Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Is Your Business Actually Ready for AI? | The Tech Matchmaker Podcast w/ Christa Heibel
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 Krista Heibel, the CEO and founder of the CH Consulting Group about AI readiness. Krista, tell us a little bit about yourself and what inspired you to start your consulting firm. Christa Heibel: Gina. So I have been in and around contact center operations and CX leadership for more decades than I want to admit anymore. So I came up through kind of the contact center operations side. And I always say I consult because I'm a better consultant and advisor than employee. Gina Gibson: Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. Christa Heibel: a fixer. I like to fix it, launch it, turn it around, grow it, right? High levels of accountability in stressful situations. So I get to do that every day for my clients. ⁓ Gina Gibson: can relate to that. ⁓ I love that. Krista, tell us one thing about yourself that we won't find on LinkedIn. Christa Heibel: Well, you'll find on LinkedIn that I am a yoga teacher, but a lot of people may not know that I actually bring groups to India to do cultural and yoga tours throughout mostly northern India, and it's a huge passion of mine. Gina Gibson: That's amazing. How long have you been doing that? That sounds absolutely incredible. Christa Heibel: I'm My first trip over there was in 2017. So I've been going back, obviously, minus a couple years over the COVID timeframe, but I've been heading back as much as possible, which in the space we work in, know, many people have traveled there, but for very different reason and maybe very different outcomes. So it's kind of cool to get into the culture and the history and the people side of all of it. So it's... Gina Gibson: I love that, I love that. Do you wanna give us an overview, Christa, of all the services that your company provides? And I know we're gonna specifically kinda hone in on AI readiness assessment because that's, of course, the big topic going on right now. But can you give us kind of an overview of everything that your company provides? Christa Heibel: Yeah. Yeah, so we're really a full suite business consulting firm, Gina, and our area of expertise is really around anything customer experience, operations, optimization, and the tech that supports that whole CX journey and contact center and back office operations. So if you've got a problem or a challenge or an opportunity within that umbrella, we do a lot of assessment, gap analysis, then roadmap and strategy. work around operational improvement and technology stack improvement. Gina Gibson: like that and with AI being everywhere right now and we all know not every company is ready for it and they're self-admitted right some of them are very cautious. How do you define AI readiness for the clients you work with and why is that so important? Christa Heibel: So listen, it was painful to watch the market from our perspective in the last couple of years. I mean, really specifically, probably 2024 with all the investment going into AI and companies struggling to actually see results from that. So everything we do is ROI based. You know, we believe if you're investing in tech or transformation, there should be some measurable outcome to that. And so to watch negative ROI based AI, implementations or AI being deployed to do call deflection and actually driving more calls into the markets operations was painful. And so for us, AI maturity and readiness starts at a business level. It's not even really about the tech. I mean, there's pieces of AI readiness that overlap with technology like data needs and how are you going to measure it and how are you going to get access to what you need to make and design the implementation successful and full integration. But there's ⁓ another layer to this, which is reasonable business expectations, measurable results, P &L, investment, budgeting, the knowledge management. side of it, the people side of it, that people were just trying to bypass. So we saw all this money coming down and pressure from boards and executives for IT to go invest in AI, but plugging AI in without it fitting into the rest of the business does not yield best results. So we're trying to bring that logic to the market. Gina Gibson: the Is that kind of the one of the areas too, Krista, that you see the biggest misconception is, we can just do it in this one area or, not kind of thinking enterprise wide. Christa Heibel: Yeah, think the big misconception is that AI is tech, and if you give that budget to the IT side of the world, they can go make magic happen and somehow cut 50 % of your headcount on the ops side. Our reality is that operations is involved at probably almost 60 % of the lift in any successful AI implementation that's impacting the contact center around CF. sales, service, and support. So that's a problem if you're not engaging business requirements like legitimate use cases ⁓ operations in the overall design and implementation. Gina Gibson: That's excellent. And you touched on a few different areas in the contacts area and center. Where are you seeing the biggest impact right now when AI is done right in context? Christa Heibel: I mean, well, P &L impact is always gonna be the bot, right? The AI agent live or web chat is gonna have the biggest impact on head count decreasing, which is a driver, right? I mean, that's a big part of why the boardroom and the exec team is pushing for this. But there's risks to just jumping into that, right? And you just really have to make sure all of your ducks are in a row in order to make sure that you're not gonna... create compliance, security, quality issues right around that. ⁓ we like the whole speech analytics into QMS, into coaching, into agent assist on the back end. ⁓ creating huge measurable improvement on an efficiency and an optimization level. And I think it lets you kind of proof it out before you turn it outward. Wow. ⁓ Gina Gibson: Love it. Do you want to share an example of one of your clients and their success story kind of from how you walked in, what it looked like to how you were able to help? Christa Heibel: Yeah, well, so we had an organization that was running a very high ⁓ turnover with their clients. They were a home business. They were running into problems. were P.E. backed, but the growth was not happening because as fast as they could invest in the marketing and the front end on the sales, they were really losing the customers on the back end. ⁓ But they very limited data and analytics in to viewing what was really happening. And the short version of that story is after about a year and a half tech enablement project, we were able to convert a large percentage of their home implementations to self-service through different knowledge management and AI tools that actually ended up resulting in about a 40 % headcount decrease. it really was about understanding what was driving that client retention issue and then being able to provide tools, in training to the internal team and operations, but externally facing tools that were really AI tools that were allowing that whole process to happen for clients in a much easier case. It literally cut their client turnover by eight. 90 % and their head count again by 40. So that had huge ROI attached to it. Gina Gibson: Those are some impressive numbers. So for anybody watching this, Krista, what would be kind of the first steps that you would want to walk them through to say, like, here's why you should give you a call, right? Christa Heibel: What? I think, I think, you know, listen, we're again, we're results focused and oriented. We are not a one size fits all. We're agnostic on tech. So we're not coming to the table with one solution. We're really about helping businesses find the right solution for them. And so understanding really where a client is at in the beginning, like knowing that we want to know you and help you solution right for your business, I think is, is probably one of the most important pieces. He says we bring the best. Gina Gibson: Definitely a differentiator in the market for sure. So looking at a time machine, time machine question time, like if you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice when starting the agency, what would it be? Christa Heibel: Bye! wow. Listen, not all business is good business. I had a mentor tell me that a long time ago when I was doing biz dev for a company and I did not appreciate him telling me he may not want all of my clients and business. But all business is not equal and really finding clients that we have good synergy with, that we can really operate with in full transparency and trust is really important to me as a business owner today. And so finding the right clients a real thing. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. Krista, to wrap things up, I've always been a big fan of James Lipton. And so to end the podcast, we do a little rapid fire. And so what is your favorite word? Christa Heibel: faith. Gina Gibson: What is your least favorite word? Christa Heibel: Clammy. Gina Gibson: what excites you the most? Christa Heibel: Hope. Gina Gibson: ⁓ If somebody, Kristen, wants to more information on you and your offering and what to do, what an AI readiness assessment looks like, or any of your other services, who should they give a call to? Christa Heibel: Gina Gibson, at Think Forward, knows exactly how to get a hold of me and we always love partnering with Gina. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Krista, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your insights and the importance of AI readiness in today's marketplace. It's always great to learn from the best when it comes to being prepared from implementing AI. Thank you so much for your time today. Christa Heibel: Thank you for having me, Gina. Thanks.