This video clip is a snippet from a recent webinar we presented on how Cognitive Load Can Impact Agent Effectiveness. Cognitive Load is the amount of “working memory” people have at any given time to perform a task or learn a new task. Content from this webinar came from two primary resources The Extended Mind and Thinking Fast and Slow
Why did I name my company Verbal Transactions? Think about it. Any time we speak to someone there is a transaction taking place. Asking your child to take the trash out has a value to it. You want to teach them responsibility and you need to get the garbage out of the house.
When speaking to a customer, you’re providing value to the relationship and the customer is expecting something in return – a transaction.
Recently Peter Cardon, the Bennis Chair in Teaching Excellence at the USC Marshall School of Business published an article in Fast Company to explain that with the increased use of AI, employers are placing more value on soft skills than ever before.
He states “72% of frequent AI users reported that oral communication will become more important, while 50% said that written communication will decrease in value as AI becomes better able to write in a convincingly human way.”
With the threats that AI brings into our lives and workplaces, the values of integrity, compassion, empathy etc. will rise higher in value to help protect us against deep fakes and hallucinations.
We’re seeing more and more employers wanting to provide soft-skill training to employees. One reason may be that the younger employee’s ability to harness their soft skills were stunted during COVID-19.
Just recently I was speaking to a manager in a call center who was stunned at how casual and non-professional some of their younger employee’s chat conversations were with customers.
By using a conversation simulator like our ACES software, we can provide a realistic and scalable way for employers to practice relevant co-worker or customer conversations and put into context why they should steer the conversation in one direction or the other.
Extensive Practice Needed to Reach Proficiency
According to Dr. Stephanie Boyer, Professor of Marketing at Bryant University, “It takes our students 15-minute AI-driven role-plays before they have a significant step-change vs. practicing on your customers. Get your teams to practice as much as you can.”
It’s a well-known fact that many call centers are challenged with getting agents up to speed as quickly as possible with a high degree of proficiency. The chart below shows the average time it takes for agents to become proficient. But we want to encourage you to start using simulations – like our ACES simulator
When we work with our customer’s call centers the #1 reason they use us is to get their agents up to speed faster.
Click here to see some examples
Recently I was doing some research on voice technology and came across this company Murf which has a pretty impressive library of text-to-speech voices that sound pretty real. 
Here are some samples I created
Another platform I have used that includes real human faces is Synthesia. I have used their voices for different simulation projects.
During a recent presentation for the Chicago eLearning Showcase, another platform many people use is Well Said Labs. I’ve tried all of these and many of these voices work pretty well but there is something to be said for a real voice. As someone who sings professionally as my side hustle, I would hate to think that someday singers may be replaced by AI voices — but it won’t surprise me if this is already being done in the gaming or Meta world.
It seems that AI (artificial intelligence) is getting more bad press than good these days. But my spin is that the good still outways the bad when it comes to the benefits of using AI-based applications and products.
For example, we are using AI to help accelerate the rate at which you can learn a new skill. I’ve seen this approach to using AI in education only at the K-12 level vs. the enterprise level as we are using it. Most other training companies using AI to curate content to help cross-train employees on skills they need for their job. I would say this is one of the easier ways to apply AI technology.
Here is a list of some other “good” ways AI is being used to learn a new skill
- Using AI to learn how to speak in ASL (American Sign Language)
- Carnegie Learning is using to help teach math in a new way for K-12 students
- ACES (our own platform) for ensuring call center employees can demonstrate the appropriate level of English proficiency
One tail of caution though, we really want to ensure that we try to reduce the amount of bias that inherently may be embedded with these systems. I was recently asked by one of our clients if we could prove our AI did not contain any bias. I applaud them for asking this question as — again, this would suggest some sort of “evil” intent is being used.
We were fortunate to find a third-party study that showed our AI back-end (Microsoft’s NLP engine) scored the lowest word error rate. So as Spider Man’s uncle says “With great power comes great responsibility”
I began my college career as a computer science major. Keep in mind this was a looong time ago when the code
consisted of zeros and ones. After one semester of this, I knew my brain wasn’t cut out for this type of schooling.
Flash forward 30 years, and now a run a successful software company. We are following a trend I see more and more companies following — providing “no-code” software solutions. In a recent article by Ventur Beat, they state that 8-% of software in 2024 will be built with similar no-code tools.
Let me list some of my favorite no-code software tools that I’m using to either support our customers or build other software solutions from.
- WordPress – website
- Amazon Alexa Skills –
- Google Dialogue Flow
- Hipcast for creating RSS feed for podcasting
- Zoho for building dynamic BI reports
Our no-code solution, ACES (Accelerated Cognitive Engagement System), allows our customers to build immersive and highly interactive simulations used primarily for customer service, sales, coaching, and onboarding to reduce the amount of time it takes to learn a new skill.
To see an example of our simulations you can visit this page on our website.
How Simulations Can Ensure Remote Workers Are Job Ready
Well, it’s now August and many of us optimistically thought in March that Covid-19 would be a fading memory. How naive we were. But here we are and every company is trying to figure out what the “long-game” is in regard to changing the way business is done.
Two years ago when I launched Verbal Transactions our small team was able to quickly land some well-known clients who saw the value of using our simulator as a way to augment their existing training programs. One key reason was that it gave them the reassurance that employees would get more “hands-on” practice.
Now with the majority of employees working remotely, tools like ours are even more imperative. Why you ask? Here are the top 5 reasons.
- Simulation training has been proven to produce better results compared to instructor-led, video, or eLearning. By giving users the ability to practice in realistic situations exposes them to a more tactile and true-life experience.
- Due to the fact employees are not sitting in a classroom or placed in a pod to where they can tap someone on the shoulder to answer quick questions, using our built-in “bot” simulations can be built to allow for users to verbally interact with the simulator to feel they have a guide or mentor to help them along the way
- A well-built simulation will allow users to make mistakes with some form of immediate feedback. We all learn from our mistakes. Using simulations to allow you to fail in a safe environment allows you to actually succeed faster.
- Because managers can’t physically observe employees doing their job, using analytics like that built into our ACES software removes any mystery around how well the employee can perform their job. Each behavior you want the simulator to observe can be tied into the scoring and reporting functionality. No need to watch a video or listen to a recording of the user completing this task, the real-time reporting gives you complete transparency to how well they did.
- Most importantly, users appreciate more hands-on practice and feel more confident about how to do their job. Many employees have a variety of anxiety in these uncertain times. Losing their job is one of them. By arming them with tools to ensure you are helping them to learn how to do their job well, ensures, you want them to succeed and to ensure they are well equipped to contribute to helping the company do their best.
