Today’s interview is with Craig Crisler, CEO at SupportNinja, a modern provider of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services. Amidst lots of research reporting that despite all the investment in new tech, customer satisfaction is at an all-time low, I talk to Craig about where folks are going wrong with their investments, what’s going on in the BPO space, what shifts are happening, what the future of outsourcing looks like, and what are some of the main challenges ahead.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Within five years, contact center agents will become contact center specialists – Interview with Sam Wilson of 8×8 – and is number 518 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.
Here are the highlights of my chat with Craig:
- Craig is a punk at heart. As a teenager, he played in multiple punk bands and also set up his own record company.
- Support Ninja was started eight years ago and now works with over 240 different clients, has 3,000 FTEs worldwide, and is primarily focused on how do they build and enable their clients with innovative tech-enabled people solutions.
- The clients that are doing well centre and focus on their relationship with their customers, and particularly how and in what ways they are driving the satisfaction of the people who are using their product or software.
- The investments that they are making, whether it be technological or otherwise, are to support that concept.
- The emergence of AI is pushing many to focus on primarily on cost-effectiveness or perceived cost-effectiveness.
- The big talk right now is about productivity. But, productivity is just code for faster and cheaper, in large part.
- All these bad knowledge bases and all these bad scripts. This is the stuff that’s driving bad CX.
- Isn’t it a more effective ticket deflection strategy to ensure that your product is working as you want it to and giving you the feedback you need?
- Why isn’t CX leadership in the top-level leadership meetings?
- There’s a couple of things that are driving growing demand in the outsourcing space right now.
- 1. More and more companies are getting more used to the idea of outsourcing and being able to access a global talent pool. They are also looking to outsourcers to help them achieve efficiencies and access expertise, allowing them to focus on their core products/services.
- 2. Clients are also trying to be capital efficient and are looking for ways to get something of quality without breaking the bank, especially given the macroeconomic climate we’re all in right now.
- I do think we’re going to start to see more and more players entering the outsourcing space. They’re going to be pretty specialized and are likely to hone in on specific industries.
- With that, we’ll start to see consolidation, with larger players gobbling up different folks to try to build up that vertical muscle that they’re looking for.
- A lot of very large companies who traditionally have done really big outsourcing contracts. They’re accelerating their investment in these outsourcing contracts because they need to free up capital to invest in AI initiatives.
- There’s been more job loss due to AI investment than there’s been to AI implementation.
- We did a state of outsourcing survey with CMSWire this year and all of these executives that use outsourcing basically said, “Look, we’re expecting innovation. We’re expecting technology.”
- You’ll see partnerships with outsourcing players emerge.
- Expect to hear clients ask, “What else can you do for us? Are there other types of services you can provide? What innovation are you bringing forward?”
- It’s going to be a strategic partnership, where the outsourcer will be trying to find value and bring it to the relationship.
- This is the major tectonic shift happening in the outsourcing space right now.
- Those that aren’t going to thrive, and you see it happening already, are just racing to the bottom, trying to do a process for as cheap as they can possibly do it, because they think that’s the only way to maximize value for their clients. Those folks are going to struggle.
- This shift will be a challenge not only for the BPO space but also for enterprise procurement departments.
- How do you assess who is a good strategic partner through a standard or traditional RFP process? Clue: It’s all about the questions that they ask.
- Like most things with AI, it’s going to take a while until we can actually use it.
- What excites me about what’s happening with AI though is the rise of this kind of enablement and how it’s going to actually help us amplify our humanity.
- A trend that we’re going to see more and more of is the importance of first-call response/resolution. It will be the most important metric in the future.
- The interesting thing about Gen AI is that it can break down silos of knowledge and democratize information, as much as you can within an organization.
- However, large enterprise organizations often don’t like democratizing information.
- Craig’s best advice: Understand what your customer needs and wants from your product or service and align everything towards serving those needs and wants. Do that first before you do anything else.
- Craig’s Punk brand: Canadian cellphone provider: Tucows (Ting Mobile).
About Craig
Since stepping into the role of CEO at SupportNinja, it was clear to Craig that the BPO industry has so much value and potential. Yet outdated perceptions have kept us stuck, preventing the progress we desire and the support people deserve.
Rewriting the narrative starts with acceptance, reflection, and thoughtful action from executives across industries. With 20+ years of experience in operational excellence and modern people management, Craig’s “be the grease, not the glue” philosophy has proven that the best outcomes happen when we let go of the obsession with efficiency and invest in value-centric relationships instead.
His personal journey in overcoming addiction has transformed how he has showed up as a proud parent, loving husband, and trusted business leader. Now that Craig has implemented an empathy-informed mindset, his perspectives may be considered idealistic or unconventional at times, but Craig can guarantee you they are always rooted in reality, gratitude, and connection.
Find out more about SupportNinja here, say Hi to them on X (Twitter) @supportninja and feel free to connect with Craig on LinkedIn here.