May 1, 2024
Shelly Swanback, President, TTEC CEO, TTEC Engage
Moving From Innovation Mess To Market Success
Listen on:
With AI being aggressively adopted in most every industry sector, you may be wondering what becomes of the billions of call center interactions that take place around the world? With all the technology imbedded in our lives, most are frustrated because they are not served well through self-service platforms—and many say they want to connect with real humans behind the brands they deal with.
Operating on six continents with 64,000 employees conducting billions of these last mile conversations in 50 languages is TTEC. The $2.4B services provider takes innovation seriously and is working on rebooting tech. platforms and other AI-enabled customer journey solutions across all interaction channels at the world’s largest corporations.
We invited TTEC’s President and CEO of TTEC Engage for an episode of The Reboot Chronicles to discuss “the innovative mess required to be better than you were the day before” and unpack how she is taking this market leader to the next level of market-making growth.
From Mess To Quality Change
Being as big as TTEC is with all the industries they work with and all the information they have to keep track of, innovating any part of the business can get messy; But as Shelly puts it “sometimes you got to get in and create a little bit of mess on purpose because that’s where innovation comes from.” In most instances you cannot just drop a change into a business, they require hands-on work before they can see the light of day. Things like proof of concepts, understanding what it means to scale this innovation, and checking if it can work in each environment of their various clientele. All while still maintaining exceptional customer service on a day-to-day basis, a messy challenge to say the least.
Not Your Father’s Call Center
One of the technological changes that has created a mess is AI and the self-service model for the industries that can support it. It is all about opening up more avenues so that customers can interact with TTEC clientele the way they want to, and in a way that makes the most sense for whatever issue is at hand. If you don’t want to talk to someone, how can TTEC quickly and correctly get you the information? If you do want to talk to someone, how can TTEC give the agent quick and correct information so they can explain it? Now multiply that across all the verticals TTEC covers and you have a real scale challenge at hand, luckily Shelly enjoys that challenge.
Being A Better Innovator
With all this talk of innovation and growth, it might be important to understand where innovation comes from now. Five or more years ago, companies were doing internal case studies and only thinking from within their company. In more recent times Shelly has noticed that has changed. “I think everybody realized where disruption comes from and where innovation comes from is actually adjacent industries.” Now companies are looking across the table, or even at other restaurants completely to see what changes are being made, and if those changes could work for them. This is perfect for TTEC as they sit at an intersection of several large companies.
