Podcasts 
Data-Driven AI Performance Enablement Software as a Service Improves Metrics and Delivers Better Employee and Customer Experiences
This week’s guest on the Digitally Irresistible podcast is Sean Minter, founder and CEO of AmplifAI. At AmplifAI, Sean and his team apply science to make teams better, leveraging AI-powered data to create a personalized environment that enables every frontline employee to succeed. As more companies explore the new generation of hybrid work, innovative leaders and organizations are relying on AmplifAI’s SaaS solution to enable performance, improve people, and make work more fun—wherever work is happening.
The BPO industry is no exception. Focused on delivering great customer experiences for some of the world’s top brands, every day thousands of iQor customer care agents respond to questions pertaining to our client’s products or services. Frontline supervisors are in a constant mode of coaching agents to empower them to consistently create smiles for our clients’ end customers.
Leveraging advanced digital technologies to facilitate the coaching of frontline employees, iQor recently announced our selection of AmplifAI as one of our digital CX initiatives to support excellent employee and customer experiences.
On this episode, we learn how AmplifAI’s artificial intelligence-driven software as a service (SaaS) performance-enablement technology platform helps iQor improve key metrics on a client program and deliver smiles through coaching and analytics.
Solving Problems Through Innovation
Sean entered the technology startup space years ago, starting three other companies before AmplifAI. He also worked at a private equity firm in between his startups and bought a BPO—PRC out of South Florida—about 12 years ago.
Bringing a perspective from outside the BPO industry, Sean looked for opportunities to do things differently when he began running PRC, drawing on his process-oriented background in tech.
He was determined to gain insight into why some customer care sites and some teams performed better than others. Indeed, his greatest challenge was figuring out how to replicate the highest performing frontline associates and frontline leaders to scale performance ability and drive consistent outcomes for clients.
He ultimately sold PRC to a larger BPO and he turned his attention to solving this problem. He knew that this challenge was not unique to PRC. He realized that other BPOs as well as brands with internal customer support call centers faced the same challenge. Harnessing his expertise in tech startups, Sean founded AmplifAI to drive more consistent customer care performance outcomes.
5 Things BPOs Need to Do to Be Successful on Any Client Program
Through his work to replicate high-performing frontline associates at scale and develop an AI-driven platform to enable consistent outcomes in customer service, Sean identified five things BPOs need to do in order to produce excellent consistent outcomes for clients.
- Deliver on a Client’s KPIs
Whether first call resolution, average handle time, or Net Promoter Score (NPS), BPOs need to deliver on client KPIs with efficiency. Sean finds that the key to improving these metrics is improving the people driving the metrics. For this to happen, frontline leaders need the right tools to engage their team, understand the data and metrics around performance, and coach their frontline associates with the right information at the right time to improve a specific outcome.
AmplifAI empowers frontline leaders to do this more efficiently. It takes away the need for frontline leaders to spend time manually analyzing data from multiple systems and reports. AmplifAI handles data analytics and recommendations so supervisors can focus on engaging and developing their teams.
With AmplifAI’s performance enablement platform, BPOs develop higher-performing and more engaged frontline associates and leaders.
AmplifAI saves 30% of a frontline supervisor’s day by identifying actions they need to take to support their team, whether it’s enabling better performance, following up after a coaching session, recognizing agents, understanding what to coach, or driving the coach-the-coach process.
This allows BPOs to deliver more efficiently on a client’s KPIs, which ultimately increases productivity, and creates more smiles with our client’s end customers.
- Instill Confidence That Agents Will Create a Great Customer Experience
Clients put their most important asset—their customers—in the hands of a trusted BPO partner like iQor to take care of them. In order for them to make this decision, they need to have confidence that the BPO will perform.
Because consistently providing good CX to a client at scale is very important, AmplifAI helps drive organizational processes by collecting data from the client, identifying what a high performer is, and creating a persona for that high performer so the BPO can leverage it to drive actions that will result in good CX at scale.
This applies to all sorts of contact center agent personas, from empowering new hires to helping good agents become great agents. By providing access to streamlined data, AmplifAI helps frontline leaders deliver timely, personalized, and efficient employee development and engagement across their teams so everyone can deliver a great customer experience across all sites consistently. Built-in accountability ensures agents and supervisors receive the support they need to thrive.
Sean knows firsthand from his time in the BPO industry that when a frontline employee has a great experience, they’re inspired to deliver an excellent experience for the customer.
- Manage Agent Performance at Scale
The need to manage agents’ performance at scale, for both work-in-office and work-at-home employees, is essential. Indeed, as mentioned previously the goal of engaging, coaching, developing, and recognizing frontline associates is important for scaling activity. When frontline leaders need to study reports to discover insights they can use to coach their agents, it can inhibit their effectiveness, hinder their ability to remember who should be recognized, and make it difficult to prioritize their time especially when frontline employees aren’t always in the office with them.
AmplifAI addresses this challenge in several ways. It gives frontline leaders access to performance data and AI-driven recommendations through a single, unified system that prioritizes actions, key behaviors, and performance indicators so they can spend more time coaching and building connections.
Through integrations with remote work tools, it can also push information out to platforms employees are already logged into to drive more interaction within the work environment.
And, its proprietary Coaching Effectiveness Index maximizes a supervisor’s ability to coach their agent’s performance while driving team engagement and cohesiveness. The Coaching Effectiveness Index identifies coaches’ strengths and areas for improvement so managers can help coaches become better team leaders.
- Maintain Compliance With Client Standards
Meeting client standards is the minimum threshold, with the goal being to exceed these standards. This means staying on top of operations in real-time. To do this, Sean says BPOs should look at data to create balance scorecards on the agent and company levels that will illuminate a bell curve of people—from high performers to low performers.
To this end, AmplifAI builds personas over different time frames to account for changing impacts (such as seasonality, new product offerings, and a new prioritization of certain metrics). This drives coaching, recognition, and activity in a systematic way across all sites at scale to help adapt to changes and identify where you are at risk of non-compliance with client standards while also recommending next actions for better customer support.
- Balance Quick Onboarding and Training With Retention
AmplifAI gathers data throughout the employee lifecycle, which AI validates before loading it into the database. This acts like an AI assistant at the agent and frontline leader level to help identify whom to coach, what to coach them on, whom to recognize, what behaviors need improvement, and more. The AI assistant gives relevant recommendations enabling the leader to focus on creating human-to-human interactions. 
Sean says that as we think about the future of the contact center, it’s helpful to think of how a customer service agent can have an AI assistant to connect them to content so they are empowered to improve themselves on easy things and human-to-human coaching can focus on more complex needs.
Understanding where frontline employees face challenges when they reach production can inform training, nesting, and onboarding so future employees are better prepared before production. AI helps recognize the data to make this possible at scale.
When BPO supervisors are empowered to help frontline employees strengthen specific skills in less time, it supports quick onboarding, training, and retention.
Human Interactions Remain at the Center of Great CX
AmplifAI helps BPOs like iQor deliver the right employee experiences to their most valuable asset, their agents. It supports better leadership that ultimately improves frontline employee performance and engagement to create customer experiences that make people smile.
What Sean Does for Fun
With a 10-year-old and a three-year-old, Sean and his family focus their free time on fun home activities in the Dallas, Texas area. Barbeque is their go-to tasty activity when it’s not 105 degrees outside!
To learn more about Sean and how he and his team power AI-enhanced people enablement, visit www.amplifai.com and connect with him on LinkedIn.
LATEST BLOG