Zenylitics partners with Pharma / healthcare specialist Centerfirst. In this interview conducted by Pete Guillot, Kyle Carter, Zenylitics’ founder, explains his rationale for founding Zenylitics and discusses a key factor for speech analytics success.
Pete: Welcome. This is the second in a two-part series with Zenylitics, a key partner of ours.
And today we have Kyle Carter. Kyle is actually the founder of Zenylitics. And so we’re going to do an introduction here and then Kyle is going to have a little bit more information on the return on investment, some of the pitfalls to avoid during implementation and how quickly that return on investment can be realized. So, I’m just going to hand it over to Kyle and let him provide an introduction, a little background as to why he founded Zenylitics.
Kyle: Awesome. Thanks Pete. So yes, my name’s Kyle Carter. I am the founder and VP of Delivery at Zenylitics. I founded Zen back in 2014 after, well over a decade in the financial services industry. Really the driving force behind founding Zen was we wanted to provide interaction analytics as a managed service. The technology is great and I, as you know, the technology’s the way forward, but if we don’t have the people to really make it, make it hum, to really make the engine run, that’s where we see a lot of users of this type of technology failing. So, we wanted to bring together people with the experience and the know how to really get value out of a tool like CallMiner, which is the tool that we use and provide that out as a service to our customers.
Pete: That’s great. You know, we started our partnership, I don’t know, sometime in late 2020, after a really extensive search, and realized that CallMiner has been a real benefit to our client’s business. I know you may have worked with CallMiner or for CallMiner or in some capacity there, what would cause you to see CallMiner as the tool that would allow you to really fulfill the vision you had for Zen?
Kyle: Yeah, I was a CallMiner enterprise user prior to founding Zenylitics, in a financial services capacity. I was brought into an organization that had some compliance concerns and we were deploying a speech analytics tool to ensure that our contact center, essentially the main priority, is to ensure that our contact center agents were interacting with our customers in a way that mapped with what regulated of us. So, seeing that and deploying it across the business, after we got the compliance piece all nailed down, we moved into our servicing environment, loan origination, and so on. Once we saw that there was a real opportunity and that was really the driving force that I saw. There’s a real opportunity to market that as a managed service. There’s a lot of organizations that don’t have a team of analysts to come in and really interact and manipulate data and help you gain insight from what you’re seeing in those thousands, sometimes millions of interactions.
So, we wanted to provide that for, you know, there’s a lot of customers out there that while they don’t have those teams, they can learn a lot and gain a lot from having that capability.
Pete: So one of the things we’ve really valued about our partnership is, we were bringing in the pharmaceutical expertise, contact center expertise there and you bring in the technical expertise, but, across a number of industries and one of the things our pharma clients value a great deal is not only understanding the pharma space, but what best ideas can be brought in from other industries. One of the questions we get, not all the time, because ROI is not always a measure in pharma, but ROI is important to many of our clients. What are some of the I’ll say best practices, maybe that you’ve been able to bring to Zenylitics into, to your partners like CenterFirst regarding ROI of AI investment.
Kyle: When you think about ROI really varies greatly by use case. Right? So, compliance and sales are total opposite ends of the spectrum, but taking compliance as the example, you know, when we look at ROI there, it’s really focused on reducing customer effort. So, think about all the effort that goes into monitoring and auditing and ensuring that all of your procedures are being followed and regulations are being followed. What we do is we leverage AI to really just focus in where the machine is seeing risk. And we focus all of our manual efforts. It’s that, it’s that hybridization of machine and human.
We focus our efforts guided by what we’re seeing come out of the AI. That also allows us from a compliance perspective, really to increase our efficiency in compliance monitoring and auditing. So, we’re getting more out of that manual effort, the people that we’re deploying for those tasks. And also, we’re just looking in the right areas. That opens the door for us to spend time in other areas. You know, we can redeploy those resources in other places then.
So, taking sales as the next example, there’s clear ROI there. Increased revenue, right? That’s pretty easy to measure. But to do that, the way that we generally do that, as we start to look at what agent behaviors map to success, what do my successful agents do, or what do we see on, you know, successful outcome calls? And then we focus solely on those behaviors. If something maps to a sale or maps to a successful outcome, that’s where we should be focusing our time. And we just make sure that our agents are actually putting the right amount of effort into those behaviors.
And then on the flip side of that, we can look at the customer side and say, are there signals or are there customer profiles that we can use to sell better, service better? Whatever the use case is, really just looking at the behavioral level to say, how can we drive towards that goal? Sales, compliance, servicing efficiency, whatever initiative has been set.
Pete: Yeah. That’s a really good explanation. You know, we work with all different types of pharma contact centers: inside sales, medical information, patient support, accessing reimbursement, and each of our clients has a little bit different interests. Certainly sales is, you know, that’s pretty obvious, but compliance is always a component in customer experiences. And that’s where we really benefit from your experience in other industries and then helping us to tailor that and tune, really CallMiner for our pharmaceutical clients.
One last question here, and I think this is one that we often get and I can tell you we’ve really benefited from your experience and having implemented CallMiner in a number of other instances, and so you helped us to avoid some of the pitfalls that others who, who go straight to CallMiner might not benefit from. What are the one or two key pitfalls that are to be avoided when implementing new AI tools in your business?
Kyle: More important than anything else out there is, do not try and accomplish everything at once. You’re going to have access to a wealth of data that you haven’t seen before about your interactions. Anecdotally, you understand why people call you and how your interactions, you know, move along. Now, you can really see how it happens. Trying to accomplish everything at once, you’re not going to get anything done. Really going in with a very clear, concise priority on what you’re trying to achieve is absolutely key to success. If you don’t have that and have clearly defined goals and keep tight guard rails on it, you’re not going to see the results that you likely could with that really clearly defined path. And also part of that is revisiting those priorities regularly. Business priorities shift, right? Whether it’s seasonality, whether it’s regulatory, anything could turn that you really have to look at it regularly, whether it’s monthly or quarterly, I’m always just asking the question “are we focusing on the right areas that are going to drive us forward? Whatever our goals are, is this going to help us achieve that?” And having that priority is paramount to your success.
Pete: That’s great advice, Kyle. I know that when we first began working with you, that we just saw so many new insights, we had a hard time sifting through the insights to really understand the areas where we wanted to provide guidance to our clients. And that really has become the two pieces of the value now, the insights, but also the guidance. How do we help narrow down their focus so that they’re able to implement some of the areas that can really make improvement in their business?
This has been really a tremendous value to us Kyle. We really enjoy our partnership with Zenylitics and we’re really grateful for you taking some time today to share your expertise in this area.
Kyle: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
Pete: Alright Kyle, thanks.
