Hi, everyone. Welcome. Thank you for joining our webinar, building a solid business case for investing in AI for customer support. My name is Maggie Bliss, and I'm your host today. I'm super excited to be here with Rosalie Girard, director of business value engineering. So before we get started, there are a couple housekeeping things I'd like to go over. First, everyone is in listen only mode, but we do want you to participate and hear from you today. So please start chatting. Let us know where you're tuning in from. And then if you have any questions during the presentation, please put those in the q and a chat feature, and then we will address the And with that, I will turn it over to Rosalie. Alright. Thank you, Maggie. Hi, everyone. So as Maggie mentioned, Rosalie Girard, I lead their business value practice here at Coveo. So what what that does is, it basically my team works with our future customers to help them, predict the value that Coveo will bring to their operations. And, we also work with, our current customers to quantify the value to date, that it has brought in, in their operations. So today the objective of today's webinar is really to to equip you, to help you. I hope you're gonna leave this webinar with the right tools to go back and and help you build that business case by yourself, when you when you're looking at, convincing internal stakeholders to invest in AI. I'll talk about it a little bit later as well, but this is always something that we can help you with, as well here at Coveo. So we're all digital right now. The after after twenty twenty, I think this is now, this is now the norm. Everybody is digital. Everybody works digitally. Everybody sells digitally, if they were not already, doing it this way. But now we're starting to realize, you know, digital is not enough. We offer digital experiences, but everybody else's does. Right? So we are in the race of offering the most relevant digital experience, and this is usually why our customers are coming to us, for. So what what we sell, like, at Coveo is a relevance platform. So in, high level terms here, what it is, a relevance platform, it's intelligence, search, recommendation, personalization, and all of this integrated wherever your employees, your customer or, your your well, your customer or your employees are. So integrations. So when we think about business casing all of that, right, I'll just start by giving you a couple example of what, our customers have seen in terms of results, but, you know, thirty seven percent reduction in cost to serve, while growing customer base at of, by hundred and twenty four percent at zero, one point five million dollar, in, saving per month in case of flexion at Tableau, thirty eight percent in improvement in case of flexion at Ellucian, and seven percent increase in CSAT due to better self-service at Informatica. Those stats are great. Those stats are impressive, but those stats are not only great for Caviar to see that we are delivering value to to those customers. Those stats are amazing for people that work at Xero, Tableau, Ellucian, and Informatica. They're amazing for their support team to show the value that they have delivered through, yes, the implementation of a software called Coveo. But all of the change management they've done, all of the process changes they've done, all of the work that they have done in the past couple of months, years, that's reflected in those stats right there. And that's why it is so crucial to do business cases before, you start investing in a project or an AI project So you can have baseline that you can report on over time. And that's really why what I'm gonna touch on today, during the webinar. How do you get started? Discovery to understand baseline. So when we think about a business case, right, a business case is basically you you capture baseline and you take projections on those baseline improvement projections. So then you can actually have, an idea of the value you're gonna deliver in the future. That's a business case. I just told you three step. Baseline, projection, and quantification. If anything is important, it's the baseline. If you don't have the resources, the time, or, you know, the the the knowledge in house to do the three of them when you build a business case, at least please do the baseline part of things. Why? It's because you're gonna really be able to measure over time if you have at least capture baseline. And this is the only way that you're gonna be able to go get those improvement metrics to turn around in your organization and say, hey. We have delivered that much value doing, doing this project. Let the data speak for itself. The data is not always readily available. Sometimes the data points that you're gonna need are, you know, you or they're just in your CRM or in Google Analytics if we're talking about a portal. But sometimes they're they're not. Right? So we use different techniques at Coveo. We would do, round tables, interviews. Sometimes we knew we use external research or industry data when when, when we need it. We work with our our future customers to do process mapping, trying to understand their pain points, and in some cases as well, we do some time studies. So when the data doesn't exist or is not readily available, the key lesson learned here is let's go get it. Let's go uncover it. By interview, I mean, this this is new data points. Right? If we're you're doing round table and interviews, this is data that probably doesn't exist right now in your company, but that you're gonna go capture by doing those type of exercises. Time studies, the same thing. At Coveo, we do a lot of these, time studies because sometimes, some data points that we need, for instance, amount percentage of time spent searching by agents. It's really rare that an organization will have baseline on that. So this is something that we address by going to the organization, spending a week, with the agents, shadowing the agents, and and doing some time studies to uncover that new data that the organization did not have access to before. They knew they had a problem. They knew they were spending way too much time and that was inefficient, but they didn't have the number itself. That's why we we do those type of exercises. So I'll give you an example of of, of what we, did recently at a customer, to walk you through that process. So, when we do time studies, so that comes, the way we do it, it comes from the Lean Six Sigma methodology. It's called a Dilo. Dilo, d I l o. It's, it it stands for day in a life of. So what's a bit different there than usual, time studies is basically when we do dialogues with, support agents. We would sit next to the support agent the whole day while they're doing their life or they go above they go about their day in the life of the support agent. And we basically have a tool that tracks every single activity that they do. So we sit next to them. The agent is opening a case. Perfect. The agent is talking to their colleague because they have a question about a technical issue. Okay. The agent is writing notes in the case. Okay. The agent is searching Internet because they couldn't find anything in, Salesforce. Okay. So every single task that the agents are doing are, recorded, and there's a time stamp that comes, next to every single task. We then take those this task study and then we quant we we actually put the all of those tasks in buckets. Was that issue identification? Was that case escalation? Was that resolution research? Was that resolution and training? Was that communication and tracking? And was that documentation and wrap time? We were really focused on then when we do the analysis is the purple, area of my pie chart here, results and research. That's what we're trying to optimize at the end of the day. Right? This particular customer here, what we found there was that their agent was spending thirty one percent of their time searching. That's a almost a third of their day, they're searching. And they're valuable employees. Right? They're valuable knowledge workers that are spending half of their time searching, not creating knowledge, not, you know, addressing customer's issue, searching for it. And that's not uncommon. Right? Our when we do those time studies, I would say, most of the time, we're from twenty to forty percent for the resolution research, side of things. So that's that's really not uncommon. Then when we look at the search time, the thirty one percent search time, so the the third of agents they spend searching, we take a a deep look at this and then we actually analyze. Is that all bad? You know, search is not bad. Not all search needs to be streamlined. There need there is good search, and there is non value add search. So once again, we take this stem from the Lean Six Sigma methodology where everything is whether waste or value add. That's how that's the how the how they see the life. And, basically, we dissect, okay. Well, from all of the time spent searching, so in that case, three hours and a half per day, what's waste and what's not waste? What should we keep and what do do we expect to keep in the typical life of an agent? In that case, you know, half of it almost was tribal knowledge and half of it, was non index content. That's all waste. Why do I call that waste? It's because tribal knowledge, that's basically them, an agent not finding what they're looking for. They would just, you know, Slack or when we were in person, they would walk to their colleague's desk or whatever messaging, software they're using. They would just, you know, ping their colleague and ask, you know, hey, what how would you go about this one? It's not bad because at the end of the day, they're gonna find the information that they need. But it is bad because the information that is shared with them doesn't live with your company anymore. It it's not staying with with you guys. So if that answer was answered by a colleague, you know, just at the, at the lunch table in your Seattle office, well, your agent that's coming across a similar issue in Japan tomorrow won't have access to this answer because it doesn't exist anywhere. It it's really just tribal knowledge. So this is why what we call waste. Non index content, but that would be all of the time spent looking for content that's not indexed in this one single window to all content that we call Caveo. So those studies are made prior to the implementation of Coveo. So we consider, well, what is your go to for search? Usually, it's Salesforce because it's indexing already Salesforce knowledge or or or Zendesk or ServiceNow, whatever the the agents are using at that time. But then we look at where else are these agents spending time. Are they well, did they not cannot find in in Salesforce? They're going to Jira. They're going to Confluence. They're going online. They're going to different forums to find information. All of this time spent searching other tools than their main tool to find one single asset that they're actually looking for is also waste. So that's non index content waste. So for this specific client, and I wanted to show you that here because this is how Coveo would address that. Right? We're saying they don't they're not searching in their one single window where they should be looking for information and and have it at their fingertips. When they would have Coveo, you can see on the right side of things, Coveo comes right in the, in Salesforce itself as an inside panel. And they would ask they're they're working on their case results with updates on the right side of the screen. So then they would basically just have to click on the most relevant result, result there, or they would use the search bar at the top, to search stuff directly in Salesforce. So we're actually meeting them where they live in that in that specific, integration example. So that specific customer, they knew now that thirty percent of their time was, was spent searching that half of it could be or a little bit more than half of it could be could be optimized or literally just, you know, removed from from from their day so they can repurpose that time on, value added stuff. But what did that customer really need? So because we were doing a business case at this specific customer, we had all of the numbers in front of us to take the best decision. Right? We they were looking at two use cases. They were looking at the optimizing the agents' work, so making sure that they have the agents have access to the most relevant information to help their customers. But they were also looking at the other use case that was, the the support portal. So, we we we because we're doing a business case, we're able to see the data, have the data talk to us. Yes. There was a lot of waste on the agent side of things. Yes. There was a lot of opportunity for improvement. However, their agents were based in in a a high value center, and that was new. So they just invested in that project, and the cost per agent per hour was so low that even if we save them, you know, fifteen percent of their work day and we could help them repurpose that, if we made the math, it just didn't make lots of sense to invest for them at that point. So this is straight up what we told them. I mean, we sell this, but we told them probably not the best move short term for you guys. However, you should actually have your support portal deflect more cases so you actually end up sending way less cases to this high value center that you have, and you're charged way less by, the vendor in the high value center that is that is running this call center. And by having access to all of this methodology, but also the data, we were able to make the business case that, hey, this made way more sense for them short term. And as their the complexity of their cases on their side is, you know, moving up and up and, they need more and more support, then this, this this image on the screen that you see would actually balance balance it out, and we would probably be, would be a good next step for them to invest in optimizing the agent work because they would be spending way more time on cases and be charged way more for case resolution. So this is a type of decision that only data can help us make. Other than that, it's unclear. Right? So when I say, putting Coveo on their support portal where well, that's basically and making sure that the support experience on the portal is relevant for their customers. So they don't have to create a case and contact any support engineer. So this is kind of a an an example of what we would do here with the speed bit, demo here that we have, but, something around, Caveo having to understand who you are, what you like, why offering some stuff that, like, you may want to learn about, or this community post might interest you to try to create self-service success even before deflection happens. Then, you know, even like a a panel here, you know, where you left off, you might be interested in this because your purchase is Speedbit. You you might be interested in this type of articles because you love running. Probably this could be good for you. So we can serve that knowledge before any, any issue happen. Build a business case framework. So this is where we get into the more, tactical piece of, of the business case building. Define and identify the value drivers. So depending on what you are already measuring in your organization or you wanna start measuring in your organization, you'll be able to choose, what value drivers make the more sense. For us, what we see really often is decreased case escalation time, sorry, decreased case escalation rate, decreased handle time, time to resolution, internal support costs as a whole, agent time to proficiency, even infrastructure cost. And also on the satisfaction side, we see a lot of, of our customers asking us to include everything related to employee satisfaction, but also customer satisfaction, NPS, customer effort scored, etcetera. So first thing first thing first, you wanna identify what are the key value drivers you're gonna in include in that business case. And once you're clear on the the value driver, then the next step is to go capture baseline. How are you measuring that today? How are you doing today on call volume if that's the the value driver that you chose to include that business case? Once that's clear, and as I mentioned, that's the most important piece of the business case, capturing the baseline so you can at least update it over time and and capture improvement. Oops. Sorry. You will want to, then, take some assumptions on a KPI improvement. This is the tricky part when you're trying to build your own business case because you don't have any benchmark. How much can I improve my call volume? Is ten percent too much? Is twenty percent way too much? And this is when you probably wanna reach out to a vendor when you're doing this type of projects to have benchmark Barca understand, well, I wanna be conservative, but I wanna be realistic. And this is where teams like us, we can help you build that case in a realistic way that can and and and make sure that when you report on it in the future, then you were not off or too aggressive, or you didn't hire extra resources because you you you were too aggressive in the business case and now, you know, don't have, work for them. So we wanna make sure that you're accurate enough, and that's why we, we can support you with those assumptions. Like, for instance, we will look at what our customers have done in the past. This example right here, RingCentral, we see twenty percent, reduction in call volume due to self-service. Well, if we assume that you are, an organization that is, you know, as mature as, RingCentral in terms of your PCS program and, all of the other external factor that really impact this type of, of improvement hypothesis, we'll run a little assessment for you. Then we can actually, say with confidence that we think that you're in good shape to accomplish, you know, a similar success as x y z customer in, a certain amount of time. So that's when it really comes handy to deal with a vendor that has a lot of our big bank of customer examples. And once that's done, you have the KPI improvement, then you actually go from there and then you can quantify the annual impact of this, of an improvement of this given value driver. That's just another example. Case is resolved within twenty four hours. We like I said, we have a lot of example of, a lot of, our customers' success. So this is how we help you position and to make sure you're you're building something that's, that's great. Access project visibility. So now we talked about the value. We talked about the productivity gain that you can that you can find with Coveo, the the revenue additions that you can have with Coveo, the enhancement in terms of satisfaction that you can see with Coveo. Now the other side of the business case, right, the, I in ROI, return on investment, you will wanna consider, various type of cost. So the first one, upfront cost. Project management, data migration, any other additional assessments. Then deployment cost, implementation, configuration. Are you dealing with a third party? SI, are you dealing are you, purchasing, the implementation with Kyvyl directly? Any anything else that you will need in place to deploy successfully. Then, ongoing costs, license costs, upgrades. If there's anything outside of Coveo that you would need, to include in that project that would require upgrade costs, then let's make sure you include that in there. Obviously, with COVID, there's none. Maintenance, internal cost, any internal cost. And when I say internal cost here, it's the last one of my list, but that's probably the most important one in there. Because when you build that business case, you as I said, you wanna be as realistic as possible. And all of the improvement hypothesis that you will see there in business cases, they're based on our customers that are successful. And they are successful because they have strong teams supporting those projects. And what does that mean? That means that if they have strong teams supporting the projects, they have internal costs associated to it. They have change management in place. They have good project management. They have good communication plans put together when they deploy Coveo. They have good ownership as well inside of the organization. So this if you see that as an internal cost, if any resource of yours need to be, focused more on, on on this project in the first, you know, six months, that's included in there so that you can have an ROI that is as realistic and close to reality as possible. So then two years from now, three years from now, when you turn around internally and present the results of this project, then you could you know, you have more chances to be on target. So things to build, your ROI model and test assumptions. So you build your ROI model, and then this is where you, you can play with it. Right? So, phase approach. Am I doing a phase approach? Do I roll out all of the use cases I want at the same time? What could the adoption rate be over time? We usually propose a sixty percent run time. So for year one, we usually advise our customers to put sixty percent of the actual, value that's projected projected just to allow for adoption to pick up, and deployment to happen as well. But it all depends on, on on the customer and what they have in terms of, internal resources. Difference between value creation and cost avoidance. So on the right of of the slide here, you have all of the stuff that you want to make sure that in your model, you get right. You get, data points that are aligned with, your company practices to ensure that, your model is as, as close to reality as possible. Update buy in. So when we do business cases, especially if you're a data enthusiast, it tends to be data heavy. Right? Especially if you really went all out and and and fish for new data with time studies, with interviews, and, you're looking at various use cases. It could be data heavy. So just a few tips here to how to present that internally to get buy in. Tell a story. It's, it's just it it will make your case more persuasive, memorable. At the end of the day, your project initiated because you you probably saw a big business problem inside of the organization, and the business case is there to support, the business, the business decision. But what really fuels the business decision is the pain point that you see in your organization. So we always try to to to to say, inspire, explain, and justify. Just the business case is the justify piece. Never forget to first inspire, explain, and then come with the business case to support the decision and and just make it crystal crystal clear. Spell the business need. It need it gives the audience a reason to listen. That's the inspire part. And have both the short and long version ready. Sometimes when we present business cases to executive teams, they, they want an executive version. They just want to make sure that we did the homework and procurement team can go, go and and and and work their magic. However, there are other executives that are really, really interested in the in those data points and that find that super insightful. So let's make sure that we have a long version or a deep dive in the analysis that's also available for, for the for for the audience that's interested into that. Step five. Now we're getting to the last step of the process, update. The last step, but to me, the most important one. And I've been saying it since the beginning of this webinar. The real reason why we wanna do a business case, of course, it is to first bend the baseline and then take assumption and see how big this opportunity really is so we can, you know, prioritize internally. But at the end of the day, the real reason why we really want to do that is because we want to make sure to have something, a success plan in place that we can measure on over time and really understand the impact that you had in your organization when you brought a tool like Coveo. First line here, report on value. Ensure you set up executive business review to update the business case, which we send progress. Always. So when we work with Coveo, that's always gonna be, in place every six months. We're gonna have, an update of the business case, see the impact that we're having, and equipping you, adequately to communicate that value internally and and be able to take action on that data every six months. Adapt to the changing context. Explicitly confirm assumptions and benefit are still accurate and relevant. It's for instance, if you started a business case and you had an organization of three hundred people, and two years later, you're five hundred people. I mean, obviously, the reality has changed. We're probably delivering way more value than you were we were expected first. So let's always look at those tools as evalutive tools, and let's always be, humble about our initial assumptions. Things change, over time. What's important is not that we're keeping the same data throughout the whole all of the years. The important is that, we are using the same business case, the same value drivers, so we can really see progress. And, the last one here, build a value driven roadmap. Set six months milestone to determine what you expect to deliver to the business by that time. Super important. Every single, technical changes that you're that you're hoping to do in the an organization should be supported by business goals. And those business goals should be justifiable by your business case. So this is why it's so important to to embrace that practice. Free support assessment offer. So, this is what we do actually at Coveo. My my team, that's what we do. So, we help, our future customers build those business cases. This is something we do. Twenty I I wanna say twenty four seven. That's not twenty four seven. But, forty hours a week for sure. So our team is available to whether help you build your own business case and support you by providing the right, improvement hypothesis, review, the the the value drivers you had in there, maybe give you some advice on creative ways to go collect some data that you might not know you have access to. But we also run the full assessments for you as well. So this is always something that we're we're happy to do. With our future customers, our our people that are looking into investing in AI. We're also there afterwards, when a business case is done by our team. We're always there afterwards to help you update that business case over time and adapting it to forever changing factors that we all come across. So, Maggie, that's it, for my how to build a business case presentation. Thank you. That was amazing. If you guys have questions, please put them in now. We'll start with a few that we have. What if we don't have access to some data points needed for our business case? What assumptions should we use? Are there industry benchmarks we can use? And where can we find that data? Sure. That's a good question. So, yes. The so my first recommendation would be, if the data is not readily available, is there any way we can go get it? So the the the time study was a good example. The roundtable was another example. If that's not possible, then, yes, obviously, there's a lot of resources out there, industry data that is available. However, my recommendation there would be that your value driver information should come from your own company. Because your value driver, you wanna be able to update them over time and see progress. Right? So if you just take industry data, you won't see any progress over time. That will help you to understand the size of the opportunity if that's really your goal with the business case. But if your goal is to build that as a success plan and live or or have it evolve with you and your organization over time, that's probably not the way to go. Good industry data would be, you know, if I'm looking at at case handle time, for instance, I would wanna have my company case handle time. But if I wanna quantify the impact of a reduction case handle time, I can go for industry data if I wanna look at salary of support engineers in my region of the world, for instance, as long as I keep the same data point over time when I quantify the impact of, of the delta in case handle time. Consistency is key here. Yeah. Absolutely. Perfect. And then how do we include the methodology that you spoke about in these types of assessments? Yeah. So the Lean Six Sigma is methodology. It actually comes from manufacturing. Right? So it, it comes from another world, but it has its its place, in the technology industry more than we think. What I really love about this industry is that the about this methodology is that everything is waste or value added stuff. So when we look at, any more intangible business cases we were trying to build, such as if we're looking at, building a business case for an employee experience, there's not gonna be hard data logged somewhere where you see that is not productive time spent by employees, especially right now that we're all digital, everything is remote. It's gonna be very hard to find that data. However, through surveys, through roundtables, you're gonna be able to identify what's value add in an employee's day and what's non value add. And this is an interesting way to look at, at the world because you're always gonna have waste. Some of the some of the day is optimizable, but some of the the waste is not always optimizable either. So that's a very interesting waste to see productivity employee productivity for sure. Yeah. It's very fascinating. So Jeff asked, how do you engage in the current environment on time usage? I'm not sure I get the question. Jeff, do you mind clarifying in the chat for us? How do you engage in the current environment on the time usage part of a project where support teams being remote? So how do you sit I think he's asked, like, how do you sit with that those employees? How do you do that now that we aren't in an office? Yes. That's a very good question. So, we just, did a couple of, of, of those dialogues that we call them or the time studies, in a a remote environment. So there's two ways to do it. The first one would be to ask, the, the resources that are part of the time studies to record themselves. So just open a Zoom meeting, press record, and spend the entire day just, you know, recording their screen without a voice because we don't really need voice, and send that over so then you can actually run the analysis. That's the first way to do it. Another way would be to just doing in doing it live with with Zoom, and have an analyst just perform the time studies as they're sharing their screen. Couple very good lessons learned that we had, though, recently by doing this during COVID, people are at home, people are in their privacy. Right? People work from their bedroom next to their spouse. We wanna make sure that when this is presented to, your support engineers as, you know, hey. We're gonna be asking you to share your screen all day. We wanna make sure we're very clear on the purpose of this project, which is, you know, to collect some productivity information that will be anonymized. And it's just to to understand kind of a trend amongst, amongst participant. Probably a good idea also to let them know what's coming. Why why are we gonna use that data? Why why do we need it now? And the microphone piece was a big one. We don't need microphone. We don't need to hear what's happening in their house. We don't need what's hap we don't need to know what's happening if they're on the phone with their friends. We don't even need to know what's happening on their second screen. All we are asking them is to, you know, share with our live or in a recording, share their screen where they're working all day and and and and communicate that, with us. And last lesson learned that we had, with this as well is because it is so sensitive to ask them to share their information while they're sitting at home or share their screen without sitting at home, it is important to make sure that the the control group that you're taking for that type of studies, are all change agents. And what I mean by change agents, they're resources that are excited to see change happening in the company. They are, really, they're eager to be part of this. You we have seen a lot of pushback with other resources that were not as as excited to be, to to be part of this type of effort. Yeah. That makes sense. And definitely COVID is making a challenge to do all types of studies nowadays. Yes. Thank you for the question, Jeff. And then last, I know you said it was free, but is there any other prices associated with your guys' service? Or and how do people get in contact with you if they wanna go through this with you? Yeah. So they just contact, Cavill. Any anybody at Cavill also through the website. Contact sales. Sales rep will put them in contact with us. And know that's completely complimentary what we do presale and post sale as well. Even if you only need, you know, support on you building your own business case, that's also something that we can do. So, yeah, that is a day to reach out. Wonderful. Yeah. It's such a great tool and resource that we offer, so I take I encourage everyone to take advantage of it. And with that, I don't think we have any more questions, questions, and so we will let you all get on with your day. But thank you so much for joining. Rosalie, thank you so much for presenting, and I will send this recording out to you. Of course. Thank you. Bye bye.