Today’s interview is with Pierce Buckley who is an automation and CX expert plus the CEO and Co-founder of babelforce. Pierce joins me today to talk contact centres, customer service, customer experience, AI, the schmai-i bit, busting a few myths around the whole tech and service space, no-code platforms, what that really means, what’s the difference between RPA and no-code and how organisations should be approaching and leveraging AI and no-code in their business, particularly when it comes to improving customer service/experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The metric that is more important than NPS and CSAT – Interview with Shep Hyken — and is number 404 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at babelforce for sponsoring my podcast this month.

babelforce is the #1 most flexible platform for contact center service. Pierce Buckley, CEO and Co-founder of babelforce, and his team of telecoms veterans have created a powerful cloud communications solution focused on No-Code integration and automation. Their goal is to break down every barrier to great customer experiences by putting intuitive tools in the hands of people who live and breathe CX.

Pierce and Jonathan Baer of Vonage are running a webinar on the 28th October at 11:00am CET and they will be discussing exactly how businesses are getting maximum benefit from WhatsApp, one of the fastest-growing channels for customer service. Follow this link to sign up. You don’t want to miss out as you will get to see a demo of the babelforce platform in action!

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Pierce:

• My first business card said Machine Learning Mathematician on it and that was back in 2000/1.
• It can be so difficult to handle the complexity and cost of building solutions in an enterprise customer service space. But, Pierce knows from the technology side that it  should be easier.
• Too many people are led by the technology rather than the kind of the experience that they want to deliver, or the outcome that they want to achieve.
• Of the scenarios discussed, the technology is there to fulfill all of those scenarios. But, many people  when considering solutions like this often get stuck because one or more of the required integrations is difficult to do.
• That’s where a no-code platform helps as it takes many of those integration challenges and the need to for custom code and eliminates them.
• A no-code platform enables customers to start with the outcome they want or the business problem they want to solve and provides them with the ‘Lego’ blocks, whether that is an AI application or anything else, to help build and test a solution.
• It’s all about democratising technology.
• It puts the tools in the hands of the people who really understand serving and service.
• The essential promise we’re trying to make as a no code platform is if you sat down with those folks, those key people in your organisation, and you got on the white board and you drew out what you wanted, then our promise is that you can build 95% of that with no code at all.
• But, the remaining 5% is just another block that needs to get built but when it is built it can be used again and again.
• There’s a tendency to talk about big solutions involving lots of funky new technologies. But, in the vast majority of organisations, regardless of size, they’d be better suited on focusing on solving smaller problems and more pragmatic situations like the situation where you might get 200 emails every half day, say, for this one particular process and where currently agents are manually handling and processing these emails.
• We need to differentiate between RPA and no-code. They are not the same thing.
• RPA is used when an existing system doesn’t have an easy interface or API and and can’t easily be plugged into another component. So, you have to wrap it with an RPA component that allows it work with other components.
• Effectively the only thing that limits you on a no code platform is your imagination and the folks in customer service teams tend to be very imaginative and have loads of ideas.
• This is all about removing the risk and making experimentation easy.
• We often turn up for a quarterly review with a customer with our customer success team and they will find something built which we never thought of.
• No-code is the situation where you get the power of coding without the code explicitly. It’s about giving your people the ability to be high end developers just without the big software project that’s necessary to do that.
• Three things from Pierce:
  • Most of the businesses we see who are successful focus on being really good at doing a few channels. So, concentrate on the channels that are working for you and make those really good.
  • They then use these to drive adoption of other channels.
  • And, thirdly they always think about integration and how everything you do is integrated with everything else. This sounds kind of obvious and easy but we find it’s just not often the case.
• Pierce’s Punk CX word: Break things and M.V.P. (minimum viable product)
• Pierce’s Punk CX brand: Yello

About Pierce

Pierce Buckley is an automation and CX expert, and the Co-founder of babelforce. Over 20 years working with software products he has been at the leading edge of fields like AI, IoT, No-Code automation and – most importantly – Customer Experience design.

He’s an advocate for putting control of the Customer Experience in the hands of the people who live and breathe it. He co-founded babelforce to make that a reality.

People should be able to enjoy their interactions with companies. That’s so rare that some organizations find it hard to imagine. But in a world of real-time data and service personalization, any contact center can offer the same level of real, human service that you’d expect from your local coffee shop.

His mission is to prove that outstanding contact center service is not only possible… it can be easy!

Check out babelforce, say Hi to them on Twitter @babelforce and feel free to connect with Pierce on LinkedIn here.

Thanks to Dries Buytaert for the image.