Speaker: Ron Pollock, Chief Operating Officer, Vox Mobile
How has your team evolved since you started working with Ada? Tell us your before and after.
Ron Pollock: before we started working with Ada, our chat strategy was more aspirational and less reality. We were in the 1 to 1.5% chat adoption range. That was not working for our company. It wasn't working for our clients. We were introduced to ADa, we went through all the due diligence and decided to partner with them in Q four of 2021 went live with our chat bot in january of 2022 it has been a resounding success for Vox mobile and for our clients, we are in the 15% chat range now, we have a dedicated chat bot manager, we have budget to grow our chat team next year. Arc clients are excited about the potential to evolve their experience of their own users and to offer an omnichannel experience to their to their end user base, knowing that some people want to interact with chat, someone to do phone calls, someone to do email. We're excited at Vox because it's a new product, it's cutting edge. It has our clients excited, it has our team excited Um and we're planning for 2023 for a 25-30% chat adoption and we're incredibly excited about the potential of ada voice as well.
What impact has automated CX had on your business?
Ron Pollock: Our investment in the automated customer experience through ADA has had a tremendous impact on our company in 2022 as chat adoption has increased and the majority of that volume is being handled and contained in our aid, a chat bot. We've been able to pass those cost savings into salary increases for the majority of our hourly employees. This has led to increased employee morale, increased employee retention and it's helped drive our end user c set to the highest level we've seen in years. Um The the additional savings we're seeing internally is helping us invest more into our automation team. Um the additional features that Adas bought technology provided has our clients excited. Has our team excited um in a big part of our 2023 budget um is based on our investment and automation, which is driven completely through ada.
What advice do you have for other CX leaders looking to invest in automation and the right people to manage it?
Ron Pollock: the number one piece of advice I would have for any customer experience leader looking to invest in automation is to hire a dedicated automation manager. This was ada's number one recommendation for us. When we started implementing our bot q four of last year we hired that individual during implementation and he's been an integral part of our team throughout 2022. He lives in the bot daily, he's looking at end user feedback, looking what's driving containment, looking what's driving recognition, looking at that, see set delivering that feedback to our internal chat initiative team, delivering it to our customer success team and doing focus groups with our key clients to ensure that our bot continues to evolve that we continue to drive customer satisfaction and that the key metrics that we said at the beginning of the year to determine success where we are hitting those or exceeding those targets. So that's advice. Number one advice number two is when you are implementing the bot and then working through year one assemble a team a cross functional team leaders across your company that represent all of the main areas in your company to ensure that your your accounting for finance, your accounting for I. T. Your accounting for operations, your accounting for customer success, your accounting for sales. So everyone is understanding the impact that automation if it's chat but if it's voice bot that they all understand the benefits and what it means for a customer to integrate a chat technology, the bot technology, automation, what have you into their their sweetest services that team our team meets every single week and we're in tune on what is needed and what the bot is delivering for our end users. And it's been quite positive. Uh the last piece of feedback that I would have or advice would be set KPI s initially, but understand that the metrics are, are going to evolve. There are some some numbers that you look at. It might be important from the beginning, be it the adoption or how, how, how much the body is being used, but it will evolve to the experience that the end users are having. So make sure there are KPI S but realize that they are going to evolve. Your benchmarks will change and you may add or remove a few metrics while you evolve the experience with the bot.
