How Gridspace is Evolving the Contact Center Experience

At VOICE22, which ran from October 10-12 in Arlington, Modev founder and CEO Pete Erickson had the opportunity to have a fireside chat with Evan Macmillan, co-founder and CEO of Gridspace. As a leader in conversational AI, Gridspace provides superior machine talent for patients, customers, and businesses.

If you want all of the details, you can view the full conversation and all of the VOICE22 events and talks On Demand here. 

The Contact Center Space

Contact centers are one of the largest employers in the United States. In cities like Phoenix and Tampa, they employ upwards of 5% of all working adults. Contact centers use a variety of tools to coordinate these workers' schedules but very little technology to make them better at their jobs or offload their most routine tasks. "In a typical contact center, operators are optimizing for handle time," said Evan. "They want to get people off the lines as fast as possible because that keeps the cost down. That's a rational thing to do in a typical contact center staffed by people. But in an automated contact center where you have a bunch of virtual agents supporting the human agents, average handle time may not be such a big deal. Large neural nets can take those calls at a pretty reasonable cost. So having neural nets have that conversation for an extra minute or two is much less of a big deal. This enables the neural nets to have a much more paced conversation, which will be more satisfying to the client and might actually get the job done sooner."

That's a win-win situation, to be sure. Both the business and its customers benefit from this approach. And having bots engage with customers for a few extra minutes also provides a low-cost opportunity to upsell some of those customers.

Real-time Data and Looking Ahead

In addition to collecting, organizing, and visualizing conversational data, Gridspace enables organizations to use the collected data from day-to-day operations in real-time. 

Evan describes it this way: "Customers are using Gridspace to sift through calls in real-time and actually change their outcomes. And that's possible because it's a real-time system. We take a real-time copy of the call from the switch, then transcribe and interpret it on-the-fly. We then make that data available to an agent, a coach, or an executive, where they can actually do something.So we're moving from just helping people gain access to the calls to helping them do something about those calls in real-time. And looking forward, we're putting organizations in a position where they can eventually have virtual agents taking responsibility for a part of or an entire call."

Wrap Up

That was just a small slice of Pete and Evan’s talk. There’s more to the story, as Evan also provided his insights on various issues related to conversational AI. So if you want the whole story, you can watch Evan's fireside chat from VOICE22 and the keynotes On Demand here. 

Automated, data-driven call centers are undoubtedly the future, and Gridspace is one of the big players getting us there. 

Modev

Modev was founded in 2008 on the simple belief that human connection is vital in the era of digital transformation. Modev believes markets are made. From mobile to voice, Modev has helped develop ecosystems for new waves of technology. Today, Modev produces market-leading events such as VOICE Global, presented by Google Assistant, VOICE Summit the most important voice-tech conference globally, and the Webby award-winning VOICE Talks internet talk show. Modev staff, better known as "Modevators," include community building and transformation experts worldwide. To learn more about Modev, and the breadth of events and ecosystem services offered live, virtually, locally, and nationally - visit modev.com.