The one with AI – Ben Wright, Co-founder Jiffy E133

🎤🎞️“The one with AI” – with Ben Wright, co-founder of Jiffy in CX Passport E133 🎧 What’s in the episode?...

[00:00] Introduction

[03:40] The shifts in AI and its role in customer support

[07:09] Prioritizing customer experience

[11:48] Select tools based on business principles, not just AI

[13:27] 1st Class Business Lounge

[20:33] How AI elevates support roles

[23:23] Staying up-to-date with the latest tools

[25:50] Contact info and closing

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Episode resources:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benji-wright/ 

Transcript

Ben Wright: 0:00

AI, not AI. What you should be looking at from a tooling perspective is how can it elevate our support reps? How can it save our support reps time? How can it solve pain points that we're experiencing? Rather than let's just plug in an AI tool, because it's cool. That's an NCI related right.

Rick Denton: 0:20

You're listening to CX Passport, the show about creating great customer experiences with a dash of travel talk. Each episode we’ll talk with our guests about great CX, travel...and just like the best journeys, explore new directions we never anticipated. I'm your host Rick Denton. I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport. Let's get going. Have you hit AI fatigue yet? Another discussion on AI and customer experience? Well, if that's you, you might want to hit pause for a little bit. Or if you realize that this is real, the benefits are tangible, and exist in large amounts for the business, the customer and the employee will keep listening. The challenge is separating the hype from the reality. Where's all our chatter about NFT these days, right? Even I have found myself in conversations with clients where I'm advising them on AI solutions when I have to say you're putting too much stock into this. Ai won't solve everything. That's what today's guest comes in. Ben Wright. With a series of entrepreneurial and mainline career experiences under his belt. Ben recently created jiffy, a tool created to solve a challenging contact center pain point, you know, a great knowledge bases the brain of any successful contact center build a great one. And agents have everything they need to serve serve the customer quickly and accurately. Yet building one takes so much input from the agents given the discoveries that each customer contact could provide. How will you balance that determines the success of knowledge base and the success of the agent? What would you do? If you could do all of that while you're in the call? Not after the call in it? Well, enter Jiffy yet. Okay, folks, I've heard about tools before you've heard about tools before I want to get more into what's beyond the tool in our talk with Ben today, the tool alone won't solve it. But the tool is going to enable it now beyond jiffy. Ben also is to quote him directly on a campaign to get Americans to say football instead of soccer. I think he's got a much better chance of delivering on these AI tangible benefits than getting all of us to change our language. But we'll see Ben, welcome to CX passport.

Ben Wright: 2:35

Hey, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, I my campaign has started off not so good in changing the changing the American vernacular, let's say but I've converted a few. So who knows by the end of this episode, perhaps a few more people will be along for the ride and and be able to be covered?

Rick Denton: 2:53

Well, let's see what happens. You know, I have certainly soccer blood in my family with a son who has been playing since he was three. He currently refs, we just got back from a trip to go to North Carolina to see Chelsea play Wrexham in a match there. So I understand it. And even I still will continue to say soccer. But there's a little bit of football that leaks out from time to time. Hey, let's go let's start broad in this conversation about AI and N solutions. And now I've been at this career thing for long enough to see Quantum Leap improvements before. And now as we continue to hear that this time, it's different. It's more, it's beyond any change that we've ever seen before. Okay, in the context of customer support the why is this different? Why is this time different? What is AI going to really mean for customer experience?

Ben Wright: 3:40

Yeah, and I think First things first, and probably kind of reiterating what you said is probably one of the biggest just technology shifts broadly to happen in the world since almost like the birth of the Internet, in my opinion. It fundamentally shifts so many manual processes into a world where you can basically receive instantaneous answers and responses. And if you think about the world of business at the moment, we have whole industries, whole companies created around efficiency, improving business automation, AI kind of does does that for you. Right, which is which is massive. And as it pertains to customer support is perhaps one of the industries where I think there's the most potential for AI to change things for the better. And I think if we fundamentally look at customer support, there are a couple of things that are undeniable, you're always busy. There's always problems to solve, right? I think fundamentally, I think you ask anybody that's in the queue. And that's the response that they would give you. I think what AI does it give support reps the chance to get rid of the tasks that take them a ton of time, but still have to be done. And instead use that time to focus on the things that matter which is providing a optimal customer experience. And so I think a lot of people in customer support are worried for their jobs at the moment and I think in some cases we'll probably get into it might lead to reduction in team sizes. However I think What it also means is that the role of customer support will be elevated meaning that will take away the stuff that you hate doing that still takes a lot of time, and instead will kind of elevate the role and your role into something, you know, far better. So I think that's fundamentally my take, which is yes, I agree. It's probably one of the biggest kind of advances in technology we've seen for a while. And yes, there will be fundamental impacts influences on customer support, there will only be for the better in my opinion,

Your CX Passport Captain: 5:29

This is your captain speaking. I want to thank you for listening to CX Passport today. We’ve now reached our cruising altitude so I’ll turn that seatbelt sign off. <ding> While you’re getting comfortable, hit that Follow or Subscribe button in your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. I’d love it if you’d tell a friend about CX Passport and leave a review so that others can discover the show as well. Now, sit back and enjoy the rest of the episode.

Ben Wright: 7:09

Yeah, I think you're spot on there and what you said that the experience should be what comes first, as a support leader, always I think it's kind of an interesting time in the world of b2b SaaS, and the economy in general, a constant layoffs. And I think cost cutting is is top of mind for a lot of people. And I think you can look at AI as a savior. But again, your starting point needs to be as a company as support leader, how do I provide the best experience for customers firstly, and then work out how AI can help you get to that wonderful experience, if that makes sense. So let's just use a common example. You have high ticket volume, which is resulting in long first response times, right, which is, which is causing frustration to your own customer base. That's something that AI could help with, right, you might put in AI ticket deflection, so you get more people kind of using self service. Or, again, as you mentioned, Article jiffy, where reps can save their responses to customers in sidebar, and then resurface these responses as new tickets come in, right? I think if you look at those two examples, what it's fundamentally doing is using AI to get to a better customer experience. And so I think that always needs to be your starting point. And then actually look at what parts of your support process is struggling where you seeing the biggest issues, and then look for AI tools to actually help you tweak, improve those processes, which in turn will produce a better end customer experience. So I would agree with you, a lot of companies are maybe doing this wrong, and just thinking, hey, let's just get all these tools in and reduce our headcount by 50% Bommali customer experience is going to suffer and not improve, because then you're losing the human experience, and AI cannot do everything a human can do at this point. So I think those are my kind of legit call from MCs with where I think I can fundamentally help.

Rick Denton: 8:59

I want to take those words of caution done, and I grinned on, you know, AI can't do everything a human can do now. And who knows, maybe AI is gonna listen to this podcast five years from now and laugh when we're all plugged into the matrix. But for now, at least, we are still humans are ahead of the AI technology. Take what you just said there. And so visualize, you know, I'm a business leader, not necessarily the C suite layer, but in this imagination. I've been told by that see, leader, hey, you need to focus on AI. Now you've got to get that implemented in your department and your team and you've got to deliver AI without really a whole lot of vision or context. They just heard about AI like all of us are hearing, get it in now. How do you help that business leader? How do you help them almost more specifically, how do you help them not by just the sexiest AI tool that's out there? And instead of help them get real value, actual value from an AI solution?

Ben Wright: 9:52

Yeah, and this is gonna seem like a boring response in some respects. But we've all been there as leaders of companies where we're I'm looking at buying tooling. And I think fundamentally, it comes back to what is the pain point that you are experiencing in your business? And then what tools solves for that pain point? Fundamentally, it doesn't matter if it's AI or not AI, you still need to have that anchor or that buying decision anchored on, what are we struggling with internally or as part of our support organization at the moment? And then what tools can solve that problem? I think, again, the AI banner can is sexy use the word sector, I think it is for a lot of companies. But my advice would be AI, not AI, what you should be looking at from a tooling perspective is how can it elevate our support reps? How can it save our support reps time? How can it solve pain points that we're experiencing, rather than let's just plug in an AI tool? Because it's cool. That's and it's aI related, right? I don't think your evaluation of tooling or how you look at what tools to buy changes because of AI, I think it still fundamentally comes down to pain point and then picking the tool that solves that pain point.

Rick Denton: 10:58

What's interesting about that, I'm sitting here listening to that, and I'm thinking we could have had this entire conversation and extracted the word AI from it and not said that. And I think that is actually and it's so hard for businesses, especially that leader who has been told by their executive leader to go do something because they heard it at a conference, I saw it in a magazine that there was some video about it. And the reality is start that outside. And if and cliche it a bit, understand what the customer is experiencing, understand the customer's pain point, understand what you can do to solve that it may not be AI, it very well could be another solution. You know what, I'll just ask this, do you think that we are just right now? Is there a little bit more hype here? Are we actually over indexing? Or is this really going to be a fundamental change? Or where do you stand on that?

Ben Wright: 11:48

Yeah, so I, I'll go back to RSI, where I fundamentally believe that AI is a beneficial a massive change to, to every industry. So I don't think it's I don't think it's high per se, in terms of technology. I do think there's this element of there's AI everywhere. And so to your point, a CEO is now saying like, Oh, what we're doing with AI and support, right. And there's, there's stories coming out all over the place. There's a company in India, I forget the name, who basically they've caught 90% of their support team and just replace it with an AI tool. And the CEOs come out and said, Hey, we're still getting, you know, great first response time, all that type of stuff, what they're not focused on the is there's not enough data to accurately X actually extrapolate that case study out and say, How is the net promoter score being impacted? Right. And so I think there may be hearing these buzzy stories without really digging into the data and really understanding what's happening. And so I do think there's hype in terms of AI is a hot topic. And there's a lot of companies that are, you know, talking about these phenomenal success stories that they've had with AI tooling. But again, I think fundamentally, you go back to core business, you know, that principles. And again, when you're asking me about like, Okay, how do I pick an AI tool? Again, remove AI from that, that that discussion? How do you pick technology usually would be my response. And then if there's a great IoT AI tool that solves that phenomenal, right, but it shouldn't fundamentally change your buying process and how you select a tool to bring in for your support team. It probably just gives you more options now, and maybe even more intelligent options that the lady wasn't available before.

Rick Denton: 13:27

Well, let's move and take a little bit of change of pace here. It's a complete turn here. When you need to take a little turn, you need to take a little break. And so let's take that break and join me here in the first class lounge. We'll move quickly here and have a little bit of fun. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Ben Wright: 13:44

Yeah, I think first one that comes to mind. Last year, we went to Patagonia and we did some cycling around Patagonia. And so that is still probably my favorite trip we've been on so so that would be my answer. Yeah. With Chilean Chilean Patagonia for sure.

Rick Denton: 13:59

I want you to expand a little bit on that as well. That is one of my dream locations. I just to me, the wilderness, the loneliness, the space of it. What was your experience, like there?

Ben Wright: 14:10

Yeah, it was great. And I mean, my ideal trip is like beautiful location, but also interspersing some, you know, activity and so yeah, as you mentioned, like phenomenal landscape, great food, wonderful people. And we did a ton of cycling. We're doing like 70 miles of bike in a day. And so for me, it was just incredible. And would fully recommend to anybody to visit for sure.

Rick Denton: 14:33

I definitely need to get down there. Absolutely. Well, so that's one of my dream travel locations. What is a dream travel location you've not been to yet?

Ben Wright: 14:41

Yeah, one of it close to home. So I've not been to Canada yet. And I'd love to do Banff National Park at some point that's looks like a phenomenal place. And again, we'd love to do some hiking there. And then I guess secondly would be you know, Vietnam and Cambodia history and agri food so I think those would be two places kind of top of my top of my list.

Rick Denton: 15:00

You mentioned food those. Yes, the food is spectacular in both of those areas. Absolutely. What is a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Ben Wright: 15:07

So I love curry in general. The brilliant bought up in the UK it's kind of our national dishes is curry and so can't get enough of it. And again, like I think if you go to Vietnam, Thailand, places like that they kind of have a lot of kind of cardio influences in that dishes. So So kind of a good good segue for sure.

Rick Denton: 15:24

All right, so apparently growing up in the UK, you got exposed to a lot of curries and you liked it. But what about the other direction? What's the thing your parents forced you to eat? But you hate it as a kid?

Ben Wright: 15:34

Yeah, we're not known for our food choices in the UK. And so there was a dish dish called fish pie, which is kind of like shepherd's pie if people are aware of that, but instead of the mints it's fish. And I'm not a picky but I just really dislike that dish and Mama villas and I apologize. But yeah, never liked that and would not recommend people in that for sure.

Rick Denton: 15:58

I love the apology to mom. Oh, that cracks me up. But I did wince at your description. There's so yeah, acquired taste, perhaps but I can see why that's a memory of yours. Going back to travel what is one travel item not including your phone, not including your passport that you will not leave home without?

Ben Wright: 16:15

Yeah, I for my sins are a bit of a workaholic. So laptop would be would be the one thing to be honest with you. I think we live in a world now which is phenomenal. You can work all over the place. And so laptop would be my would be my home for sure.

Rick Denton: 16:38

Then absolutely we can work anywhere in the world. 100% is I want to go back to something you said earlier. And it was a conversation about how we talked about AI improving the customer's experience. It can also be used to improve the employee experience and specifically the agent experience I really want to explore how can AI help that agent improve the agent experience? Why is it this going to be better for agents?

Ben Wright: 17:05

Yeah, yeah, love it. I think you asked me about AI and customer experience, I think I think AI fundamentally elevates a customer support agent and ultimately the the customer experience as well. If you think about a current kind of agents process in any support queue or a ticket comes in, you have to go out and search a number of places for information. AI can help with that, right? You think about an agent's current process where maybe your kind of tier one agent doesn't know the answer, pausing your tier two, tier three agents, you can now have kind of AI routing, to give that tier one agent enough information to then actually become tier two tier three agent, right, because they have that information at their fingertips so they can, they can do stuff like that. And so I think if you just think about things now which take time and fundamentally impact the response to the customer in terms of time and quality. Ai helps with that. So again, I'll go back to the point of it takes things that are painful for support agents at the moment, makes it easier and actually allows them to formulate a better higher quality response to the customer and actually enjoy the job a little bit more. So I fundamentally see AI as a an enhancement rather than a detractor for a customer's point.

Rick Denton: 18:18

Okay, and I can see that in the macro level. I'm gonna go a little deeper on that. But I want to ask you specifically about jiffy. You haven't told me I know when we talked earlier, some of the things that you described in Jiffy sounded pretty cool. And I want to give you that chance. Tell me a little bit about how Jiffy is specifically solving that agent experience.

Ben Wright: 18:34

Yeah, so I think one of the things and we did a ton of, you know, customer research prior to building the tool, talk to over 100 support support leaders, one of the things that fundamentally happens in every support queue is that a ticket will come in. And there's 12 Different places for support agent to look, in order to gather information to respond to the customer. And it doesn't need to be that way. And so fundamentally what we're doing at Jiffy is when you respond to a customer, that response is saved perpetually in a database. And then as tickets come in, your whole agent cohort can then see that previous responses basically using previous responses, almost like a dynamic aibs macro, that pops up in the sidebar and says, Hey, John's already answered this question. Here's how he answered it. And you can simply snip that information really easily, and reuse it and respond to the customer. So it's serving up the information at your fingertips, allowing you to use it and respond quickly and efficiently to customers. And so, again, if you think about the time saved that, instead of you having to tap John on the shoulder or shoot in a slack and ask for his opinion on the ticket. He's already given you that boilerplate response which is going to pop up through AI so that's kind of fundamentally what we're looking at looking at doing it your fee and we're seeing some really great results from from our current customers as well.

Rick Denton: 19:46

We said it helps the agent but that helps the customer to right and that that's not really surprised. No one listening here is going oh my gosh, Rick, you're totally right. But you see it right if the agent isn't having to struggle, hey, let me put you on hold Old or that agents kind of verbally vamping while you can kind of hear them clickety clack getting going through there. And if I the customer able to get my answer as quickly as possible with a friendly, engaged empathetic agent than heck yeah, absolutely, I can see how that works for both agent and customer experience. I want to ask you, though, something a little sensitive, though, you know, what do you say to that agent who's working for a company that's exploring AI now and that company is probably expecting go from 1000 agents to 100? Or pick your number, whatever the ratio is? What do you say to the 900?

Ben Wright: 20:33

Yeah, it's it's a really interesting point. And I think fundamentally, that's the main worry in the in the world of customer support. If you're an agent, now you're looking at things and thinking there's no way that we aren't, we don't reduce headcount. I will say that I can't see a world where you have such a dramatic reduction, I actually think, again, I'll go back to my earlier point around customer experience, and I can't imagine any type of customer support that will suddenly reduce it by that amount and not see a negative effect in terms experience. But my idea, or my, my idea for the future of support with AI is that the tickets that do reach agents are going to be the most technical and difficult in nature. And so customer support agents actually start to become solution engineers at that point, if that makes sense. So, yeah, the role actually becomes really highly paid, because you have your most knowledgeable reps that are able to deal with the most complex issues. And so I think that's the piece that I'm really bullish around is actually AI may reduce total headcount, but the reps that are left are going to be more highly paid, more experienced. Because ultimately, if you have all these AI deflection tools, you have tools like jiffy, that help you respond, the easy questions are gonna get answered, they're not even going to reach you, right. But the tickets that do get through are going to be technical in nature. And so you need to have a elevated level of knowledge and experience to answer those tickets. And so that's kind of where I start. The other risk I actually see is not just employee support reps, but actually outsourced customer support reps and organizations. Because if you think about AI, and as I've just mentioned there whereby like, potentially tier one reps can become two to three reps with additional information, potentially, like you don't need now to have, you know, outsource reps poured in to just deal with your tier one tickets or outsource reps poured in to deal with seasonal demand, because now you've got aI which can pick up that way, that extra demand. And so I think that's a future I see both from the first top point which is elevated roles and support. But then secondly, actually the risk I see as outsourced port companies maybe losing business due to AI. And so for those of my bold predictions, and I guess some some views for the future,

Rick Denton: 22:38

it will be interesting to see that shape out. I've had a BPO conversations on CX passport before and they've actually been bullish on AI. So it is interesting how they're looking to leverage it into better their companies and their better delivery. So it will be interesting, what you're saying makes logical sense to me, Ben and what they're saying. So it will be and the reality is, none of us know. And it's going to be an interesting world. I want to close out actually staying away from AI for a second. And I want to go beyond the context in a world I want to go and just overall sass. I know you've got a lot of experience in that world. And I'm curious, what are you seeing in the near term outside of AI, that companies should be watching to improve their overall customer experience?

Ben Wright: 23:23

Yeah, I think that's a great question. I like to say that I try and keep my my finger on the pulse as it pertains to tools. So So I think outside of AI, I think there are new customer support tools, ticketing tools that are coming out on a daily basis, I had a chance to get to know the the team at diksa, very recently who are out of Europe, who have got really great, great product, great UX, etc. And so I think in terms of customer experience, and customer support, I think AI is interesting. But also if you look at just your point, fundamental tools to your support stack, there are new tools coming out on a almost kind of monthly basis, it seems like and I think it's actually the responsibility of each support leader that's listening to this or just in the world generally, to keep your finger on the pulse as it pertains to tooling. Again, like I said, support tools are wonderful, but there's always a responsibility to go out, learn the market, see what's going on. Because fundamentally, you know, if you've got a tool that can even you know, push up your response time by, say 2030 seconds, that's fundamentally worth it to your organization. And so I've mentioned Dexter as a call out there, some others that are out there as well. But again, I think to answer your question, keep your finger on the pulse. Keep your eyes on, you know, Y Combinator and companies that are going through there and see if there's any support type tools, keep your eye on, you know, CrunchBase and some of the tools that have been launched on there. But yeah, that would be my advice is keep your finger on the pulse because support is an interesting one in the way that it's not a sexy area to build tooling for I think fundamentally like oftentimes support leaders have to make do with a tool that the sales teams bought right and you have They kind of Frankenstein and pull it together. But with as I mentioned, with AI, there's going to be tools built specifically for support. And I think it's fundamentally going to going to make support a really interesting good area to be working in,

Rick Denton: 25:12

like that. And I'm glad that we got to spend a little bit of time outside of the AI world because that is important for me, for you, for listeners in general, to recognize that there's so much conversation around this but then there's a whole nother category of the things that have been out there before the things that are still being developed that may not have those two hot letters that exist right now and yet they're still vitally important been this has been an interesting conversation to me. And I know that you're certainly a vibrant person and content creator out there on LinkedIn, others if folks wanted to get to know you, or to get to know Jiffy a little bit better. Where should they turn?

Ben Wright: 25:50

Yeah, can I be on LinkedIn? LinkedIn is my preferred kind of social media social media platform. So then right on LinkedIn, feel free to shoot me a DM happy to cheer within about customer experience, AI, anything really always always able to happy to have a conversation, and then learnwithjiffy.com. If you want to find out more about what we're building, super excited about the future of support. And again, really appreciate you having me on today as well.

Rick Denton: 26:15

Yeah. And I just want to share I heard that right. Learnwith jiffy.com. Is that

Ben Wright: 26:20

learnwithjiffy.com Yeah, correct. And when I when I push out your, the you know, this episode of the podcast, I'll be sure to link to the to the website as

Rick Denton: 26:28

well. And listeners know, new listeners for Ben's episode and longtime you'll know, scroll down, the links are right there, click to him and you'll get taken right there. Ben, you took me on a good conversation. I love that we spent a lot of time in a world and I also love that we went beyond what I really appreciated that focused on agent experience, and how that ultimately helps the agent and how it then improves the overall customer experience. And how that then in turn creates actual business results. Ben, it's been a delight having you on the show. Thank you for being on CX passport.

Ben Wright: 26:58

Cool, appreciate you mate.

Rick Denton: 27:05

Thanks for joining us this week on CX Passport. If you liked today’s episode I have 3 quick next steps for you Click subscribe on the CX Passport youtube channel or your favorite podcast app Next leave a comment below the video or a review in your favorite podcast app so others can find and and enjoy CX Passport too Then, head over to cxpassport.com website for show notes and resources that can help you create tangible business results by delivering great customer experience. Until next time, I’m Rick Denton and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport.