The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Jonathan Shroyer, CEO and Founder of Officium Labs

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

officiumlabs.io

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Today, we have an amazing guy on the podcast with us today. He is the CEO of a company called Officium, and his name is Jonathan Schroer. He's been a customer service professional and leader for over 22 years, leading large teams at established companies such as Microsoft, Monster, Symantec, and Autodesk, as well as startups like Postmates, Kabam, and Forte Labs. A thought leader in the industry, Jonathan has often been found to be speaking at CX conferences, participating in podcasts, and writing about his passion, the future of customer service and the CS marketplace. Welcome to the show, Jonathan.

How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks for the opportunity, Chris, to talk with you and to have your listeners learn a little bit more about the future of service. There you go. We were joking before the show where it's hat day. So we both appeared in hats. Yeah, we coordinated that with our assistants. So give us your dot com so people can find out more about you and your amazing company on the interwebs. Yeah, so it's officiumlabs.com. So that's O-F-I-C-I-U-M labs.com. You can also follow us on Twitter at officiumlabs and on LinkedIn, officiumlabs as well. There you go.

Give us a rundown on your company. How does it work? What do you guys do over there? We started the company just under two years ago. My co-founder and I, Scott McKay, we were walking the streets of San Francisco, and we've both been in the services industry for about 20 some odd years. And we really felt like there was a future of work and a future of service that was going to be different over the next 20 years. And so we

created a company that one of the things I always like to talk about, Chris, is a little bit of a story. But I was sitting on that chair right there, looking at the Wi-Fi router, and I thought, wouldn't it be cool if technologies and workers were elastic in the service area? And so that's what we founded the company on, is we provide elastic CS workers, best-in-class technologies to companies all around the world. And we started off with just four of us and nobody in our network. And now we have roughly 30 folks in the company and about 300 folks in our network. Now, when you say Elastic People, it's like the Fantastic Four guy, Stretch Armstrong sort of thing.

Think about it this way. If you look at the future work studies that have come out, even pre-COVID, roughly, I think it was around 51% of Americans have some type of a secondary kind of opportunity or job that they're doing. A lot of Americans and folks around the globe want more flexibility in their workplace, how they work, where they work, and so forth. And so if you look at Glassdoor and some of the other companies, you're starting to see people want flexibility, they want optionality and those things. So think about Elastic from that point of view. You give that flexibility to the workers to allow them to work when they want to work,

similar to Uber and Postmates model, but quite a bit more of a complex workflow. Could you guys hire me if I don't want to work at all? I like that elasticity. Well, we could hire you, but if you didn't work, you wouldn't get paid. Yeah, I'd probably just let you guys be firing me like within an hour. That's just me. This is pretty cool. So let's, before we get more deeper into your company, let's show you a little bit more

to our audience so they can get to know you and get all warmed up to you. What led you to start this company? You founded it, which is pretty amazing. And there's a really cool founder story to this. So give us some background on you, where you grew up and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Some good context is I grew up in a small town in Texas, Cleveland, Texas, about 7,000 individuals there. It's still about 7,000 individuals. And when I graduated high school and was thinking about university and what is my career going to be, it appeared to me that unless I chose certain kind of career paths, maybe teaching or if I was going to become a doctor or a dentist,

I probably wasn't going to be able to come back to my hometown and live after my university, because the tech jobs and the things that I was interested in, they just weren't there. And so as I went through my kind of 15, 20 years in the tech industry, what I found is I kept bouncing from tech hub to tech hub. They're great places. I lived in Seattle. I lived in London, Boston, San Francisco. I lived in India and Bangalore. Just a lot of really great tech hub places where everybody goes to get the tech jobs. And what I thought about as Scott and I were walking through San Francisco is how do we bring those same opportunities to people that live in

rural communities or smaller cities that are still great cities, but aren't tech? And so that was one kind of component, like the future of work. The second component is how do you help move economies? So move the money from tech hubs to local communities. And the third one was the future of service. How do you create profit center service organizations? Because a lot of companies look at customer service as a cost center. In actuality, if you run it in the right way, you can create a profit. So we looked at those three things and we thought, hey, let's go start this innovative startup. Let's experiment and see what happens. So I talked to a good friend of mine at Forte Labs, Kevin Chu, an amazing founder.

And he was so kind enough to give us a loan of about $150,000 to try this out and to experiment. And what we found is in the last 21 months, I did a post recently about $150,000 to try this out and to experiment. And what we found is in the last 21 months, I did a post recently about this, but in the last 21 months, we went from that $150,000 loan with this idea of decentralized work, decentralized economies, decentralized value and ROI and CX

to $9 million in 21 months. So we've just grown exponentially. We've identified the market is really interested in this way of thinking. Yeah. But have you paid him back yet? No, I'm just kidding. $9 million, dude. $150,000 investment to $9 million in less than two years.

That's extraordinary. That's awesome. Yeah. We've been grateful for not only Kevin's vision and believing in us and Forte Labs and Rally who believed in us, as well as the early client adopters. Many of our early clients took a chance on a small company and we showed great value for them. And that's been fruitful for them, but also for us as a company. There you go. I think this is really brilliant because you guys are approaching it some different ways. Now, you guys are basically, it seems like you're remodeling maybe different aspects of workers that you guys can offer to companies.

Or how are you repassioning it? Let me just let you just lay the foundation for some of the different aspects of what you guys do and how you guys are approaching the future of work. Yeah, for sure. We have three main product lines. The first one we call Connect. And you could think of this as Uber of customer service. That's what a lot of people like to call it. But it's higher quality workers than what you might consider for an Uber driver and so forth. Basically, you have these best in class customer service workers, technical support workers

that want to have a flexible staff, want to work from home, and want to be able to do some work for a cool brand. And so they come and they work with us and we have cool brands and they can pick when and where they want to work. They get to do some cool things with cool brands. And it's really super flexible for them. For us, it's great because we can plug and play them based on where the customer or client demand is. And for clients, it's great because clients only pay for exactly what they use. They don't overpay, which is what happens today with a lot of BPOs is you overpay by 20 or 30%

because you can't match those supply and demand. So we do that in the Connect space. The second product line we have is Transform. And this is where we go in and we have kind of a trademark service stack and patent pending framework where we can do assessments on companies and help them understand how they can go from a cost center to a profit center based service organization, where their gaps are, where they're best in class, and then help them transform to that. And then our third product line is our SaaS solution, which is our innovate line, where we have product solutions like our workforce management tool spreadsheet scheduler, where we sell those to startups, mid-level companies and enterprise companies to use those. So those are the kind of three approaches. But what that means, Chris, just in a nutshell,

is that we have an end-to-end view of the entire customer experience with the Service Stack solution. So some companies use this for everything. They're just like, hey, we don't want to have anything to do with it. You go and take care of it, plug into us. And other companies will use different parts of the Service Stack, which those three product lines sit inside a triangle on the website. Oh, wow. That's pretty cool. Do a lot of these workers that are flexible, are they usually part-time, full-time, or they just want different hours? Some are part-time, some are full-time. What you find is generally, you'll find there's a bunch of college students that want to make some extra bucks, and they have innovative technology backgrounds, and they're interested in gaming or whatever product we have. You'll find house husbands or house wives that they've been doing for a while. They had a career before and they want to keep doing something, but part-time on the side. Oftentimes military wives come into this play, especially if they're international.

You'll also find folks that have been in the industry for long periods of time and just want to do something more flexibly. Like in our transform space, we usually have, our average tenure in that space is like 15, 20 years. So you'll find folks like that, but it's across the gamut. And then unfortunately, because COVID's hit a lot of people, you'll also find people that are looking for extra income because they've lost their job. And our network, as well as other networks like ours, will give them the opportunity to earn some money. That's pretty awesome, especially with what's gone on with COVID. Do most of these workers work remotely or do you offer a mansion?

A hundred percent. They work remotely. They usually work from their house. They could choose to work from a coffee shop. They could choose to work from the park. As long as it's a secure internet connection, they can choose to work from wherever they are. And we have a security system set up for all the workers to ensure that they're completely secure with the information for our clients and whatnot. Oh, wow. That's pretty awesome. I've worked from home since 2004.

I can work anywhere in the world as long as I have Wi-Fi. And, you know, I don't have to have Wi-Fi 24. So you're an early adopter from the work from home. Definitely an early adopter. I like to work from home. I ran the big, you know, brick and mortar companies and stuff back in the day and yeah i like working from home i when the coronavirus came and everyone's not working i'm like i've been here forever the point though it does take a certain profile and what we have found is there's some folks that are really successful

working from home and there's some folks that it's not the right fit so i imagine kind of post-covid as you think about the future of work, we'll probably see a hybrid come back, but we'll see a lot more people that are going to be interested in the benefits of working from home. As long as we're on that topic, let's talk about what your vision is for the future of work because I'm starting to see some of the people we've had on the show

with CNN and different stuff, they're being dragged back in the office and different things. What do you see is going to happen? It's interesting. I think what we'll see initially as the vaccine is accepted and things become much more safe, we'll see a rubber band snap. So there'll be some companies that have already stated like, oh, my employees can do whatever they want.

I think Google and other companies, Microsoft and other tech companies have done that. There'll probably be some companies in certain industries that say, hey, you have to come back in the office. Maybe in the legal industry, obviously healthcare, it's hard to work from home. Healthcare, although telehealth is starting to be an exploding industry. So there'll probably be an initial snap back. And then there'll start to be companies that start to pop up that enable remote work more and more. And as those, whether they're security companies, whether they're technology companies, service companies, whatever they are, these companies are going to create tools and

capabilities where CEOs like me are going to feel more comfortable. Oh, it's okay for my information, for my customers' information, and for this job to be done remotely. So then we might start to see a slow migration, but I think there's always going to be key roles that have to be in person at some level. Like I, telehealth is a great example. So I do a lot of my doctor visits now telehealth, but there are some times like the doctor has to like check out your ear, check out your throat, or there has to be some type of a test that you can't do remotely. So there's definitely going to be some jobs that have to be done in person. But I would guess if you and I were talking in 10 years, maybe we're 60, 70% remote. Wow. That's pretty amazing. I think

one thing I've been thinking about, and I'm curious your thoughts on this, is some worker resistance to coming back in the office. And they may be more interested in turning to companies like yours, as opposed to the boss who goes, you got to get your butt in here and start working 40 hours a week. And you got to start doing that drive thing for, if you're in California, that's two hours each way. And there might be a lot of workers that are going to be like, maybe I should look around for some jobs that I can work from home. That's a normal question to ask, right? Because I think it's probably going to happen. I don't know the scale that it happens because a lot of companies have great benefits and they have other things that keep workers there. And if you find, if you look at like the number one

reason why people leave jobs, it's they don't leave jobs, they leave bosses. And so when you look at it, you may start to see like worker flexibility start to move up the chain on why people leave companies. I don't know if it's going to shoot to the top, because a lot of people like to work with great people. And that's why they stay with jobs, other than finding great purpose and whatnot. So it'll be interesting to see where worker flexibility starts to rank into that. I think the hardest part for most employees that aren't used to living the way I do, of course, I'd have that problem too. If I went in the office, I'd show up one day in my robe, my underwear with my coffee and I'm like, we're supposed to work. Wait, there's a dress code here. Oh, I'm so used to working from home now after two years.

There's definitely going to be some changes. Like I don't think i can wear my hoodies and my every time i have to go back to my more traditional collared when i go to clients and whatnot but hey i think there's also something to be said about having an in-person meeting you know i mean there's so much so many different nuanced things that you can accomplish in an in-person meeting that's much more difficult to accomplish in a remote meeting. I think also if you think about the psychological drain of being on video all of the time and being present 100% of the time, it takes a lot of physical energy and mental energy to do that. So I think that there's definitely some pros and cons that people will find. You may find folks want to work from home three days a week, but want some of that energy and that interaction and we also may look at like the different profiles of individuals use popular terms of introvert versus extrovert even though i think everybody's on the spectrum

but if you look at introvert versus extrovert you may find different behaviors for those types of people for example i'm an introvert and so so I prefer working from home more and going in when my energy is high and I want to be present. And when I want to reserve my energy, work from home. But now I'm 100% on video, so I don't get a choice. And so it'll be interesting to see what the different behaviors are coming post-COVID. I've often wondered when this was going to, for decades, I wonder when. I'm like, when is it we're going to convert the way I operate? And I look at the

drive time, California, two hours in, two hours out from SoCal. And you just look at your quality of life, or at least I always did. I just looked at it and went, geez, that's four hours of your life, man. And yeah, it takes a lot. And I'd do anything to get that four hours back. And if you have a wife and kids and you want to spend time with your kids and stuff, there's a certain acumen of value that you want to have and spending time with them. Me, I just want to, you know, be alone and play call of duty or something, but it's definitely a factor. And I am wondering how much we're trying to get that Pandora thing back in the box where everyone's like, okay, we got to go back the old way. And people are just like, I don't know, man, I'm really enjoying this whole freedom thing.

Yeah, I think the old way is gone. What's happening is the new way. We'll see over time what that is. There's definitely going to be impacts. If we step outside of kind of customer service, my domain, you're going to see impacts in real estate. You're going to see impacts in other types of jobs people want to take. You're going to see the impacts and how the economic power inside the United States,

how that shifts with some of these changes. And we're not going to see it right away. We're talking about macro level decade type of impacts. But I think it's going to be interesting to watch to see how those kind of happen, as well as what new companies come up to take advantage of this new world that we're in and not only take advantage, but service this new world to help human beings get more purpose and meaning

out of life, more enjoyment and pleasure out of the products that they choose to buy. So I'm really interested in your second product in helping people turn their customer service into cost. A lot of people treat this like a stupid sub child. And it really makes me angry because I grew up in the era where Tom Peters are writing in search of excellence. And there was this huge customer service push and the great stories like Nordstrom taking a tire on a return or something. And it just seems like nobody just gives a flying F anymore with customer service. It feels that way sometimes. Yeah, I mean, I think what's interesting, Chris, is that for years I've always felt,

and I think most service leaders that you'll talk to will say, hey, we've always felt like the executive teams don't fully understand the value that sits in the services area. Or if they do, because of the changes that happen at the top, that kind of mentality is short-lived. And so one of the changes that happen at the top, that kind of that mentality is short lived. And so one of the reasons I started Officium is that I wanted to create a framework with a service that that would allow service leaders the ability to be able to talk in the language of executive teams and drive value. So there's a couple of customers that we have where we've gone in and we've done that service assessment under the transform area that we talked about, the second piece. And we've identified gaps. We've identified what they're doing really well. But most

importantly, and this is really important, we connected their data sets. So their data centers of what's happening in customer service with what's happening in the rest of their enterprise. And by connecting that data set, you can then correlate value. And then once you can correlate value, you can then demonstrate ROI. And then once you demonstrate ROI, you start to show how customer service isn't a cost center. It either protects revenue or it generates revenue revenue depending on how you invest in it.

And we've got a number of customers that have protected millions of dollars in revenue because of best-in-class customer service, leveraging our service stack transform solution. And that's really the future. And really, it's any company now, we've done a lot in gaming. We're a little bit in kind of the telehealth space, a little bit in logistics delivery, grocery delivery, that kind of stuff. But any company that has a digital footprint, it has the ability to assess themselves, see what they need to do to become a profit center focused organization, and then do it. And they can talk in the language that the exec team has, so they can have a seat at that table and be a differentiator.

There's a number of the companies we work with where in the past they were customer services and afterthought. Now they're actually sitting at the executive table right next to the product leader, right next to the engineering leader, and help make key strategic decisions to drive lifetime value and revenue growth for the company. So it's pretty amazing. Yeah. Customer service really needs to make a comeback. I don't know what needs to happen. I'm writing a book and talking a little bit about it, but maybe Tom Peters needs to come throw his fist down or something. I see a lot in tech things where

they're just like, yeah, just go talk to those Zendesk people and put your thing in maybe in a couple of weeks, somebody to answer it for us. Cause we just don't care. I just had a friend who she had some sort of error on her airline ticket or airline booking five hours with a major airline on hold. She posted the screenshot to just to get someone to answer the phone. That's crazy. And even some companies I do with routinely when I call them, it's 45 minutes to an hour just to get a live person. And it'll make me mental because I'm like, there's a lot of people out of work right now. Yeah. Hire them for hell's sakes. They'll take a job. Let's get it going on. But I think where you guys are focused on turning that into an ROI position where you can make a profit center out of it. I think that's brilliant. And I think that approach is really overlooked by a lot of people

these days. Yeah. And I think you hit on a couple of points. So if you look at why does a customer repurchase your product, whatever it is, whether it's a service or an actual product, it's what it's three main things, in my opinion, when you send in a response. It's A is what's the timeliness of you getting back to that customer? That usually results into kind of 15% of their overall satisfaction with that particular incident.

And then number two is, did you resolve the issue? Did I, as your kind of product, resolve the issue? And that's the other 85%. So if you respond in a timely fashion and you resolve the issue for that particular incident, you get brand equity, right? Now, if you look at over the scope of time, how do you as a customer engage with my product, right? What's that customer journey look like?

Did I fail you in other places, even though I was good to you in that one place? And that's where the looking at the entire journey and planning and preparing for that journey is critical to create the profit because you don't create the profit at just the one incident. You have to look at all the different, not only support incidents, but then also every time I engage with the product, do I get out of it? What do I expect? When you make changes to the product, are you thinking about, am I going to get frustrated with those changes or am I going to love those changes? It's looking at that entire kind of architecture journey, which is so critical. And that's why

when we talk to companies, we say, it's not just about the incident. It's not just about the one moment, even though that's really important. It's about the millions of moments that create your brand. And then your brand is what people rebuy. And one of the things I really get tired of, and you're welcome to use this for whatever you want, but I get tired of this spin that they give me either on this after survey or did we service you well? Because it's all focused on customer service guy, Bob. And so if I spend 45 minutes to an hour on hold with say GoDaddy, and then I get Bob on the line,

Bob's a really great guy. He helps me, works through my problem, fixes my problem. I'm still angry at GoDaddy for putting me on for an hour. I'll pick on GoDaddy, they're our hoster. And they're good and bad sometimes, but come on man, 45 minutes an hour. I have to call them in the middle of the night actually. So I can, I don't have to wait that time. I actually do the middle of the night thing. The problem is when I, Bob will tell me, Hey Chris, they're going to send a survey to fix your problem. Hey, thanks Bob. You did a great job thing for me today. I'll get the survey and I want to tell GoDaddy, you need to knock off that 45 minutes to an hour thing. Okay. You need to knock that off. I'm still angry at you, even though Bob

was really nice guy, but the way the frame and the shaping is of the questions and stuff, it's all going to get Bob fired. If I start crapping on why I'm angry still about GoDaddy, right? Everything's about Bob. And I see there's a real shaping and control and containment mechanism that I don't appreciate as a customer. So I don't know if you can use that. I think it's interesting. I'm stepping away from GoDaddy and just looking at the industry at all. I think that what we're seeing is that the companies and the brands that are really successful are the ones that want. Stella Connect with Medallia,

Worthix, there's a lot of great companies that we actually partner with to help rethink how do you get feedback? How do you understand sentiment of the overall customer base, not just a manufacturer view to make you feel good that you're doing a good job in your center with your employees, which is a very big oversimplification of what the old traditional survey process would look. But even the folks that are in the center, they want to have more meaningful feedback so they can do an amazing job with the customer. And they want credit for doing an amazing job. Sometimes some of the surveys that are out there make it parlay and look like the agent or the frontline worker did something wrong

when actually they were great and had to do something that was outside of their control. And so I think you really have to start looking at those innovative companies that are thinking about how to get feedback, how to translate that feedback into sentiment and that sentiment into meaningful change at the product and the engineering level so they can get that and executive level so they can get the needed feedback then to make the right service changes. Yeah, because I'll be honest, that sort of stuff is where people are losing me, where I get upset, whether it's a cable company or others. And sometimes I'll get like the little survey and they make them vague, but I'm smart enough to know the wording, maybe probably because I've done law, but I'll want to, I'll start going off in the box about how, Hey man, I was on hold for

45 minutes. Bob was great, but man, the company has a real problem here. And then I'll reword the, I'll re read the wording. And I like oh man i'm gonna get bob fired because this is more about bob than it is about the company and they're really missing an opportunity to identify that how they could do better and then maybe i wouldn't be so mad at bob when poor bob gets on the line i'm like i mean that's the crux of one of the things that the service stack solves is looking at that kind of end-to-end view and helping companies see in the player journey, you're accidentally cutting off your nose and spiting your face, right? There you go. You're not doing intentionally because I don't think anybody intentionally is trying to frustrate customers so they don't rebuy their product. In this location, the journey in that location, you're doing a good job.

But in this location, you're causing yourself some challenges. And that's what our future of service is about, is like revolutionizing and disrupting that and looking at it differently. There you go. We talked about decentralization or wanted to talk about decentralization and how you guys are using that. Yeah, we're using a couple ways. So I think one way that we love decentralization is you can either call it decentralization or distribution of workforce, the decentralization all over the globe of the workforce. We're also a big believer in the blockchain. So Forte Labs and Rally.io, which are very close friends, they're building awesome and amazing

kind of blockchain and crypto capabilities. If you haven't looked at them, you should definitely look at them. And so since we're such a big believer in blockchain and crypto, we do have one client where we accept cryptocurrency as the payment mechanism. And we think about where is the future of that going? We don't know. We believe that probably in the next five to 10 years, some of normal mainstay banks are going to start backing crypto and so forth in the sense that it'll start to be used in a valuable way. You can think of one use case. We don't particularly use this use case

because we're not in these countries. But in some countries that have high inflation rates and they cross the border and the inflation rates are more stable, the currency exchange rates are more stable the currency exchange rates are so different it's hard for somebody to purchase back and forth whereas a crypto rate is pretty static across both of those right so it stabilizes that in some of those countries that could be a future use probably outside of services but that could be a future use

of how a crypto can be used from an economic standpoint. But I think in general, we think there's a huge, in gaming specifically, there's a huge opportunity to think about crypto and the blockchain. And there's great companies that are thinking about that and doing cool things with that. And then we think there's in the future of payments. We don't know how far in the future, five or 10 years. There's probably a worker payment system that includes cryptocurrency and so forth. So we're dreaming about those stages. Right now, we're beta testing,

getting paid in crypto, and we love crypto companies and what they're doing. Yeah, might be interesting. I know PayPal just went to crypto. You can pay in crypto and accept money in crypto. And then I don't know if this was a stunt that KFC did,

but they said they would take payment for Dogecoin. I don't know if that's a stunt, but I know it was tweeted out by them. That's interesting. It makes me wonder sometimes what's in their chicken at that point if they're accepting Dogecoin. I don't know. That's a joke. Don't sue me, KFC.

But no, it's interesting i i think we're finally getting adoption on that front that would be an interesting place what if you put people's 401ks into cryptocurrency and the value went up like you put all you put your whole 401k or whatever your employee matching funds you put in dodge coin and it goes up like five thousand percent no we i put we put our investments wherever Elon Musk says this week on Twitter. What could go wrong? Well, yeah, that's definitely outside of my expertise, but I do think it's a fun area to watch. And in cases where we feel like they're stable coins, we're starting to bait test that on taking payments in a stable way. So that's the second

part of decentralization. And then I think when you think about the third part of decentralization, you think about the kind of from a technology standpoint, how is that going to get decentralized over time? Right now, we're not seeing a lot of decentralization of technology and servers and things of that nature. But that could be an interesting thing in the future that we're just paying attention to. We don't have any strategies around, but we're paying attention to. But specifically, where we focus on now is the decentralization of workers and remote work. So what have we talked about with your services covered or dug more in depth with? I think when you look at it, we've done some pretty good deep diving here.

But I think the biggest thing is people want to be engaged where they are. So whether it's a phone call, whether it's an email, a chat, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, wherever they're at, they want you to support them and help them. And so I think that's one future trend that most companies that are getting it are starting to move towards. I think another one is for products that are apps, whether they're entertainment apps, whether they're games, other things, people want to stay inside the app to get support.

So you'll see a lot of CRM companies that will start to transition to in-app support because again, you're meeting the customer where they're exactly at. I think that's the second piece. I think the third piece is when you think about your brand and you think about the future of your brand, you now have to think about it at the micro-moment level.

You can no longer just hope that the product works good and your customer service is okay, and they're going to rebrand because millennial and Gen Z consumers are making decisions by how they feel about the brand at the moment. And maybe some gen Z and millennials are making several micro moment decisions, right? But some of them just get frustrated and they're like, hey, I don't want to spend my eyeball time or my money time there, so I'm just going to make a change. And so more now than ever,

is it critical that you really engage your customer base, you take care of them in a timely way, you resolve, you know, whatever their issues are, and you meet them where they are. And if you do all of those things, and the product is a decent product, you're going to have a lot of success as a company. If you mess up, or don't invest in some of those areas, you may find that you're not going to be a market leader or you're not going to be as successful as you hoped that you would be. And you bring up some good points. I don't know what's going on the last few years,

but I've seen more abandonment of customer service in Facebook pages. And that's usually a main source that I'll find to try and get some customer service from people. And they'll just have one of those bots now that got so popular. And it's just like, yeah, we'll respond to you in the next 24 hours. Then no one ever responds.

Like, it's just stunning how many, I should write it down and study it because it's just stunning to me how many never get back to me. And I'm asking customer service questions that would be a profit base because I'm like, can I buy it? Should I buy your product? Or can you answer this question? is stunning to me how many never get back to me and i'm asking customer service questions that would be a profit base because i i'm like can i buy it should i buy your product or can you answer this question zero answer like just crickets there's like a bot that kicks in but that's about

it and then but you're right meeting people where their platform is and i know a lot of millennials that are friends of mine they don't have a facebook account. And you go, why do you have a Facebook account? That's weird. They're like, we're millennials. And I'm like, oh, that explains it. But a lot of my authors that come on the show, many of them are journalists. And so Twitter is usually kind of their place for journalism and politics and news and stuff, whatever the coverage is. And I'll be like, how come you're not on like Instagram?

Because Instagram is great for authors. And we do really well with it. In fact, we didn't do really well with it. And some of our authors said, Hey man, Instagram is a good place for this. And we went on there and now we rock it. LinkedIn is another great place. Facebook is another great place. And they're just like, we just like this thing. And I'll sit down with them like you said, and I'll say, look, man, you, your audience is everywhere. The Chris Voss show we're everywhere. Cause we're going because we're coming to you, man. We're meeting you where you're at,

wherever you want us to be, we're at. We're even trying to figure that TikTok thing out in 60 seconds, which is hard because we do an hour podcast. But we're there. And I think what you said, a lot of brands seem to think about it from that aspect. You need to be, your customers are everywhere.

People that drink Coca-Cola just aren't on Twitter, man. They're everywhere. Brands seem to think about that and what they are. Yeah, I think that's it. And you touched on a point earlier about AI and under our innovate brand, we work closely with a lot of customers on AI and how the future of AI is going to transform the worker space. And our forecast on the future of AI is I often get the question, are bots going to take over customer service? And the answer is no. What you'll find is there's going to be some very simple workflows that knowledge-based bots and NLP bots will be able to handle. And as long as your customer satisfaction is high, I always say, when people

say we're automating 15%, I always say, well, what's your customer satisfaction for that volume that you're automating? Because it should be on par with the customer satisfaction that you have from the human. But there's a second component that's not often talked about, which is really powerful in the automation space, which is you can use a bot, especially an NLP bot, to write 80% of the response and then let a human review it. And it's called agent assist AI. And we do that for a lot of our customers. The human makes some adjustments and some changes, but they can do it in about half the time than they would to write the whole

response. And then the human sends it. So in essence, you get the benefit of having AI, but you get the higher quality of having an engaged agent or engaged worker do it. So it's what we call hybrid AI. And I think those are the three buckets in the future. Simple workflow AI, agent-assist AI, and then agent by themselves. Now, it might be in five or 10 years, we start to see some really good progress on AI that changes that.

But I think for the next five years or so, you're going to see a lot of value in companies that build strategies, thinking about those three buckets, and then invest in those three buckets, and ensure that their satisfaction and their retention results are based on how they invest in those buckets.

There we go. This has been a wonderful discussion. We really got into the cool deep stuff in the future and all that stuff. So it's been awesome. Anything more you want to plug as we go out? I think from our standpoint, we like to help people. Officium is Latin for to serve or to help. So if folks want our help or are interested in it, definitely love to have a conversation.

We also have a foundation where we're training these new local communities that may not have the customer service training as they transition from job to job. So we have a foundation as well if you're interested in helping there. That's great, too. But I just appreciate the time, Chris. It's an honor to be on the show. It's an honor to have your listeners learn a little bit more about the future of service, or at least how we at Officium are dreaming and building the future of service. So thanks for the time. There you go. Give us the dot coms once more. So it's officiumlabs.io or officiumlabs.com, either way. But it's O-F-I-C-I-U-M

labs.com. And then we're on Twitter and LinkedIn. And I think we're on Instagram too. But there you go. F-I-C-I-M labs. Go where the people are. That Instagram is really hot right now. Sounds like something from Zoolander. What's interesting is Clubhouse, that Clubhouse app there.

We're actually, now that you mentioned it, we're on Clubhouse every two weeks. We do an hour session. You should look up nate brown on linkedin okay you'll see our clubhouse uh invites and all that kind of stuff we are in clubhouse too what's funny is they've really helped my instagram just explore of course and the podcast linkedin it's crazy and stuff so it was an honor to have you on as well thank you very much and great story man just continued success so thank you very much. And great story, man. Just continued success. So thank you very much for spending some time with us today.

Yeah, thank you. There you go. Guys, check it out and go to youtube.com for just Chris Foss. See the video version of this. Go to goodreads.com for just Chris Foss.

You can see us because we're everywhere, as we mentioned before. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. There's even a MySpace account, I'm sure, that's still up somewhere. And you can see all the groups on Facebook and all that sort of good stuff, and on Clubhouse.

So thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.