0:00:00 Ben Wright: I’ve been trying and, you know, I’ve been tested.
0:00:06 B: Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast with your hosts, Ben Wright and Jemima Ashley. Ben, known as the sales strategist, and Jemima, our resident visibility expert, are here to share their wealth of knowledge and experience with a little fun along the way. Whether you’re a leader, entrepreneur, or aspiring business owner, this is the podcast where we share everything we know about business and to help you succeed.
0:00:31 B: Let’s get started. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast.
0:00:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: Good morning, Ben. How are you?
0:00:45 Ben Wright: Excellent. How are you, Jemimah, today?
0:00:47 Jemimah Ashleigh: Good. I’m a little popsicle at the moment. Depth of winter here in Melbourne, and we’re doing a little zoom call in. I’m very sad that I’m not in Noosa, but once again we catch each other on video call.
0:00:57 Ben Wright: Excellent. Yeah, of course. I’ve actually had something that has been weighing on my mind a little bit since the last time we did a zoom recording.
0:01:05 Jemimah Ashleigh: Tell me.
0:01:06 Ben Wright: And what I wanted to know is, have you sorted out your automatic vacuum cleaner so it doesn’t interrupt us like last time? Because for those listening, a few weeks ago when we had Andrew Blaine, there were these little beeps and then we lost Jemimah and she went on mute. But I’m pretty sure I still heard the swear words, the cussing that came from it. It was all because of this little automated robot that I think. You think I didn’t notice. I’ve been sitting on this once.
0:01:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: I didn’t actually know that you knew that had happened, but that’s exactly what happened. We were in the middle of a very in depth interview with Andrew Blaine and he was in this great point, and I just heard beep. And then I heard the vacuum start. And I thought, oh, yeah, it’s 10:30 am that’s happening right now. Which, of course, we need complete silence in the background when there’s podcasting. That makes a lot of sense. And then there was suddenly just me going, oh, God, and I’m chasing a vacuum now. I had to. I thought I was playing it really cool. I muted myself. I sort of just kept strolling over, waiting for it to kind of come to me. Because the great thing is with electronic vacuum cleaners, they just do what they’re gonna do, and their plan is to clean the house so it has a map. I thought I played that really cool, and I also didn’t. I thought I had gotten away with that. Ben, I’m not gonna lie to you.
0:02:12 Ben Wright: Well, the hallucinations of technology are amazing. And a Few weeks ago. We’ve already mentioned Andrew. We had him here to talk about the future of work, particularly with an AI driven thing, which I thought was really fascinating. Right. He went deep into some Mark Zuckerberg’s going to be your best friend type of profiling. Right. It was really different and really creative. Today we’re going to expand a little bit on that or in fact we’re actually going to drop down a level on that and talk about the future of people development, right, which is going to really focus on customer facing people. Right. And how they’re developing. But then what it means for businesses in terms of the types of customers you deal with, how you deal with these customers. Right. And how you can grow your business. And to do that, I think another expert is relevant given that I don’t think Jemima or I collectively would have, you know, even a small percentage of what some of these great thinkers have.
So we have invited along today a man I’ve known for a little while, Erik van Eekelen. He is a Dutch national who now resides in Australia. And for me, Eric, we’ve all had those friends who got into something a little bit left to center really early in their careers, right. It doesn’t matter what it is. But in Eric’s case, right, he got into AI 20 odd years ago. 20 odd years ago we started talking about what does AI mean? I’ve got no idea what we would have come up with. You know, it certainly wasn’t artificial intelligence and certainly it was not mainstream. But Eric’s now got a master’s in AI. He has 20 years working in this space and now has a company that is in growth mode and, and serious growth mode. Right. We’ll talk about some of the cool things that that company does perhaps later on. But Eric’s a guy that I can always rely on to have a great opinion around where AI is moving at a practical level. So we’ve got him on the podcast today. Welcome, Eric.
0:03:54 Erik van Eekelen: Thanks so much, Ben. Thanks. Thanks for having me here today. And actually thanks for the reminder on iRobots and robots vacuum cleaners. I just turned mine off
0:04:02 Jemimah Ashleigh: Look at Me! Being helpful for future guests. You’re welcome. I’m going to ask you a not serious question. Is our vacuum cleaners sort of AI?
0:04:09 Erik van Eekelen: Yeah, it is. It’s probably one of the first like AIs that made it to people’s living rooms. Like the fact that it’s actually building a map as it’s going through your house is actually training itself in a way. Simple. It’s Definitely not the type of AI that we are now used to with ChatGPT and the like. But it’s probably one of the first, like commercial products that people got in their houses, right?
0:04:29 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. They got the map of the house. I knew where it was going. I had an issue with what part of my house where there was just part of my floor that was never getting clean. And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out. I’d watch it go up to that area. It would do a circle around it and move. And it’s because I saw my cat laid every day. So it actually kept running into the cat so frequently it was like, well, I can’t go to that spot. So it just did this circle around. I was like, bloody cat.
0:04:51 Ben Wright: Like the old chalk line in a crime scene. Hey. Yeah, yeah. Beautiful. Well, I’m gonna let us, if that’s okay, roll into today because there’s some fascinating things to talk about. Eric, I’d like to set this up for you. Traditionally, and we’re gonna focus on the revenue, customer service arms of businesses today. Traditionally, when we’re setting up how these arms function, be they customer care or be their sales process, we will generally set up the goals of that division or that function, the strategies that are going to come with it. We’ll build a process, we’ll work out where the gaps are, what we do well, what we don’t, we’ll fill those gaps. Right. And then we’ll go to market and we’ll roll out. Right. Well, strategy’s easy. We just implement like crazy. Right. We can hashtag that. And certainly those first parts have always been very human dominated. From there, what we’ve traditionally said is, okay, we’ve got some initiatives that we need to roll out, be it compliance, be it improvements to our sales process, be it just generally giving our customers a great experience. And we need to measure how those experiences happen throughout our organization. Right. We’ve been able to do call recordings. That’s certainly one way we can do it. We do call jockeying where the leaders of the teams will listen. We’ve certainly been able to have general training on this and feedback. Right. But it’s been very heavy hands on implementation of our goals and improvement ideas. So much so that if we can get to 5% of all interactions, we are doing unbelievably well. But more than likely we’re talking about 1% maximum of these interactions that are getting measured. And that’s also been very human driven. There are some real changes coming here and I Think that particularly where I sit generally I sit across all of those areas. Right. I’ve always had the biggest challenge with the implementation of the great Org design or team design or process design that we’ve built. Never ever had a challenge getting that really smart ideas out there and finding out how we’re going to compete, how we’re going to sizzle, how we have a competitive moat. But implementation has always been the more difficult.
So Eric, tell me, right, Jemimah and I and everyone listening, what are the changes that are coming and how do you think it’s going to impact the way that the teams function?
0:06:55 Erik van Eekelen: Yeah, I think there’s a few different dimensions and obviously a lot of what I do and what I think about and what I talk about is AI related. That’s how we start this topic. So obviously AI is already, it’s not just going to have an impact, it’s already having an impact on the way that teams function. And we can go on a company level, on a specific team level, on an individual level on how people work with AI and that’s definitely significantly changing. So you use that example of calls and conversations that people are having and how you can coach them and how you can listen to those. And we’ve all been aware of these call conversations where you have. But you have to listen to, right? Like for the first call that you listen to. Like I used to go into an organization as a new CTO or CPO and I love to listen to a few calls because they would tell me something about the voice of the customer, right. But then you’ve listened to one of those goals, two or three of those goals and then it gets really hard to keep listening to them because in a way it’s actually really boring to do that. Like to. It’s really important, but it’s also very boring. It’s very tedious to, to do that, to keep your attention to it for a long time. And so this is one of the great place where AI can come in and actually take away some of that like tedious work. So that. And to cover not just 1% or 5% but 100% of all of the calls in a call center and then use the output from that AI to do the hands on like the face to face coaching that we still do need people for.
0:08:27 Ben Wright: Certainly, to start the conversation. What we’re seeing is the ability for some really smart technology now to say, hey, I’m going to fill in the gaps here around implementation, right. So I’m going to take that heavy load of working out what we’re doing, what we’re implementing well, and what we’re missing. I’m going to record all of that for you. I’m going to provide some great feedback. Right. And away we go. Certainly. But tell me, Eric, so how then do you think that is impacting how teams are then developing and dealing with their customer base?
0:08:58 Erik van Eekelen: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think in general, you. Sometimes we can get too focused on, like, the individual conversations. And like, how did I do in this. This conversation? How did I do in that conversation? Right. And what if you are a manager or a leader of such an area, then you actually also want to know about, like, across the board, like, how our customers responding to us. Right. Like, and how do we engage with them? What’s their sentiment at the moment? Right. Like, how do they feel about our brand? And so that’s something that you can’t pick up from one individual conversation, but you need to have, like, an overview of, you know, how that’s developing. And I think that’s really hard to do, you know, if you, if you just listen to individual calls or if you speak to individual people who are on the phone and staff members that are on the phone. And so having that oversight is crucial, I think. And, and, and again, you know, this is, this is where AI can come in to do some of that, you know, coverage across the board and then, you know, for us to see what. What are some of the trends that come out of that.
0:10:02 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah. And for me, certainly I’ve got a couple of years in AI experience now, so I’m getting better at taking the theoretical into the practical. I think one of the areas that need, that people’s development need to happen in really quickly for AI to be adopted at a more mass market level is actually understanding the commercial use of it. So what I might do is we might change tact here for a moment here. Certainly not. This is not a plug of your business, but I think it’s important to understand actually what it does. Right. To give us a sense of how that application can be. So tell me about Icana and what it does for a call center team or a sales team, and then we might have a look at how that can then impact the types of customers that the businesses you work with are able to go after.
0:10:41 Erik van Eekelen: Yeah, sure. So I guess just to take a quick step back, like what I’ve seen AIM working in lots of different organizations, both in Europe and Australia. So there’s like always three challenges in call centers. Right. One is there’s the top performers, there’s a gap and then there’s the other performers and it’s really hard to bridge that gap. Right. Second, there’s a high turnover. Right. Lots of people leaving, new people coming into the business and then you have to train them up. Especially if you have a complex product that takes quite a while. So the onboarding time can be long. The third one is exactly what you were talking about earlier Ben is like the coverage, like how many of these calls can you actually listen to for quality and compliance purposes? So what we’ve done is we’ve built Call Coach, which is an AI products that basically listens to 100% of all the of the calls and analyzes those calls for both what is being said and how it’s being said. So using tone of voice, empathy, pacing, articulation and combines that in kind of an analysis report that it then shares with both the agents on the phone. Right. Like on, on how they can improve and with their team leads and managers to give like get that overall picture of how the team is doing.
0:11:55 Ben Wright: Yeah. Wow. And thank you for explaining Icana. But if we go from a very specific piece of tech to a more generic or at a macro level, what I’m hearing from you is that these AI tools are not just now giving you coaching on what you’re saying, but they’re giving you coaching on how you’re engaging with people. I speak very openly that high IQ does not mean you are a highly successful sales or customer facing representative for any business. Right. But when you layer in high eq, I would take strong EQ and average IQ than high IQ alone any day of the week in sales roles. So what I’m hearing now is that the technology is allowing you to actually develop EQ and iq, which means that we’re having a faster speed to market of new hires. We’re having a higher overall capability ceiling through our existing teams, through a lower overall engagement level from leaders having to manage this. Right. Which then frees up leaders time to spend on the coaching that comes from those reports. So less time listening, more time coaching, less time listening, more time with customers. Right. Which opens up whole new funnels for business without doubt.
So for you Eric, the use of AI, whether it be AI agents or AI core coaching software or any other form of tech, you know, in a similar space, what do you think that means for the type of customers that businesses can now go after?
0:13:20 Erik van Eekelen: Yeah, you know there’s a few different aspects on what you were just saying and I just Wanted to touch on some of those. So the fact that you can listen to empathy and how important that EQ parties of a conversation, I absolutely agree with that. And I think especially when new people join a business and you were talking about the training time, I like that kind of onboarding time. We’ve got one customer, Open Universities Australia, they’ve got, they used to have like a six week onboarding period for new people and by using call coach, which you know, for, for their new agents, that explains how they can do better, not just in what they say, but also how they said they went from six weeks to four weeks. So that’s a massive impact of how I can basically help to new teams to get started, new people to get started. But it could also help you to kind of address your last question. There’s for an organization maybe to go into a different direction to, to explore a new market and to kind of train people faster up on those new products. Right. So there’s a number of different elements there. You could also get a better understanding of how customers are responding in those new markets. So I think there’s a lot of different opportunities that come up then when you start using. And I really am a big believer in kind of the humans working and I say human people, right? Like people working together with AI. So it’s kind of like hybrid way of working. So there are obviously AI technologies that will take over jobs and there will actually will be a lot of change in the coming years. But I think for now, and at least in the coming years, I think the key point is that, you know, if you’re able to use AI to do your job better, and it can be your job, your individual job, or your team’s performance or your organization’s performance. Right. I think you’ll be one step ahead of many other people. Right. And many other businesses. So I think there’s some key opportunities there that probably not too many companies are tapping into yet.
0:15:13 Ben Wright: Yeah, absolutely. The efficiencies that come with being able to improve the base competency of your team, they simply open up the doors for you to service the next level up of customers. And Eric, I know you’ve got some thoughts around this. We’ve spoken about it previously. Right. But if you can have a team that you can rely on to deliver, essentially do mostly the same thing the majority of the time across the majority of your team. So we’re hitting those high levels on most occasions. We can then start to position our business to go after a different type of customer. I mean, Eric, Your thoughts on this? I’ve certainly heard it before, but I think I’d love the audience to hear. What does that mean in terms of, for you, what type of customer you think you can start going for?
0:15:52 Erik van Eekelen: Yeah, so one of the things that I expect and that I already, not just expected, I can already see happening right now is that with AI, especially smaller teams that are just starting up or, or existing organizations that want to go into a different direction, want to try out a new business line or a new concept that they’ve never been able to do before because when they think about it, they really have to scale things up, hire more people, invest a lot of money, right? So now by using AI, you can actually do a lot more with a much smaller team. One of the things that I’ve been talking to both, you know, founders of startups and executives and board members of larger organizations is if you have a core team of maybe maximum 10 people, 10 people who are doing the office-based work, let’s say, then utilizing AI, you will actually be able to scale up things a lot more. So things like legal, finance, operations, if you use AI smartly, and I already do this on a day to day basis with my team and I see lots more organizations doing this, but you can actually reduce the number of people that you need to set this up. So maybe a quick, quick example, let’s say that you wanted to set up a logistics company, right? And you want to compete with the big logistics companies that are already out there today. But you want to keep your cost base low and you want to keep things simple. So now instead of hiring a lot of people to do your operational planning to start with, instead of hiring a separate legal team to do all the contract negotiations, what if you started using AI to, to take care of a lot of that jobs, you still need a human in the loop, right? Like you still need a human to direct what the AI is doing. But you know, this is where people are currently being able to kind of scale much quicker without the normal cost that would be associated with that. And people sometimes think that, oh, this is future, this is like AI agents, we’re not ready for the jet. But that’s not true. Like the tools are already there. It’s just making sure that you know how to do them.
0:17:55 Ben Wright: Yeah, right. Okay, so that if we tie both of those together and probably my key takeaways from today is number one, the AI tech now. And you’ve certainly got to go and find these tools, right? That’s part of the adoption piece. But The AI tools that are available now are allowing small businesses to offer a broader scope of service to larger companies. So the time curve to scale is reducing by the ability to bring on low cost. It’s almost fractional labor that has a very high level of competency but doesn’t break the budget of a lean startup. Really, really like that. Right. So the barriers to entry for businesses are going to drop.
0:18:36 Erik van Eekelen: Not just that, I think it also helps. Like if you’re already an established business in a market and you’ve been wondering about, okay, how do I strategize for a future where I’ve got competition that works with AI. Right. So how do you prepare for that? Like you can do this for something very similar. You can set up a small team that is working with AI and they have a very different job than the rest of the companies. Like they are almost like an internal startup that you want to achieve and see how far they can get with just using AI and not by scaling up massively with people and other costs. Right. So I think there’s opportunities there for both like new startups and coming into market, but also for existing companies preparing for like, you know, the new world basically.
0:19:20 Ben Wright: Yeah. Okay, okay, great. So new business startups, the ability to really reduce that back of house cost curve, key takeaway for me. But then the second piece is for the remaining human capital, particularly the customer facing human capital, be it call centers, be it sales teams or phone based whatever it may be. Right. There’s now an opportunity to really rapidly increase their capabilities both at an IQ and an EQ level. Right. We’re now able to train these teams to a far higher level than we were previously. Right. So whilst getting the strategy right, in fact I’d argue getting the strategy, the goals, the gaps becomes even more important now. Right. The implementation of what you’re trying to achieve is far easier and can spread across a far greater level through tools like Icana. Right, Icana. It’s actually the first one I’ve heard that measures, that really properly measures, I’ve heard proper fits the kind of brands that half do it. Right. But properly measures how you say something. Right. So there’s benefits here for your back of house, non customer facing and your front of house, particularly human labour. Right. That’s working with your customers.
So yeah, really nice how they roll together. Thank you Eric for those perspectives. Jemima, anything from you, from key takeaways.
0:20:28 Jemimah Ashleigh: Just how a couple of things I think Eric. I’ve just been absorbed in what’s happening and listening to this Conversation. A few things that really popped out for me was the fact that so much of what I think particularly call centers do is so much of that is just that monitoring requirement, the KPIs I think historically that have been used, I think AI is fundamentally going to shift that. What does the tone sound like? Was it the right conversation? How are we getting along with the people? Not just how many calls are you making? What does that look like? I really liked that. I also really liked this idea that we could go after the bigger fish that it was. We can now go. I think call centers have historically always been thought of as being something that was. You’re probably going to be hitting a little bit lower of like middle business style. Whereas now we can actually go much, much higher, much faster with better results, better KPIs and better ROI, I think. Incredible. Absolutely incredible.
0:21:20 Ben Wright: Excellent. Well, thank you, Eric. I know that you have a lot on your plate growing this business. I know demand’s pretty high at the moment, so yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time today. Eric von Akelen, he’s the MD at Icana AI. Where can people find out more about you or Icana if they want to know more?
0:21:37 Erik van Eekelen: Eric, I think you just said it. Icana AI is the website people can obviously also look me up on LinkedIn. There’s not that many people with my name, Eric van Eekelen, so that makes it easy as well. But yeah, and absolutely, if people are interested in to know more about the products, please feel free to reach out or just talk about AI in general. I’m happy to have that conversation.
0:21:57 Jemimah Ashleigh: Think we’d have to get you back, Eric. I’ve got so many more questions for you.
0:22:00 Erik van Eekelen: And then we can talk about like robot vacuum cleaners and how does going to grow into the world, right? Like what’s that going to mean for us in the future? Our society changed due to robot vacuum cleaners and their products.
0:22:14 Jemimah Ashleigh: The automatic part of that is so incredible to me. So you think I’m kidding, but like, I mean, Eric, let’s do this. Vacuum cleaner day. Let’s go.
0:22:22 Erik van Eekelen: Sure, sounds good.
0:22:23 Ben Wright: I’m going to opt out of that one, but you two have fun. We’ve been your friends in business. Everyone. Thank you for listening. We look forward to seeing you next week. Bye for now.
