Build Your Business Around Why You Breathe Every Day, with Christa Heibel

Christa: All that leadership creates that people buy into. It’s a vision and communication and teamwork. It’s less tangible than three sentences crafted by mid-level management.

Steve: You know what, when you see it right at, you know, um, I had the opportunity to build a company that really turned into a passion play. I mean, it was just, people were just so passionate. And those people, weren’t just our customers there. They were all are warn our employees. They’re our customers too.

It wasn’t like everybody that we touched and touched us. We got this little thing where we got this energy and passion and, and you couldn’t quantify it. Yeah. If you started raving about it, there’d be so much.

So you had to go, what’s the single thing. You know what, there is a single thing and that in any businesses, when I call your core value and that’s, that’s the point of why I work every day, I live every day and breathe.

And so go build your business around why you breathe every day. Yeah.

Benefits of a Contact Center Consultant

Steve: The industry requires consultants now. I mean, it’s not an option anymore. I think often people, business, people think it’s when I have a problem, I need, I can’t solve it, I’ve tried everything. I have nowhere else to look and I don’t want to write this check for people walking in telling me what I think I already know.

And that’s where consulting always is sad. But now we are technology people, no matter how we get good at it, we’re still not the contact center are not technology people, no matter how good they use the technology, they’re not honest. So it’s a third component that almost every single time should come along.

It also says a lot about consulting and how critical it is to any business, but certainly in the contact center space, because the ones that recognized your value say: ‘help me,I need help, this is way bigger than me just by myself.’

Contact centers are so focused on. The minute to minute activity that has to happen or the revenue that has to happen or the, or not what they’re making, but what they risk losing.

And so oftentimes what happens is the only way that they get even consider change to improve new technology, a data of approaches in are any approaches going home for an example, like the pandemic consistent requires you. It requires somebody else while we’re doing the work, come on in and, and, um, tinker with us per cent.

At NobelBiz, we know we have really great technology and we know for 20 years, we’ve been really a good, kind of a good custodian of, doing things, right.

But that being said, we struggle every single day with the, how the heck are you supposed to do an implementation for someone when in fact they can’t. In any way, change anything about what they’re doing even for a minute, and I’m not criticizing them because I get it.

I grew up there too. I worked in them, I owned them and I service them and make technology for, it, it becomes almost an impossible circle of a beehive of activity and no one can fit in enough time to implement.

And I, that’s something that I really wish I’d hear more of these conversations about, about how the heck do you do it because, uh, other than does everybody need to hire Christa Heibel, but I’m not sure anyone knows exactly how to do it.

And I suspect you’re even saying well to, to implement this, you do have to kind of slow down a little bit.

Christa: It’s a tough thing to navigate a lot of times, as you alluded to you that the client. Does not have the bench strength of access IT and operations people to drive those projects, forward-thinking, future state improvement, right?

Steve: Do you think that you go into know what their, their best practices are, know how to, how their rituals and routines are? Or do you find that you’re the first one in a long time? I just had them stop and analyze it.

Christa: I think it’s a combination of both. I think, I think some of them are very aware of their workflows and processes, even if they are outdated and they know that others are operating, um, you know, just in it, this is the way we’ve always done it mode. And sometimes the reason why things are being done inefficiently, let’s call it because would that kind of cover a lot of things is because the technology doesn’t allow it to be more efficient.

So we’ve waste this last year, clients that are transitioning from, you know, on-prem older age tech into more omnichannel cloud and they’re giving the tech company the directive to just translate that implementation exactly as it.

This makes no sense to us because the minute you put this tech in today, you have feature features that give you business benefit and customer experience benefits you don’t even have here and so they’re not even using them, huge opportunities to help clients optimize.

We’re just pulling some of the statistics of businesses, the percentage of business is still on, on-prem. You know, voice and omni-channel platforms. Like, even though we’ve been talking about cloud for years now, aggressively, right.

And even with all the options on the market. So, we there’s a lot more talk than action going on. And that’s because it’s new and it’s okay and it’s why asking for help, whether it’s, you know, with a third party like us, or just really taking the time in the process of working with technology company, like you to look for partners that care enough to understand your business.

It’s a very, very competitive markets to navigate, there are a lot of paper where there’s a lot of promises and futures that are oversold. No offense, sorry but you know, I still got about my BPO partners and sometimes if you’re about the tech and you know, it’s, it’s such a fast growing space,

Everybody’s got their sales engineers and project managers and people that are deploying and implementing for them.

These are not contexts in our operations people. So if the clients are coming to the table with clearly defined workflow and process automation, requests and improvements how it is impossible, and you’re not, you know, you’re just being honest about what we see every major contact center as a cloud service provider dealing with, we’re going in behind all of the major players and saying, okay, how can you use this specimen?

Steve: You’ve gone to enough contact centers where you’ve seen how they run things. And so you’re bringing something that, uh, they don’t get to see that in itself is really valuable, especially when, uh, and with context services is critical turns into our. Yeah, every dollar they’re spending here, they’re going to get more later.

Implementing New Tech in a Contact Center

Christa: When, when tech is the point correctly today in this space, it’s deployed in a way where it benefits both the CX side of it for the customer experience, but also we believe it also benefits the internal operation by way of efficiency. Most of the technology work that we do today, we believe can have ROI cases made on the investment right over and over.

It’s implemented correctly and it cannot be implemented correctly without the end user client understand their business and their workflows and their business requirement is, is about bench strength. That’s the way I propose this to my clients all the time, because we don’t just work with enterprise America, which often has less contact center technology strategy experience.

Contact centers are unique within the broader enterprise where telephony and all of this Omni channel and data requirements meet in the call center contact center totally different than the rest of Europe. Tech helping organizations make the business case on and is another valuable asset that we bring to the table because we can look at where they’re operationally at by way of process of resource requirements on existing tech and can the ROI model oh right.

Why this is a good business decision and in the process, give them some of that documentation that it’s going to make that implementation like of highest value, right, of highest optimization.

Steve: So why is it that someone would go to the trouble and, and disruption, heavy disruption to implement anything new in there if they don’t use it? If it isn’t a positive experience and the crazy thing is the technology companies we want it to be a positive experience, but we may not be the best prepared to do it.

Christa: And sometimes it’s not knowing. So not to be afraid to ask for help again, whether that’s through a strategic partner, right?

Like you, or a third party, like us, that can help you. Know what you don’t know, because it eats of just managing your business day to day and you haven’t been able to get out and see what others are doing and understand the trending and all of that. That’s going to have a, you know, like just, just being open to change starts with like learning, right.

And being open to new information information.

Steve: That’s a full circle to my lessons I’ve learned. Those are the lessons that if somebody is willing to listen yeah. In life, they might choose to make some positive changes in their life.

Christa: Hopefully somebody is going to listen to us. Steve, I know wrap on our chat and we’ll share this.

And I hope that I get to. To talk to you again soon. I know, you know, again, the technology’s really exciting. There’s some other things happening in the tech that I’d love to talk to you a little bit more about we’re really big on automation right now against some of the workforce management and labor challenges we’re seeing.

So let’s come back for part two on that. I look forward to it and to your other shows with other people I’m listening and learning. Thank you, Steve so much.