who should they reach out to? Juan Caire: They can reach out to me directly or go to our website, AllianceBPOServices.com. It's very straightforward. And I'm happy to share my contact information as well, which is actually published there. We're out there. Gina Gibson: Perfect. JC, I've so enjoyed our time today. Thank you so much for making time to join us and explain a little bit more about Alliance BPO services. You guys are doing some exciting stuff and I just love the heart behind what you do. So thanks for being here today. Juan Caire: Thank you very much. It means a lot to us.