Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Stop Agent Burnout: How Snowfly Uses Gamification & AI to Boost Contact Center Performance
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, everyone. Today we're chatting with Eli Cox, CEO and owner and Emmett Johnson, Director of Strategic Partnerships of Snowfly Performance, Inc. Eli and Emmett, I've been looking forward to this one for quite some time. Welcome to the podcast. Elijah Cox: Hi Gina. Emmett Johnson: Thank you very much. Gina Gibson: Let's start with the basics. Eli, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Elijah Cox: ⁓ As you said, I'm the... I'm the CEO and part owner of Snowfly. I've been running the company now for, I think we're coming on eight years, maybe a little bit longer than that. I actually started at Snowfly as a junior developer and just kind of worked my way up. And then the original owner who started the company in 1999 retired. And I bought it from him ⁓ quite a while ago, specifically because we wanted to like rewrite technology and get everything into the cloud. And I just saw huge opportunities there. So a little bit about me from Gina Gibson: Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. Elijah Cox: that I'm an accountant by training and a software engineer by hobby and so that is the story of my life is just constantly figuring out businesses work and then solving problems using technology and software and that has been the story of my life and story of Snowflie it's kind of been a reflection of who I am so that's just a little bit of who I am. Gina Gibson: That's awesome. A tough act to follow there, Emmett, but do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself too? Emmett Johnson: Yeah, I've been in the Snowfly for, I'm in my seventh year. And so I was one of the first hires I guess Eli had. And I come from a background of finance actually spent 25 years in financial services, managing money for, you know, for people. And I basically wanted to change careers because I am not a brandy sniffer cigar type Wall Street reader. guy. I like to deal with people and the more laid back culture of the software, SaaS industry. And so I interviewed multiple different people and found a home with Snowfly and just love it. Gina Gibson: That's fantastic. And Emmett, I'll stick with you for a little bit here. Why don't you go ahead and give us the Snowfly Elevator Pitch. Emmett Johnson: Right on. Well, okay. So in the world of contact centers, particularly, ⁓ those are jobs where you are working a pretty difficult gig. And as Eli has said before, it can be soul sucking. so adding a little bit of ⁓ joy and entertainment and gamification into that process can lighten it somewhat. But contact centers are great because they also track the most amount of data. So the more data that is collected, the more things that we can attach little game of gamification to. And that's kind of how Snowfly started, right? 26 years ago was taking the psychological principles of the founder that, for his career, he basically helped employers engage their employees in the workplace using psychological principles and gamification. And so that's where our roots are. ⁓ Then about six years ago, we got tired of trying to gamify analytics. ⁓ data because it was actually not that great for the agent itself. Very good high level data that you could get strategic information, but you really couldn't use it well for agents. And so we decided we were going to build our own product so that it would give you all the same high level data, but also allow the agents to self-train using their analytics that they're getting from our automated quality monitoring. ⁓ it just was a natural fit. We do coaching, have incentives, ⁓ recognition, of course, the games, ⁓ surveys, we kind of have all the solutions that you need to drive employee retention, which ends up hopefully with some better CX numbers, improve performance numbers for the for the agents and supervisors, and we can make everything more efficient and automated. So all altogether, it's a it's a really great package program that you can you know, fit in just about any environment, much less, you know, BPO contact center space, but just about in any industry. ⁓ And it's a la carte, and it's a monthly billing. So there you go, we basically are, we try to be able to fit everybody's needs and budget. Gina Gibson: And the... Elijah Cox: So Gina, sorry before I go, that was the 60th floor elevator pitch. That was the, that was the going all the way to the penthouse elevator pitch. Emmett Johnson: That was, yeah, that's when Elf hits all the buttons on the entire, entire, yeah, entire straight building. Well, that's what you get when you ask a sales guy to give you a rundown on your business. Gina Gibson: The CN Tower in Toronto elevator bench. I love it actually. I actually love it. my follow-up question on that is what would you guys say sets you apart from your competitors? And I know from working with you in the past, the monthly billing is one thing where they're not, customers are not tied into a long-term kind of contract situation. But in the gamification and recognition space, what sets you guys apart? Elijah Cox: I'll take that in. So there's really three principles that we've tried to live through since I've been running the company. And the first principle for everything is white glove service. So if you talk to any of our clients, they love us. We make long-term permanent friendships with our clients. Our longest client has now been with us for 22 years. And that's beyond, I mean, just me, that's just the principle of the company. So if you work with Snowfly, you're going to create a lifetime relationship. what we do. The second thing we do is we're not an out of the box, we're not a cookie cutter solution. So you can get up and running in two, three days, but we are going to adapt, we're going to apply and like Emmet said, we're an all cart system. So you're going to get what you need and you don't have to overpay for licensing or for products that aren't going to apply or that are already duplicated in other places. Like we're very aware coming into an HRAS, you've already got surveys and something so we don't make you for that bloat and so we can give you exactly what you need and customize it to be the way that you need it. And that sets us aside. mean that sets us apart. The ROI on that alone will usually take care of any of our competitors when we come into a deal. The third is the structure of the way our company is set up. We are We're about a year and a half, two years ahead of most every, most of our competitors. And the reason I say that is because... Rather than spending all of our money on marketing, we spend our money on products and on people. And so what that allows us to do is to be very flexible and very fast and to be able to adapt to the AI stuff that is exploding and to new technologies and new security issues. And because of that, ⁓ we don't grow by 100x, but we retain our clients and all of our clients bring us partnerships and referrals. And that keeps us more than busy enough for anything that we could do. And so we can help you cut edge we can help you into new technology and even with like government Clients we can even help you take ten steps back and go back to where the government is from the 1990s and We can do everything in between and it's because of the way that the foundational way we built our technology Gina Gibson: Excellent. And you guys kind of pulling the covers back a little bit. How does Snowfly help with agent retention and making sure like ensuring their performance is there and we're in as you said it could be soul sucking. We're in a high turnover kind of industry right in the contact center space. So talk a little bit about the specifics about what how Snowfly helps with that. Elijah Cox: So what we've seen. is there are a lot of gamification things out there. And I mean, the obvious thing that we've seen is most people, I would say 90 % of the market doesn't understand gamification. So they'll throw leaderboards, they'll throw fancy recognition things, and that is really fine. I mean, it actually works. But what we see is a lot of diminishing returns and boredom. And so generally speaking, when you just throw gamification into a product or as a product in and of itself, Gina Gibson: Yeah. Elijah Cox: You'll have good retention for three to six months and then it will die on the vine. So what we ended up doing and the way we approach it is rather than selling gamification for gamification sake, what we do is we try to find what is happening in the life cycle of the agents and then we try to support them. And as Emmett said, you attach the gamification to the things that are being supported. Our favorite and our most valuable thing that we've been able to really move the needle on agent tenure is ⁓ specifically ⁓ agent dashboards. most neglected products on the market because it's expensive and it's difficult. And so you can show agents points and you can show agents like comparisons versus other other agents but to really show them what their supervisors want and then to utilize our quality tools, our AQM tools, our survey and feedback tools, our KPI tools. you give the agent the ability to actually change their performance and then get tracked in near real time. That's what we find is the number one driver for agent retention is giving them a little bit more control over their job. The way that you lose agents is having them show up to a coaching session and get blindsided by a performance problem that they had no idea that they had. And when you're a, you know, when you're a Home Depot, when you're a, you know, some huge company that has the money to build it out, that's fine. But let's be honest, most companies don't have the resources and they can't go pay for a Tableau integration to provide to their agents. It's just too expensive. So the second piece that is the second most important that we beg all of our clients to do is, especially in a digital world, you need to connect your employees. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. Elijah Cox: And so we suggest remote work. We see major productivity gains from remote work. However, your age and tenure will actually decrease with remote work because they feel isolated and lost. And then the interaction we do have are coaching or training, which is either one really boring or two, it's a negative interaction. And so we have a whole series of tools that help people. ⁓ I mean, it is still remote, so it's not as good as actually people being together. Gina Gibson: Mm-hmm. Elijah Cox: but it gives them recognition tools, gives them communication tools, it gives them... Teamwork tools ⁓ that makes the team feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves. And that's the second thing. If you can get your team members to feel like they're part of something that they actually care about, that will make a big difference. And when you're a BPO and you're outbound selling, which is a tough thing to do, you can't unify around the product because you get yelled at too much. And so it's very difficult to unify around that product, but you can unify around culture or you can unify around environment and so there's you just have to be a little bit creative and then working with our consultants and our experts we can help you utilize whatever that culture piece is and help you gather around that as a team to feel human again and not just an invisible piece of a cog. Gina Gibson: Yeah, that's fantastic. And we can stick on that stream or talk about one of the other modules, but what are some of the results you guys are seeing from your customers? Like a sense of the impact of using Snowfly. Elijah Cox: That's a great question. So our highest ROI product right now, interestingly, has actually been our manual QA product. So we have a whole bunch of tiers with our manual QA product, but effectively what the product does is it ingests interactions, calls, video recordings, emails, tickets, chat, text, it doesn't matter, like interactions. And then we provide a whole suite of tools for leadership, supervisor, quality team, management, it doesn't matter, but leadership to be able to monitor those interactions. and then utilizing the tools and the reports and then the agent dashboards and then the gamification. ⁓ we've seen a speed to proficiency from the agents that we've never seen before using any products and and what we are researching and have some white papers written on is It's that ability to one be able to blame the software to the software is a bad guy So then your supervisor is your advocate So your supervisor comes in and you open these reports together and you say look what the software found You know, I can't believe it. Well, let's work together to see how we can fix this And then also you've got this coach friend. ⁓ And we're able to provide agents practically near real time feedback. And we're able to integrate into the LMS and then we're able to integrate into our coaching system. you just build this tool set. And what we found is you're moving quality from a checkbox requirements to a speed to proficiency tool where everyone feels empowered and you're building a team again, right? Your supervisor is now moving toward an advocacy instead of a bad guy. instead of cracking the whip, of fix your problems. I know that sounds just a little bit too good to be true, but that is literally why we have our gamification and that's why we always give our suggestions of, here's what you could do as a team and here's, Valentine's is coming up. So a lot of our clients are using candy grams. They're sending out fun little Valentine's messages to each other and when they're achieving their Gina Gibson: Yeah. Elijah Cox: their KPI goals, they're getting badges that are decorated with Halloween candy and flowers and hearts. And then next month it'll be clovers, right? I mean, it's easy game. It's just the regular, but that's what we're seeing. Like that's really the changes that we're seeing is the agents have always had the tools, but now they know how to find them. They know where to find them. And now they're working together with their supervisor instead of against their supervisor. Gina Gibson: That makes a lot of sense. How are you seeing AI coming to play with like the role of, of course, you know, it was going to end there, right? human recognition. Elijah Cox: Yes, of course. AI is so complicated. ⁓ So we've seen a few different things. starting first, the AQM, right? Which was, we were a little nervous that our AQM product was going to die immediately just because of how big AI grew. And a lot of our competitors were coming in and saying, you know, AI and you can do it so fast. And what we found out is that AI is just so inaccurate. it's so, it creates such a negative impact that we saw it decline in the market as fast as it grew. So what we did, again, we thought forward, we saw this coming. We've been using AI for like three years before this big firestorm happened. But what we did is we built ⁓ human training tools into our product so that as our people are utilizing the system, it's automatically training our algorithms and our models. And so before hallucinations were even a thing that people were measuring and before inaccuracies and before all this stuff. Gina Gibson: Yep. Elijah Cox: was already happening we were already running it 90 93 accuracy on an AQM because of the because of our manual tools. And so one of the things we always tell all of our clients, know, AI is the 2026 thing we've got to work toward is we always tell our clients never allow an unsupervised AI into your system. And that includes AQM, includes decision making, that includes summarizing. It doesn't matter, but there needs to be a built-in accuracy and flag tool into the software or you avoid it until there's a system. And not an email to say this is an Gina Gibson: Mm-hmm. Elijah Cox: accurate, there needs to be integrated AI training tools and whatever you're using. And that needs to become compliance. That should become the requirement to utilize AI with any kind of tooling is to make sure that you have human accuracy tools built in. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. Absolutely. Elijah Cox: On the negative, that's the negative side. On the positive side, ⁓ one of our favorite things that we discovered, we have this module called AI Insights. And so what it does is it listens to our calls and it listens to your tone of voice and your pitch and your energy and all of the conversational analytics that come along with that AQM. And we used it with an outbound sales program and just started asking it, like, what can these agents do? Like, what could happen? Here's the, we already know their scorecard. We already have access to a good portion of their LMS and their procedures and we're already hearing what their customers are are objecting and how they're rejecting and their tone of voice strongly they're objecting we could even identify where it is that the sentiment changed in the interactions during the call and then you know within like six hours we can tell our client hey right here this agent is losing their callers they're pushing too hard or they're being to you know they're they're not they're not using the proper rebuttaling or whatever might be. That was... Gina Gibson: Mm-hmm. Elijah Cox: It was absolute magic to watch AI be able to take that off of a human's hands and to be able to provide us a summary. So it's not just saying, hey, here's how you could sell, but every single interaction has little coaching notes and little agent opportunities and little agent weaknesses so that as the agents are going through the day, they get little dashboards that just say, hey, pay attention to this. And then again, always gamify it. As they implement, we can detect the trend and we can say, nice job. You listen to the feedback and look how it's affecting your trend. I mean, AI is magical, but it's like fire, right? You have to treat it with a lot of respect and a lot of fear, right? Put rocks around it and put walls around Make sure that it is so, so well protected so that it doesn't wreak havoc. But, ⁓ man, it's magical. Emmett Johnson: That's a good analogy. Fire. Gina Gibson: I was just going to say I love that analogy and I've not heard that before. Do you guys want to share going on that vein of seeing the magic happen with your customers? Do you want to share a success story with us? Elijah Cox: I would, I'd love to. Gina Gibson: Yes. Fire away. Elijah Cox: Can I go? Great. ⁓ going back to another one of our outbound sales clients, it was, it was literally brand new. ⁓ They, one of our BPO clients had just won the business and the client had just, they acquired a company and were just starting a sales process. And so our BPO had just purchased, you know, they just won is like a 40 seat little small outbound sales program. And the, They had put into their contract that they had like six months to develop a scorecard and to find sales trends. And then they were going to work together with a client to set expectations in SLA. And then in six months, they were going to meet again and redo contract according to the last six months of performance. Well, we implemented our AI insights and then we just kind of did the AQM piece for just a little bit. But they had no LMS, they had no scorecard, they had no history. Like it was literally card block. was brand new and it took us nine days of just letting a model kind of run on the patterns and we had an analyst that was just going through and using our training tools to say no not that way not that way yep this is good this is and they just use our interface and they just kind of went through it again nine days and we had a scorecard built for them we had suggested SLAs and then we actually started generating ⁓ LMS articles, like knowledge-based articles for them based on what was happening in the calls and then the conversations from both sides. And none of it was fancy, right? It was just kind of like a blue output, but. Within two weeks, we just went to the client and we're like, hey, here, this is what you should be doing. Here's the scorecard you should start with. Here's a bunch of the articles that you should create. This is our script. This is our suggestion. And so they threw it in. It took them about a month, right, to get everything in because, you know, knowledge. It just takes a while to get stuff in. But it took them at month two, they approached their client and said, we're ready. And that difference between that two months and that six months earned them an extra three years. Gina Gibson: Yeah. Elijah Cox: on their contract. I like, and nobody had that expectation, right? It was just a, knew what products we had and the BPO came to us and said, here's what we're doing and boom. And it took 14 days for us to be able to deliver, to give them a deliverable. Again, AI is magic when used within the proper tools, but it was a miraculous, couldn't believe that it worked as well as it did. And. Gina Gibson: Wow. Wow. That's beyond impressive. Elijah Cox: very carefully that month we did a month because we didn't want to just trust the AI, right? We didn't want to just say, here's what AI kicked out and what our analyst thinks. So they used it for a month to make sure that it was realistic and it fit. And of course they made changes and of course they adapted it, but it still put them four months ahead of schedule. Gina Gibson: Fantastic. And now one of the things I've always loved about Snowfly is that it's like rooted in, as Emmett alluded to earlier, rooted in human psychology and the inner psyche. So what's next for Snowfly? Like, how do you envision the product evolving to the ever-changing needs of our customers? Elijah Cox: ever-changing means. So right now, our, I mean, we're very excited about our 2026, 2027 is communication. So in the past, it hasn't been quite as important, but as we're seeing that remote work taking a bigger and bigger toll on the psyche of the human, we're realizing that we need more and more human-to-human touch points and not just automation. So some of the things we're working on right now is building in our communicative AI and our automation and our gamification to build, you know, kind of a discord kind of processes or, you know, teams utilizing things that already out there. Like we don't need to reinvent the wheel. They're, all over. but giving people this protected communication channels where that's safe to have a little bit of fun ⁓ and it's safe to not be in trouble for productivity problems. And the research that we have to do and we have to publish before we can really go hard into the market with this is that it doesn't actually damage productivity to allow people to play during the day. And one of the things that we're actually measuring right now, my director of IT Gina Gibson: Mm-hmm. Elijah Cox: His name is Kyle Murphy, one of my favorite humans on the planet. He set up, we're all remote, right? We've got people in Mexico, we've got a couple in the Philippines, we've got a bunch in the United States and all over the place. And so he set it up, he set up a Friday afternoon game day. And so everybody brings, they either bring a board game or a card game or ⁓ like some kind of computer or console game. And they spend three hours as a team. Anybody that can chill up, right? And they just kind of hang out. And at first he was thinking, you know, it'd be like one or two people but it is like people set aside their time to go hang out with their with their co-workers and so that's what we want to facilitate we want to find ways that's not gonna work for everybody but find ways to get people together in their cultural way that's still safe and it's still protected within a company so that you don't have to go use it, you know a whatsapp that's That's got all sorts of social and unprotected and all over the place. So we want to build that into our compliant environment and still show the evidence that allowing people to breathe and to smile and to laugh, even if they're not on the phones per se, is still an effective work time. That's where we're going. Wish us luck. Gina Gibson: Yeah, I love that. Love that. And it's the opposite direction of what people are thinking right now, I love that. Love. Elijah Cox: I know. Again, it's hard to train people to think differently because you think, I've got to get my occupancy up and I've got to get my, like in my attendance, I've got to, yes, take a deep breath. It's, there's, there's evidence to show that conversion and revenue is way more important and it's just important to understand where that correlation is. Gina Gibson: Yes. But yeah. Love that. Is there anything you guys that I haven't asked you about that you'd like to share with the audience today? Emmett Johnson: Well, I was just thinking when we were talking about the AI stuff is that one of the things I love about being able to show Snowfly to people that are considering AI, they've probably already looked at some products, looked at the price tags of some products. ⁓ And it's either something that they're just scared to death to try because of the commitment and the amount of money that it would cost. ⁓ We have in our manual QA tools, ⁓ for just about any contact center to step into just a platform that will allow for a lot of efficiencies to be able to ⁓ to go over more calls quicker. And those tools are the same tools that we use in our AQM. And so they can step into the AQM from maybe the manual QA tools. And it's a small step, right? It's not a huge commitment, not a giant step, and particularly BPOs, which, you know, they're always cost conscious. ⁓ Gina Gibson: Mm-hmm. Emmett Johnson: we are able to show them how it works, how they can add the efficiencies. And then it's really fun because then we start talking to them about, this is a great coaching opportunity. Why don't we take a look at our coaching module? And they're like, where's this been all my life? You know, and a lot of the recognition and the incentives, we can do bonuses for people very inexpensively. And so we just have all these different answers. there are a lot of people didn't even know was a problem to begin with, but it's like we give them Gina Gibson: Yeah. Emmett Johnson: solution and they're like my life is so much better now. Thank you so much. And you know, and it's it is it's it's really gratifying because we don't have a huge marketing budget. We got me. And so I can't help people understand just how awesome the product is by showing them, you know, 30 second commercial during the Super Bowl. But I can step them into a very affordable product and then they get to see the white glove treatment. They get to see, you know, the Elijah Cox: Yeah. Gina Gibson: . Emmett Johnson: the benefits and the productivity ⁓ increases and the efficiencies and it's just it's a lot of fun. mean Planning gigs is my favorite thing, obviously, as any salesman would say, but I'm probably even more gratified by the upsells that happen after I've handed it off because everybody is so pleased with the product that they bought. They want to know more. And so they keep adding on and it's great. mean, it's one of the best parts of my job is to see how much people really enjoy our product. Gina Gibson: I love the crawl walk more on a poach too, because so many, and like you said with BPO's, it just gives everybody that. Let's get comfortable and then move to the next level. And a lot of times, and I know you've alluded to this earlier, but a lot of products out there don't have that. It's all or nothing or it's everything there. So as we wrap up, gentlemen, I've always been a fan of James Lipton. So to end the podcast, we do a little rapid fire. And so ⁓ I'll ask you both the same questions, but Emmett, let's start with you. What noise or sound do you love? Elijah Cox: Peace out. Emmett Johnson: Do I love? ⁓ my gosh, you're probably going to... I'll just say a crowd erupting and cheering and applause. Yeah. Gina Gibson: Hmm, Eli? Elijah Cox: That was weird. I had to think for a second. Do you know that sound when you're in the mountains and there's a foot of snow and there's crust because it's cold and you step through the crust and everything's just completely silent? That is just like peace. That is my happy place. Gina Gibson: Yeah. love them. Eli, what sound or noise do you hate? Elijah Cox: Geez, crowd erupting really loud. ⁓ I don't know. What sound do I hate? I don't like people chewing and I've got four kids. So that's problem. Gina Gibson: Emmett, how about you? ⁓ Emmett Johnson: Yeah, screaming baby. That's like every single, yeah, every single like nerve in my body starts to go off. Elijah Cox: Green baby. ⁓ and then come on over. Hahaha Gina Gibson: Emma, final one, what profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Emmett Johnson: Profession? ⁓ Professional gamer. Gina Gibson: Yeah. Hmm Eli? Emmett Johnson: I'm just thinking, yeah, I would never try it because I'm terrible. I don't play games, but I'm just thinking you get paid to play games. It's got to be like you're on the mountaintop. You've won. Gina Gibson: you Elijah Cox: I'd be alright. So is this like wish list? it's, I guess, okay, so what I'd love to do, I would love to be a food tester. You know, the companies that are like building products are like a chef's, you know, test. ⁓ man. Not a critic. I don't want to be a critic. I don't like the writing part of it, but I would love to food test, man. That'd be, yeah, that'd be great. Gina Gibson: It's be fun. Mm. Yeah. the eating part of it. Gentlemen, ⁓ if somebody wants more information about Snowfly, who should they reach out to? Elijah Cox: The best person on the planet is Gina. She'll tell you everything you need to know. And in all honesty, Gina, I mean, talk to Gina because you know the technology and you know the peripheral and you know how to solve specific problems without having to buy more than you need. So bringing somebody like you, Gina, with an implementer, with the knowledge of what's going on, Gina, yeah. Emmett Johnson: Mm-hmm. Gina Gibson: I appreciate that. Thank you. And gentlemen, I've just had a blast. Thank you so much for joining me. And I look forward to having you back. Maybe next year when you release the new feature functionality, we can talk about how that's impacting contact centers. But for today, thank you so much for your time and for joining us. Emmett Johnson: 100%. Elijah Cox: All right. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time. Emmett Johnson: Thank you.