Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Turn Conversations Into Intelligence: How Yactraq’s Clara AI Delivers 34,000x Faster Insights
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. Hi everybody, today we are chatting with Chris Dickens, who is the Vice President of Sales at Yachtrack. Chris, welcome, I'm so happy to have you here and joining us on the podcast. Chris: Thank you, Gina. I appreciate that. Gina Gibson: Excellent. So typically, Chris, we start with the basics. If you could tell us a little bit about yourself. And always like to say, give us something, one thing that might not be on LinkedIn, just to let people get to know you better. Chris: Okay, so let's see. So the basics about me is that I've been in the software or software as a service field for about 23 years. And feel I'm a domain expert in kind of enterprise software, data management, that kind of thing. Currently I'm the vice president of sales at YakTrack. I've really only worked in three companies in 23 years, is pretty unusual out there, right? Gina Gibson: Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. Yes! Chris: Throughout my career though, I've really been in strategic leadership roles and really on growth engines, operational efficiencies, CX, things like that you and I talk about all the time, right? And I'm about making sure people get the outcomes they need. You know, in a world where people are always talking about, hey, look at this cool feature, look at this functionality. ⁓ I always think, a cringe, right? Because really what we want to look at is capabilities and benefits and how you reach the outcomes you need or hit the ROI that you've proposed, whatever it is. And I know you and I agree on that. But that's really my niche. Gina Gibson: Excellent. And tell us one thing we wouldn't know about you from LinkedIn, from your career, Chris. Chris: Well, I'm on several boards, company boards as well ⁓ community boards. And I say that probably my favorite thing, at least at this point, is the animal welfare and fixing pet situation. ⁓ As well as educating people about pets and making sure that they're spayed and neutered. That's a real big thing for me. And I do a lot of work in that area. But other big area that I'm passionate about, and I've heard your passion, so I to talk about that for a second. Hold on Is that the other passion that I have is child advocacy and child advocacy in a nutshell is really kids that have been sexually abused or physically abused or have seen something horrific, some witness some kind of violence in their life. And so that's a big passion of mine as well. But I am on some boards as well. And know yours is Dress for Success. Gina Gibson: I love that. Yes, absolutely. Yes, I and admire those that back to the community. So thank you for what you do. Looking at Track, Chris, give us your pitch. Chris: Well, I'm going put it in simplest terms first because I think that makes the most sense. But Yaktrack helps businesses understand and improve every conversation that they have with customers, no matter what way that conversation is happening, and then taking that information and delivering it back to the entire enterprise. ⁓ in simplest terms. Now, we want to get a little bit more technical. We Omni-channel, we handle business intelligence, AI, machine learning, analytics. You know, we have a full platform and people consume or use pieces of the platform that are going to align with the outcomes they need. So what they're trying to accomplish in my job is to help partners understand what that means or help customers You don't have to bite off too much. You can build the platform, use you can, and then keep adding to it. Gina Gibson: Excellent. And what would be some of the specific problems that YakTrack solves for Chris: wow, there's so many ⁓ every customer's a little bit different. Well, first of all, every customer says, we're unique and we're different. But when you peel back the onion, they're all trying to solve some of the same problems, but we just have to solve them a little bit differently. The one thing I love about Yacht Trek is the fact that if you need to do something, like you're trying to accomplish something, get to some kind of outcome, oftentimes there's four or five different ways to do that. So what we try to look at is what are you trying to accomplish? ⁓ And then we'll tell you what the best way, given the other parameters that you've told us. we sell for operational efficiencies. We look at customer experience. Some people call it agent experience. I call it employee engagement. We look at sales, customer service, every single department marketing we touch. Because again, that front line of a center is the lifeblood of a business. You know everything when you are the lifeblood of the business. and then taking that information, as I said, in my simple terms of what we do and delivering that back into the enterprise so that they can make fundamental changes that they're trying to make, whether that's increasing revenue, operational efficiencies, improving CX, whatever it might be. Gina Gibson: Excellent. And Chris, how does YakTrack differentiate itself from the competitors, from your competitors? Chris: Yeah, I think momentum we got when I initially started was around our cost, We could stand and say we are the lowest cost, we will never be beat. And that still stands today. That still stands today. But I think that the bigger thing that's happened as we built momentum because of the cost is that we became the gold standard. So I now hear my partners out there saying to people, this is the gold standard. This where you need to set the benchmark for excellence for your organization. And my partners are saying, let me bring in this partner and let them show you what they have to deliver. I think those are the two biggest things. We're now a mature proven solution. So I think being able say gold standard. And I think the other thing that I don't want to miss is that we have a lot of outsourcers. And of course, we have all the verticals. And I think the big thing is that we can customize so easily. so customers say, can you, can you? In a world where people say, sorry, can't do that, or that'll be $25,000. All these things happen, right? We're saying, if we do this, it better all of our customers? And typically the answer is yes. So my product team is wonderful. They're absolutely fantastic. Gina Gibson: Wonderful. I mean, cost, every customer is cost conscious. So that is a huge benefit. And then like what you were saying, because so often there are those siloed deliveries, right? ⁓ yes, here's the pre-packaged and here's what you can do. So being and being able to make those customizations for customers is definitely a differentiator. So Chris, with AI everywhere out in the space right now, can you walk us through how YakTrack implements AI and what role it plays ⁓ within your product? Chris: Yeah, so the words AI, machine learning, large language models, everybody's saying them, right? So I think the proof is in the pudding. So I will tell you that one of the things that is differentiating us, you asked that question earlier out in the space, is that in our platform, we're capturing so much data. And when you capture that much data, then what do you do with it? The traditional analysts that look at data, no longer exists. Like if you have a platform like YakTrack, AI thinks 34,000 times faster than a human. And when it has data, it's just data, right? We're just collecting data. So we have part of our platform is called Clara AI. And Clara AI understands all the data and it understands the correlation of the data. So you can ask it anything. You literally can ask it anything. And it will come, because it's compartmentalized to your data, you don't get those hallucinations, right? You get true responses. Now, keep in mind, you might get a response that says, I can't give you that information without access to your CRM, right? Maybe there's no integration yet. So we'll come back with responses that are intuitive to a person. So gone are the days where, I love to tell this story. I remember back in the day, somebody would say, I need a report. Right? I need a report on something. somebody runs off and does a report. And they bring it back two days later and they say, here's the report. And they say, I didn't realize this. Can you go add in this kind of analysis? And they shovel back off and they go do that kind of analysis. And it's an iterative process. And three weeks later, you have your response. Right? Well, AI has changed that. We no put a box around the question. Because if you. have a report that means you know what outcome you're looking for, right? You've asked it a question, somebody's gonna go find the answer to that. Well, Clara AI takes that box away. You're looking at all your data because it can do it 34,000 times faster than human, it makes correlations that it might be intuitive to our brain, right? But it doesn't take any of the biases we have in our brain, it just looks at data. So it's pretty cool. Gina Gibson: Excellent I'm Claire is probably one of your that your customers rave about, one of the unique kind of things that they don't see out there. Are there any unique features that your customers... Chris: Yeah, yeah. So a lot of the competitors out there are talking about, yeah, we can automate quality. Well, we actually can separate the voice of the customer and agent. We can do that with the sentiment. We can do that with all the transcripts. We do it with everything. But where it becomes really important is when you're doing your analysis. So for example, if I'm agent and I say, I really don't know. That means I might have a training opportunity, right? But if you hear a customer say, I don't know, that might be just the agent needing to educate them on what piece of information they need to go get or whatever it is. So being able to separate those things in your analysis, you can ask Clara AI. Most people, if they have stereo recording, they can separate that. But what they don't do is separate it when they bring it into the system. And we do separate it when we bring it into the system. So it's very clever. Gina Gibson: Yeah. Chris: I think a couple other things that not necessarily be unique to us is the auto-summarization, but we have an additional feature that does make us unique. And in the auto-summarization, we actually summarize the interaction, and can make it more verbose or less verbose, depending on what the customer needs, and we place that into the CRM. So a lot of automation, it saves typically about 12 % of... the agent's time, and by the way, thinking about agent experience, they love it, right? So there's all these studies out there that agents are poo-pooing this AI, they don't want AI. Well, when AI does this kind of stuff, they love it, right? They want to embrace it. the ⁓ part of the feature that I mentioned was that we do have super summary. And the super summary, think about a world where agents can literally, as an incoming call, Gina Gibson: Yeah. Chris: or they're working on some kind of piece of material, and it summarizes the last three days or the last five days or the last two calls or the last two calls in one email. the agent automatically has in front of them the summation of these, and they can say, know, Gina, I see that you've called about these things over the last three days. Let's make sure we resolve that today. It changes the game. Gina Gibson: That is absolutely a game changer as far as empowering the agent, but also from the customer experience too, right? that they're being acknowledged and, we you've called a few times. That's fantastic. Chris: ⁓ yeah. Yeah, it really does change the game. And again, that's another what's in it for me for the agent, which is why they love AI. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. I know you've been implementing and what are you finding the most common pitfalls for customers when you go into an implementation with AI Involve, Chris? Chris: Great question and it's going to sound like I'm going to give you easy answers, but they are really easy answers. So first of all, I did a quick video and you know this because we work together, but I like to make sure I empower my partners with tools that make them successful. But just did a video and it's about six minutes and if you want to attach it to this, you're more than welcome to. But ⁓ it really around helping people understand instead of taking buzzwords like AI, machine learning. Gina Gibson: fit. Chris: know, they're just using acronyms, But nobody knows what's behind those. The words mean nothing. First of all, the words mean nothing. What mean something is what is the sustainable outcome you're going to get from implementing what those words actually mean. And so to the pitfalls that I see. the number one, maybe not number one, give you three, maybe four, but the expectations weren't set right? somebody in the sales process set the wrong expectations, right? So you have to be really knowledgeable of you can and cannot do as a a service provider, and make sure that you're educating correctly, which is why I do those videos and ⁓ all different things that I do. But also there's sometimes a disconnect between capabilities and business goals. Like I said in the earlier comment, You have people that talk about features and functionality, and then there's an assumption of what those features and functionality do. So I like to peel the onion back and say, is it you're trying to accomplish? We could probably get there four five different ways. We'll help you understand which way, and then we can define what the capability is that they need, and then how do we tie that capability over into the business goals that they're trying to achieve. And you would be surprised at how many disconnects there are if you're not aware that that's. going to happen, right? The other thing I think is just there's not enough guidance. And it kind of blends with the other two that I just said, but not enough guidance around. Gina Gibson: Yeah. Chris: how they're going to get there. Like we have playbooks. Playbooks are important because it changes the way analysts work, it changes the way QA works, it changes the way managers work, supervisors, even the leadership team and how they're going to get to information. Think about putting Clara AI into a C-level's hands and say, wonder if, could be dangerous, but I mean, you know, like it does change the game about how people use data. Gina Gibson: Yeah. Yes, absolutely. will you share with us one of your customer success stories and kind of what the problem was when you walked in and what you guys implemented and then ⁓ know, what the, whether it was ROI or whatever the metrics were ⁓ you helped improve? Chris: Yeah, I think it's a little bit longer story than probably you want me to tell here, but I will say. But I'll try to crop it down to size. So I think it's about this particular customer. They don't know what they don't know, right? So our job is to educate. And that's one of the things that I love is that I can educate people. And just trying to understand what they were trying to accomplish. And I was trying to gather their baseline. They didn't even have baseline, like, you no baseline. So I said, OK, the first thing that we got to do is Gina Gibson: Thank Chris: is if you implement, if you choose us, need to focus on what is the ROI. You know how hard it is to write an ROI if they don't have baseline, right? So they said, let's just pick a number. Let's just pick a number and use it. We can correct it later, right? Now, what are you trying to accomplish? And then we wrote the goals of what we were trying to accomplish. And then I said, OK, I need your commitment that when we launch, we're going to launch quietly and get our baseline. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. Chris: because we can't help your senior leadership know how you spent your budget dollars if we don't have a baseline to show them where you started. By the way, the first win is you didn't have a baseline and we gave you a baseline. That's a huge win, So, yeah, so helping them get that baseline and make sure that it kind of stayed under the rate, it was a little bit backwards, right? Because normally you would tell the groups what you're doing and your teams motivated about the new change. Gina Gibson: Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ Yes. Chris: But this was a little bit different because we had to launch it quietly to get the baseline and then build that momentum afterwards. then we had, this was an interesting thing, we had them start tracking each one of the agents, say, hey, if you see something really cool that happened because you now have this technology, write it down. It doesn't have to be a quantifiable thing. Just write it down. Like, how did it make your life easier? And then taking that stuff and mashing it together so that you could go back, they could go back to their leadership team and say, look how we used a budget dollars, like look what we've done. And you could actually quantify it, but then you had soft things that were important to the agents. I think that's the biggest win. then, and that was in a highly regulated organization, highly regulated organization. So that was even a better win because there were other things that we had to take into consideration. By the way, I can guarantee you when that company goes back to get more budget dollars, they'll run the same kind of project plan they won't get the budget dollars because they were so good about figuring out how they were going to prove that they made their return on investment strategy work. Gina Gibson: That's excellent. And what's next for Yachtrack? mean, everybody's kind of looking, you know, it used to be the five-year plan. Now it's like, okay, what's 18 months look like because everything is changing so fast. Is there any new product releases or any developments or partnerships or anything on the horizon for Yachtrack? Chris: I knew it. There are a lot of new developments and in one of them, embarrassed to say this. One of them I can't even remember what they're it. Like it's so cool. The team told me what it is and I had never heard of it before, so we'll see. But I'll keep it quiet because we launched these things and I think it'll be great. It is a really cool piece of what we're going to add to our platform. Gina Gibson: Excellent. now just to wrap things up, Chris, I've always been a fan of James Lipton. And so to end the podcast, we always do three rapid fire questions. So what is your Chris: Ooh, I wasn't ready for this. ⁓ Gina Gibson: What is your favorite word? Chris: Big study. Gina Gibson: What's your least favorite word? Chris: Feature. Gina Gibson: awesome. ⁓ excites you the most? Chris: Hahaha My husband and my dog, my family. Gina Gibson: I love that. Chris, if somebody wants more information about YakTrac, how it can help their company, who should they reach out to? Chris: Well, first and foremost, obviously you. But they can reach out to me directly, but you know, obviously I'm on your podcast because this is what you do every single day. So reach out to you and you will get them in touch with me if it's appropriate. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Thanks so much, Chris. I really appreciate you coming on today and sharing with us a little bit about YakTrac and what they do, the future looks like and your thoughts on AI. It's always great having specialists from the industry. So thanks so much for joining us. Thanks everybody for joining in and have a great day. Chris: Thank you. Thank you.