Today’s interview is with Jimmy Hosang, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at The Modular Analytics Company (TMAC), a rapidly expanding artificial intelligence and machine learning provider that helps people make better decisions faster. Jimmy joins me today to talk about how technology has made things worse, why vanity metrics like NPS don’t make sense, how speech analytics has been miss-sold and why we need to go back to creating the best experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Leveraging branded virtual assistants to drive personalisation and innovation – Interview with Eric Turkington of RAIN – and is number 430 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.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Jimmy:

• The goal of what we do is to make every conversation valuable.
• Our lane isn’t just in the technology side, it’s in experience. We’re all Contact Centre people. We worked in the industry for a long time and then also we’re all about affordability.
• We want to be 80% cheaper than everybody else in the market for the technology we use.
• And, it’s about speed. So, we typically see benefits with our projects within six weeks.
• The customer experience space has become a cottage industry.
• Technology has made things worse, particularly the service and experience of space.
• I hate how people use technology as a sacred cow.
• Using technology to drive better outcomes should be the goal.
• It’s like the Church of Tech will solve your problems type of stuff, as long as you sign up to the 24 month contract to you’ll be fine 😉
• There is an idea, and it is a dangerous idea, that scripts ruin customer experience.
• I did performing arts at university and when you do a script correctly no one ever says it’s inauthentic.
• By getting rid of scripts, you’ve effectively outsourced a customer’s experience to the front line agent. When you add high amounts of churn into that process then you can start to have problems.
• Nobody remembers this but everybody thought that webchat was going to be a source of big cost savings. And, it wasn’t.
• How good a conversation can you have with someone when they are, on average, having six conversations at one time?
• Sometimes it’s always quicker to use voice.
• Amazon, Google, Apple. They all have voice activated home assistants. It’s all voice because they understand that so much of the experience is still in the human to human.
• We lie to ourselves as transformation leaders. We tell ourselves that our service scores are going down because humans nowadays have less patience and are more demanding because they want even better service. That is nonsense. It’s because we put so many barriers in place to good service that people are just getting frustrated because they’re getting bounced from pillar to post.
• But, the problem is not with technology. It’s with vision.
• NPS is rubbish. It’s not a holistic measure for customer experience.
• Speech Analytics has been used again and again to try and drive down cost. We’ve been using it to identify which parts of the conversation or which conversations we can migrate to self serve or cheaper channels. And that’s not what it’s really great at.
• Speech Analytics is great for being used in combination with other other elements like changing the script, behavioural changes, analysing who’s performing, next best action recommendation engines, up selling and cross selling and producing netter outcomes through coaching.
• Going forward how and where you acquire talent is going to be critical, especially in the customer contact space.
• With a volatile economic climate, customer lifetime value is also going to become an issue.
• Jimmy’s final bit of advice: Concentrate on nailing your human to human experience first and don’t spend millions doing prototypes of UX/CX transformation.
• Don’t don’t spend money on big tech and consultants. Hack it first. Get to a point where you know how much value and benefit there is and then start putting the tech of the consultants in to build it up and to maximise the value.
• You should own your vision. Never outsource the responsibility of defining that. Only when you own what you want to do, do you know what you’re going to need to buy to achieve that.
• Jimmy’s Punk CX word(s): Hack It
• Jimmy’s Punk XL brand: Monzo

About Jimmy

Jimmy Hosang is Chief Executive Officer at TMAC and has had a long career in data consultancy and advisory. He is a former data scientist with expertise in next best action, machine learning and speech analytics. His career has focused on driving innovation in a variety of roles at Lloyds Banking Group, Direct Line Group, John Lewis, Sainsburys, Argos and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).

The Modular Analytics Company (TMAC) is a rapidly expanding artificial intelligence and machine learning provider that helps people make better decisions faster. We deliver affordable AI and ML SaaS solutions that help you listen to your customers, act on their preference, and coach your teams to success.

The Modular Analytics Company was founded by Jimmy Hosang and Sean Northam in 2018 to change the way data science is understood and applied.

Their clients include one the world’s biggest banks, a UK national newspaper and a FTSE 100 insurance company.

Find out more about tmac.ai, say Hi to Jimmy on Twitter @JimmyHosang and feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn here.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay