SuccessKPI recently announced it has contributed key technology components in the new Maximus Total Experience Management Solution (TXM), designed to deliver trusted information and government services to transform the customer and employee experience when interacting with federal agencies.
Regular readers of No Jitter know that there are dozens of companies building artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for customer experience applications. Admittedly, not knowing much about SuccessKPI, I decided this joint Maximus announcement was a wonderful opportunity for us all to learn more about SuccessKPI and how a key customer is using its solutions. Maximus is a leading employer and provider of government services worldwide.
SuccessKPI, headquartered in Fairfax County, VA, is a global, AI Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) provider focusing on enterprise and public sector customers. It was established in 2017 by three co-founders with deep expertise in the contact center space. Two of the co-founders spent years at Genesys and one at Amazon Connect. Initially self-funded, in 2022 SuccessKPI received $33 million in funding from Banneker Partners, who previously has invested in Genesys. SuccessKPI partners with Amazon, Five9, Genesys, and Zoom, among others.
SuccessKPI describes its core product as a workforce engagement management (WEM) platform that uses AI, analytics, and automation to remove the obstacles that contact center agents, managers, and executives face in providing a great customer experience. Capabilities included in the platform are:
Maximus TXM, using the capabilities described above, was designed for government agencies to improve efficiencies and effectiveness within contact center operations, such as reduce onboarding costs, improve quality performance, and reduce employee turnover. The Maximus team developed TXM based on several large-scale projects within federal financial and homeland security agencies in collaboration with key technology partners utilizing FedRAMP credentials, such as SuccessKPI, Salesforce, and Amazon Connect and Web Services.
I recently had an opportunity to interview Michelle Paiz, Vice President of Total Experience Solutions and Services at Maximus. Paiz has been with the company for over 11 years and has been involved in every aspect of Maximus’ deployments of SuccessKPI functionality as well as in the design and delivery of TXM. We talked about the company’s reasons for using a CCaaS technology partner for AI and the success they have had to date.
Note: Like most contact center solutions, Paiz explained that Maximus is technology agnostic, especially with respect to technology vendors; they support more than one. Maximus is ready to support the technology requested by the government clients they serve. In this article, as Paiz did in our interview, I will not disclose the contact center vendors deployed by specific clients and protect the anonymity of those clients.
Paiz explained that Maximus first partnered with SuccessKPI in 2020, when Maximus accelerated its migration to a cloud-based contact center solution. I asked why SuccessKPI was an important part of that transition. Paiz explained that Maximus was using reporting packages based on multiple premises-based contact center solutions and, “our transition to cloud created a need for stronger reporting capabilities. Anyone who has worked with CCaaS vendors – especially in the last four years – knows that they did not have a robust reporting package inherent to their platform.”
Paiz continued, stating that “SuccessKPI has been a great partner because every time my team has requested support, they have picked up the phone. They’ve not only supported our reporting needs, but they also helped us mature our offering during our CCaaS migration. They supported our focus on the really important data elements as we improved reporting. This allowed our team to ensure improved and consistent high quality for our customers.”
In addition to a transition to the cloud, Paiz explained that another transition was taking place in the contact center in 2020 (think pandemic and remote work) with transition of workforces to remote work. There was greater attention to the employee experience in the contact center, and the largest focus area was for agent experience.
Maximus began identifying data elements for analysis to ensure that they were capturing those important to evaluating agent experience. “Government clients are really interested in understanding how their employees feel about the public interaction,” Paiz explained. “We're not only using SuccessKPI to report on the call engagement, but also from the customer to the agent to the contact center operation,” she continued.
A recent project to support agents and supervisors used automated quality scoring of interactions– evaluations of agent interactions using SuccessKPI AI-enabled quality management. Paiz explained that the agents receive their results weekly, sometimes more often depending on the client project.
The benefit to supervisors is expediting the analysis for evaluating interactions and enhancing the scorecard capability. At Maximus, the quality management system has been integrated with the Human Resource and payroll database. It lets supervisors know, for example, if the agent was online for the 40 hours they were scheduled to work. It allows supervisors to quickly approve timecards, removing more everyday paperwork and bureaucracy. It frees supervisors to, “spend more time coaching agents, and that is a good thing,” said Paiz.
“We owe our agents good feedback and fairness. Leveraging AI for quality monitoring ensures critical items aren’t missed or scored incorrectly due to human error or ever-present contact center floor multi-tasking,” explained Paiz. This also benefits agents so they have a much more holistic view of their performance from all of their interactions, providing for targeted behavioral coaching from much more data to inform how Maximus recognizes employees for excellence as well as for opportunities for improvement.
The benefit of the SuccessKPI platform deployment to large enterprises reinforces the power of consistent metrics and timely reporting, according to Paiz. Enterprise-wide reporting allows Maximus to make sure that everyone is driving the right metrics, the ones that support the organizations improved customer engagement.
This single source of truth extends to agencies, who can have access to reports on their projects in real-time. This level of transparency, supported by SuccessKPI solutions, is something that agencies appreciate. This has resulted in high levels of trust and transparency with federal partners.
Anyone who has worked in a contact center knows you can easily run into time constraints when trying to provide timely reporting. “People become fixated on wanting to find out what is happening with just one metric,” said Paiz. SuccessKPI makes it easy to reveal the insights that matter most and drill down on issues, so reporting is consistent and comprehensive, which allows us to target precisely where we can enhance customer experience, according to Paiz.
This holistic reporting impacts the bottom line: individual federal agencies have already seen $26M in reduced onboarding costs, 27% improvement in quality scores within the first six weeks of implementation, and 198% reduction in employee turnover.
In closing, I asked Paiz what advice she would have for companies considering a move to AI, and specifically SuccessKPI. “Absolutely do it,” she said. One challenge she thinks most organizations will face is, “embracing AI.” Contact centers have historically been very manually-driven; there are people who do not want to let go of their spreadsheet technology, the way things have traditionally been done, she explained.
If 2023 was the year that vendors announced how they would deliver more established generative AI in their solutions, 2024 is about detailing how trusted AI is delivering the promised benefits. Every organization will have their own journey to AI implementations, but learning the experiences of others can only help mitigate the trepidation some may feel.
