#214 Florian Garnier of Calabrio flying high with WFM

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of Get Out of Wrap. Today I'm very pleased to be joined by Florian Garnier, who is the Product Marketing Manager WFM for Calabrio. I've really enjoyed working with Calabrio recently. We've done some great stuff and this promises to be, we were just saying beforehand, the best that's been done so far. So we're putting ourselves under a bit of pressure. But Florian, thank you very much for joining the show.

[00:00:28] Florian Garnier Thanks for having me Martin, really excited to be here. Marc Thiessen And we were talking just beforehand, you know, this is the first time that we've met, which is something that I love about the podcast. We're connected and we've seen each other and show up online, but hearing each other's backstories and already forming connections as a result of them. But yours is particularly interesting. So how did you get into this industry?

[00:00:52] Florian Garnier Yeah, thanks for the question. Indeed, I think a lot of folks that are passionate about workforce management have found themselves falling into WFM, you know, but not by mistake, but just just out of nowhere, because there's no such thing as a degree, I think in workforce management.

[00:01:09] Florian Garnier Nobody is five years old and says to their parents, this is what I want to do in life. I want to workforce manage this, this one company that I want to be, you know, firefighters or airline pilots. And that was me when I was five years old. I wanted to I wanted to fly planes for a living. And so that's actually what I ended up going to school for. I went to California and got well, pretty far in my flying career. I got a commercial pilot's license.

[00:01:33] Florian Garnier So yes, I could fly planes for a living. But I did that a really wrong time. It was right in around 2010, when post the financial crisis that happened with the 2008, the airlines weren't hiring at all. And so after completing my commercial pilot's license, I was looking for just any job that I could find out there. I was living in Nashville, Tennessee at the time, but I'm originally from France. And yeah, I found this hotel company that was looking for a French speaker

[00:02:03] to help to help them to make reservations on the phone. And, you know, making ends meet was mattered for me and my family at the time. So sure, I joined the contact center industry through being an agent and I and I loved it. It was what gave me, I think, the empathy that has really carried me through the rest of my career in the contact center space.

[00:02:23] Because I understand what, you know, having back-to-back calls all day means, having customers who may be very challenging or have issues that you need to resolve and finding the right information.

[00:02:35] So yeah, I was an agent and then grew within that company as a supervisor and manager. And eventually we needed a workforce management platform for the 150 seats or so that we had. And we got Calabrio WFM, which, you know, is now the company that I work for. That's, for me, was 2013 through 2016, where then I joined Lyft, the ride-sharing company here in the US. And we managed about 5,000 agents on, at the time, was Teleopti WFM.

[00:03:02] This was, to me, the big gig, right? Like now I had made it in the workforce management space. I have 5,000 agents and we have BPOs in the Philippines and South America and in Poland and really a really great ride. And we were doing that on Teleopti WFM that was then acquired in 2019 by Calabrio, the irony. And in 2020, I joined Calabrio as an employee. So the last almost 15 years of my career in the contact center has been tied to Calabrio one way or another.

[00:03:30] But yeah, started as an agent, like most people in WFM, I think. It's fascinating. I absolutely love it. There's so much to love about that story. And I guess it starts with, was there a bit of a culture shock at first from your training as a pilot and everything that that entails?

[00:03:51] And then you're into the world that we all know, especially when you're an agent and your customer facing of it just constantly being on or did, or was it just the adrenaline of that and the buzz that outweighed any kind of, oh dear, this is very different to what I thought I would be doing. Yeah, there was an adjustment at first, but in the end, I applied what I've learned through my education in flying to the contact center industry.

[00:04:20] I thought, what checklist do I need to go by to resolve these customers' concerns? Why data matters? How is the weather impacting my guests on this hotel? No, there was a ton that I was able to apply from what I had learned in the aviation industry. But mostly with data, it piqued my interest in all things Excel and understanding how contacts are coming in, what time do we get what type of contacts.

[00:04:47] And that's, you know, genuinely what I believe got me to move up within the hotel company is because I was, yeah, very curious. And the curiosity is what helped me, that drove me to land in workforce management is I wanted to understand why we were getting so many calls that were back to back, how we could make our employees' lives better by having an occupancy that was lower.

[00:05:10] So, yeah, I documented myself, listened to a ton of podcasts, read books, watched videos on the contact center industry and applied what I had learned prior to it. That's fantastic. So was that at the stage? Because I think there'll be, you know, there'll be people listening. A lot of our audience as senior leaders have gone through the journey, but equally, there's a big portion of our listeners that are wanting to pursue a career in, further their career in contact centers.

[00:05:39] So maybe they're at that kind of team manager, team leader, contact center manager stage. And was there that there was an opportunity and you went for it or was there, did you start doing that kind of research and self-learning prior to the opportunity?

[00:05:59] Yeah, I think there was no specific, you know, need for me to do it or I didn't have any instruction specifically to do some of that work that I first started doing. Yeah, documenting things, yeah. Going through, yeah, in Excel, just being curious about, hey, why do we not do this or that? And kind of sharing some ideas that I may have had that in the end could help the contact center industry or at least our contact center within the hotel company that I worked at.

[00:06:30] So I would say that staying curious, but not being afraid of sharing your ideas with your director, with your VP, because you may think that they're busy and they don't have time for you. But in the end, the work and the ideas that you provide is it's the reason why you're there and the value that you bring to the organization. So make a nice little PowerPoint, just one or two slides, something that's easy to digest. Don't overload it with data. Don't overload it with too many words.

[00:06:59] Just something clear about some of the things that you've seen or learned will go a long ways. And when you made that transition then to Lyft, so you've been in WFM and you said it was like 150 seats. Yeah. And that was your first, that was a single propeller plane, right? And then moving over was the twin jets. How did you make that transition? I mean, the space shuttle. How did you make that transition?

[00:07:26] Well, through, of course, help from the team that I inherited at Lyft that were incredible workforce management professionals. We, you know, the BPO world was something that was new to me. So there was a, a fantastic learning curve brought me a ton of what I now know about the BPO space. But yes, of course, relied on some fantastic teammates. Interestingly enough, that almost all of them now work at Calabrio.

[00:07:56] So post, post Lyft, we decided as a group to migrate over to Calabrio. And yeah, those folks are still here today. That's so cool. Because I, I couldn't remember getting this, getting a question, but it was operational management. And I'd managed, I think about a hundred up to 150, same sort of number. And this would be going into a role where, where there was a thousand.

[00:08:21] And during the interview for the role, it kind of stumped me because somebody said, you've managed a hundred, 150. Now you're going to manage 10 times that. How are you going to go about it? And I don't, I'm not sure. I mean, I got the job. So my answer must've been okay, but it was literally, well, I'm assuming I'm going to have teammates to help me. I'm going to have a support function to help me. But the, the principles are still the same.

[00:08:50] The tools that I might have will be different and the support I might have might be different. But yes, I might not know everyone's name straight away. Like I do with my team of a hundred, 150, but the, the people focus is still going to be the same. Is, was that similar? I mean, bearing in mind that you had multiple locations geographically as well. Yeah. You go from being able to just stand up from your desk and see if people are adhering to

[00:09:17] their schedules, to having to rely on tools to know what's happening. Right. The, the good old like count people as they're here. Okay. I see that, that Bob made it in today. So yeah, that's, that's an adjustment. But to your point, the deep care for agent engagement, knowing how much that drives the customer experience at the end of the day, which is one of the, you know, three pillars

[00:09:42] that I think about when I think about the contact center industry, customer experience, one of the main feeding metric to customer experience is your agent engagement, your agent experience. And when you see that in a smaller contact center, because you can physically see the impact of having positive employee engagement and the impact that it has on your customer experience, you can easily translate that to a thousand, 5,000, 10,000 seats.

[00:10:08] You know, the principles of agents that are going to be more empowered to make decisions, to solve for their customers that are going to have access to knowledge and tools to help them solve, but also flexibility with their schedules and flexibility around the work that they do pays dividend even more. So when you have more agents, because now you're looking at, you know, the, the 5%, 10%, 15, sometimes 30% attrition you see in the contact center industry means something very

[00:10:36] different when you have 150 seats than when you have 5,000 or 10,000. And I guess as you've progressed and now you're, now you're at Calabrio and you have this kind of whole of market view across multiple verticals, multiple locations. There is a, is there a key part of you that is still Florian, the agent and knowing the impact that your schedule has on you? Absolutely.

[00:11:01] Every day we think about in, in how we, we market our product, right? I'm in product marketing for, for Calabrio, but at the end of the day, I am a WFM nerd that, that knows the impact that workforce management positive or negative can have on agents. So when I am out there, you know, presenting in front of a crowd or, or on a podcast like

[00:11:25] this one, I remember that rolling out an adherence program can have very negative, negative impact on your agents. If it's not done with empathy in mind, if you're just telling your agents, get back on the phone, get back on the phone. You're going to not drive the, the experience that I would, I would strive for. When we, we have conversations around self-scheduling that, you know, we do within Calabrio WFM, moving your breaks and lunches, adding hours to your own schedules, moving your time, or just

[00:11:55] painting your own shift that I can speak to that because of my experience as a, as an agent. So yeah, flowing the agent is always in the back of my mind because I can easily relate not just to the WFM admins and contact center directors that we want to sell our platform to, but more so to the experience it's going to provide for their agents. And I can speak about that with my experience, which I believe helps me greatly in those conversations. A hundred percent.

[00:12:23] So it was kind of like it was destined to be, but why the move to Calabrio? The move to Calabrio, well, to be fully transparent, Lyft with the pandemic got hit really hard. So actually it was through layoff of the workforce management team that we, that we had at Lyft. Not everybody, but at least me and a couple other folks at first through the first round of layoffs that Lyft did after the pandemic.

[00:12:49] But I had a fantastic relationship with my customer success manager at Lyft, a guy that had been a CSM for me in my four years at Lyft that I'm friends with today and called me the same day and said that, you know what, this is a scary time with the pandemic, but we got a job opening for you. So if you want to join the team, come on over. So it was at the same time, a really challenging day that layoff and turned around in a matter

[00:13:15] of hours. Not to get too personal, but my wife had been laid off that same week because she was in the music industry in Nashville. And we all know what happened to the music industry during the pandemic. We had a six months old daughter at the time. So yeah, scary announcement at first, but then that turned around into something that was incredibly positive for me and my family as a result. It is crazy to think that this is now coming up to five years ago. It's bent our concept of time, I think.

[00:13:44] It's such a strange, strange period of our history. And you, you know, thank you for sharing that. I'm glad it ended well. Did it? Then when you come into Calabria, straight off the back of the pandemic and the, you know, that had a transformative effect on the contact center world, not just from moving entire workforces to, to working from home.

[00:14:11] But I know I saw firsthand as well as the, that initial kind of infrastructure IT challenge. The next, the biggest challenge rested with WFM. Yeah. The one part of it was contact centers that were running on-prem really were challenged with sending agents home. They, you know, they had to get these Meraki devices and the connect to servers that were at a specific spot.

[00:14:40] From an IT standpoint, that was a massive challenge. We saw the deployment of contact centers that were on cloud technology. That was much easier, both from the phone platform or the chat platform, the email platform, and of course with workforce management. But with WFM, specifically to post-pandemic agents wanted more flexibility to have lunch with their kids because their kids were home from school and they had to figure out how to teach them, school them from home, which everybody wanted to send them back to school

[00:15:09] after about a couple of weeks of having to do a teacher's job. But more so, so yeah, flexibility with when they worked, how they worked, working from home. And eventually that morphed with a return to work with the ability to understand if agents were working from home or from the office on specific days, seating capacity and so on. So yeah, it has made workforce management evolve from, well, the technology that it serves,

[00:15:35] but also just the mindset around agent engagement post-pandemic, I think has shifted in the context in our industry. In what way? I think, again, more flexibility, giving the agents tools to self-schedule on what type of phone or email or chat work at specific hours of the day. Not as, you know, tied into a specific skill, but multi-skilled agents that can do e-learnings

[00:16:03] and can graduate to have additional knowledge and serve different things. Yeah, the pandemic has shifted the workforce management space. And then, of course, with the rise of AI, right, we see the fact that agents are going to be asked to work on more complex tasks, be those subject matter experts that are going to know the things that AI can't figure out where you have 16 different touch points to resolve one customer concern. You have to call this person that's going to unblock this.

[00:16:32] It's like an escape room, you know, almost for these agents now with the complexity of tasks that they have to face where AI can, you know, and will in the future most likely be able to handle not just the simple, simple tasks, but even things that are just everyday tasks. I don't think I've heard a better description yet than escape room, but what we're going to, what we're going to be potentially asking agents to do in the very near future.

[00:16:58] Now, I know we touched upon this briefly prior to recording, but you, there are some, there are several things that really fit in with Calabrio's view of the market. And I love the word your, you know, curiosity, your curiosity led to you progressing through your career. And I think that's such a important message to, to share with people, but being curious

[00:17:23] about agent experience and, but you, you have a real passion around those contact centers that get the balance right between cost and the kind of delivery service. Can you just touch upon that? Absolutely. Yes. I, I strongly believe that you have contact centers out there that are striving to be obviously operating at a higher level.

[00:17:48] And in order to get to that place of being a world-class contact center, you have to constantly think about the balance that exists between cost and quality. If your contact center focuses on one single metric and you have a, you know, maybe a leader that tells you all we need to focus on is our service level. That's all we need to focus on. You are ignoring so much of what is actually happening in your contact center.

[00:18:15] The fact that your contact center is a living, breathing beast of if you pull on one lever, if you just focus on SLA, then other things might suffer from it. When you think about the feeding metrics to cost, you have your schedule optimization and maybe your forecast accuracy, your occupancy or utilization of your agents to ensure that they are occupied at the right amount. Maybe that's 85, 90% of the time, whatever the case may be.

[00:18:43] And then on the other side, you have the quality piece with your NPS scores and your first contact resolution, your call quality grades, and all of those are feeding to either cost or quality. You have a couple of things that I believe are those magical metrics, first contact resolution and agent empowerment. First contact resolution, if you're trying to resolve things the first time, that's a better customer experience.

[00:19:10] But also, it's going to reduce the number of contacts coming in. They're not going to call back for a second time for that resolution. So you're reducing the cost as well. You're balancing it well. With agent empowerment, it's a bellwether metric. In effect, your agents that are highly engaged are going to be more curious. They're going to want to know how to solve things for customers. They're going to have fun doing it. And you have to invest in your agents for that to happen. Career pathing, the training hours that they get.

[00:19:39] Yes, the empowerment around flexibility of schedules that you provide for them. Invest in those things. Your agents will be engaged and your quality and your cost will come out of it on the positive side. But overall, I think contact centers that try to operate with the lowest possible cost out there. If I'm trying to be the cheapest rent contact center on earth, your quality, you know it, is going to take a massive hit.

[00:20:04] If I'm the contact center, on the other hand, that tries to deliver the highest possible NPS score that's ever been known to man, it's going to cost you a lot of money. You're going to have to have a lot of agents that are PhDs, you know, that are highly trained, incredibly, incredibly strong individuals. And so overall, it's always about balancing this effort of cost and quality.

[00:20:26] Every project that you should have, that you're trying to implement within your contact center should impact either trying to help lower your cost or increase your quality. If it does both, do it now. Don't even wait. That's a project you absolutely should do. But overall, it helps with the decision making process. You think about the lens of cost, quality and agent empowerment. So that's why we, at Calabrio, we think about those three things heavily.

[00:20:54] We always talk to our customers and to our prospective customers about the fact that Calabrio will help you increase your productivity and impact your cost, deliver better service, help you with your sales and deliver better employee engagement and reduce your attrition overall. Those three pillars of the contact center industry are absolutely what I'm passionate about. And you can't do that, can you, unless you take a balanced approach?

[00:21:21] No, because if you push too hard on reducing costs, yes, your quality will dip down. If you're trying to be, let's say one of the levers you pick to reduce your operating costs is to get your agents to be on the phone 100% of the time. They're going to get back-to-back calls. And I know, because I was an agent, that after a week, you're exhausted. After a month, you're looking at another job.

[00:21:47] After six months, you have a, you know, 90% attrition in your contact center because you never want to strive for, even though from a financial standpoint, 100% occupancy sure is the most efficient you can ever be from a WFM standpoint. This is where workforce managers out there need to be fully aware of the agent experience. Because if I'm pushing my occupancy that high, I will have problems down the road with recruiting, with attrition.

[00:22:14] And then newer agents that come in that may not be as fast because they're learning. And so suddenly your handle time goes up. And now because your handle time goes up, you have more abandonment and lower service levels. And because more people abandon, they're going to call back in. You're going to have higher volume. And this repeating circle of challenges you're going to have if you don't pay attention to keeping it all balanced. I was a team, because I love that. I was a team leader once. And we would have our team meetings.

[00:22:42] And we were going through a period that had carried on for a bit. It's funny when you mentioned those back-to-back calls. It was so prevalent that we, as team leaders, we were getting on the phones again as well to try and alleviate some of those cues. All hands on deck, right? It was, yeah. The alarm was going off. I loved it. I must admit, I loved it. Mainly because I knew that I was going to be able to get off them.

[00:23:10] But we went to the team leaders. We all went to then a meeting where there were some senior leaders present. And they wanted to know how our teams were feeling and how are things going because we're dealing with this unexpected volume. And the thing that surprised them the most, I said, you know, the number one thing my team are concerned about is they want to know what's going on with recruitment.

[00:23:36] Because they needed to know that the company was aware of what was going on and was going to be doing something about it. Because your point is so true. You know, you can do it for a few days. You can maybe do it for a week. But you can't cope with back-to-back calls for much longer. Otherwise, like you say, you start thinking, I need to get out of here.

[00:24:02] Yeah, there's so, you know, the office pizza and the gift cards are only going to get you so far. That works for a little bit. And everybody enjoys food. So, yes, still deliver the, you know, the food to your agents from time to time. Of course, this is a very pre-pandemic type of mindset. But it is a massive challenge to have those calls that are back-to-back. And, yes, your agents are going to start to wonder, what is my leadership team doing about this?

[00:24:32] Why do you – and, of course, right away, agents are going to think we don't have enough people. It might be true. You might be understaffed. And we see that across many industries. But that's not the only thing. Hiring more people might not be the only thing that's going to help you. Maybe it takes too long for your associates to resolve an issue. Maybe they do have to do an escape room-style effort. And they have 17 different clicks they need to do to resolve a customer's concern.

[00:25:01] Think about your bandwidth speed. It might be as simple as just stronger internet with faster computers. But, overall, a knowledge base that's right in front of them to help them resolve your customer issue is going to reduce your handle time without having you to coach to handle time, which also can have a very negative impact on agent experience. So, invest in the tools. Invest in the knowledge base.

[00:25:27] With artificial intelligence, we think that AI is going to not replace agents but make them super agents. They're going to have access to knowledge so much faster. When a customer says something, it might serve them with the right knowledge base article right away to help them resolve a customer concern. Again, to help reduce the amount of time that it takes to resolve. And with that, fewer back-to-back calls. So, yes, watch your understaffing because being understaffed will create those challenges

[00:25:56] around high occupancy and higher attrition. But over time, you can reduce your overall FTE count needs by having better processes in place than necessarily by just struggling through times of being understaffed. And just, you know, we're still at the start of the year. And you're, I've got to ask because you're kind of behind the scenes in the nerve center.

[00:26:21] When you look ahead to this year, what excites you around what you guys are doing? Well, we are at Calabrio continuing to invest in making lives better for our agents and for our WFM admin teams. So simplifying process vacation requests around managing BPOs. We have a new module that we've worked on with some of our largest customers

[00:26:49] in providing a tool that helps you allocate your headcount and distribute hours of operations and overall percentage of headcount allocated or by FTE or by number of volume of tasks being taken care of. We have a lot of exciting things that will help agents as well with agents, giving agents the ability to schedule specific activities that are apart from just email or chat or phone,

[00:27:18] but plug in their own training hours and their own project times that they may need to complete. So if you have an agent that needs to do 10 hours of projects, they'll be able to go in and self-schedule that project time as well. It's an incredible, exciting year for Calabrio at WFM with real-time optimization. We're thinking about the agent assist type of notifications to come up to agents. And in the future, we see workforce management being...

[00:27:45] It's funny because I've related to my aviation career another thing this year within WFM, but I've always talked, for the last year at least, talked about how you have... Planes are great enough and have been for many, many years to land by themselves. It's called an ILS Cat 3 approach, where if it's so foggy outside, it's safer for the plane to land itself than for humans to actually fly it and land it themselves.

[00:28:14] And when you think about it, when you take off, right after takeoff, pilots will turn on the autopilot and the plane will climb to cruise altitude on its own and descend on its own and also can land on its own. What pilots are there is not to constantly fly the plane. They're not there to constantly fight against the controls at 30,000 feet and fly the thing. They do want to enjoy coffee or a meal too during cruise. We can do the same thing with workforce management.

[00:28:40] We can make workforce management fly on autopilot for most of the time. And for us, only be there when it matters most. Pilots are there for when the decisions need to be made on what to do next. With workforce management, we can do the same thing. If you have a WFM platform that sends you a notification that tells you that your service level is going to drop below X percent and gives you three options on what you could do next to help remediate that issue, you can click on that and have the level of control that you want to say,

[00:29:10] okay, maybe one of the options is canceling the training sessions that we had scheduled for today. And then, of course, give you the control over when and how many of those sessions to cancel. But only have you there to ensure that everything is going according to the plan that you've set forward, not to constantly fly the plane, making minute adjustment in the platform. So that is the analogy that I've used a lot recently in where we're going to take workforce management in the future. And I know there's going to be lots of people using that analogy now.

[00:29:39] What a cracker it is too. When it comes to looking at your clients and prospective clients and do more sit in service and sales, where's sales sit on this? Have you seen some sort of check? I know I can remember when introducing to service teams the concept of sales through service. You know, we want to make sure that our customers have access to everything that they have access to that they might not know about.

[00:30:06] So that might entail some outbound calling or whatever it may be. And you have to manage the mindset of people going, well, what am I a salesperson now? And I'm like, no, you're still customer service, but we're making sure that our customers are utilizing everything that we can offer them. How is that shift looking? Is it still the same? Is it, you know, with your clients and prospective clients and what you're up to? Yeah, there's many different ways that sales can seep

[00:30:34] into the customer service contact center space. There's the outbound sales, right, that you make to call in and you have very low rates of take on those. And so you have to manage those 10,000 phone calls today that we're going to make and maybe get 200 or 300 folks that actually stay on the phone with us. Or it can be in the customer service space. Actually, I was part of sales at the hotel company that I worked at as an agent because, yes,

[00:31:02] we were there to help our guests make reservations and find the right room for them. But at the end of the day, I would be incentivized to tell them that there's this room with a balcony that looks over the ocean in Miami. And or that's the one that has the view of Central Park in New York. And so there was an upsell goal for us to get room upgrades. That is part of sales.

[00:31:30] The reason I think historically, which was the wrong view, contact centers and customer service was seen as a cost center, right? We've heard this before. And when they're seen that way, then it's just money going out and it doesn't serve me any purpose whatsoever. That's what a CEO from the 90s maybe thought about. Now, CEO and the executive leadership within organizations know the impact of customer service. They know that a bad customer experience can end up on TikTok

[00:31:58] or can end up on Instagram Reel and really negatively impact your brand. So forget the cost center piece. It's a customer experience center that you help deliver better customer experiences that in the end are going to create return customers. And so with that, sales comes into the mix because it's about also increasing the number of returning customers. So you're always somewhat in a selling motion because you want those customers

[00:32:28] to come back to your brand. It might be very direct sales if you're doing that type of outbound work or very indirect through having returning customers or someone in the middle with upsells and cross-sells of things that you offer. At the end of the day, you know, the quality of the calls, the training of your agents on how they handle support and sneak in sales sometimes into the process. But just overall, having agents that are excited to work there, that are helping your company,

[00:32:56] that are passionate about wanting to deliver better service will always turn out to be better for your sales as well. 100%. Florian, this has been great. I really hope we can meet in person because your passion and your experience and skill set within our industry is just really refreshing to hear. And I definitely want to ask you some more about flying and aviation. I am interested in that.

[00:33:26] So we'll have to do another one. But Florian, thank you very much for coming on. It's been brilliant. No, thank you, Martin, for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure. And yes, let's try to meet in person sometime soon. Yeah, I'd love to.