Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / How SymTrain Cut Agent Attrition from 50% to Single Digits | Tech Matchmaker Podcast w/ Dan McCann
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. Hello, everyone. I'd like to extend a warm welcome to Dan McCann, the CEO and Chief Learning Officer of SimTrain. Welcome, Dan. Yeah, it's great to have you. It was fun doing the research on you, Dan. I had no idea you were a serial entrepreneur and that this was number four for you. Dan McCann: Hey Gina. Hey, thanks Gina. Excited that you're here. Gina Gibson: Fortune 5000 awards Stevie's and back to back Georgia top 40 tech honors. Congratulations. That's impressive. ⁓ Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. Dan McCann: Yeah, I think it all started when I was getting thrown into the principal's office in second and third grade for selling Jolly Ranchers. I would buy in the grocery store in bulk and then bring them to school and sell them for 10 and 20 cents a pop. So my parents were getting called down and I went home and my dad's like, you're not in trouble by the way. That's pretty cool. Keep it up. Just figure out how not to get thrown in the principal's office. So ever since then, I think I've been on this entrepreneurial journey, Yeah. Gina Gibson: in That's a god, that is awesome. And you have yet one more new venture coming up. You are starting a podcast called Coach's Corner. ⁓ Dan McCann: ⁓ yeah, super excited about that. What's really neat is, you know, I'll take the persona of Coach Dan because we're CX coaches. My goal is to, I wanted to be a coach in high school and so my goal was to coach people, right? And now I want to coach a million CX agents globally. That's my new goal. so we're going to be talking to all different types of coaches, like sports coaches and ⁓ coaches and CX too about developing people and the impact and it should be a should be a lot of fun. Gina Gibson: I love it, I love it. We are so grateful that you're here to join us today. ⁓ Dan, tell us a little bit about yourself. I mean, that story was perfect, but something that we might not find on LinkedIn. Dan McCann: Right. Yeah. So not find on LinkedIn is I live in Atlanta, Georgia, right? So I'm about six hours from the nearest body of water, but I also own, you know, nine surfboards. Right. So I grew up surfing in New Jersey. It's kind of just stayed in my blood. Now they just became works of art around the house and they frustrate, frustrate my wife terribly. She's like, what are you doing? Right. Get out of them and surf them if you're going to do it. But I don't need them as work arts in the, in the house. Gina Gibson: I love it. Dan, give us your ⁓ elevator pitch for Sim Train. Dan McCann: Yeah, so SimTrains AI coaching, right? And what that's all about is really helping those global CX contact center agents learn how to perform their job do so faster and better than any of the alternatives, which typically is manual, right? One-on-one role play, phone jacking, round tables, different nesting periods, and being able to do that in a safe environment. you know, these agents are able to up skill and build their skill sets, but also their confidence at the same time. So they know they're ready to handle any sort of or scenario, especially mean customers or tough scenarios or things that might make them defensive personally. They'll test that out and practice in Sim Train. So they're prepared to have more empathy with their customers and not take those things personally. So, you know, that's what, that's what Sim Train is all about and AI coaching. So it's an exciting. you know, solution to really make a meaningful impact in life, in their career, and help them, you know, learn how to do their job better is really fun. Gina Gibson: I that. And if was hearing about you for the first time, what would be the one thing you'd want them to take away? Would it be that that would be the empathetic learning or what would want them to take away? ⁓ Dan McCann: Yeah, mean, look, takes a job to fail, right? And so our customers, a attrited probably about 50 % of teams in every year. Right. And we're making huge impacts on retention of those employees because they're connecting faster, they're performing better and aligning better to the company. So they're keeping those jobs longer. It's a major impact for the employers, but having that impact on an employee's life so they can feel comfortable and perform their job better. It's like that's my favorite part. ⁓ a matter of fact, you we have a video from a few years ago, one of our larger banks. And of the things I love when every time I see that video, he You know, our agents have a genuine appreciation the fact that we've invested in, you know, sim training and they're able to go practice in their job. And that, that, that piece around the genuine appreciation, it just, really is, has meaningful impact for me. So I love people taking that away, Gina. Gina Gibson: Yeah, absolutely. And with this being your fourth startup, was the motivator? Like what solidified your decision to, okay, training is where I want to focus? Dan McCann: Yeah, so a little bit of being an idiot, my, know, frustrating the family members. So we had a good thing. I retired at 45 and we had a nice lifestyle, but I had this burning desire. Like I said before, I wanted to be a coach, right? When I was in college and I wanted to teach and coach and that was important to me. I set up different like baseball programs in my town and just to coach kids and such. So when I saw the impact I was making, so I created created SimTree and I was running a small BPO type of contact center and I was really struggling to get my new hires up to speed and performing effectively. And actually, Gina, I was attriting half of my new hires in the first six months. the funny part is, because I was doing like premium sales appointment setting, I actually for a few years said, well good, right? The cream of the crop are the ones that stay and the rest go away. And that little piece I was telling you before, I lived that. I kind of created that environment. Like, 50%. They didn't take a job with me. They didn't look their family members in the eye and look at their spouse and say, I'm excited to go to work today. And hopefully, you know, I get cut and I lose my job. Like that wasn't the case. But I was doing that to people. And I started to feel really bad about it. And what we did. We leaned in on this technology and we made an impact. I took 50 % attrition and brought down to like, single digits for those first six months. They were performing better and better than my awesome players on the floor. And so I kind of geeked out and I nerded out about the impact and I'm like, I got to go do this, right? I got to go do this again. So I'll get out of retirement. Actually, honey, I'm going to go grab a lot of our money to go invest in this thing too. So I hope you like AI coaching as much as I do, because this is going to be, you know, the next 10 or so years of our lives. So that was the motivation. Gina Gibson: Love it. I'm sure that went over well Now are there any unique features or aspects your competition that you'd like to highlight? Dan McCann: Yeah, definitely. So first off, what's really kind of neat is the name of our company is Sim Train, right? So when we started this back in like 2016, 17, and I used it internally for my other company, know, natural language processing was our AI of the day. So we were able to create a simulated based training application. And over the last few years, when Gen.ai and now Agentic AI came out, we've really morphed into AI coaching. Right. And what's really neat about that is we've streamlined the creation of content. Right. In many cases, we've made it instant so we can convert call recordings instantly into coaching exercises. We could take QA data and we build libraries for our clients and we can connect to our clients QA tools, their performance management tools in their CX stack. could be an LMS or gamification, you know, even CCAS. So being able to connect to those applications and build that content super fast. for very pointed, like targeted exercises for each and every agent. Like that's insane. Like we love that. And it's very, very unique to SimTrain on being able to create that content as fast as we do in minutes or seconds or instantly versus having to wait weeks to get this stuff developed. Gina Gibson: Well, and how impactful too for the agents, right? Because if something new is popping up, then they can be trained on it right away before the next shift, right? Or during that shift. Yeah. ⁓ Dan McCann: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Can you imagine being trained on something that Dan thought was a good idea seven months ago? It's like, not that interested in that as much as, hey, here's production calls last week and the areas that our team did well and converted at a really high rate. Let's get everyone performing at that same capability. Yeah. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. Do you want to share a quick success story from one of your clients with us, Dan? Dan McCann: yeah, there's a lot. one the ones we love is ⁓ an company. They have to respond and stand up a whole bunch of agents for disasters, right? Which is a really tough thing in someone's life. I lost a house, a hurricane hit the coastline and hundreds if not thousands of people are dealing with this catastrophe this customer has to stand up like 2,000, 3,000 agents as fast as possible in order to respond to that, right? So we were able to help them take a 72 hour training and onboarding and cut that down to four, right? Think about that, right? That's like an 18X faster speed to delivery. And the best part about it is NPS went up at the same time. And this is NPS with people who lost their biggest investment in their whole lives and they're saying, yeah, I would refer these people in this company to other folks, but how they treated me. I love that. Gina Gibson: incredible! What an incredible story! No kidding! there any emerging trends, I mean everybody's talking these days, but is there any emerging trends that you're particularly excited about or preparing your product for? Dan McCann: Yeah, we call it kind of the learning diamond, right? Versus the learning triangle. And what's really neat with agentic and conversational AI coming into the marketplace right now what's happening is if you think about how agents typically learned when they weren't using SimTrain, they would provide knowledge and they would go take some one calls, right? Kind of like go figure it out. That was how people learned how to do their job. And even today, Gina, as a lot of training is that way. It's it's low risk, it's easy calls, good on the floor, go do this. And like, then you'll figure it out in four to six months. You'll be a great agent and we'll promote you. What's kind of neat, we call it the diamond versus the triangle, because that middle tier is equally as large today as it was last year, five years ago and 10 years ago. But what's happening is that bottom tier is all eroding away to AI, conversational AI and agentic. So the training ground is gone. Like done. Like I need higher quality agents performing at a much better rate because they're no longer taking tier one. And ⁓ by the way, I have no way to train them on the job. what's really cool is this simulation based training for six years was like a nice to have. Like the top companies would invest in it, which was awesome. And it was a fun journey. But now it's no longer a nice to have. If you want an agentic AI strategy to work, you have to have an AI coaching strategy to go along with it. or you're gonna fail. You can't get those people to perform at that level because there's no other way, which is, it's a really fun thing for us, given that, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, agentic AI, SIM training is gonna go away. Like, no, it's gonna increase and do a lot more of it. So that's been kind of fun. Gina Gibson: Yeah, that's what a great perspective great perspective so to wrap up Dan always been a fan of James Lipton, so I finish it off with the three quick rapid-fire questions. So what is your favorite word? What is your least favorite word? Dan McCann: Favorite word is awesome. Lee's favorite word is can't. Gina Gibson: and what excites you about life the most. Dan McCann: man, the days that end in Y. I love those. Those are my favorite. Gina Gibson: Ha! it ⁓ no dad if somebody wants information on sim train and what you guys do who should they give a call to? Dan McCann: I don't know, if I was looking at SimTrain and AI coaching, I'd probably call Gina Gibson, right? Think forward, you know, reach out to you guys. have a really good handle on what we're doing and a great resource. You could also reach out to our VP of CX, right? Callie Sorem. And can get her at simtrain.com or simtrain.ai and she'll a really great job of explaining our solution ⁓ well. Not good as Gina, but close. Gina Gibson: Thanks, Dan. I want to thank you so much for your time with us today and your stories. Fantastic. And it's so interesting to hear the impact SimTrain has had on your So thank you so much. Dan McCann: Awesome, thank you and thanks for putting this together. We would love to have more folks joining the AI coaching mission as well. So thanks, Gina. Take care. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. Thank you.