Introduction to Guest

Mike is the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at Khoros, a digital customer care service with AI-powered workflows and operational analytics. An experienced executive in contact center and CRM, Mike worked for MCI for 14 years leading contact centers and technology and has been helping big brands interact with customers for over 30 years. He was also recruited by Convergys as a President and Officer to create a new technology division and lead key acquisitions. Mike received his MBA from St. Edward’s University.

Coming Up with The Idea

Mike’s journey started in a unique way, in sales and marketing. In 1985, Mike went to work for MCI for 14 years and had an amazing journey. Mike helped grow MCI from a little company to an $8 billion dollar company in revenue on the consumer side. He was in charge of all the call centers and call center technologies. There were 26,000 people at MCI that were managing talking to customers every single day. Mike learned about AC, DS and IVR, call centers and workflow, and routing (to name a few). However, after 14 years, Mike sold his stock at MCI and started another company, which later was sold to Siebel.

Over time and into 2009/2010, Mike was working with big brands at the beginning stages of social media. These big brands were angry because people would go on Twitter and say things out of context, or statements that were not true. They would go on Facebook and post random things that started to destroy the brand’s marketing. The brands simply didn’t know what to do or how to handle the situation. At this moment in time, a light went off in Mike’s mind. He was going to build a company that had the rigor of a call center for customer communications in social media. In 2011 and in 2012, Mike and his team built a company called Social Dynamics, which was all about asynchronous messaging. All digital channels could come in and the brands could manage their social media platforms. They realized people weren’t trying to be mean, they were actually trying to engage and get brands to listen.

Social Dynamics was soon sold to Lithium and Lithium was later sold to Vista, which all live under the umbrella of Khoros now. Khoros have care, marketing, and community all living and working hand in hand together. Mike and his team began bringing digital customer engagement capabilities, through this new platform, forward in the world. This all wraps up the last 30 years of what Mike has been working on – building software to help brands engage with their customers.

Platform-based Approach

Khoros is an aggregator of all the channels. When they started, Khoros worked primarily with Twitter. Later came Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and WeChat, as well as other messaging channels. While Khoros started out in social media, Khoros had begun primarily focusing on messaging channels, which is still growing rapidly. Khoros is able to think of a person at a brand, able to see every single channel and see the engagements – what people are saying on Twitter, Facebook, etc. – and then Khoros helps brands listen to their customers’ content, understand their needs and who they are. From there, they can prioritize converting these potential customers into clients who buy.

The social platforms that Khoros’ customers use depends on their particular industry. For example, Yelp and Google Maps are used in the restaurant industry. Facebook used to be big. Twitter is big in the US but not other parts of the world. WhatsApp is used worldwide, but not so much in the US. Basically, Khoros tells brands not to worry about social channels, for they have all channels built into their capability. It’s important not to worry about which channels to use, but instead focus on the people’s needs using a particular channel.

Validating The Market

Currently, Khoros is hosting all of the content and tracking all the engagements for brands. Khoros manages all channels, while keeping track of the brand’s history. They build tags around conversations, creating different profiles/personas for people who are interacting. From there, Khoros creates marketing content around that specific persona of that person. So, every time someone engages, the brands become smarter about their audience. This is then leveraged through Artificial Intelligence to make intelligent decisions based on that persona.

Khoros’ AI and technology helps narrow down what a customer really wants. To understand the customer, you must treat them like a person. This can all be done using AI. First tags are created, then labels, and then the labels are used to create content that is now leveraged for marketing, for example.

Working with Artificial Intelligence

Khoros has been spending a lot of time and energy in the AI department. The first thing they’re doing is aggregating all of the content. AI is used for two parts. Part one: what in the world of content can convert this potential customer? You can use Artificial Intelligence to understand what this person is asking for. You can see how they’ve engaged with content you’ve presented to them in the past. AI helps make these particular decisions, what content to present customers moving forward. The second part: using AI and/or bots to get an answer to a question from a potential customer. A lot of time people do not want to talk to someone, they just want an answer to their question (in messenger, for example) or they want to create content and share it. These are all ways in which Khoros uses Artificial Intelligence.

Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Find one thing and do it well. Be great at one thing – really strive to be the best. Stay true to your passions and your dreams. You will achieve your goals, but you have to stay on it. Sometimes the road is long but keep at it. Start small, find a problem and see how you can fix it. If you’re interested in AI, find out a meaningful way to plug it into the ecosystem.

Working with Industry Leaders

Let yourself evolve. Let your customers be in charge and listen. Embrace change management, new technologies, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, cloud-based computing, etc. If you open up to new channels of communication, aside from using 800 numbers, the customers will go to these new channels. The customers understand social media channels. Embrace them.

https://khoros.com/platform/care