Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / What If Your AI Could Tell You Which Calls You Can’t Fulfill? | Jamaal Savwoir
Transcript
- Gina: Hello everybody. Today we're chatting with Jamaal Savwoir, the Senior Channel Solutions Consultant at PolyAI. Jamaal, I'm so glad you're here with us. Your experience in building channel programs has been incredible because you worked for some of the biggest UCaaS and CCaaS providers out there, and now you're doing it with voice AI. So I'm excited to hear your perspective on things today, and welcome to the podcast. Jamaal Savwoir: Thank you so much for having me on, Gina. This is a pleasure. Gina: Excellent. So let's start with the basics. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Jamaal Savwoir: Yeah, so again, my name is Jamaal Savwoir. I'm the senior channel solutions consultant at PolyAI. And my background goes all the way back to when UCaaS used to be called VoiceOver IP or VoIP. so I've spent time in unified communications, contact center as a service, and customer experience consulting, which gave me a totally different lens on the technology landscape because it gave me access to people that are more around process and people. So understanding not only how the technology works. there goes an airpod. Gina: Yeah. Jamaal Savwoir: Not only how the technology works, but also how it really impacts the frontline workers, the administrators, the operations, the business people, all around customer experience and contact center. Gina: And I think that I mean, that alone brings such a unique perspective into the organization because typically your other operations or technology rarely do you find the combination of the two. So I think that's probably one of the factors that makes you so good at what you do. Jamaal Savwoir: it it like I said, having that lens and really understanding how those technology s decisions impact not only the customer experience, but that employee experience. You know, those people are frequently taxed, they're frequently impacted by things that are out of their control, but they have to maintain that steady, you know, brand awareness and tolerance for change and dealing with customers and also systems that may or may not be compatible with what they're trying to do. So it's really been eye opening. Gina: I love it. So tell us one thing about yourself that we might not find on LinkedIn. Jamaal Savwoir: Ooh, let's see. well I was born at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. My dad was in the Air Force at the time, so but I grew up mostly in New Orleans. That might be on LinkedIn, I don't know. But it's really cool to have the reference point of a pretty good place to be born. Gina: I love it. Go ahead and give us the PolyAI elevator pitch. Jamaal Savwoir: Yeah, so PolyAI is really going from the foundation of conversational artificial intelligence to the frontier of agentic dialogue. And the distinction there is there there are a lot of tools out there that have natural sounding conversations, some of them better than others, but with agentic dialogue, PolyAI really focuses on resolution. We want to take those high volume use cases, those frequent flowers. Those frequent frequent requests from from callers, from people that make him come in on different channels and have our virtual agents actually go out and resolve that concern for that customer. So Not only having a natural conversation, but also touching those back end systems, having the ability to actually impact something like a booking or or reservation or a doctor's appointment or an order an order delivery for a customer and produce that outcome without having to touch a human. So That really distinguishes us and our enterprise deployments have really proven that we're able to deliver those results. Gina: I love that. And and because of your vast experience on both the business, the technical side, what is it about PolyAI that drew you there? Jamaal Savwoir: honestly, the people behind the platform drew me to the company. I'd seen some demos and seen them at trade shows and and seen some of the the logos that that the company has acquired over the years, but really getting to know the people and getting to work with some of the people that I'd worked with in the past that I knew were really excellent at what they at what they do. that that's what really sold me on on moving over to PolyAI. And it's it's honestly some of the smartest people I've ever worked with in the industry and I get to interface with them on a daily basis. Gina: That's great. And you alluded to the fact that it's a really crowded market, right? Like it is, there are a lot of chatbot, a lot of conversational AI, you know, vendors out there. Can we talk your can you talk a little bit about the approach? And I know it's voice first, right? And and you kind of you guys have built on your own models in different places. Can we talk about what an experience looks like? So what does it look like on a live call and what is a customer on the other end kind of experience? Jamaal Savwoir: Yeah, I'm glad you asked it in that framework because there are a lot of solutions out there that were chat first or digital first. and that is a much easier starting point for someone to say, hey, we have a viable solution, and now we're gonna maybe lay our voice on top of that, or kind of say we have some voice stuff just so we can be in the conversation. But PolyAI actually flipped that model and we started off with the most difficult channel, which is that human voice. And the name of the company, PolyAI comes from the word polyglot. our co-founders speak multiple languages. And it was very important for us as we got going to be able to understand human speech in multiple dialects, multiple languages, but also to be able to piece together the parts of a conversation that matter for a virtual agent. when you're in a digital environment and you're gonna ask a question or make a statement, you're pretty much gonna finish typing what you s what you have to say before you enter, right? So from a technology perspective, a an agent can take all that in, You the the the hardest part of of those operations really being voice, understanding what people are saying in different languages, and not having being able to take part of a conversation and understand you're waiting for the rest. Or take the whole conversation that it may have multiple things in it. Hey, I need to reschedule my appointment, but I also need to refill my prescription. And being able to have those natural conversations, and we call that spoken language understanding. So there's There's NLU that's out there, but it's very different when you're dealing with spoken language. So that differentiates us. we've also continued to invest in even better models, better text to speech, better speech to text, and better capabilities on the back end to really produce those outcomes for callers. Gina: Well, and I think one of the things too, Jamaal, is that because you started with voice first, you've been able you guys have had that runway to work through all the errors and the issues, where as you mentioned, those that started with chat or started with email, it's a different experience on the voice side for sure. Can Jamaal Savwoir: Totally. Totally. Yeah. Gina: you walk us through a use case with one of your customers? You don't have to disclose the name or anything like that. But where you where you guys Jamaal Savwoir: sure. Gina: made a real difference and kinda Maybe what was happening before and then how PolyAI changed their outcomes. Jamaal Savwoir: Yeah, and and I love this story because it it also speaks to the human element. a lot of a lot of questions around AI are about is it going to replace people? is it observable? Do I really know what's going on in the in that black box where all this weird stuff is happening and it's making all these strange hallucinations? we have a customer, a large retailer, that started out with PolyAI in a very narrow use case, just basic where is my order kind of stuff. Gina: Mm. Jamaal Savwoir: and it it gave them the ability to see kind of the early benefits of the high volume of calls they get during during things like, you know, Black Friday or the holiday season where there's just so much going on. Their human agents, their human representatives are inundated with calls. And a lot of those things are are frequently asked questions. Hey, I want to go to this store, what time do they close? Okay. Well, you got five of those calls in line ahead of somebody that is trying to get a present for their grandchild or something like that, you know, that's sitting on hold for five, 10 minutes. So The early use cases were about the simpler things, you know, frequently asked questions, but we quickly got into where is my order, buy online, pick up in store, and even more complex use cases like price matching. If you offer something online, then maybe the difference price different prices was in store, and you want to keep those loyal customers, you want to give them the ability to make that phone call and say, Hey, I just bought this thing, it's cheaper online, you know, can you give me some some kind of break on this price? So Those turned into very complex scenarios. So from a crawl, walk-run perspective, we're able to quickly get from the easier, maybe simple answer things to the more complex multi-turn conversations, multiple back-end systems having to be collaborated together to deliver those outcomes for callers. And then on top of that, we're able to enable some chat functionality across three languages that gave them coverage in French, Spanish, and English across North America so they can handle Canadian customers. It can handle US based customers, they can handle Mexico based customers. Gina: How long did that expansion take? So starting with the simple use case, use case number one, how long did it take for them to build confidence in the in the platform and and see the results that they were hoping for? Jamaal Savwoir: Yeah, really in a matter of months, they went from a lower containment and resolution rate to a much higher containment and resolution rate. I think on chat right now we able to resolve about eighty percent of the inquiries that come in over chat. and the real impact to the human representatives was, you know, in the US, they used to have to staff for Black Friday weekend and and that season, but now due to the volume of calls that are handled by the PolyAI agent, their US representatives are able to take those days off. So they they have enough capacity to send their US representatives home for those holidays. They can overflow to Canada and Mexico, but they don't lose it they don't lose a beat because the PolyAI agents are handing the highest volume of calls. Gina: That's fantastic. Who is your ICP? And for people that like, where does PolyAI fit in? Like they might think, well, I have this CCaaS platform and and they already have an AI offering. So where does Jamaal Savwoir: Yeah. Gina: PolyAI kind of fit in that? Jamaal Savwoir: Yeah, we we are what some people call a point solution. So we we we don't we're not beholden to any sort of CCaaS or UCaaS you know based platform and it doesn't require anyone to change what they have to use PolyAI. So we can wedge right in between that entry point and the contact center system and handle those calls or those inquiries over digital digital channels in lieu of the contact center platform. So we integrate with the usual suspects that maybe your magic quadrant CCaaS platforms. But we also have in integrations at the telephony level where a customer may have a large volume of calls, large volume of locations, but they don't necessarily have a context center platform. Gina: What's next for PolyAI? Jamaal Savwoir: So many, so many great things. I'm glad you asked. we we are recently in the finishing up the development cycle with a couple of great tools. One of those is our Wren Studio Assistant. So our product is is built on a back end, but the customer facing or the the configuration facing part of the system is called Agent Studio. Inside of Agent Studio is a very useful tool that we call Wren. Most of our product names have some bird references to them. So but Wren is is a multi functional assistant that lives inside of Agent Studio that helps customers build new functionality, test functionality, and analyze real conversations to produce better business outcomes. So you'll see that in the interface. looks like a little a cute little bird, and you can really prompt it just like you would prompt a a chat agent in an in another AI tool. you can say, Hey Wren, my My system currently answers these types of calls. I'd love it to be able to answer these other four use cases. Help me build that into the system. And it will produce a plan. it'll give you some test scenarios. It may reference, hey, in order for you to update this automatically, I need to connect to an API. Do you have any API documentation available? And it understands how to read that and connect to different things. So it's very useful from a configuration perspective. But where I find the real power of the solution is in analyzing conversations that are going on in the system. So if you see that you have a high volume of calls asking about a particular business process or particular business outcome, Wren can actually identify some use cases that will be helpful to make that better for your customer base. One example we have is a hospitality organization had a lot of restaurants and there were lots of customers calling in for two-person reservations when the when the restaurants were configured for four and six top seating. So by doing a basic analysis, just asking Wren say, hey, what types of what types of calls or what types of reservations are we not able to fulfill in the last 30 days, it can give you a full analysis of who's calling, what time they're calling, what they're requesting, and actually recommend some things that will improve the business, not just the call center. So I really find that very valuable and you know creating A/B tests and anything else that you may dream of to improve your customer experience, Wren can handle. Gina: I love that because it's really showing not even not as you said, not just in the call center, but in the operations of your business as well. That's fantastic. Jamaal, is there anything you'd like the audience to know that I haven't asked you yet today? Jamaal Savwoir: yeah. I think one of the things when you asked about ideal customer profile, we start we kinda went down the r the road of contact center system integration. But I'd say that you know there are some really powerful use cases in healthcare and that's not just in patient access but also in medical devices. really powerful use cases in utilities. So PG&E is one of our customers. we we've we handled lots of calls for them during outages and things like that. But we've had some really great outcomes for so many different industries, logistics, healthcare, as I mentioned, retail, restaurants, hospitality. So as as your audience thinks about, you know, where can they produce real financial benefit, business benefit, customer loyalty benefit around artificial intelligence, PolyAI fits squarely in the case where you you bring us in, we help identify opportunities and we really produce great outcomes. Gina: That's fantastic. Can we dive a little bit into the medical device one just for for knowledge sake? Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about Jamaal Savwoir: Sure. Yeah. Gina: that. Jamaal Savwoir: Yeah. So if you think about the entire medical device industries, a lot of those things require reorders or resupplies. they may also involve insurance verification. So it gets it gets rather complex to really produce that outcome for callers. And they're also very sensitive, right? They if somebody that needs a new medical device, say a CPAP machine or diabetes monitoring or something like that, they need a system that's gonna produce that outcome for them. If they have to if they end up talking to that agent and they say human four times and they never really get what they want, it's not really a benefit. So we built some really great solutions around listening to callers, understanding, hey, maybe maybe I want my device shipped to a different location because, you know, where where I live, I'm not gonna have a great experience there receiving that package. Or I don't really understand what you the medical term you just mentioned, can you explain that to me in you know in in in natural language, right? So Gina: Very yeah. Jamaal Savwoir: The agent has been programmed and trained to do a lot of different things and make a healthcare outcome possible, but also do that with the right level of empathy and the right level of explanation for the for the caller. Gina: I love that. So to wrap things up, I know you said you watched a few of the podcasts, so you know I'm a fan Jamaal Savwoir: Yeah. Gina: of James Lipton. So we always do a few little rapid fire to end things off. So what Jamaal Savwoir: All right, let's go. Gina: sound or noise do you love? Jamaal Savwoir: I love the sound of the ocean. yeah. I've I've been been I I live here in Sarasota, Florida. I'm close to the Gulf, but but when I can get on a beach somewhere and just hear those waves crashing any time of day or night, like that's that's fantastic. Yeah. Gina: Excellent. And what sound or noise do you hate? Jamaal Savwoir: Woof. yeah, don't don't really like the fingers on the chalkboard. I guess pr that's probably universal. Gina: Yeah. Jamaal Savwoir: man. yeah, I think screechy stuff in general probably Gina: Yeah. Jamaal Savwoir: gives me a little bit of the you know, you can kind of feel it in the back of your teeth. Those are those are those are pretty bad noises. Gina: Those are the ones I hear it. what profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Jamaal Savwoir: Ooh, either photography or architecture, I think. Yeah. Yeah. If I if I if I could Gina: Okay. Jamaal Savwoir: if I quit this life of crime and telecommunications and customer experience, I'm gonna run Gina: Yeah. Jamaal Savwoir: off and be a global photographer architect dude. There we go. Gina: National Geographic Lookout, right? Jamaal, if somebody's listening and wants to explore more of what's capable with PolyAI, because you have given us a laundry list of things that you guys can do, how Jamaal Savwoir: Yeah. Gina: can they get in touch? Jamaal Savwoir: Yeah, the the website is fantastic. we've recently done some some updates there. So www.poly.ai, that's po l-y .ai, is a great resource. you can find me on LinkedIn. Happy to connect with anyone that wants to ask any questions about the platform. but yeah, I think those are two great resources. Gina: Excellent. And Jamaal, this was such a great opportunity to get to learn more about you and about PolyAI. So we just want to say thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Jamaal Savwoir: Thank you, Gina, and thank you, Think Forward. Gina: Excellent.