Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to the Table Service podcast where we'll dish on all things support, success and beyond with the people and companies building the future of customer experience. Table Service is presented by Tavolo Consulting and I'm your host, Jordan Hooker. Luke Jamison is a globally recognized customer experience thought leader. Having transformed some of Australia's largest Superfund contact centers in the past, Luke brings a wealth of knowledge and practical understanding combined with a contemporary and multifaceted view of the customer. Sought out as an industry speaker, thought leader, podcast host and presenter, Luke is a force within the contact center and CX landscape. He's been featured in numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal and the Australian, as well as being a featured contributor to the ICMI in 2025. He studied design thinking at D school, Stanford University and as a certified Lego Serious Play facilitator. Luke, welcome to the Table.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: G'day, Jordan. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: Thanks for taking the time. I'm really excited for, for our conversation here today. For our listeners who may not be familiar with you or are, but want to know more, I'd love to hear a little bit more about you and tell us a little bit about your story.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Well, my story depends how far back you want to go, but sure. In a brief nutshell, when I left school, I actually became a baker, pastry chef, and then realized after I bought my business and did my apprenticeship, finished all of that, that one, I was a really good baker and a really terrible accountant. So I shouldn't have, shouldn't have started my own business or maybe I just didn't have the time. I don't know. I also realized that it's a great way to not have many friends because you're working nights and they're out partying. So I shifted gears, tried a few different things and eventually after moving to Melbourne, landed a contact center job.
And then for the next 20 years, I stayed in Contact Centers. So, so I've seen all, all facets of contact Centers now. So I've been an agent, I've been the team leader. I was lucky enough to, as you said in the bio, set up some pretty incredible contact centers and run them. And you know, that led me all around the globe. Funny enough, you know, I was able to go over to and that's how I met a lot of the people from ICMI through, through that. And one of the contact centers I ran became like the best in the world for in 2020 12, 2013.
Wow. It's getting away from me now.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: So I've been On the BPO side, I've been in the.
The retail side. I've also been on the other side where I've consulted to them and now I work in the tech side of the tech side of Contact Centers in a really interesting startup space.
Just it just as a, you know, something for the listeners. I noticed you've got a mandolin in the background.
[00:02:52] Speaker A: Indeed I do.
[00:02:53] Speaker B: So, yeah, I also play mandolin.
[00:02:55] Speaker A: Nice. I don't think I realized that we.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: Should have jammed this out.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: I've also had Nate Brown, who's based in Nashville, Tennessee, who's also a mandolin player. So I think we need to get a little CX crew together for us.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: Yeah, let's head. Let's head on down to Nashville and I love it.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: I love it. Let's do it. Awesome. Well, obviously, I know you've had a really interesting change, not really change in your career. Kind of an outgrowth of the work you've been doing with Operetta, which you have gotten plugged in with this year. So tell us a little bit about the company. Tell us a little bit the story that got you there. I think it's a really, really interesting story to share.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Yeah. Wow. What a. What a unicorn. And not in the, not in, hey, we're going to the moon. But maybe. I hope so. But it's, it's the, it's just been like the perfect fit for me. So I've, I feel like I've landed in my home in that, you know, I'm, I'm super passionate about customer experience and employee experience.
As I said, I've been on the receiving end of a lot of tech vendors and it can be very frustrating because you get sold the dream. This is what it can do. It's going to save you like 10 minutes in average handle time, even though your calls are only five minutes long.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:10] Speaker B: And you know, so. And it's so frustrating because you then don't you never. I don't think I've ever really felt like I've got all the benefits out of something that I've gone and sit in.
So when you get the opportunity to work for an organization, particularly a tech company, you want to make sure it can deliver on what, what it says. Well, I do. That's really important to me.
Anyway, so I, I was looking up after I was consulting and doing some content and I was really interested in this idea of observability because I, I set up an Amazon Connect contact center when I was at one of the super funds here in Australia. And it Was one of the first here in Australia. I learned so much through that, that process and that shift from being on PREM to cloud to mm.
And there's a whole heap of things that you just don't realize. Like you get sold all the benefits of moving to cloud and they're heaps. There are heaps and probably far more than ever being on Prem.
But you do also find that you get all these, this new technology terminology things like moz, your MOZ score. I was like, what's a MOZ score? I've never heard that. Because you don't. You, you wouldn't have a MOZ score in an on Prem contact center.
So this idea of a quality of speech, I then through that process met all the team in IT and worked really closely with them to make sure that it launched. And we did the whole let's slowly roll out this process and transition over. And what I found out was this thing called observability. Like look, we've got an observability platform and we were able to monitor and make sure that all your systems are working well. I was like, oh wow, that's really cool. Imagine you could do that for a contact center. And so I started just diving into observability a bit more.
But I had this, more of this idea about Imagine we had observability for CX because it's not to play down the importance of doing journey maps because I think journey maps have a place and they're good, but they're just such a small part of cx. There's some great consultants out there, like Dave Seaton for example, like that guy knows how to do, just knows journey maps like off the back of his hand and he's so good at it. But I think organizations, they get hooked up on it and it becomes, that's what CX is. And then it becomes something that's stuck on the wall and kind of loses its value. And those post IT notes, you know, eventually the stickiness wears off and everyone forgets about it.
[00:06:53] Speaker A: Very true.
[00:06:54] Speaker B: So, so this idea of imagine we could, we could observe CX in such a way like, like you can an enterprise system. So I started doing a bit of research. I then came across Operada. So someone introduced me to the CEO and I started to, to get this, I, you know, this insight to what they can see in the contact center. And they kindly let me interview John Mitchum, one of the founders and I just, yeah, it was so nice just to meet these amazing down to earth people who are just, they're all contacts in a background. This deep domain expertise about contact centers and IT and observability and this team just so passionate about improving the connection experience, improving the human experience both for customers and for agents. And I was like, that's what I'm passionate about, man. How awesome would it be if I could work for these guys? And so over the next couple of months we kind of talked and, and I did a little bit of content for them and then it just got to a point where they, I think we were both saying I think we're the right fit for each other. And you know, I was so lucky, so lucky to land here because operator does some really cool stuff and allows me to be myself as well. Which is, which is also very cool.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: I'd love to talk even a little just more about observability in general. Can you tell us a little bit as you know we think about inside of cx, what does that look like practically in the day to day operations of a call center?
[00:08:25] Speaker B: Yeah, good question. So observability is, it's something that it's come from the IT space. It's about making sure the healthier systems is all working well and up and running. And it's, you know, the traces metrics logs that's kind of the three core pillars of observability. Being able to look at all those things and tell a story.
But in a contact center, ironically the place that you can measure basically everything, you know, probably measuring everyone's breath if you really wanted to, it's, we don't really have this observability. You have all of these systems like immune, intricate systems. You've got your workforce management, your knowledge management system, your CCAS platform and if you're running on cloud, you've got all of these networks that sort of mesh together, all have to work perfectly in order for that to sing. And we don't measure that in the contact center space. And we're kind of very hooked up on these traditional metrics and we're guiding ourselves by these metrics. But they're almost not the lighthouse metrics we need to be going off in my opinion because it doesn't matter if your average handle time's great, it doesn't matter if your core quality like the interaction and what you say is correct, if the customer can never hear you in the first place.
So CX observability on the other hand, being able to look at all of those traces metric logs in a contact center is really important because what, what's Happening is we're looking at all of the upstream impacts that can change. So the quality of our voice, the quality of our interaction, and being able to hear each other clearly, being able to have no lag, no, no jitter, that actually builds trust. So California University and Australian University did this study on the quality of your voice. And what they found is when that's degraded and when people can't hear in this lag, you lose trust immediately as a customer.
So that's super important. So many things affect that. It could be the fact that you're on WI fi at home, especially after Covid and everyone's working from home, your WI fi might be awful.
And you're meant to be on Ethernet. We can tell whether you're on that, and we can give the agent a prompt. And this is where it's about helping the agent as well, not just helping the customer. The agent doesn't have to call it saying, hey, customer, can't hear me getting off queue, lodging a ticket, waiting for it to be resolved, and having also then impacting it service desk and asking them to look into what it is.
We can identify the issue and give a prompt and say, hey, you're on WI fi. Maybe switch over to Ethernet. It could be, hey, your boom mic isn't close enough to your mouth. You know, we. We do this. We flick it up when we. When we want to talk to someone, we go back to. We forget.
[00:11:30] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: It might. It might be that you just having a really good hair day and you don't want to wear your headset, and so you decided to use your PC mic.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: Who knows?
[00:11:39] Speaker B: So there's all these things that can happen. We can also do things like tell when a customer's abusing you and put up a flag to a team leader to say, hey, this guy's getting abused. Maybe go and help them out.
The sheer volume of what we can monitor and keep a trace of is incredible. So we have over a trillion data points that we look at.
And so you can imagine the data that we're getting, the stores that we're getting. And that, to me, is why I was so excited about this, because they showed me behind the curtain. And all of a sudden I could see all these stories for us to tell.
We just analyzed 150,000 calls. It was like 148,000 calls, all of them that had a service desk ticket attached. And so we then analyzed all the service desk tickets, and what we found was like, it was incredible. 54% of them were related to audio issues. Some sort of audio, whether it's one way, audio lag, whatever it might be.
When you think about how many tickets that is and then how many, how much time that takes to resolve, you can turn around pretty clearly and say actually we probably can help you with the average handle time or your, or agent availability because we're actually got these tangible results that we can see. So for me that was really cool. So I think CX observability, to answer it in a really succinct way, it is making sure that all of the upstream impacts that can, that can impact your interaction with a customer are clear. And the best analogy I can probably come up with is you might be standing in clear waters in the river and thinking, wow, this water is crystal clear, that's your contact center. But just up around the bend there is maybe a, maybe a deer doing its business in the water that you didn't even know about. And we make sure that we can see that and we observe that. We make sure we shoo that deer away.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: Sure, absolutely. Absolutely. Very good. No, that's really helpful. Thanks for, thanks for walking through that. I think that as this concept of not just thinking about, you know, how do we, how do we drive efficiency but also thinking about how do we catch these problems and solve these problems is such a critical piece.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: Solve them real time. Yes, absolutely real time. And giving the power back to agents to be able to self resolve instead of having to lodge tickets, I think that's super powerful. And when we talk about making agents more effective and empowering them, I think this is just one more part of that.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: Just talking about agents then in general, can you talk a little bit about how improving that experience for agents ultimately improves the customer experience as well?
[00:14:22] Speaker B: Well look, it's, it's no secret that agent churn is just so high in the contact center space. And that's because I think we build these roles around tasks and all of a sudden we've got AI that is taking tasks. The one thing that had kept people going is now disappearing. We also talk about roles as a stepping stone. So it's like, okay, well yeah, of course I'm only going to be in here for a really short period of time.
We don't talk about them as a career side of things where I think this really helps from an agent. You know that agent perspective is that empowerment. We're giving, giving something back to an agent so that they can feel like hey, this job's actually worthy. It's a good job, it is a meaningful job. I can actually have impact.
That's a really important thing, I think, for the industry to really acknowledge and be striving towards and then providing them the tools to actually do their job. I don't think any agent really gets up in the morning and says, I'm going to do a bad job. I'm going to. I'm going to ruin this day. They want to do a good job and so many things get in their way. And I remember being on the phone, I remember my first call so clearly. Like, I remember my finger shaking with. You know, we back then had the actual phone on the desk and I had to push a button to answer. I remember my finger shaking with nerves about answering that call. Yeah, I remember getting abused. I remember the frustration of when systems were slow and you're trying to fill airtime because you're like, you know, just a moment. I'm just looking this up. Bear with me just a moment.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: You know, how many ways can you say that, right?
[00:16:04] Speaker B: It's so frustrating. It can be such a frustrating job. And I think anything that we can do to improve the lives of agencies is just so important because I know they want to do a good job and I know how frustrating it is. So let's help remove those frustrations.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: Absolutely. Absolutely. I've never had the opportunity to work in a larger call center environment. My focus has been primarily startups. But even in that space, just, gosh, picking up the phone and dealing with customers day in and day out is just such a challenge. And you add the complexity of systems that are not working well or not working at all, and it just adds a whole different layer to the challenges that agents face day in and day.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: Out, you know, and we've got some interesting times ahead as well. So voice AI is. It has come a long way so quickly, and I think the industry could be under threat in that regard. So I think that's something that we need to be thinking about as well. And what does that look like? What does the future of contact centers look like if there is AI Voices?
[00:17:12] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Let's kind of dig into that topic then for a few minutes there. What do you think that the future is for this contact center space that we've been talking about?
[00:17:21] Speaker B: I just spoke with Maya, who is Sesame's new AI. It's. It's really cool if you get a chance to go and demo it.
This conversational AI, it's incredible. Her pauses, the way she laughs and does the voice, verbal pauses, processing to the point that you can have a genuine conversation now that's. I know that's just one layer of the whole piece, you know, that's just the front end layer. And that has to tap into things like your CRM and your knowledge management, all to get that sort of stuff. Right. And that maybe that causes some lag, but we also have lag. As humans, you say, I'm going to place you on hold for a moment while I have a look at something.
At the moment, as humans, we don't really, I don't think we really judge too much about that. So we're not like, oh, this human's broken. Because they've got to put me on hold. An AI, on the other hand, the minute it pauses and thinks for more than three and a half seconds, you're like, ah, this thing's buggy. Ah, it's broken. Right?
[00:18:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: So there's a perception thing.
However, if you think about the fact that even if they're just pausing for a couple of seconds and making API calls to these other areas, they could do that pretty quick. And that's pretty scary. Like, I remember, I'm gonna say 15 years ago, Bill Gates said that in five years time, contact centers will die. Five years rolled around, contact centers were thriving. Right. Ten years later, still going 15 years later. I genuinely think maybe there's a threat here.
[00:19:09] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:19:09] Speaker B: And if that's the case, because we didn't evolve ourselves to come up with better ways to, to deal with people and add meaning and impact to these roles, and contact centers do go to Voice AI. So I mentioned before about those service tickets. All of those 148,000 tickets were agent generated. So the agents, like, there's an issue here. The customer can't hear me, I can't hear the customer. There's lag, whatever it might be. If AI's talking to people, who's lodging that when the, when there's one way audio or someone can't understand or they just get it completely wrong, you know, because that, that still happens. You know, we've been doing a lot of testing on that. I'd love to play you a recording. But when you run Voice AI and you listen to this conversation I have with this Voice AI, it greets me, but then there's this huge pause before it responds back to my question. It then responds back with what it thinks I'm after, but it's not.
I then have to rephrase it then gets it right. But then it. The call terminates and I don't know why the call terminates.
[00:20:25] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:26] Speaker B: And we're when we then go and look at traditional metrics around the voice quality and it says, it's perfect. This was a great call. Well, who's going to say that it's not?
[00:20:37] Speaker A: Right?
[00:20:38] Speaker B: So. So that's what we're really looking at, is being able to identify some of these things and say, actually, that really got it wrong. It got the intent wrong. There was actually some long pauses before it responded. So. So I think voice AI space, it's coming, and it's coming really quick. Like, if anyone goes and has a play with sesame, I just, like, I put something on LinkedIn last week about it and I had this full conversation and we talked about contact centers and the future of contact centers.
[00:21:06] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:21:06] Speaker B: It's a fascinating conversation. Even I got lost in that for a moment or two that I wasn't speaking to a human. It calls in the question, what is this idea of connection? And, yeah, so I think we could. We could talk about that for hours. But I do think there definitely needs to be something that's looking at these interactions and are they. Not only are they accurate, but our customers actually getting the full experience and able to hear and have that trust that is built from a great interaction?
[00:21:34] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that is the thing that I am seeing most companies missing right now, particularly around live chat bots versus, you know, a voice AI situation where they. They think, well, it's solving the problem. But is it solving the problem in a delightful way? Is it solving the problem in a way where the customer leaves and doesn't mind the fact that they talk to a chatbot instead of a person? Because the experience matched what they would expect to have experienced if they talked to an agent at that company giving them that support. And I think that's what so many companies are missing right now. And I hope we're going to see a reckoning of that, of realizing, yes, AI is an incredible tool for us to bring to this space. How do we do that in a really great way? And I think that's the thing we have to keep asking ourselves with each step of this.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: I do, too. And look, I don't think contact centers are dead, just for the record.
[00:22:22] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:22:22] Speaker B: I think that humans are always going to need to be in the loop. And sure, voice AI might handle a ton of those things, but when push comes to shove and you're in a crisis, you're in need of something, you're emotional about something, you don't want to talk to an AI, you want to talk to a human.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: And it might be clunky. And there might be. Can I put you on hold for a moment? But I do think that there's a. There's still a place for that.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, Luke, thanks for talking through these topics. As we kind of wrap up this conversation, I'd love to take a few moments for any closing thoughts you may have on these topics or anything else you'd like to talk through.
[00:23:04] Speaker B: Jordan, thanks for having me. I think we're in a very fascinating space.
I think CX is in an interesting space in that a lot of organizations have forgotten the value of it or not seen the value because we focused too heavily on one or two aspects of it. And I think that CX is evolving rapidly as well, just as rapidly as AI. And I think we're going to start seeing CX will, will be rejuvenated very soon with how we actually approach it. And we have a more holistic view of, of our interactions and, and the world. The world that is customer experience.
[00:23:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that thought and very excited for seeing those, those changes and that growth coming in our industry. It's definitely, definitely long overdue and very excited to see it happen. Yeah. Well, Luke, if anybody wanted to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to connect with you?
[00:24:05] Speaker B: LinkedIn is such a good place to connect and I do respond and I do say hello when you connect. So I'm very, very passionate about that. It's not about building huge followers, it's about making genuine connections. So please connect with me there. You can check out my website, which is LukeJamison Live, and, and check out Operata as well.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: So wonderful.
[00:24:31] Speaker B: Lots of articles on there, too.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: Well, I'll make sure we link those down in the show notes below so listeners can get to you easily. But Luke, thanks. Thanks again for joining us here at the Table.
[00:24:40] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: Yes, been a pleasure. Thanks.
[00:24:44] Speaker B: Until next time.
[00:24:47] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the Table Service podcast. You can learn more about today's guest. The show notes below Table Service is presented by Tavalo Consulting, hosted by Jordan Hooker, music by Epidemic Sound.
