Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / From Bots to Agentic AI: How Quiq Is Redefining Customer Experience with Smarter Automation
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 everybody. Today we are chatting with Michael Hartzog, who is the VP of Strategic Alliances for QUIC. Michael, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us today. Michael Hartsog: happy to be here with you, Gina. Yeah, this is a great opportunity to have a conversation with you. Thank you. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. Let's start with the basics, Michael. us a little bit about yourself. Michael Hartsog: Yeah, so I head up our global alliances organization. So anything that has anything to do with partners rolls through me here at QUIC. We're based in Bozeman, Montana, which is I live. ⁓ And I've in the CX space since 2009. I work for companies like now Technologies, Oracle, Five9, ⁓ Genesis, and have been QUIC for about seven years now. Gina Gibson: Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. That's excellent. And I usually ask people to tell me one thing that might not be on about themselves, but I can't help but marvel over the beauty of your backdrop. ⁓ tell us something about yourself, but also include those beautiful photos. Michael Hartsog: Yes. ⁓ Yeah, yeah. So I am an amateur photographer. My wife and I both are. did actually try to become professionals, but then it wasn't any fun. So spend a lot of time down in Yellowstone Park to South of here and any other national park we can get to. And I've always a camera in hand and I try to capture those moments. Gina Gibson: Fantastic so back to quick Michael. Give us your elevator pitch. Tell us about what what does quick do? Michael Hartsog: Yeah. Yeah, Quick has been around for about 10 years and we first started, you know, back in the day as a business messaging platform. mission has never really changed that much in that we started out with the understanding that Contact Center is going to eventually move in the same direction that peer-to-peer communication has You and I, hardly ever talk to our friends and family on the phone anymore. We're constantly texting, we're having these asynchronous messaging conversations that go on and on and on forever, of at whatever the speed of life is. And so we started as a business messaging platform built on an asynchronous architecture that allowed for AI to be able to manage the conversation for the... the contact center agent in digital channels, concurrency, things like that. Over the last really, probably six years, bot technology into play. We kind of took that AI native architecture and we grew with it into ⁓ NLU and NLP, learning three to years ago. And then, when large language models came out, was very natural for us to be able to just unplug our edge learning models and plug in large language models. So within two months chat GPT hitting the market, we had already launched our first fully generative AI agent into marketplace. We claim we're the first in the world to ever do that. Nobody's ever challenged that. So we're going to plant that. We're going to keep that flag planted. Since as AI has begun to move down the path as rapidly as it has, we've actually ⁓ our generative AI model to a more cognitive architecture. And so where we are today is we're an end-to-end experience orchestration platform that's built on an agentic AI layer. that has cognitive reasoning capabilities. our come to us when they're looking to revenue, reduce and improve customer experience. ⁓ And that's what do with our customers. Gina Gibson: That's excellent. And Michael, is the cognitive architecture that you mentioned, and I know you and I chatted a little bit before, but we were talking about, you know, confidence levels and that kind of thing. Is that one of the parts that sets QUIC apart from your competitors? Michael Hartsog: Yeah, for sure there's confidence levels that come into play, but it's actually a good bit more than that now. And what it is is that we've moved beyond this deterministic flow build where if A equals this, then this. If B equals this, do this. And there's this kind of deterministic flow that bot has always had. And it's always been the weakness of automated customer experience. What we've done is we've gotten away with that and we're now using... an architecture that allows the AI to access multiple sources of data and make its own determination as to what to do next. So it's a non-deterministic, we don't even use the word flow anymore. It's a non-deterministic experience that the AI is actually using cognitive reasoning to have a conversation with the customer in the same way human. Gina Gibson: And then amazing, right? But also that is consistent across all of your channels, right? So whether it's SMS, web chat, or social media, no matter what, you guys, ⁓ it's same conversation because you do have all that in one platform, correct? Michael Hartsog: That's right. So you build one AI agent and you deploy it across voice, email, chat, a dozen different digital channels, including social media. And so you have a consistent experience across the entire customer experience. Gina Gibson: And Perfect, that's I was gonna say, and that's how we create the consistency. So no matter when or how the customer reaches out, we're able to have that exact same interaction and experience for them. How do you tell if a customer's ready for agentic AI? And I know you and I chatted about that too, you know, we've been, AI readiness assessments are kind of all over the place. How do you help customers determine? Michael Hartsog: That's right. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It's a really, it's a great question. I love how you phrase that because what I have seen and I've talked to dozens and dozens of enterprise and mid-market to enterprise and even strategic accounts that are Fortune 100. I would tell you that the vast majority of, well, every customer I've ever talked to wants to grow revenue, wants to drive cost down and they want to improve customer experience. So the motivation is there. The data is already there, ⁓ if the data is not perfect and even if it's somewhat unstructured and disparate. So I say that the vast majority of our, you know, everybody we talk to is ready for AI. They might not understand the business case. And I think that's where the challenge is, is, okay, The board of directors in the C-suite is telling the business unit, go figure out how we're going to use AI. they're telling the technology team, go figure out how we're going to implement AI. And those are siloed conversations. And both of those organizations are saying, we don't really know where to start. What's the business case? How do we do this? And where I think the readiness ⁓ is into little bit of a blockade, which is, OK, now what? And so we work with our customers to kind of get them through that. We work with them to understand what their end user stories are, what their business objectives are, where does the data sit, how do want your AI to treat specific end user stories, end user stories are going to have the greatest impact, and which ones do you need to just get to a ⁓ in order to ensure that particular end user story is being handled properly. So we walk them through that process of understanding their business. ⁓ and understanding how they should be thinking about how to apply AI to that business. Gina Gibson: And do you have, and I know you've got success stories and I want to hear a success story, but is there kind of a unique or a surprising way or a surprising use case that one of your customers has used Quick For that you hadn't, you were like, oh yeah, we can absolutely do that. Like I hadn't really thought about that, but this is maybe a surprise. Michael Hartsog: Yeah, that's a great question. have to sit back and think about that for a second. I can think of, I can't use this company's name, but it's, you would know them if you ever bought office equipment, um, supplies, right? So they actually have an internal use case for employees to be able to just get help when they need help with anything. And there's all kinds of questions that they might have. And what we've found amazingly, Gina Gibson: Okay. ⁓ Michael Hartsog: is that some of these employees are actually using the AI agent, not only to kind of find out like, where is this specific inventory or what form do I need it? But like, how do I handle this dynamic situation? Like they're using it for almost a personal counselor and it's not built for that. But the empathy that we were able to build into the platform gives it the ability to understand the is asking for, and it that it has the data to be able to give guidance. so ⁓ of course guard rail that, of course there's SOPs built it, but it was a bit surprising to see some of the outcomes of that, of those interactions. But the other one that I would call out too is Roku. Roku is a story for that has been... Gina Gibson: Yes. Michael Hartsog: just a real eye-opener because they started out with 29 different AI vendors and narrowed it down to 12, down to five, and then it was down to us and one of the large ultimately what they were trying to do is they were trying to build, of course, know Roku, they've got multiple different hardware, ⁓ they've operating they've got streaming services. you know, 20 different products across their entire global experience in multiple languages. to try to have a deterministic flow for troubleshooting scenario was impossible. And so they had one of those kind of ⁓ what would call a intent based AI bot, kind of gen one AI bot, and it wasn't And so they came to us and said, we need to be able do this. ⁓ but the AI needs to be able to navigate the conversation without an if then else thing. so, ⁓ is what the definition of agentic AI is. And so out of all 29 vendors, we were the only ones that had the ability to build that at that time, nine months ago. And so they've a very impressive I think heard in a webinar recently about a ⁓ 48 % resolution which was a good bit higher than what they were expecting to see. We're now rolling out across multiple channels and voice. The of agentic AI in and of itself over and above the Gen 1 capabilities ⁓ that in existence prior to large language models and even generative AI has been a bit surprising. Gina Gibson: Yeah knowing you've been ahead of the curve a couple of times and I know I'm not going to ask you to share your secret sauce but ⁓ there anything you can share us any teasers about next for quick? Michael Hartsog: that's a good question. ⁓ So we're definitely, you know, one of the things that we are ⁓ more more is help us with post-conversation analytics, ⁓ analysis of conversations. And so we are going be rolling out very shortly, actually in the next of weeks, our first QAQM capabilities. And built directly into the AI itself. So it is a part of the AI agent where there's another agent that sits over the top of it and the components that each customer can build bespoke to the dynamics that they want to be measured. so that's very close to the There's a couple of other things on the horizon I can't talk about, but it definitely will broaden our to be more full, not orchestration layer, but contact center solution. Yeah. Gina Gibson: Excellent and to wrap things up Michael I have always been a fan of James Lipton and so to end I usually do some rapid-fire questions. So what is your favorite word? Michael Hartsog: Yeah. My favorite word, fun. I have fun. This industry is fun. It allows me to have fun. I love the conversations that we get to have with the people. I find myself in conversations that I'm kind of sitting back going, wow, I can't believe I just had a conversation with that guy. Yeah, it's just fun. Yeah. Gina Gibson: And the people, right? The people you meet, as you said, they're of a kind in this industry. What's your least favorite word? ⁓ Michael Hartsog: Failure. try to not allow it in my ⁓ We've never had an AI agent fail. You know, knock on wood, but failure is not an option for me. So I don't the word. Never have. I was a competitive skier when I was a kid and I don't fail. don't like to fail. I learn. Yeah. Gina Gibson: love it. What excites you the most? Michael Hartsog: Yeah, I think that it's both exciting and it's also a little bit of the of the unknown in the future. I've this a couple of times with some folks recently where I think for the first time in our technological history, we do actually have the ability now to help brands ⁓ grow revenue, help cut costs. think a big component of that is, is we see, ⁓ I think this is super exciting, that we're seeing that the human agents that are involved now are actually moving up the value chain. They're being repurposed into more valuable conversations. quality of life is going up. The value what they bring the table is going to go up. so I think it's just, think it's going to be, there's, There's a lot of uncertainty as to how this is gonna shake out, but I'm super excited to see the benefit that we can bring in these technologies to and ⁓ people. Gina Gibson: And Michael, if somebody wants more information on QUIC, who should they reach out to? Michael Hartsog: Yeah, I think the first thing they need to think of is Gina Gibson. out to Gina. Please if you'd like, reach out to us here at ⁓ You can me here QUIC. And you do reach out to me, let me know that you're working with Gina, and we'll certainly make sure that we keep the connection there and get you taken care of. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Michael, thank you so much for joining us today. I've really enjoyed our time together. I appreciate it and look forward to the next time and the next releases that the quick has out in the market. Michael Hartsog: device. It's, they're coming fast. It's, it is literally every two weeks we're rolling something different out, something new and exciting. So yeah, it's, it's awesome. Gina Gibson: Thank you so much. Michael Hartsog: Thank you.