#112 - Roland Hallebeek, CEO of Scotty Technologies - On how scaling human touch leads to 9+ customer satisfaction scores

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to achieve 9+ satisfaction rating with any of your customers. My guest is Roland Hallebeek, CEO of Scotty Technologies.

Roland has been in communication all his life. He was the vice president of Telecom and Media at Capgemini (2001-2011), headed up various data driven start-up initiatives between 2013 and 2016, led European AI Customer Engagement Management at IPsoft (2017), and ran the Global Digital & Cognitive AI centre at EPAM Systems (2018).

In 2018, he founded both Cognitive Affairs and Scotty Technologies, two companies centered around the same mission to take Customer Contact Automation to the next level by making it simpler, smoother, more scalable, highly predictable from a cost perspective, and most of all – more human.

This triggered me, hence I invited Roland to be a guest on my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the world of Digital Transformation, why many companies focus on solving the wrong problem, and what could be an alternative way to approach it in order to get far better results for both the customer as well as the business. We also explore Roland’s approach to building a remarkable software business.

Here are some of his quotes:

“People are talking about digital transformation, customer journeys, customer experiences. All big words, big projects, and initiatives, but very often not very clearly defined in so what does it do for your customers or how do your customers behave?

We saw many initiatives where people were focusing on chatbots, so automating chats.

What we also saw is that a lot of the voice so people calling was being outsourced to low-cost countries or to overflow parties. So basically, moving away from your core processes in your company.

But if you look at the numbers in Western Europe, you see that less than 5% of all customer contacts is actually chat, and voice is actually way over 50%.

So, way over 50%, you outsource, you give away to other parties to handle it for you, and all those efforts on chats are basically solving less than 5% of the complexity and volume….”

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. Why it’s critical to take a big picture view and challenge yourself whether the problem you solve with your software business is the most valuable problem, and not just an interesting problem.
2. Why very often you get exponentially better results if you aim for a symbiosis of humans and 60-80% automation, rather than plain 100% automation.
3. That remarkable things happen when you start off with a clear vision, hire a team of linchpins – people that can deliver 10x – and then organize around a framework focused on value and defensible differentiation.