Thriving In The Digital Age: Darren Prine and The Future of Contact Centers

Darren Prine, co-founder and chief revenue officer of Cloud Tech Gurus, discusses the challenges and opportunities in the contact center industry. He emphasizes the need for companies to be agile and adaptable in adopting new technologies, such as AI and GigCX, to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and enhance the customer experience. Prine also highlights the importance of staying on top of technological advancements and considering vendor loyalty in order to leverage the best solutions for the business. He encourages companies to take an AI readiness assessment and explore the benefits of AI Agent Assist and GigCX.

What you'll learn about. 

Companies in the contact center industry need to be agile and adaptable in adopting new technologies to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and enhance the customer experience.
Staying on top of technological advancements and considering vendor loyalty is crucial in leveraging the best solutions for the business.
Taking an AI readiness assessment can help companies determine their preparedness and identify opportunities for incorporating AI.
AI Agent Assist and GigCX are valuable solutions that can significantly improve agent performance, reduce training time, and provide on-demand staffing.
Companies should prioritize the adoption of AI and explore the benefits of AI Agent Assist and GigCX to stay competitive and meet customer expectations.

Transcript

Joe Crist (00:01.202)
Hey everybody, welcome to another exciting episode of Thriving in the Digital Age. Joining me today is Darren Prine. He is a co -founder and the chief revenue officer for Cloud Tech Gurus. It's a TSD or technology solutions distributor with the world's best portfolio of cutting edge contact center solutions. They also provide a smarter way to source contact center solutions where they and their roster of gurus handle 70%.

of their client's sourcing workload. Darren, thanks for joining us today. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself.

Darren Prine (00:37.777)
Great to be here. So like everybody in the contact center industry, I had no intention growing up of being in the contact center world. I fell into it like everybody. I was in commercial real estate in 2007 and 2008 ruined me. In fact, I lost both my houses, my car and finished 08 technically homeless.

And so it was time to leave real estate and find something else to do. And I fell into this industry when a friend of mine offered me a job selling what was called a hosted call center platform. Nowadays, we know that as cloud -based contact center platforms or CCAS.

And and I worked for him for time. Then I moved to several other companies where I was either in sales or running sales. I think all in a run sales for about four CKAS providers. And so been in the industry since 2009. So what am I at 14 years roughly in the industry and love it. You know, I ultimately.

you know, decided I love the people, I love the industry, I'm fascinated with customer experiences and even the ones I experienced with vendors that I use personally. So great industry to be in. That's how I got in it after, you know, working for various CCAS providers. Ultimately, I wanted to create something with my partners that would be more impactful.

for clients that I work with. And I noticed that working with clients, I noticed a couple of things in that when it comes to sourcing contact center solutions, in most organizations, one or multiple people are assigned, you or you guys, you're gonna source a new WFM for us.

Darren Prine (02:27.185)
And these people already had full -time jobs. It kept them super busy. Now they have to try to carve out time for research and vendor screening and documenting requirements, building RFPs, all these things. It is just a whole, a whole horrible experience, especially when, you know, after the demos for while you have the repetitive discovery meetings with each vendor. And then, you know, after the demos, eventually you have three, four, five, six salespeople reaching out to you every week, trying to sell you.

trying to close you. And we wanted to create a better way to do it. So we started Cloud Tech Gurus. And so that's how I got to the point I'm at now. And like everyone else, started somewhere else, fell into the industry and love it.

Joe Crist (03:11.282)
Wow, that's quite a story. So you said before you've been in the industry for 14 years.

Darren Prine (03:17.521)
Yeah, well, 2009 to, I guess, 15. Yeah. So when I left real estate in 08, I jumped into the industry early 2009 and have never looked back. Then again, it's hard to leave an industry that, you know, I was in sales for companies in the past. I'm a recovering salesperson now. I'm not a salesperson. I don't sell anything. Cloud Tech Gurus doesn't sell anything. But what I was, I never worked for companies where they

hired business development reps or sales development reps to go out and get warm prospects that were then turned over to me to enter into my pipeline and work with. I had to kind of do everything myself. And so I got certified in social selling and learned how to use LinkedIn to build all the companies I worked for. And so I...

I was out there building my network. If someone's in that role that's watching this, you really ought to be adding about 20 new LinkedIn contacts today. And that also requires sending out more of a customized message. You can't just use the standard one on LinkedIn. You have to look at like common connections, find something that you can push out where they know you actually wrote it, that it was customized, there was some thought in it, and you get a much better acceptance rate.

Anyhow, once you get to the point where you've got thousands, now I'm over 19 ,000 LinkedIn connections, but once you get to several thousand, it's hard to ever leave the industry because, wow, it took me a long time and now I've got 2 ,000, 3 ,000 connections. It would be a waste of all that time it took me to build those connections to jump into something else. And I noticed when people leave the industry, they tend to come back. I think it's because they start from scratch and something new and it's like, huh.

I'm going to go back to where I have all these relationships and connections and then back in the industry at some point, but hopefully that answers your question.

Joe Crist (05:19.282)
Yeah, that is amazing. So obviously you've been in the industry for a while now. So today, right? I mean, the world's been changing so rapidly and with AI and conflicts around the world and everything else we have going on, what are some of the challenges you see in your industry and even in your clients' industries? What really just comes out as like, hey, this is something that people really need to be aware of?

Darren Prine (05:43.953)
Yeah, so I'm only going to bring up two, not that there aren't a whole bunch more and on any given day, depending on what I've been dealing with, I might have different responses for you. But as of this morning.

What I've got is this, one is in the past, companies had a particular loyalty to their vendors. And, you know, I remember calling on a big transportation company when I first got in the industry, I didn't even know the difference between an ACD and a PBX and IVR. You know, I was, but I was out there trying to get relationships and get demos and hopefully sell the hosted platform that I represented.

And I called this big transportation company and they said, well, we've got three centers and we handled 20 million calls a year. And in each center, we have Avaya equipment. We're in Avaya shop. We have teams of people at each site that manage the Avaya equipment and call centers for us. And we have no interest at all in moving to a hosted or cloud -based solution. All right. That was the end of that. And then six months later,

I come back from lunch and I get a phone call. It's that same person. And they said, you know, you know what? We've decided we're a transportation company, not a company designed to manage and manage and run expensive equipment. And we want to move completely to the cloud. But my point in that story is that they had this allegiance to Avaya in, you know, unless you have a fiduciary in a company, then

You just want to keep using what you've been using. You know it, you're comfortable with it. You don't have a fiduciary. So if something else could work better or save the company more money, you don't really have a vested interest in that. You and your team just want to keep doing what they're doing, using what they're using. They're comfortable with it. Also, there's the risk if they move to cloud that some of them might lose their jobs. More likely, they would just get appropriated to some other

Darren Prine (07:53.169)
role versus losing their jobs. But then in any case, there was that loyalty with Avaya, Cisco, Genesis, Pureconnect and on -prem systems and others. And there's still, it still exists. There's companies out there that they're loyal to Five9 or Nice or the Genesis cloud system or somebody else. And I don't think that serves them.

In fact, I don't see how it serves them at all today because it was obvious in the late 90s and early 2000s that tech was evolving like that. And I don't think we see the press reporting on that as much about how quickly technology is evolving. Now we could all think back to, was it two years now in third quarter where OpenAI came out and changed the world?

that's an example of how everything and like I've been, I have the corporate account with open AI and now it's 4 .0 is the version of one and what it can do now compared to what it did then, you know, it's like having a second brain working with me every day. It's mind blowing. it even teaches me things it's, it's wild, but that's an example of tech has never stopped evolving like that. It's still rocketing forward. It's evolving so fast.

Joe Crist (08:50.546)
Yep.

Darren Prine (09:18.929)
for instance, CCAS companies or CCAS vendors, the more modern ones, the newer ones, they're even on federated clouds where they're hosted in Google, in Azure and on Amazon. And it's orchestrated the same way Netflix has this type of model orchestrated where it really acts as if it's in just one data center, even though it's in multiple data centers with multiple hosting providers, but it all acts as one. And in that environment,

Generally, there's gonna be no downtime, because if something happens with Azure, you have Amazon and Google. If it happens with the others, same thing. So, everything is evolving so fast that even in my industry as a technology solutions distributor, I can't have any favorites. Well, it's bad for my clients if I'm not agnostic. But it's also, it would be bad in general for me to have a favorite vendor, because the way I see technology evolving,

My favorite vendors should be changing every roughly three years as somebody comes up with, they invented a better mousetrap or a better way to do things or a way that's hosted better or that's more interwoven with robotic process, automation, AI workflow, automation, and so on. So I don't think it serves any company to just, all right, we're going to buy a shop and in contact shop, a nice shop, whatever.

nice in and contact the same company. Sorry about that. But, you know, whatever vendor, it doesn't serve them. What would serve them, though, is creating a model where they're so agile that every three to five years, when somebody comes out with something significantly better for workforce management, CCAS, QA automation, AI, whatever, that they're able to they're able to just move to that new system. They get

They get to the point where it's so agile that it's not a big deal for them to actually move from one C -Cast to another if it better serves their business, customers, agents, everything else. That is something where I'm still seeing people are locked in to some particular vendor and then they're missing the boat on the technology evolution. Something significantly better for their business, their contact center, and their customers is gonna come out in the next two to five years.

Darren Prine (11:44.657)
They're not going to take advantage of it because they're locked into, wow, we're with Five9 or we're with whoever. So I think that's a problem. And I think it's something that businesses with contact centers need to think about and maybe think about how can we become so agile we can switch out vendors as needed to best serve our business, to reduce our TCO, to improve efficiency, yada, yada, yada, reduce costs.

That would be a good idea. And I don't think that, I don't think enough people have thought that through. Cause if they did, they'd see that just becoming that type of an agile, flexible organization who could move to different platforms as something significantly better arrives, that better serves their business than being locked into anybody. So that loyalty, I don't think has a, has a place anymore in the industry. The other is,

There is on the AI front, you mentioned AI. You know, I think there's a lot of people that are still waiting to adopt it. They're thinking, all right, well, I don't, from what I'm hearing, I don't know that AI is really there yet where we can use it to, to basically handle 30 to 50 % of our customer interactions. So I think we need to wait a little longer and they're way off there. AI.

has gotten to a point, you know, since open AI and over the years since I would say even a year ago, AI that works amazing, that can handle 30 to 50%. I'm not limiting it at 50 because I've seen up to 80, and handle interactions and any interaction AI should, could be handling. It should be handling because it does it better with no queue time and

and solves people's problems better. And in some cases, there's no accents that are difficult to understand. Ultimately, it's been shown on the right interactions, AI is going to get a better CX score than an agent. And it does it faster, more efficiently, no queue time. And then when we look at labor costs, I mean, people are seeing 100 % to 500 % ROI on AI. It radically reduces the labor costs. It improves efficiency.

Darren Prine (14:05.105)
It improves virtually every aspect of a contact center. So for all those people that are waiting, I'm not sure what they're waiting for because what I'm seeing now, it could be three years, it could be five years. AI will actually be at a point then where it easily handles 80 % of interactions. And agents that 20 % that it can't, those agents are more specialists and they're complicated, complex interactions that only a human brain consult.

probably a human brain with an AI agent assist, but they'll still be in need for humans. It's kind of good for the human agents because the reason I quit being an agent when I was an agent for the phone company was the repetitive interactions that I had to handle. I would bang my head on my desk. one more moving my service order when all I wanted was, you know, talking to people that wanted to buy a cell phone or upgrade their phone plan or

something that I actually got in contests and won prizes for, got commissions on. That's what I wanted. I didn't want the moves and changes that I was getting and it's just mind numbing stuff. So I think for agents it's better. They're gonna be able to work on interactions they'll actually like more. That'll improve the agent experience, maybe affect attrition. But every other aspect of the contact center, what you're doing on the reducing TCO, moving from a...

cost center to a profit center, all the things call centers say they want can be achieved. And the time is now, it's not time to wait any longer. Right now it's 30 to 50 % on average. It's gonna be over the years to come, 80%. So if you're in a competitive industry and your competitor is providing a better customer experience, because they're using AI, they don't have an hour queue time like you do during particular hours of the day.

and you're getting better CSAT and everything else. People will move to your competitor, even if your product isn't quite as good, if you've got better service, people will pay more for better service. Wouldn't you pay an extra $100 a ticket anytime you flew if you knew you were going to get great customer service versus what we get right now from Airways? Right. I'd pay an extra $50 to $100 on every ticket.

Joe Crist (16:24.274)
Absolutely.

Darren Prine (16:29.809)
You know, if I knew that there was a problem, I can call in and someone's going to help me right away and satisfy my, resolve my issues. So, anyhow, we're at a point now where if you haven't already incorporated AI, now if you have, remember to be agile, flexible so that if something comes along right now, you're doing 30 to 50 % of interactions fully contained with AI. Someone comes along that can do 60%. Well.

It's good to be agile enough where you can make that change. And nowadays moving to AI is easier than ever because the AI providers using generative AI, they're able to incorporate cognitive AI, which is able to take your website, your ticketing system, your documents, your knowledge base, ingest all the data, contextualize it, conversationalize it, even get to the point where it understands intense.

And where I could literally take all that repository data with one of my providers and have the beta, if you will, for their AI up and running in a couple of days. Then it's just tweaking and testing and putting up the guardrails. We helped a large hotelier source AI many years ago with things way before open AI. And it was, it took data scientists and workflow engineers, and it took a year to implement and have it live and millions of dollars.

Now it can be, you know, that same kind of implementation might've only been two or three months now and at a fraction of the cost. And AI even works now for SMB. It was only for the largest enterprises, but there's AI solutions out there that will even handle a large percentage of interactions for SMBs, car dealerships and law offices and whatever else.

Joe Crist (18:06.834)
You know, there.

Darren Prine (18:25.841)
So it's pretty cool and it's time for companies to take an AI readiness assessment to see how prepared are they to incorporate and adopt AI. And that's a step one that nobody's taking for the most part, very few, that everybody should be taking right now. They should be getting assessed. We offer an assessment for it, but whoever you go through,

you should have an assessment done to see how prepared you are and how ready you are and also to determine what, which interactions AI could handle. And so that's a step people aren't taking. So the adoption isn't where it should be because of bad information. And also sometimes in our personal lives, we work with a vendor and we see their AI and it's terrible, right? You know, you can't interrupt it. You can't ask it questions. It's not conversational.

Joe Crist (19:04.178)
Yeah.

Darren Prine (19:23.697)
It's like if -then statements that are behind it, right? So they haven't adopted it yet to the point where they should have. And they're not actively pursuing AI readiness assessments to see where they stand and how and when they could use it and ultimately start looking at moving forward with AI. So those are the two, loyalty to vendors, AI readiness and adoption.

Joe Crist (19:50.226)
You know, I've seen a lot of those myself working in the consulting world. And you mentioned like the adoption of AI and a big challenge I do see with a lot of companies, it's they ask, are we ready and do we even need this? Right. So when it actually comes to these opportunities or these solutions for these industries, like how would you recommend companies go towards it?

Darren Prine (20:12.529)
So there's, you know, other than cloud tech gurus, there's others as well, consultants that kind of specialize in AI that can do a readiness assessment. And they look at what they have in place. You know, there's certain things you need to have in place and be aware of and have mapped out so that you're even ready to adopt AI. You don't want to just buy an AI solution and then, what a mess we have that's going to take extra time hassle.

Maybe you can't even really source and evaluate the right provider till you have all your ducks in a row. Maybe someone that just jumped in without taking these proper steps, maybe they buy an AI solution that isn't actually right for them or won't meet all their needs. So there's that AI readiness and analysis that they should do from a consulting company that is prepared and can do that.

And then, you know, with the, with the, as far as choosing one, if it's all well, you know, that AI readiness, analysis, it should basically show, you know, all the systems they're using and all of the customer journeys and channels and the use cases and types of interactions. And it should already kind of be determined where they can use it and how they can use it so that then they're able to put together a really good BRD business requirements document.

that someone like me can use to screen the vendors in the market and see which ones are the most ideal to be included in that evaluation, which ones they should send that RFP to, right? So that's kind of things that everybody should be doing right now in getting prepared because it could be three years, could be five years, 80 % of interactions are gonna be handled by AI, whether you're kicking and screaming and don't wanna...

don't want to look into it and do it or not, it's happening. The world is changing. This isn't just contact center, right? Outside of contact center, same thing. There's a lot of jobs where people are going to be reallocated to things that are more challenging and AI will handle the more basic and repetitive types of roles and interactions across the board. So we can't be ostriches with our head in the sand. We have to be

Darren Prine (22:35.921)
start preparing for this outcome that's going to happen whether we like it or not.

Joe Crist (22:42.066)
You know, that brings up a really good question too, right? So, I mean, I'm sure it's the entire world of seeing already in the past, what was it about 18 to 24 months ago when chat GPT really came out and how much has evolved and how much has changed. Those who adopted have already felt the benefits of it. And those who are behind are still wondering like, Hey, can we use this? But

Darren Prine (23:00.465)
Mm -hmm.

Joe Crist (23:07.346)
for those who do and even those who don't, like what does the future look like of not adopting these technologies or not even adopting these solutions you're talking about?

Darren Prine (23:15.697)
Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for those that

For those that haven't adopted it, it's really a what are you waiting for? Because the time is here. You don't see people that go through the right steps and move forward with an AI provider. And AI is handling x percent of voice calls, x percent of chats and digital interactions. You don't see them then going back to not using AI because it radically

changes everything in the business. There are costs and TCO and efficiency and CSAT and agent experience and everything. When you get to experience it for yourself, you don't end up saying, now we're going to go back to having agents handle everything or having some terrible, essentially scripted workflow with if -then statements for people to have to deal with.

until they get to the point where the that can't solve their problem. And it tells them they have to call during business hours to talk to an agent. That's just frustrating. Right. So the time is right now. There's there's a lot of other opportunities, you know, in in our industry and solutions that are creating an amazing impact that also aren't really I don't think they're being adopted in the way they should. I almost consider them no brainers.

Joe Crist (24:23.282)
It is absolutely.

Darren Prine (24:42.577)
They're no brainers because you're paying more to not use them right now than you would be if you were using them. And then there's a lot of benefits. And I'll give you an example or two. So what is that AI Agent Assist? So some call it real time agent guidance. Some call it AI Agent Assist. There's a bunch of different terminologies. I don't know the industry really settled on one acronym for it yet, but I'll just call it AI Agent Assist. So it...

It basically, what it does is it turns agents into Iron Man. With Iron Man, Tony Stark's in the suit and Jarvis is the AI guiding him and keeping him safe and giving him answers and telling him what's ahead. And that's essentially what it does for agents. It's real time. It's there with the agents. It's pulling up product skews and information, pulling information from the knowledge base, keeping them compliant.

It's doing all of these things. So the agent becomes a super agent. They're able to handle interactions in sometimes 30 seconds or a minute or several minutes faster than they normally would.

But also you think of this, you know, if you, if you go to work every day and I can say this as a former call center agent, you go to work and there's all these things that you can't answer. There's things you can't resolve. It always seems like when you're on one of these situations in an interaction, you can't find your supervisor or anyone that can help you. And you go through a whole day, a day where there was so many people where you really couldn't do a great job resolving their issues. And how would that make you feel when you

left work and when you got home. How do you feel great about yourself and your job when it feels like you're failing every day? And for a lot of, you know, when I was an agent, I know I felt like I was failing on a lot of days. And what do I want to be happy? I want to feel like I'm good. I'm successful and resolving things.

Darren Prine (26:41.937)
So Agent Assist, ultimately agents have like a second brain there helping them through interactions and they do everything better. You see the CSAT and CX scores go up, the agent's happier because they're resolving every interaction and they're doing it pretty easily. So huge impact on the agents that should relate to lower attrition, right?

higher agent satisfaction and people should be monitoring their agent satisfaction and their agent experience and their software to do that. But ultimately, so the agents could have performed better, like their job better, do everything better. The customer is going to love it better. But in addition, like when you're training new agents, part of their training is going to incorporate that AI Agent Assist.

What we're seeing is that they are able to get trained in about half the time as it normally would take. So now we're saving time and labor on training. They hit the floor and almost immediately their performance is on par with the veteran agents. So it's not a one to three month window of time before they get to be proficient. They're proficient right away. So there's, you know, those are some additional benefits. So you have reduces training time.

reduces interaction time, improves everything else. And yeah, companies are seeing roughly a five X ROI. So this is another one where right now, if you're not using it, you're paying far more not to use it than you would to use AI Agent Assist and enjoy all those benefits I just described. So that would be a big one. And the other part of that,

is the AI Agent Assist vendors, they've also all incorporated advanced QA and QA automation. So, you know, now you don't also need a separate platform to look at sentiment and tone and challenges. You know, when you want to figure out where can I coach agents to help them improve, it provides you all of that data too. You know, the sentiment, the tone, all the things the agent did right, didn't do right, and auto grade scores.

Darren Prine (29:01.745)
So it also saves money on the QA side. So, you know, that's an example of one. There's certainly others. One that blows my mind that because it's so revolutionary is called GigCX. Although I think we're, you know, I don't think the industry set on that acronym yet and it could change to flex workforce or fractional workforce or whatever. But, you know, it's essentially BPOs that use that gig worker model. So it's like UberLift.

You have all these agents and the reason why so many experienced talented contacts are in our agents are moving away working for traditional companies and instead working essentially as an independent contractor with a gig CX provider is they get to choose their hours. You know, so that's big. If you're a mom and you have X amount of time while they, while your children are at preschool or kindergarten or whatever.

You could be working during those hours. You know, it might be two hours a day, it might be four, it might be six. It might be split up where you want to work a couple hours in the morning and a couple hours at night. And you can do that. You can choose your schedule. So what these companies do is they incorporate all the schedules. I could only imagine it's like multi -million dollar workforce management systems being used. But they incorporate the skills and talents and experience of all of these gig workers.

and all of their available schedules and makes that available so that when they have a client, the client says, well, we need a Monday morning from seven to nine, we need extra help. And on Wednesday afternoons and Friday afternoons for two or three hours, we need help. They're able to plug in to ensure that you're getting the perfect workforce all the time. In fact, they can scale up and down by as much as 300%.

to based on demand. So it's like an on demand workforce of skilled, talented people that are trained. The gigs, X providers get better at training agents than anyone else because they have to. and usually they can take training from one of, from the client and they can figure out a way to do the same training just as well in, you know, weeks less time. So that's the, to be in the industry, you just have to be an expert in doing that.

Darren Prine (31:22.673)
But, but anyhow, they're able to provide that on demand workforce that can flex up and down. So, you know, an airline has to cancel. 5 ,000 flights because of weather, you know, they can be used to do the outbound calls to all 5 ,000 people. you know, it might be an extra thousand agents for two weeks or three weeks. You know, BPO doesn't want something for two weeks or three weeks. they have an FTE model and two, you know, all the time that and cost.

it takes to be able to do something for two weeks or a month even, they're not going to make their margins. They're not going to really want that. So in fact, one of the biggest clients I have for GigCx are other BPOs where they have a client where their staffing model won't allow them to make their margins if they were to staff for it. So we plug in one of our GigCx providers to work with the BPO. They're able to provide the flexible staffing and the ability to scale up and down and up to 300%.

And the BPL actually is able to make their margins. The client gets the staffing they need and everybody's happy. So they're, they're one of the biggest clients for gig CX. But I see that the rest of the industry, you know, let's look at, let's look at a direct response, a direct response company based on any infomercial they're running. It's spiky. The number of, you know, one is better. The verbiage is better. The presentation is better. One, they get this huge influx of people calling.

and then there's gonna be a queue, because workforce management by itself isn't gonna make sure you're staffed perfectly all the time, especially if you're in an industry that can be spikes, that has spikes and surges. So, you know, all of a sudden you have this great product that's getting this demand and you're not handling the calls fast enough. And when you're in direct response, a lot of stuff is, I saw that and now it's in my mind and I want it. But if I have to wait too long, my motivation's gone. I don't really care anymore. So like that's one.

But companies that do tax work during tax season, they might need an extra thousand agents for a month, two months or three months. And then they don't need it anymore. Or catastrophes. Insurance company has, let's say floods. There's a flood somewhere, let's say Louisiana. And all of a sudden the insurance companies are getting this giant influx of claims calls for two weeks.

Darren Prine (33:48.753)
You know, it's super tough to staff with that. And not only that, but GigCX can be used to offset attrition. So let's say your call center has a 30 % attrition rate. Well, when somebody leaves, there's a cost of anywhere from $5 ,000 to $10 ,000 all in to replace that person. That's recruiting and background checks and all the interviews and training and everything else that's involved. And payroll and...

whatnot. And when you're using a gig CX provider, by the way, gig CX and other advantage, they're billing on productive time. Only when agents are logged in and ready for interactions, not for when they take bathroom breaks, lunch breaks, or talking to someone at the water cooler. You're not paying for that. But, but the other cool part with apart with it is with, with gig CX, you're, you're able to staff for what you need for as long as you need it.

And it could be daily surges spikes. It could be for Black Friday or holidays. It could be for any of these things. But I mentioned attrition. So as you're losing, so some companies use it. So let's say 30 % attrition. They're replacing those agents with GigCX because now the GigCX provider takes on all the costs for finding and recruiting and interviewing and background checks.

testing their home internet and computer to make sure everything is ideal. And then they're handling the payroll. So it's about a 30 % reduction in cost in using these gig workers than in putting that expense into hiring more yourself. So there's some that just use it to replace their attrition, to augment for attrition. And then others find it, you know, there's no reason now with GIGCX that you ever have to have long queue times. It just shouldn't happen.

It's there. It doesn't cost more. It generally costs less, sometimes way up to 30%. It doesn't make sense to me why the adoption rates are slow, but that's another one. I think it's a no brainer. I don't think there's, you know, even if you're using AI, you might still have challenges where there's spiky times where you just can't handle it well. Recently on American Airlines, I was in a chat queue for six hours. Certainly that's not acceptable to any of us in the industry.

Darren Prine (36:13.233)
Had they had a gig CX partner, they could have had no queue time in that chat. And I wouldn't have posted a blog that tens of thousands of people saw about how bad American Airlines customer care is. They would have saved themselves that. Then, you know, those are just a couple of examples. There's others. You know, there's solutions for collaboration, monitoring, training, collaborating with agents that even with remote agents, it kind of gives the feels if you're still in a center.

And as a supervisor, you can, they can see you, you can see them, you can see what's on their screens, hear what they're doing, actually see them in fact. And it brings back more of that traditional brick and mortar, even in environments that are completely remote workers using their own personal PCs. So a lot of amazing tech out there. And that ties back into being agile. You know, companies should look at what's out there that can reduce. Right now we're in a scenario where you see all the layoffs still happening.

Joe Crist (36:52.854)
Hehehehehe

Darren Prine (37:11.121)
I'm trying to help people get jobs all the time. Anyone that wants, follow my LinkedIn and when I post about people looking for work, repost it. Let's help them find new jobs. But the layoffs are still happening. There's economic uncertainty. So a safe hedge right now is to let's look at our contact center. Let's look at where we can reduce costs and improve efficiency because it might be more important than you're even aware of.

It doesn't hurt. It's a good hedge. Let's start looking at ways to reduce costs, to turn it from a cost center to a profit center, to improve efficiencies throughout the contact center and the agent experience and the customer experience. The time is right for them to do that. And I think that it's wise to do so. This is the time right now where we should, all right, who knows what the future is going to hold. The least we can do is

tighten up everything on our contact center. So we're reducing costs as much as possible and running a tighter ship, if you will.

Joe Crist (38:17.426)
I absolutely love that. You know, it's the one thing a lot of companies don't really think about. Well, I know there are companies that don't think about this when it comes to seasonality and events and actually being able to really ramp up very quickly and then ramp down afterwards. But yeah, that's an absolute wonderful solution for companies to look into is actually using gig workers.

Darren Prine (38:32.785)
Yeah.

Darren Prine (38:37.073)
Yeah.

Darren Prine (38:41.172)
Yeah, so, you know, if somebody isn't, if people aren't using solutions like AI and GigCX as part to augment their customer service, you know, I could either say now as a customer of airlines and stuff where I just find their customer service intolerable and unacceptable because I know what the technologies are they could be using. So it's either they're not putting in the time to really investigate these types of solutions or

The only other thing I'd come up with is disdain for their customers. American Airlines just doesn't care maybe that I'm in a six hour queue or two hours on their voice queue. But anyhow, if someone really cares about the customer experience and also creating advocates from their customers, then they should be using this technology to make sure people get their problems resolved quickly.

Joe Crist (39:34.29)
So we covered a lot today, all very, very amazing information, very useful for those businesses out there who are really looking to expand and scale up. So Darren, everything we've covered today, I want to make sure we can leave the audience with some good advice. So if you could give any parting words to the audience out there, what would it be?

Darren Prine (39:54.193)
So technology is evolving very quickly. I would say that...

whether it's through a consultant or whether it's through someone on staff, somebody should be staying on top of this evolution. And as there's solutions that can reduce TCO, improve efficiency, reduce nutrition, and so on, they should be on top of this and be aware of it. And when appropriate, start looking at are they ready for solutions like that, how it could be used, what could the impact be?

they should be doing that. So I would say, one, as I mentioned before, become a super agile organization, whereas you're able to easily adopt new solutions. You're able to switch out vendors as should be necessary because somebody is doing it so much better and there's a lot of impact for you. So that's really it. Stay on top of the tech.

have somebody that, you know, in general, in a contact center, most people are super busy with their full -time jobs. They don't have time to be doing research and watching demos. So, you know, either have a consultant partner like CloudTek or who's or have someone on staff where they have the time allotted where they're going to shows, they're going to webinars, they're watching demos and they're staying staying on top of this stuff. But also, and I can't tell any contact center how to do this, but. Operationally.

How do you become that agile organization that can adopt new tech, that can switch out from one Seacaster to another, WFM or QA or whatever it is? That's kind of an internal thing, but companies I think should be looking to do that, to become an agile organization. And again, have someone that's on top of the latest, greatest tech, what the impacts are.

Darren Prine (41:46.513)
Is the company ready to adopt a solution like that? And then last, AI. We can't be ostriches with their head in the sand. Within three to five years, and it could be two years, 80 % of interactions. It'll just be super complex, technical kinds of things that we'll need agents for. And you've got competitors. If your competitors...

are doing this, they're adopting it and getting all the benefits and reducing their costs, improving their CX. How will that impact you? That's something to think about. So anyhow, it's good to look at it's moving there, whether you like it or not, let's jump in. Let's see, are we ready for it? Let's map out what we've got and how we could use it and what interactions and what the ROI, what the cost significance and advantage could be for us.

and let's prepare and then let's start vetting and evaluating vendors. And it's something we need to incorporate because like I said before, if an interaction could be handled by AI, it should be. That's what we've seen time and time again with our clientele.

Joe Crist (42:55.634)
wise, wise, wise words, Darren. Absolutely. I 100 % agree with that. All right. So we're at the end of our show. Everybody, this was Darren Prine. I said before he's the co -founder and chief revenue officer of Cloud Tech Gurus. I want to thank you again, Darren, for coming out. I really do appreciate it. I feel smarter already listening to you, and I hope the audience does as well.

Darren Prine (43:01.713)
Thank you.

Darren Prine (43:17.329)
I've never heard that before and I'll send you some money for saying it.

Joe Crist (43:20.978)
I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, everyone. Hope you enjoyed the show and tune in next week for another exciting episode of driving in the digital age. See you then.

Darren Prine (43:31.601)
Cheers.