See, there you go. Recording has started. So, um, thank you everybody for joining us. Um, thank you to, uh, Billy and Sally for, uh, for attending this morning's webinar. And um thank you to Hugh and Scott for for joining NSL and um talking about the Verant product. So we're keeping the microphones on, cameras on if you would like. Um if you have any questions, this is an open forum and we'd like it to be as interactive as possible. So um please do um interrupt and and ask as we go along. So I believe Scott, you're going to do an introduction first about Barren itself and then Hugh is you're gonna hand over to Hugh and he's going to walk us through a presentation. Yeah, thank you. Um, thank you Mark for the um, you know, the invitation and uh, thank you Billy and Sally for for joining. Um, great to be here. So I I'm Scott Westwood and I work um, with you and and our wider variant community. My role is a channel director. So I support the partner community for for Verin and uh NSL fall within that ecosystem uh working with um with one of our valued partners 8 by8. So obviously you guys work closely with those um with 8 by8 and um then obviously you um NSL are supported through through that ecosystem. Um yeah so so my role really is to is to provide things like this to make sure that you're fully aware of Verant the capabilities what we can we can drive and how we can be innovative with your businesses help you know better sales better customer service better CX experience whatever it whatever it may be from a varant perspective the the the business is a very very large um CX automation um vendor we have a very large ecosystem across the globe um supporting you know 85% of the footsy 500 businesses globally from WFM traditionally quality um monitoring uh so QM AQM and and all of our I guess core products and portfolios that we're we're known for within that within that 85% of that footsie over the last five or six years we've been very innovative in the development of our portfolio and we've um started to to transition from I guess our on-remise background into our SAS background. But whilst we were doing that, we kind of dived into all the products and you know started to understand where can we get you know better CX innovation with um with with with some of the tools and the and the portfolio that we use and my bot in the corner is is testament to that. So we've we've built probably 50 or 60 different types of what we call bot technology which is our AI and augmented AI technology and that drives um our WFM, our QM, our you know knowledge management right through to a full portfolio of uh CX in innovation through what we call our CX automation. So we're now a leader within CX automation within the market. We've got pretty great market credentials and and like I say, we support organizations and resellers and vendors that can't or don't have the capability to build that type of um technology. So, they will potentially sell their voice contact center and then use Verant to I won't say plug the gaps, but to to create that innovative um CX experience um you know connected to their contact center. So it really helps drive, you know, the bot and the human. So from from our perspective, you you you've got a contact center with lots of agents. Those those agents are um working really hard. They're trying to be multi-killed and and what we've kind of done is is is invented technology that can help support that agent and and bridge the gap between human and AI. So we very much don't replace the the human interaction. We kind of enhance that that capability. Um and from today Q's going to talk more about the WFM piece but then some of the supporting technologies that can potentially help um help uh you know get them get more out of that that particular platform. Um so very much very much a complimentary service is what you're saying there Scott for what's in place. Yeah absolutely. So, you know, we could um take a lot of the call today talking about product byproduct and we've got thousands of different products. Um so, it's really important that we we understand what what your business is trying to to achieve from a um a customer engagement perspective, but also an agent engagement perspective. So we're we're very much, you know, on the the premise of yes, we want to improve sales, we want to improve customer service, we want to improve containment with IVA, you know, we want to improveuling and and there's so many products that can do it. So we could take a four or five hour webinar to talk product by product. But it's um it's important to understand what you're trying to achieve as as a business and then and then how variant can help you know create a starting point and then get to the end goal of whatever that may be over a certain period of time. But but absolutely complimentary uh between human and bot and you know automation and reporting and analytics and all the great stuff. So, it's um it's a very it's a very tough job because there's a there's an awful lot of products. Um they they all do great things. Our our bots are designed to do one thing well. Um so, it's we we have a pretty much a bot for every every CX and automation experience. So, whatever channel you're communicating with, inbound and outbound, we've got some sort of technology that can help improve that that that service to your customers and to your agents. and um and yeah, so um I'll be interested to see what what Hugh has to say from a WFM perspective and and how that may may help you guys with your with your customers and agents. Thank you very much, Scott. Appreciate that. Awesome. Hugh, over to you. I shall do the sharing thing in a second. Click that little button down there. Excellent. And now, of course, I've lost my Teams window. Well done. There you go. Uh so there you go. So that should be showing a slide. See that? Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. One of the interesting facets I find of Teams, by the way, is that once I've gone full screen, it's hard to see if anyone puts their hand up. So, you know, to the point earlier, I'm sure my colleagues actually will keep me honest. But if you do have questions, let's uh let's talk them through. Although, because this is a good um works management session, we will we will keep to time. And um so Scott's introduced varants and and where we fit. Uh workers management is a key part of what we do. It's one of the sort of core capabilities we have alongside things like recording and analytics and these tools as well. And actually we've been in the business of workforce management for some considerable time. Um so we actually acquired the technology many years ago from a company I started with. So it's an area I've been uh working with for around about 20 years now. So it's been and each of those years has brought us something new and interesting. It's a it's a fascinating area just to sort of start that conversation really. If I click there that would be a little bit easier start that conversation you know fundamentally what do we do when we're looking at workforce management and and you I'm sure you might have seen this kind of approach before with a with a few other folks. We're all about ensuring we've got the right number of people in place to handle customer interactions and they are ready and skilled to do that. And if we do that right, uh we know that customers get satisfied quickly. Uh Scott alluded to the fact that um a lot of our work now is in the digital space with uh what we call containment within IVR capability. So when those interactions with their emails or chats or phone calls e exit that self-service piece, we we then need to have people that do that. And that's what our fundamentally what our technology does. It allows us to deliver that element um of uh of of staffing. And it's kind of interesting when we look at that problem, it's become harder because the the skill of that employee is now way off the charts from where we were a few years ago. And that's because customers can find out information on knowledge. Uh they can type in their questions on a on a chat GPT and get an awful lot of information about the product or service um that they're they're having from yourselves. Uh it's almost the the overflow then into the into the way an agent is going to handle that whether it's an email or a phone call becomes incredibly more complicated. And that's really the the business the tricky business that we're in. The good news is if we do this right and we've got thousands of customers who will testify to this, we know that it delivers on that customer experience. CX scores increase um because they're answered promptly uh and they're also answered by somebody who can help them. So, so we fix that problem too. We know also that employees uh have their work life balance. So, we'll look at tools in a second that not only allow us to see schedules way ahead of time so I can plan my life, but also allow me to own those schedules and change them if I need to. And again, that's important. That's control because staff are incredibly precious commodity. Um, we do need them to be responsive and, you know, have that smile on their face when they're having conversations or handling those emails. Uh so we need to make sure they're cared for as well and we certainly drive up employee engagement. Actually kind of an interesting um uh comment I'd sort of make personally is that that's become increasingly important over the last few years. Uh and retaining the the right staff, retaining the good staff is is a key KPI we've seen. Obviously what fits under all of this is maintaining costs. So it'll be fantastic if we could just hire away to some of these challenges. uh but actually there's a cost there to to to kind of consider and again that's where our technology fits. So when we look at the needs of the business which can be driven by cost delivering service there's always a a good balance that we aim to achieve between what an employee needs out of that workday and and how they're working and also the the business and how they're delivering that service and of course the cost of delivering that service. It's kind of interesting because AI has come up a couple of times. I've made a reference to it and then Scott too. It's interesting I think for us just to look where AI fits within um the portfolio of capability we have and especially on WFM we all know that AI is front and center. It's a government strategy. It's a strategy by pretty much all of the businesses we work with to understand how AI is unlocking capacity improving productivity within their operation. and they typically have teams really smart people who try to figure out where some of these AI tools fit within their business and how it's going to yield the benefit. Also, there's a lot of pressure because if you if you're not doing something, is your competitor doing something? Are they getting that little edge which is going to differentiate them in the marketplace? Where we see AI fit and and it's got a reference to this is really focusing on micro workflows. So if you've got a a particular problem to solve, instead of throwing all of the AI at it, we just identify that microworkflow, our bots will answer that. And we'll talk about forecasting bot in a second and how that kind of works. Um, so so that's how we've addressed this problem of looking how you apply AI sensibly and with business outcomes throughout an organization. And again, just to back up the point that uh um that Scott made, we absolutely see that AI augments that human experience. So, we still have agents. They're still really important to us. And whether I'm using some automation AI technology to ensure I've got the right number of staff or actually when those staff are answering a call or handling an email, they're getting coaching in that moment or knowledge that helps them deal with that interaction. Uh that's all positive use of AI and bringing that to bear for that for that individual worker and and right now. So we're going to kind of break this down a little bit. Um I tend to look at these uh processes and and hopefully you'll see some synergy with what you do on a on a kind of day-to-day basis. We'll look at first at capacity planning. So figuring out how many people are required and there's some really smart technology around there. uh we'll touch a little bit on some technology we have to help find the right staff moving forward and then of course moving into much more focused how we develop that schedule uh that was called out earlier and then little touch on the new newer capability we've introduced called time flex which just enhances that ability uh for an agent to feel much more comfortable in their workplace and we'll also cover a couple of things on real time as well as we go through. So the first problem for any operation is figuring out how many people you need. In the markets that we serve, it can be quite a challenging uh problem because you have calls that can fluctuate. You have the digital channels, secure messaging, uh direct messaging, uh emails, all of these different channels are now starting to come in and they can be quite challenging to service all of those. Um so our capacity planning tool wraps all of that up. we understand the kind of um predicted future uh based on historical demand. Um now we've got some smart algorithms that help us do that but also it requires we think a really good robust process and we work with customers around this. You know you're both working in industries that will I'm assuming you you'd have um annual fluctuations. People travel a lot more in certain times of the year. People will take vacation other times of the year. These are all trends that if we've got enough historical data, our algorithms will start to seek out and then gives you the tool then to figure out what that future looks like. The bit where we really can make a difference is understanding how that maps to people. Um so the the problem as I mentioned earlier is is really around the the number of things that uh people that customers will call and want to discuss and that's a skill problem for us. So we understand how people like Scott who's multifaceted can help us when they're answering their phone calls as an example and that's a skill problem that you require quite a advanced technology to resolve and that's what our tooling can do. So we can understand based on demand how many people are required um and also when we need to hire them. So if they're brand new people it'll take maybe 6 8 12 weeks depending on the industry you're working in before they become effective. So that's good to know. But if you've got a peak in 12 weeks, you really need to hire that person starting today. So you can start to embed them, start to train them and teach them what they can can do. And we have tools that can do this. Uh the outputs are typically around how we're delivering service. So service level predictions and also cost. So it's fine to find the most highly skilled employees to help you out with this problem, but that comes at a cost. uh and it might be a strategy for yourselves to look at how some of that demand can be handled by outsourcers. So we can also do some quite clever stuff uh where you can look at what the impact of taking a piece of demand and either putting that through self-service IVA capability for example or actually having another partner of um an outsource partner sort of handle that piece. So it's really kind of interesting when you when you work it through. In fact, many outsourcers will use our technology in order to accurately estimate the cost of providing the services. So it's it's kind of double faceted there. So that's the first bit way ahead of time, usually weeks or months and for the next couple of years. We then drill down to the actual what we call the schedule period itself. So we're really getting down to little 15inut segments because with platforms like 8 by8 we get historical data uh and we can use that data to help us predict the next couple of weeks. And again that's super easy. Um we use the principle of taking the demand itself averaging the historical data sets and taking into account any spikes or differences on the particular day. So if there's a bank holiday, uh if there's other kinds of impacts there with events, then we can factor that into our tactical forecast. And the really important thing is we're getting right down to that little 15 minutes. We understand how the arrival patterns will vary through the day. That's typically more important for phone calls, of course, uh because they can they're more immediate that people are hanging on. But it's interesting how the expectation of digital service has risen. And I certainly had a had a secure messaging chat with a healthcare provider just recently and although they took a few hours to respond, my pet is thinking if I phone them it will be a lot quicker. So the expectation of delivery across all of these channels is increasing. Uh so you can actually match that within our forecasting model. Set a service target number of minutes before the call get answered. Number of hours before the email gets handled and then we'll figure out how many how many staff we need. Now, the the difference here is when I modeled ahead of time with my capacity plan, I'm talking about groups of people. We call them staffing profiles. When I've done my tactical plan, I can really hone in then on the actual agents that I've employed, um, name, skills, work patterns, contracts, all those kinds of things. And then we automatically assign those shifts to those agents based on the predicted demand, but also um, when they're available to work. of their contracts taking into consideration other areas as well. And the problem actually is really interesting to map out. Um when we look inside of this uh you you have contractual hours that people working in max but you'll also have patterns rotations where people might be working days and late uh and that will sort of vary as well uh throughout throughout the months and years. So all of that um uh all of those attributes are going into our scheduling algorithm in order to figure out how many people I need, who I need, and when do they need to actually start to work. So it's a really kind of complex environment, but we're kind of wrapping it up in some really smart technology. Now, one other thing I like to think about as well is that the approach is very employee focused. So when we look at the rules, you might think sometimes we're sort of forcing people to be in a particular desk at a particular time of day or work from home even these days. Uh but actually sitting around that there's an awful lot of rules which we can ensure applied to make it a fair reasonable workplace. I mentioned a couple of things there but but take fairness for example. You know you might have staff who love working Saturday nights. You might have staff that that's actually not a great time to work. their family commitments or or something else. So we can put rules in play that treat individuals as individuals. Uh so they ensure that we are respecting that the demands of their social life and give them the kind of working environment that allows them to be productive. Again, we're doing that because if they're happy and productive and they're skilled, they're going to service customers so so much better. So we really care about the way that kind of works, too. One strategy we'd like to talk through as well just to make sure this works um effectively is a staffing strategy. Uh we sometimes talk to customers who who have sort of people who just have one skill and what we encourage them to think about is beyond that and career development for those staff to try and understand whether those agents can grow initial skills can be really helpful for us. I'm not sure particularly what markets you serve but languages is a classic one. you're super good at handling um the uh the the the the product, understanding the product and helping customers serve on that. Maybe what you can do uh is actually do that in a different language and we can also model the fact that'll take you a little bit time as well to to kind of get sorted. So staffing strategy important and we'll reflect that in the plan and obviously and this is really important actually the fact that we will then ensure that the uh model there is perfectly aligned to the way calls emails chat secure messaging is rooted off platforms like 8.8. So we've got to be really aligned to that otherwise um you know things won't happen as we expect. Now one newer thing which which then adds value on that. So we've created the schedule people are working those kind of schedules but if we've created something that's a little bit of a challenge in terms of work life balance what can tend to happen is the absences of attrition will increase uh people will find maybe the pay is the same but they'll find a better working conditions elsewhere and they maybe want to work uh or move into that new environment. uh and also we see attrition as well uh sorry absence has been increasing so people you know may have a different reason not to to show up that day. So what we've focused on with another one of our bots is that um scheduling flexibility. So really driving practically unlimited amount of schedule flexibility for the staff put them in control uh of that and then you've seen business outcomes being really impress impressive. Uh you can see the figures here that reduction in attrition. So that means more capacity available to answer your customer interactions. Uh and it really kind of drives through improvements in that way. And it's got introduced earlier on. We've got a bot that that solves that particular problem. We call this time flex. So it's got a little video that will play through it. I'll narrate it by the way. It's just going to um give me a way of presenting this on screen. So the first thing is it's super easy to use. We expose this through a web and also through mobile experiences. And it gives that employee clear understanding of the shifts they've got and also helps them understand if there's changes that can be made. So hopefully you can see the shifts on this screen. Helps if you got a bigger screen I think in this one. You can also maybe see the little ribbons that are above the shifts and they have a unique concept we've built called flex coins. So nothing currency related but what they're aiming to do is show an agent where changes can be helpful. So they'll earn coins and changes won't be so helpful. So they'll spend coins. So if you move your shift, so you're spending coins. Uh actually we won't just save that. But it it kind of indicates it helps in a gamification type of way an agent understand that that change probably won't be accepted and actually my business really needs me to work that that way. But actually that's still the case, right? So if I look at my dayto-day, my mouse here should be nicely highlighted for you. You can see it's built into their experience. Nothing new to learn and everything. And this um use case could be something quite simple. So I look at the day there I've got to work. I can see clearly the hours I'm covering. The uh the shift there is showing the um the breaks and lunches I've got. But maybe what would be applicable is that I would like to change that. So I need I need to do that. Simply done. It's it's so easy. So you can just simply click the shift itself and you'll see me here uh where it's actually just dragging along that shift so I can uh can make the changes I need. So as I do that you'll see you can see the little coin icon there showing me that I'm spending coins. So I can absolutely accept that change. My hours remain the same um or make that change rather hours remain the same but I I need to I need to figure that balance and that's how it works. It allows an agent to make those changes. So that is good for them, not so great for the company at the moment. So what I'm asking the agent to do is actually um spend earn some coins with me. So what I'm going to do is I don't really on Wednesday I can start earlier. Weather's fantastic. I can get up earlier, commute in something like that. And you can see at the top of the screen now we've gone from uh a minus3 to a plus five. So that's fine. I can play around a little bit. I need it to be zero or I need to be um positive. In this case, I've I've hit positive. So, I can make that change. Absolutely fine. The business has got what they wanted, which is coverage and coverage when they really need it. The agents got what they need uh which is acknowledgement that they have a few other challenges um that they need to to kind of accommodate. So, super flexible as you can see here. You can do an addit, you can do a shits split. A great example somebody shared with me the other day is if they sort of have childcare responsibilities working at home, they might split their shift so they can grab something from the supermarket before then picking up the kids and then coming back and finishing off their shift towards the end of the day. So all of that coverage is is there uh and it's really simple to execute. And that was the key thing. It it empowers agents. You can see that hopefully on screen. but also it's done in a really simple way that doesn't require a ton of training and also if you do this with traditional systems doesn't require a more team leader effort to actually approve any of these. We're doing it automatically based on the rules that are set uh within the system. It it's kind of interesting. We are focused on helping customers achieve value business outcomes as Scott mentioned. Couple of comments here though that I think are really good and these are from some of the customers are currently using it is actually um validation by the agents themselves. You can see one here from a BO that we worked with in another part of the of our region. Um and they're really bringing to bear the fact that it's transformed the way they're kind of working. So they really, you know, we actually gave us some great um sort of feedback on that. What what um and in this particular case really fixed the absent problem uh for that for that particular agent. We all have challenges outside of work each of us. Um what we're doing with time flex is allowing traditional contact center agents handling all those different customer interactions the same flexibility and control that we would have as office workers as well but within guardrails that allow that um to be done in a helpful way to the organization. So that's probably the key thing there in terms of you know we we've generated a forecast we've built the schedule and then we're allowing those agents full control over how those shifts can be worked. But by the way, there are rules always behind this. Um, so the changes you've seen me apply are controllable. We don't have to allow everyone to do exactly the same thing. We can make sure that it's a tool that's appropriate for your business uh, and how you would like to to manage your staff. The other areas in terms of engagement is we bring that to life really with our My Vent mobile app. And again, we've done something pretty innovative here. You've probably seen uh on the market that vendors will have mobile capability. Uh ours is native, by the way, so it's built in. Works really, really well. And it allows you to do the things you'd expect like view schedules, trade shifts, um uh wi with their colleagues, book some time off. All of that's available regardless of where they are because it's on a kind of mobile device. What we looked at is actually leveraging some other platform technologies and Scott alluded to some of the other portfolio products we have and and we kind of built in one this little friendly bot. Um, as you can see here, it's greeting me that my demo personas match actually, which is why it's got my name slightly differently there. But what it's doing is it wrapping up some really smart IVA capability that we have to allow an agent to have a conversation with their data rather than sort of looking at the calendar. know they can do the my time button at the bottom by the way will just show a schedule calendar but why don't I just ask what my schedule is for the next week and you can do that on the prompt as you can see or you can kind of type it into so the system's going to look at the schedules done a lot of smart stuff to the lookups and it presents the data that that staff need in a very kind of engaging way here as you can as you can kind of see on the screen but I want to need I need to know a little bit more so I can just then ask again maybe to look at some of the details behind that kind of shift. So again prompting or or the um uh the the the message box works easily and I can just say you know exactly which day do you want to know about? Uh get the detail the little icon there is telling me whether I'm working at home or in the office and give me the activities that I've been scheduled to work but it's actually I want to book some time off there. So it's again it's super easy to do. they can just follow the same workflow that they would if they're sitting in front of our browser, but they do it in that conversational way, which I think is really transformational because it's the way that some agents like to work. It's very modern. Um, and it allows us to be incredibly flexible when we're developing this technology. It's actually an approach we're going to try and embed in a number of our personas and our kind of use cases. So, you can see how easy it is to use and the fact that you get results quickly. So again, there's automation behind this. Our case here is that somebody's booked some time off. Um, and because of the fact that we've got automation behind it, it's processed automatically and if I switched it on, it'll say, "Yes, that's fine." Or it'll let you decline it. Obviously, then you'll have a a conversation with your your supervisor on there. And again, it's interesting how customers have adopted this. Um, great example from one of our Dutch customers. um long-standing user actually really great to work with and it's kind of interesting if you look at the bottom here they use a lot of student labor in their market uh and it's really simple for the students once they finished their day they can figure out what shifts they've been allocated pick up some shifts so you can do some shift bidding on there if you wish and then do that all from their phone contacts so they don't have to find a desk a browser login they can do all of that as well uh and of course what's important and I'm sure everyone here you agree with especially when you move into cloud all of that data securely processed and managed within our own cloud. So there are no danger there of any of this information getting uh getting away and each of these studies actually are on our website if you want to uh ask drill into it a little bit more. So Hugh just talking about the um holiday um request there. So from previous projects that we've run, you can build rules in the background to say certain numbers of staff of these skill sets can request holiday at any one time and so that can be automatically approved which would really save a lot of time for the team leaders and managers. Yeah. Um but building those rules in the background and if if that is um if if the holiday is is declined and then you say actually I' I've spoken to Billy and Billy said that he'll cover that shift for me. he's the same skill set. Do you mind if we swap shifts? And all of that is is just so seamless which can save not only the agents time but also as I say the team leader and manager's time as well. Yeah, 100%. I mean one you I think you pointed out brilliantly there the fact that it's totally engagement the agent point of view they get what each of them gets what they want and need but also from a business point of view the the service is producted. they they need a they need a skilled staff member whether it's Billy or myself or something is a is you know we we can arrange that between ourselves. One final thing actually on that the very common approach would be then to ensure that we are working with enterprise ecosystems is that we'll synchronize that that leave with the HR system of choice um workday or whatever the customers using and that's important as well because what you want to avoid is double keying or inaccuracy in data. So once we've done our job and as you say we can control who can take time off and when uh we can also then feed that through automatically to HR systems so all of the HR reports are accurate and uh uh consistent which I think is a super important point too. I I like um I guess on this particular product that it it connects agents together as well. If you've got, you know, homeworking staff and things like that, it, you know, when they start bidding for shifts and changing shifts and things like that, it enables them to to be more connected to the office because obviously there's there's quite a lot of organizations that that have contact centers working from home and, you know, uh, splitting the time between office and home. So, I I I quite like that angle on it as well. So, Scott, you mentioned um bidding for shift. So my understanding of that is we might have a peak period coming up and you it would post out on the verant system to say we need this many members of staff to cover these hours. Would anybody like to do some overtime? And again that's seamless. Yeah 100%. And actually it's really interesting again both the organizations I suspect have pockets of brilliant staff who do other roles right now who might want to help out in the customer uh contact centers. one of our customers, Capotch, and this is um on our website, the the testimonial. So, they they're a bank in South Africa, what they call the challenger bank. So, they've done incredibly well against some of the traditional ones. Uh so, they have staff who are based in branches and those branches aren't busy all the time, and those staff are really keen to do different and and exciting work. So, they use a bidding process just to offer those shifts um and get that filled by by um other people within the organization. and they effectively then are taking calls um within the contact center or working some some back office tasks and of course all this is glued together if we look at cloud platforms like 8.8 that works really well without that kind of underlying technology of course then we we aren't able to offer that kind of flexibility but uh no it works really well I think in that context makes sense yeah thank okay thank you cool so where we've kind of got our journey is we've planned we've executed the schedule we published it agents have worked um uh started to work the day and then we kind of focus on some of that real time stuff so this is probably the Next important thing I think that we are we we want to spend time making sure the plan is right. If you get your investment correct there what it means is that then changes on the day are much easier to manage. Um so we have tools that also help with that. So both in real time and also so stuff you can see on screen. I used to have a customer that had our sort of screens up on on a massive wallboard that they could uh see every day. One of those television type things. And also alerting as well. We need to spot that there's issues going on and then give you the ability to reforcast, analyze that change and then if needed reoptimize the day. Now, we don't always encourage that, but it's entirely possible. You can imagine that if an agent set up to do their work through the day, disrupting that needs to be done cautiously because we don't want to affect that too many times. But it's entirely possible and in extreme cases absolutely can be done. And if we are changing their shifts on the day itself, we'll make sure we'll send them an alert to say your you know your break has moved or your your shift has actually moved on that particular day. The way we do that twofold. Firstly, we've got a great tool called Q analytics. So this is taking the feed we'll get from the CCast platform um which we have used to do forecasting but this approach is taking that data through the day. So every 15 minutes we get an aggregated feed and we can then plot that on screen. Now what you can see there's kind of a two two um area charts one in blue one in gray. So the the gray one is is where we thought what we thought was going to happen absolutely fine. The overlay there is showing us what changes and we've got here as you can see um a slight difference in the forecast the volume at the top of the screen pretty much flat on the AHT. So that hasn't changed too much. That's probably a good sign. And then staffing or FTE in our context, you know, are we staffing to the right levels. So this is a tool that helps me understand as a supervisor team manager are the cues performing as I expect and if not allows me to take action to to remedy that. So whether it's reforcasting based on the actuals uh you know we've all been in situations maybe where a website is failing or a self-service channel is failing. So, we'll get more calls than anticipated or somebody's come up with a a new offer from a competitors and your agents are having longer call times and AHT is starting to kind of creep up. Um, so spotting this through analytics tools is is really important. Um, and that this tool Q analytics allows you to do that on screen. And if you haven't spotted on screen, by the way, again, back to that point about notification alerts, it'll ping you and say that, you know, the queue isn't performing as you expect. Uh, it needs some attention. We also couple that with adurance. So, this looks very similar to the calendar deliberately. So, what we do with our tooling is we've added the schedule adurance capability directly into the calendar so that people who are controlling this can have full visibility. So, schedule adurance again is taking a feed from CCast. We're looking at a real-time feed in this context and we're able really to understand each activity that employee is doing um if they're handling calls, if they're on a break, if they've logged in at the start of a shift and that's mapped against a publish activity. And again, we're showing in real time what's going on. This is slightly different than the earlier Q stuff is all about 15 minutes. This is kind of in real time. So you might be able to see on the screen here, we've got a clear understanding of adherance and that's the comparison to what I wanted to happen versus what's actually happening. Little flag there that that gets um that that gets popped out. This is a great tool for team leaders. It's web- based and they can see just their team so there's no privacy issues and also they can choose to intervene or if actually the person is spending a little bit more time on a call because it's necessary they can approve that adurance because it doesn't then appear as red on my kind of chart. But the important thing is I'm always looking at that and understanding whether I've got the people that I expect handling those interactions at that particular time. It's it's really important on the day to ensure that happens. We then obviously roll that up into reporting but also into something we call our KPR scorecards. So all of that data is powerful and reports are great because you get the uh real insight into what's going on. But we think it's important that um somebody has a scorecard to kind of look at. I'm looking at Luke here who's one of my key team members. And in this balance scorecard, I've not only got the adherance, you can see here 91%. So doing a good job there. So I care about the overall performance to schedule here in percentage terms. I can then drill down if I need to understand where that time is being lost. But I also looked at other statistics around them. You know, what are they doing, how long they're taking to do things. So it allows me as a manager to really understand how that um employee is performing. And of course, what that really then drives is a good one-to-one type session. So, I'm able to have conversations about how to do things maybe differently and better. And for full transparency, we're also showing that to the agent, too. So, they're able to see all of this data. It's not going to be a super surprise uh at the end of the week when they get called into an office. They're going to know what that shoe is about. And hopefully, if they've responded to, say, an out of a alert, they've corrected that prior to the one-to-one session. That's the intent. just building that as well. So reporting I mentioned is really important. One of the areas we're really excited about about platform is it's completely open from all dimensions. So that allows us to share information with the right people. So your um colleagues yourselves can get access to the data you need to manage uh the operation moving forward. So a couple of things on this one. uh it people get very excited the fact we've got a data catalog and they can grab pretty much all of the workforce management data they have and they can bring that down and report against it with whatever tools they want to and if you uh have more services from variants from our quality analytics tool it's the same data um basis that we're using here data catalog so if you've got multiple services from variant you can consolidate that as well in your own environment and we're seeing And that was a huge step forward for a lot of customers who traditionally been locked out of their data and in fact some vendors that are charging for this. With Varant it's open there's no charge for it and it's very it's easily accessible as you need. We've also taken that approach and visualized it ourselves. So you saw some of our scorecards which are about empowering people and tracking performance. Here's a great use of one of our dashboards as we've built this technology that gives you a clear understanding of shrinkage. So within your operation when I when I look at my planned activity I really need to understand where time is not being spent with my customers and that's shrinkage and it's an important attribute when we're setting our forecast. But here I can track it and I'll also track it during the day. So I can get a good sense at midday what happened this morning and then allows me then to change things uh in the afternoon should it should it be all right. And again I've had some great customer feedback where they're trying to understand what why they didn't maybe hit their targets in the morning. Where was time lost? Is it in absences? Is it in people not doing or not showing up? That's the kind of analysis we can get out of our shrinkage dashboard and we could present that to senior leadership who understand really what what's kind of going on. We then kind of extended that forward and again another um area where we try to make things simple is that's our pre-built dashboard. Everyone on our cloud platform will get that. We also have the option to look at what we call um our enterprise platform and this is really allowing customers that complete free tax there. And as you can see, I'm I'm doing my shrinkage analysis here, but I've got slightly different dimensions around it. So, basically, I just type in that natural language search uh and it's rendering the data I need. No coding from my point of view. So, fantastic for you as as operational leaders. And more than that, what's presenting that data back which you've just seen, all of this narrative um and graphics is generated automatically by our tooling as well. I switched the narrative bit off actually, but somebody is actually there's a voice which is narrating what's coming up on screen. So, we really built this to solve that problem where you know you're in that session with your peers or your leadership team and you want to try and drill down on that kind of data. We're doing that automatically. So, we're looking at the data. We're figuring out where outliers exist and are there things really that uh need need to be looked at. So it's a really powerful tool and it it I think with what quest management an old colleague of mine said it's very much a journey rather than a destination and this is the tool that exactly fits that. It allows you to understand how your operation was performing and spot areas where things can be different or can change. Now everything I've shown you is work management related. I always think though because I like to talk about things that can be different staffing strategies different ways of handling calls. You know, if we look at broader variant products, the same technology applies. And I've got sentiment analysis, which is out of our speech analytics tooling. So, if I made all this change when it comes to recruiting people, training people, and uh getting them to work different shifts, maybe have have they affected what my my customer experience is? And yes, we have surveying tools as well that can add to this. But also with speech analytics, I can start to understand sentiment. So, are people generally um welcoming the kind of changes I've made? Are they getting the same kind of experiences? So that's not workforce management, not to confuse anyone, but it's an example of how you can actually bring technologies together, I think, in this day and age. So it's it's it's part of an overall um approach. And the way we kind of do that or we're able to do that is because everything I've talked about is on a platform, a variant cloud platform. uh we do the integrations in the cloud to all the the um the vendors that we need 8 by8 and any of those HR integrations I made mention of so that openness allows us to to um find the integration get the data and also then share the data that's required right at the hub of this which is the the engine really that drives it is Da Vinci AI so a lot of the technologies we're developing and bringing to market are based on our knowledge of customer experience for decades needs uh and using data to make a lot of sense. Um it's not our own AI engine. We're not competing with CH GPT or these kind of vendors. It's our ability to leverage those platforms and use them in the right way in order to to deliver, you know, really positive business outcomes for for customers. One final thing actually, it's kind of interesting. We we often talk about, you know, what's the future of workforce management from our perspective and and my view. We do a real good job of forecasting scheduling and and getting that piece right. But one thing we've always really been focused on is opening up capacity. So making sure that agents are productive, customers are having an insanely good experience, and just bringing to bear some of the other bots we've got within glad that um Scott introduced the concept bots earlier on. But if we think about it, those add value too to what we'd say is a traditional workforce management problem. So here's some examples. Um when you have an interaction through the digital channels where you have a bot that summarizes and presents that sort of journey so far to the agent who's handling the call. So they don't have to repeat things that they know that already. And you can see here we've got things like knowledge automation. So one of our tools can go and uh spider websites and find out what you know the help system is is looking at. A couple of um uh travel vendors are actually using this. So we look at their website, find all the information, create the knowledge content and then that knowledge content then is presented to the employee. So when they get those tricky questions about policies or how things need to happen, we can help the agent answer that without them having to key into different systems and and find out the answers. And you can see a number of those areas here on on screen. Each of these are microworkflows. For each of these, we've got a bot that that addresses and and resolves that issue. Now I will actually talk about a wrap-up. Actually, it's it's quite common these days to use technology to um transcribe on the call and at the end of that call prevent present the agent with a summary and we're using really u AI obviously generative AI in order to get that summary out. Um and then that saves time on call and obviously that's a really important business saving for our customers. But one thing that really struck me um talking to a customer the other day, they've deployed wrap-up pot and what they found as a testimonial for one of their staff who lives with with dyslexia and they were a brilliant agent. They are a brilliant agent. But the thing that was stressing out stressing them out on the day was making sure the summary was right because that was a little bit more challenging than it was for their for their colleagues. So, their lives have been transformed because our wrap-up bot is now automating that. They can just simply read what the summary is um all about and they're much more confident then about sharing saving that information to the CRM system. So, it's really transformed and it was really good to hear uh because as I said, we're also saving that customer money when it comes to um uh the length of a call. So, that's improving capacity. So, that's good. But also, it's transformed that particular user's lives. And I thought that was a really really good story. So that's me I think in kind of summary for what we've uh talked about do and couple of takeaways really one this is really our capability is really based with that modern CX center. So we can handle any channel we can look at back offices we can look at retail and and even branches as well. AI is used smartly so it's infused within an operation to make decisions easier to automate those uh avoid the need for managers to get involved other than in exceptional cases absolutely zero down on the employee side of things. So not only having fairness rules when scheduling but allow the agents with tools like time flex to make some changes but wrapped up in a super easy to use workflows because if we built the you know the best mouse trap then we need to make sure that it uh is easy to use and consume by the customers like yourselves. And finally all of this is really um powered by that open platform. Uh so whether we look at just workforce management from ourselves or the broader capabilities we've got uh that platform really opens up all of these different capabilities and a lot of our customers will grow with us. They'll deploy WFM and they'll really try to see what we can do in other areas. And as Scott alluded to earlier where it makes sense for your business and working with our partners, you know, what other tools and bots can really kind of help ju just to me. Sorry. Yeah. as you say just to finish off um you know to help with those business cases and and understanding what bot technology fits in what area we we do operate um what we call 120day risk-free program on some of our technologies so I don't know if we we mentioned it earlier on H within that but obviously WFM is slightly different because it's a more in-depth um you know featurerich tool so there's there's no programs in in terms of the WFM but the supporting bot technology that's around that we can um we can help mold and develop you know the right solution by delivering one of these 120day programs. And one of the key things that have come out of the programs that we've run is you know after the 120 days if it doesn't suit or it doesn't deliver the outcome that you require you can rip it out but we've never ripped one out. So everyone who's taken the the program has delivered um has kept the the the product. So whether that's time flex or or whatever the um the risk free program is. So so we really put our money where our mouth is and our credentials um you know on show. Um we have a huge amount of case studies that they are very large case studies. So you know big US banks, big US insurance companies. So so the headline figures are huge. But if you scale that back to, you know, the size of the contact centers that that maybe you um you know, bring bring the contact center down from the 10,000 seat to a, you know, a 200 seat, it it it's still the the same kind of outcome. So, um what I'm trying to say is, you know, if I share some case studies, it says, you know, a bank has saved 10 million, it's because it's a huge huge account, but it's all relative to the size of the contact center is what I'm trying to say. So, we can uh we can share things like that as well. So Scott, I'm glad you mentioned the savings there that um your customers have achieved. So yeah, what are the industry stats from organizations moving from say a spreadsheet environment through to using Barren? Because there must be efficiencies that are made by using AI to map schedules instead of somebody doing a best guess effectively with with a spreadsheet. Yeah, absolutely. And again it's relevant to to the size. So a lot of our case studies are built around the outcome and you know the savings. So if I take I don't know IBA for example, we've got an 80% uh success rate in our containment bot. So it it kind of keeps the call within the IVA um and you know it doesn't deflect to the to the agent. So therefore it saves productivity, it saves time, it saves inbound call costs, all those kind of things. Um, time flex bot is more of a um, agent attrition product. So, it stops um, you know, agents feeling isolated that they're not part of the organization that they don't have control and therefore they they retain staff longer. So, again, what's the FTE on, you know, replacing staff and going through that recruitment process and then the retraining process. So, so I I wouldn't like to say that there is an official stat for each product. I would say it's very much based on you know understanding the organization and you know where the challenges lie. Um I I I guess we we probably have something where it says, you know, you can save 30% productivity or whatever it may be. But I would I would certainly say a workshop understanding, you know, the challenges that your agents face on a day-to-day basis, the challenges that your customers face, you know, um what are the calls coming in, how are they being handled, what's the average call handling time, how do you want to focus on those sorts of things that I I would I would suggest that yeah, there's no there's no um silver bullet there. It's more of an understanding of everybody's environments really. Thanks, Scott. Sally, did you have any questions? I I know that she's shared a lot of information with us today. Yeah. No, I've written some notes, but no, I'll wait for to speak to Erin about this because she'll probably understand a lot more than I do, but it's very interesting. And we loaded a lot of the content. You'd see a little markers there for the content at our website, too, as well. I think yourselves as well broadcasting some great stuff on YouTube. Um, so feel free. There's a couple of good little um snippets of customers saying we did this and we found that which I always think is like a good testament to as well as listening to Scott and myself what we can do. Um so yeah Mark um you can get access to the partner corner internally that will have you know some of our videos our case study interviews um some of the outcome you know ROIs on the bots that we've got more of the detail and stuff like that. So we can um through Becky we can share all of that content. We've got some really I I quite like them some really neat um adverts that talk about you know what our bots do and and how it helps. We've got some they're quite funny little adverts, but they they kind of resonate with me a little bit. I'm I'm more of a, you know, a visual thinker, so when I when I see the adverts, it kind of makes sense to me. So, we've got all that sort of stuff that we can share as well. Appreciate it. Yeah, look forward to seeing those. Billy, anything from yourself? Um, no. I was just going to mention about um you said about the RO R ROI and like it's depends on the size of the of the business, but um I've been looking at a few different solutions and we've got like 155 FTE uh 155 seats contact center here and uh we've got a quite a basic WFM system at the minute because we weren't classed as big. Uh however just what we've got is complexity. So we've got different ch multiple channels like our retail team are only made up of 10 people but they serve three different cues as well as like that's Tfony alone for 10 people doing three different cues as well as um using Salesforce for generating leads. Um we've got 76 daily rules 125 weekly rules. So we've got quite a complicated organization for such a small number. Um, so I think it's just to try and get an understanding of how systems like this can help us with a complexity even though we don't have such a high we're not a big context a big organization but you fit I think from my experience you fit into a pretty good category there. Um, so we got a couple of WFM offers these days as an enterprise and essentials. I think we dropped the enterprise banding the other day. Um uh so both of those work and they're both built on the same core really smart technology. So they would cope with things like um they would cope with things like the complexity of scheduling for chats and all that. We we manage or we set for example how many concurrent chat sessions uh are there. Now essentials actually works in the same way. it tends to be used better by smaller operations. And the reason we kind of make that happen for them is we kind of lock down a little bit some of the rules. So we set up the rules for them. So the rules that you mentioned wouldn't be a challenge, but then we kind of lock those down because then it makes it easier for you to look after, easier for us to train you and and shortens the effective time. Um, so I think when people say what's the ideal size of a of a contact center deployer stuff that there are smaller centers but actually to your point far more complicated and that's a that's a pretty good um that's that's a good trend these days that actually would benefit from this kind of stuff. Absolutely. And then you look at and Scott's mentioning a couple of times it's as well as that complexity you still got the people problem right. If you lose one person it's actually almost the bigger impact. remember um uh u talking about the power of one with a few colleagues and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, one person not being there if you've got 10,000 agents is kind of an annoyance for you. It can be really critical. So, having those kind of tools that substantiate this kind of approach is uh is is really is really important. I always think I think it's almost more of a challenge for you with aund 155 seats because you've got to justify to your you know your board the investment where if you've got 10,000 seats then obviously the justification's there because you've got so many people but then I I I find this challenge in uh public sector as well that generally they have smaller contact centers but they've got so many different entry points so they've got waste disposal they've got you know complaints they've got vulnerable customers, they've got all that kind of stuff and it's being serviced by 50 to 100 agents, but they they're so overworked. It's kind of how do you how do you manage that that process and then get justification from a board that you need you need to invest in the product? So, so we can help, can't we, with you know, uh working out all of that the the intricacies around the investment and and the ROIs and the the the outcome based stuff. Yeah, absolutely. So, Billy, we can organize a more detailed scoping call with yourself if you like and um just walk through your use case and and focus on your needs. Yep. Yeah, that' be good. Brilliant. Um so, one of the use cases that we I appreciate that we're running slightly out over on time on this. Um so, one of the use cases we had was we transitioned an account from the AAIA ana system over onto 8 by8 and we managed to capture all of their call history um from the AAIA, load that in. so that we could build forecasting which was fantastic. So your team was bring contact center they were also bringing on new accounts and we were able to grab historic information from those accounts and embed that to be able to forecast the growth of their team. So I mean it's invaluable to to businesses that have changed within their organization. Um so yeah amazing. Um, Hugh Scott, was there anything else you'd like to share just before we wrap up? Um, no. From from my perspective, like I say, we're we're here to to to help and to, you know, make sure that you get the right type of solutions. So, we we do have resource internally to help do workshops. So, if you want to, you know, do a shoulder-to-shoulder workshop together with uh with yourself, Mark, and and yourself, Billy, Sally, um, separately, then we can um we can facilitate that. And we've got, you know, resource in every area. We've got specialists like Hugh from a WFM perspective in his team right through to individual specialists on particular bots and IVA specialists and all that kind of great stuff. So if you guys have a wish list and you know a remmit that you want to support, then we can kind of fit our resource around around um around your your initial I guess um qualification requirements and and work out what it is you guys need. Thank you, Scott. So I'm just sharing my screen at the moment. So uh this is the NSL web page and this webinar has been recorded. So we'll be loading it into our knowledge and then come down to our webinars and these are all past webinars. So if anybody would like to have a look at any previous webinars, please do. And at the bottom there'll be a registration for the upcoming webinar. So that's the one that's today and that'll be updated for the 20th of August which will be our PCI pal. So taking payments over the phone um and also digital payments as well. So thank you everybody and um yeah appreciate your time and I hope you found this was useful. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you Scott. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye.