Interview
The Gist
- From cost centers to value centers. David Levy explains how we're seeing a transformed contact center that is now a strategic asset driving brand loyalty and customer lifetime value.
- AI as an enabler. This is about leveraging generative AI and customer data strategies to enhance both agent efficiency and customer experience, shifting industry paradigms.
- Omnichannel personalization. The future of BPOs includes personalized, proactive interactions tailored to individual customer journeys.
Once viewed as cost centers focused solely on efficiency, contact centers are now emerging as pivotal value centers that enhance brand loyalty and lifetime customer value.
Is AI helping? You bet.
Businesses are rethinking how contact centers contribute to overall business objectives, leveraging advanced technologies to optimize both agent experiences and customer outcomes.
In this episode of CMSWire TV's Beyond the Call, Dom Nicastro, editor in chief of CMSWire, dives into the ongoing transformation of contact centers and business process outsourcing (BPO) operations with marketing leader David Levy, chief marketing officer of Foundever. The discussion explores how AI tools and customer data strategies are enabling contact centers to deliver personalized interactions, improve operational efficiency and strengthen customer relationships.
We address the challenges of workforce turnover to creating agent workflows and driving actionable insights for CX leaders navigating the future of customer service.
Episode Transcript
Editor's note: This transcription was edited for clarity and brevity.
Introduction and Setting the Stage
Dom Nicastro: Hello everybody, Dom Nicastro here, editor in chief of CMSWire, for our latest round of Beyond the Call. And today we are joined by CMO of the U.S. market at Foundever, David Levy. David, what's going on my friend? Good to see you too. And we're gonna dive into the world of contact centers, BPOs, where those meet, and maybe a little AI, I think. I mean, what are you, you ever heard of that? You up for that?
David Levy: How you doing, Dom? Good to see you. I've heard AI mentioned a couple times this past year or two.
Dom Nicastro: We really want to get at, Dave, today, how these contact centers, BPOs, are moving towards value centers, more than cost centers. Because I've said it over and over again on these shows, if you're following these shows, that I think the custom support team, the contact centers, are more important than the CEO. Now, no offense to your CEO, Dave, whoever that is, but I'm telling you, it's true.
David Levy: Well, as the CEO of a contact center company, he's actually in a special position.
David Levy’s Career Journey
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, that's right. So he's important kind of too. So, alright, so let's get into a little bit about you. Firstly, who are you? What landed you in this role? You know, some of your past professional roles. I'd love to hear about those too and kind of how you landed in this seat.
David Levy: Yeah, I pretty much grew up in and out of ad agencies, which over the years have progressively become more digital. So very much a generalist in the sense of having been with full-service agencies back when there was still a lot of broadcast and radio and then the evolution of websites and content management systems and ecommerce. Over the years, I've touched them all. I've been in a few marketing technology startups, even before AI was AI and we called it machine learning.
David: And then worked for Sykes, which was a BPO that was acquired by Sitel Group and eventually became Foundever. And there was a digital agency as part of Sykes that they were integrating with sort of a full customer journey where there was customer acquisition all the way through support and retention. And then I just ended up with the parent company and the global marketing team. And then when we went into Sitel and Foundever, I found myself leading the marketing for the US market and really moving into full funnel brand-to-demand lead generation marketing.
The Evolution of Foundever
Dom Nicastro: Yeah. And tell us about Foundever. What's the sweet spot for you guys? What are your customers asking of you and kind of how has the company evolved over the last few years?
David Levy: Yeah, because of the acquisition, there really is a lot of scale. We're one of the top three BPOs just in terms of sheer size, global scale, and reach, with lots of well-known brands. Customer support, whether it's a hybrid model where we're part of or an extension of the captive teams, the in-house teams, or truly part of a full outsource strategy—and everything sort of in between.
David Levy: I think we've always been very, very good at the customer support and some of the ancillary BPO horizontals like tech support, back-office work, sales, and retention. But as we start to progress more with CX technology as a whole, we're starting to change our focus to be more of an integrated solutions provider. Meaning, it's not just the labor anymore. It's really bringing the tools and the expertise with the tools, and even embedding some of those tools into our own workflows so that our clients are getting the benefit of those technologies without necessarily having to push them or figure out how to extend them across their entire ecosystem of multiple BPOs or their own centers.
David Levy: So I think, you know, just working on our own workflows and aiming towards the right outcomes is really driving a lot of that technology adoption. And then we'd start learning about that and we can start to become a little bit more of a consulting partner for our clients and help lead them in their transformation with their CX technology. So there's a lot going on with our clients trying to figure out where to invest, in what order do you invest, where are you gonna get the impact?
Shifting From Cost Centers to Value Centers
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, well is there like a number one problem that these CX leaders, these customer support leaders, these contact centers are coming to you guys and asking? Like, is there a significant common challenge across all these sort of use cases?
David Levy: Well, I think, you know, the elephant in the room is that it's always really about cost and efficiency. You know, BPOs came up in the world as a means of driving those efficiencies and driving those costs down and essentially doing more with less. That is still sort of the underlying theme of all of our client relationships. But the more mature ones, in terms of understanding that value that happens in the contact center, understanding that the promise of CX is in that dialogue and not necessarily in the one-way communication from a marketing standpoint, are starting to drive deeper conversations.
David Levy: They're asking, "How do we work towards outcomes like lifetime value and brand loyalty through the contact center?" And that's where, of course, we would like to go as well. The technology we're seeing and the data strategies behind the technology are ultimately what enable that. And that's how we're going to get from cost center to value center. It's in those enabling technologies. And that's really just starting.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah. And you sit at a great vantage point, Dave, because you're a marketing guy. You're a marketing leader, and you're in a CX company, right? So you know the dynamic of moving these contact centers into value centers and leveraging data for marketing output.
Related Article: 6 Contact Center Trends to Watch
Customer Support Is No Longer Only 'Failure Management'
Dom Nicastro: And just bringing them more to the forefront of what the company's business objectives are rather than just handling calls. So the old-school thing is like, yeah, 1-800-Customer-Support, how you doing? We'll fix it. Goodbye. And it's over. How has that evolved? How has that changed making these cost centers become value centers?
David Levy: Well, I mean, think what you're referring to is very much how customer service and customer support has been viewed, which is essentially failure management. Those calls are not a natural occurrence. Something has to happen. Something has to be wrong. Somebody needs some kind of help. And so I think there's always going to be an element of being there to help the customer with something that they need help with and to get them essentially off the phone as much as possible and give back their own time to do what's important to them.
What's interesting is though, if you run it out to its logical extreme and you start putting in all of these technologies and self-service, over time, our clients are having—if their goal is call deflection—ultimately the number of contacts they have with their customers over the course of a year is driven down to the point where there are fewer and fewer of those moments that matter with customers.
And those moments they do have start to matter even more because it's the only time that they can really enforce some of that brand loyalty. And really, you know, it's not necessarily about the cross-sell or upsell as much as it is about the lifetime value and the relationship that a customer has with that brand. And so the conversation around call deflection and efficiencies and costs, you know, is a dangerous one if driven to its logical extreme, because at some point, you stop having the interaction with your customer, you risk being commoditized, you risk losing that relationship.
And I think that's where a lot of this AI and technology comes in, which is starting to understand in a very personal and surgical way, which customers need human interaction and when, by really understanding their customer journey with you over time. For instance, if I'm a brand and I'm talking to someone, or if I haven't talked to them in a year or two, and they're doing everything on the mobile app and self-service, being able to have a data strategy that would tell me that in real time and route them to a human being to have a more meaningful interaction, it might be time to do that. It might be time to make a moment that matters as opposed to letting the system guide them through that system.
The Contact Center as a Marketing Goldmine
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, 100 percent. All these insights and data points coming into the contact center, to me, they're like a goldmine of marketing data. You're front and center in front of your customers. When else do you get that except for when they interact with you on your website, inbound stuff, emails, that kind of thing, and that kind of data—GA4, whatever. But this is live conversations. This is customers opening up. It's like therapy, right? You have everything in front of you.
As a marketing leader yourself, should the marketing leader work super closely with the VP of Contact Center to get some insights and have marketing campaigns come from this stuff? Do you think?
David Levy: Yeah, you bring up a really good point. I don't think that a lot of CMOs truly understand the value that's coming into and out of the contact center. And I don't think it's been until recently where we've been able to really mine that data at scale. I don't think the CMO has been able to access those insights.
I understand from the CMO's point of view that that data hasn't, that those insights haven't been accessible yet. I do think that over the next couple of years, the CMOs that don't start working with contact center leaders are going to miss out on a huge opportunity to give far more meaning and depth and really to operationalize their customer experience programs.
Because I think what generative AI is bringing to the table is the ability to ingest large amounts of behavioral data and real-time data to augment the first-party data that they already have in their own CRM or CDP and tech stack, and be able to actually sift through that in a very surgical way so that they can understand not just the patterns that evolve from people like David, but David himself—what David's journey has been, where David needs to go, and what that predictive side, what that next best action for David is actually going to be.
Instead of operating at a persona level, they're actually at the personal, real person level. And without generative AI, this really hasn't been possible. I mean, I think CMOs have been using NPS scores and surveys. The problem is that the average survey gets like a 3% response rate. When it comes down to QA in the contact center, you're talking about a few calls per agent per month. These are maybe statistically significant, but they aren't giving you the actual data at a personal level that you really need.
Related Article: The Intersections Between Marketing and Customer Experience
Mining Data for Deeper Customer Insights
David Levy: Maybe statistically significant, but not giving you the actual data at a personal level that you would really need, or uncovering the patterns and insights to see what's really going on with your customers and to see if the products are failing for a certain reason. Is there something they need to understand about the customer base that just hasn't surfaced because the patterns are not visible to the human eye?
We're currently working with a client where we're ingesting hundreds of thousands of conversations and putting it into a generative AI system so that we can start to understand what offers really make sense. And so, those kinds of things should be a goldmine for CMOs. It just hasn't been accessible in the past.
Survey Engagement vs. Behavioral Data
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, that's, I mean, to me, that's a huge win with generative AI—taking that massive amount of data that us humans, no way in the world can we do that. And just giving you some trends, some analysis that lets you make the decision on how to react to it with customers and with marketing and with your customer service and support. I agree, I mean, surveys? I think they're almost dead. I mean, even if you get back 3%, what kind of insights are you going to get out of that? Are they telling the truth? Do they just do it real quick so they can win the Starbucks gift card?
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You know, we're having trouble too with survey engagement. It's like, why won't you answer us? We put that in every email we send out. But then I ask myself, when's the last time I filled out a survey? Right, you skip it.
David Levy: Right, yeah, well, it's better to see what somebody does versus maybe what they say. And the kind of data that we have now around how they're interacting with your website, how they're interacting with your content, how they're interacting with your product is probably far more meaningful than how they even think they are.
Generative AI’s Impact: Agent vs. Customer Benefits
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, yeah. So, generative AI—you know, like we're talking about two years-ish at the time of this interview since ChatGPT debuted, and that's, of course, where generative AI hit the mainstream. For dummies like me, it was like, "Ooh, I could use this." So, in the BPO or contact center world, is the win right now with generative AI two years later, is the win internal for the agents? Are they getting the best gains out of it?
Or are customers, like someone like me who calls a contact center that Foundever is running or helping with, getting great benefits from AI? Or is it the agent that's on the other end of the line?
David Levy: Yeah, no, good question. Two sides of the same coin. The agent experience drives the customer experience. But the question is a fair one. And I think the quickest gains, and the ones we're seeing now, the soonest, are really helping with the agents. It's in the background, making them smarter, making them quicker, surfacing up what used to be a broken knowledge base of PDF files and images and all kinds of things that weren't as seamlessly accessible.
Now it's a co-pilot strategy where these things are coming up to the agent in real time, allowing them to provide a much more seamless experience for the customer. So I think the first win is really on the agent side. I think what you're going to see then with AI is the segmentation of going through all of that data, being surgical, and then dynamically serving up the right answer for people in real time.
This could play itself out in a voice conversation but could also play itself out in a self-service chatbot. It's still going to be the customer who probably drives the channel that they prefer, but it's all going to come from a central knowledge base where AI is going to be able to serve up the right answer to the right person at the right time.
Related Article: Can Agentic AI Revolutionize CX and EX?
Cost Implications of AI Implementation
David Levy: That's going to take a little more time, and it's going to take more investment than I think a lot of people think. There's something called AI cost correction—the idea that these things are more costly than you think to power an ecosystem around AI. We have a client who was purchasing a chatbot from another vendor, and the chatbot was a quarter of a million dollars. But the ecosystem and the people and the data strategy around it cost a million dollars a year to operate.
So what they thought was only a quarter-million-dollar investment really turned out to be a $1.25 million investment. And so there's a lot of reality that's starting to come with the promise of AI. It's much like the data labeling for content moderation over the years. There's an entire sub-industry and sub-economy behind all of the data that needs to power these technologies that are still very much driven by humans guiding that AI.
Until we get the superhuman intelligence—the promise of AGI and superhuman intelligence—there is still going to be much more runway than I think people expect to really get to the customer-side value of AI. I think the real gains, to the point of your question, are really in the context and over the agent itself.
Removing Friction Through AI
David Levy: Well, and hopefully it's invisible to a certain extent because they get guided in a way that seems like it's a decision that was made or hard-coded when in fact it is truly happening in real time. And it is being driven by AI in the background. So hopefully, the goal really is there's always going to be effort in the contact center. The goal is to continuously remove friction.
And as we remove more and more friction in the background, these experiences get better and better. You know, we hope that the clients—just like the customers—start having better, less friction-filled experiences.
Lessons from AI Investment
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, yeah. And from that case example you shared with the initial investment for a chatbot, and then it like quadruples when you throw in the integration, monitoring support, the team it takes, the time it takes. I'm guessing that the lesson there for contact center leaders is...
David Levy: Mm-hmm.
Dom Nicastro: ...you know, do your homework if you're implementing a tool like this and really figure out where the wins are and if it's worth it. Because, you know, if you're putting in any system, any contact center system, you would have a team involved and there would be six months of product demos and everything. But then ChatGPT comes in, and it's like, “Use it, throw it in.” So what's the lesson there? Maybe organizations should have some sort of AI task force. Overkill?
David Levy: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And I think that's something that we're essentially setting up internally. And I think that's part of the conversation around how BPO goes from being a cost center to a value center. It’s because by doing this over and over again with so many brands across different industries, you start to really get good at seeing where the pitfalls are.
It’s about putting that roadmap together and explaining what kind of investment, time, and resources it's really going to take to get the promise of AI, the promise of automation, and the promise of analytics. You know, I think we saw this to a lesser degree with RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and Intelligent Automation, where people jumped into automation, bought a bunch of licenses, and tried to automate things. But in reality, they didn’t really understand all the business process mapping and business process re-engineering that had to be done before they could get the full promise of automation.
The same is true with AI when it comes to knowledge base, knowledge management systems, and data strategy to really get the value of AI. There's a lot that will go into it. As consumers, we see how quick and flexible ChatGPT is. But until you're willing to bet your shareholders’ value on it, it seems a lot easier than it really is.
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Redefining Metrics to Prove Value
Dom Nicastro: Yeah. And on this theme of moving from cost centers to value centers in this world, what does the conversation look like between, let’s say, a VP of a contact center and the CFO when they’re trying to convince the CFO that they are a value center? What KPIs, what metrics, how do you even start that conversation in convincing them, you know, “Hey, we need to work with the BPO,” or, “We need to hire more agents”? Where do those conversations start? How can AI enable that? I asked a lot of questions just now within one question, but the floor’s yours.
David Levy: Yeah, what I heard was CFO. And I think it's a tough conversation. I think it’s incumbent upon BPOs and people in this space to truly educate. We talk about thought leadership and content marketing. I think now more than ever, as a marketer, I’ve got to provide that kind of education to my prospects to enable them to have that conversation with the CFO.
I think we’ve got to redefine what some of these contact center metrics are. Average hold time, first call resolution, CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), NPS (Net Promoter Score)—these are all critical metrics for understanding operational efficiency. But when we start talking about outcomes and lifetime value, it’s incumbent upon contact center leaders to change their KPIs and reframe the work they do in terms of real business value and outcomes.
Building Relationships and Driving Outcomes
David Levy: We’re going to have to develop the metrics and the way to capture those metrics to make that business case to the CFO. And there’s going to be a transition period. Frankly, early adopters of this are really going to see the wins. You’re going to have to build the relationship with the CFO and the C-suite, and it’s going to be up to us to show them how we’ve done that work with other clients and where the payoff has been.
I think that’s also where the BPO journey comes in. Your own contact center is doing it for themselves, but we’re doing it for hundreds of different brands. We can bring that experience and bring those stories to our buyers about how they were able to sit down with their CFO and make that business case.
Impressing the CFO with AI
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, yeah. What would impress a CFO the most about AI in a contact center? Like what's the thing that will get that CFO to say, "All right, I believe it a little bit"?
David Levy: Well, I mean, if you're talking about kind of today's traditional CFO, they're still going to be thinking about call deflection. They're still going to be thinking about, you know, how do I reduce my volumes by 30%? They're still going to be thinking about how to drive down that cost, knowing that there's somebody across the table who represents the other side of the customer satisfaction and the NPS score.
They can continue to deflect those calls, continue to drive down costs without upsetting the person on the other side of the table or rocking that particular boat. But again, I think that if deflection is your only goal, you're going to run into a point where you're no longer truly thinking about customer lifetime value and the customer experience. And so I think today's CFO is going to be looking at things a little bit differently than tomorrow's CFO.
It’s going to be up to the CX leaders in the company, again, to provide that education. But we all know that CFOs are very data-driven. The industry itself, the contact center industry, is going to have to develop the data to support how we can drive lifetime value, revenue, customer stickiness, and really show it in the numbers. It's not going to be anecdotal.
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Where AI Gains Will Show in 2025
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, yeah. It's almost like you need a pre-AI chart and a post-AI chart. Like, where are we? What do we do? What's different? What's the biggest win? And, you know, speaking of that, for this year, like 2025, where are we going to see the biggest gains in the BPO space when it comes to AI, when it comes to agent experience? Is there something that you think will pop?
David Levy: I mean, obviously you could ask a hundred people and get a hundred different answers to this one. I think we really believe that the paths are being laid now for the value of AI, but that in 2025, it’s still going to be about how you start planning for value creation. It won't be until 2026 or 2027 where the technology is truly paying off in the way we're thinking about it today.
These things take time. Again, it’s that cost correction around what is it really going to take? What do we have to do to build the knowledge management and the knowledge base that’s going to power all of these channels? It's time, it's investment, and it’s not necessarily going to pay off immediately. There are quick wins, again, like we talked about on the agent side, where they are able to be faster at what they do. They’re able to have that single pane of glass.
They're able to respond with large language models in the background telling them what to say, how to say it, capturing the call, automating the QA in ways that haven't been automated before. There’s a lot of back-end operations efficiencies that are going to come in 2025, but the real customer-facing value, where the C-suite starts to see the promise of AI pay off, is probably going to be more of a 2026 or 2027 story.
Improving Agent Experience to Reduce Turnover
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, and those agents, man, they’re important hires, right? They’re important, just like a customer service chatbot is an important hire. It’s like, “Hey, let’s get this person to answer for us 24/7 anywhere in the world anytime.” Like, it’s got to be the most vetted candidate for a job ever if you were vetting a customer service chatbot. So the question is, with these agents, what’s going to improve their experience and limit turnover? Because we know that’s causing big headaches—and always has—for these VPs of contact centers and CX leaders. The turnover issue and the cost to the company that it leads to. Final question, what’s going to improve agent experience where the turnover rate is better?
David Levy: Yeah, no, you’re right. Turnover, attrition, retention—those are the single biggest drivers of profitability for a contact center. Really, keeping our agents happy and giving them the right work environment reflects directly in the customer experience. So I think the more busy work we can take away from them, the happier they’ll be, the more job satisfaction, the better the agent experience.
Post-call notes that get summarized by a large language model and simply reviewed and submitted, versus trying to juggle taking enough time before the next call—those moments in between, as we reduce the effort for them, will make a big impact on their day-to-day experience. Any tool we can give them to make their lives a little easier is going to help.
Leveraging AI for Coaching and Management
Dom Nicastro: Yeah.
David Levy: And then, as you go up, anything that we can give team managers, supervisors, and coaches in terms of surfacing issues in a QA approach—where they’re not necessarily having to listen to the entire call but are getting voice-to-text transcription—is foundational. The ability for AI to come in has been dependent upon the gains we’ve made in voice-to-text transcription. The ability to mine those transcripts for the learnings that need to be coached makes their life better.
You’re going to see it go up the chain from the agent all the way to contact center leaders, where efficiency improves and there’s less effort required for some of that busy work.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, I think one vendor I went to a conference with mentioned coaches—AI coaches. I like that term. It makes a lot of sense to me because it avoids that whole awkward thing we used to do, like 10 or 15 years ago with agents. “All right, Jimmy, here’s a month’s worth of recordings. Let’s listen in. You were a little aggressive in that.” Now, AI can do that itself and just have a quick output.
David Levy: AI can do it. It can do it quicker, faster, and better, and it can free up the coach to have a more human conversation when it is time to coach. They can operate from the same understanding of where the issues are and really talk about the causes, how to coach up on empathy, active listening, or even the tools themselves, which is, of course, going to be a huge thing.
The Evolving Role of Talent in AI-Driven Contact Centers
Dom Nicastro: Yeah.
David Levy: You know, these tools, yes, they're going to be easy to use and embedded in these systems, but the talent strategy of hiring for people that understand these tools is also going to be important.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't hire someone now if they told me they haven't used AI yet. You know what I mean? Like it could be the best journalist of all time, Pulitzer Prize winner, if they said, "Yeah, I don't use AI." I'd be like, "All right, well, I'm going to hire the guy who does," you know.
David Levy: Well, I do think we're going to see from a talent strategy standpoint, almost a split where the frontline agents may not need to have that AI experience because it's going to be served to them in a really seamless kind of UI. But then there's also going to be a group of people we need to start hiring that do understand AI, can run that ecosystem, and can help us train those models. You're going to almost see this bifurcated talent strategy in BPOs where we can continue to hire frontline agents.
Dom Nicastro: Embedded, yeah.
David Levy: And augment them with, it's essentially giving spell check to a writer. It was a seamless thing to have that word underlined and be able to right-click and change the spelling. The goal is to make it that easy for the frontline agent. But again, there's an entire new ecosystem of people in BPOs that are going to need to work with the AI and enable the AI so that it is seamless for the agent.
Creating Moments That Matter in Customer Experience
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, well, David Levy, this space excites us very much. And I'm just thinking of how passionate we are about it. And I'm just imagining like my 20-year-old son just calling a contact center—he could care less. And everything we put into this, we're so passionate. And then at the end of the day, the customer, they just want a resolution, you know.
David Levy: They just want to get off the phone or they just want to get the answer in the chat. I think the thing that's going to be most important is the ability to segment customers based on their historical data, based on the patterns of people like them. How do we serve that person up the experience that they want before they even know that's how they want it? So that it really does create loyalty between them and the brand.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, yeah.
David Levy: When they compare it to their other customer experiences with other brands and they think to themselves, "That call I had to fix that thing—my alarm system, my IoT device—that went really well." I think where you're going to see the value add is not necessarily in generating direct revenue, although I think cross-sell and upsell are going to be a huge thing, but in the predictive, proactive approach.
For example, you call in because your speaker system is having a certain problem. But the knowledge base tells the agent, "People that have this problem in four weeks generally have this other problem." And we tell them about that and we educate them about it ahead of time. It’s no longer about first-call resolution. It’s about not even getting that next call. That’s a tremendous value add. And really, what it’s going to force BPOs to do is be willing to shrink in the short term as we have fewer contacts and drive some of that volume down.
We have to be willing to shrink in order to grow. And what I mean by that is volumes may come down, but ultimately the relationships with our clients will get deeper and deeper as we figure out how to really drive the entire ecosystem.
Related Article: What Is a Call Center? How They Work
Building Customer Loyalty Through Personalization
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, we like when people and companies remember things. My wife loves when I remember things. I don't always get that right, but when I remember something, she's like, "That's good." And like, the same thing—I was thinking of my son’s case example. He’ll probably call DoorDash customer support and be like, "There was no cheese on my fries." And for AI to collect that conversation...
David Levy: Hahaha!
David Levy: Yeah.
Dom Nicastro: ...and then send him an offer through the marketing department that says, "Hey Matt, next time you order, cheese fries on us." You know what I mean? Like that’s what you’re talking about. That’s the power.
David Levy: Right. Or even just open the bag and see an extra container of cheese and think, "Wow, it’s like they know me."
Dom Nicastro: And put a little note. Yes, put a little note. And that’s what you remember about brands. You don’t remember how the product is amazing. I mean, you might, but you remember how you were treated in those customer service calls. That’s what we all talk about at Thanksgiving and holiday season. We talk about how we were treated, if we’re talking about companies. No one says, "Hey, look at my phone, it’s amazing." They say...
David Levy: Sure.
Dom Nicastro: ..."I called Verizon customer support, you should have heard." You know, that’s what drives brand awareness and brand loyalty.
AI-Powered Customer Loyalty for Every Customer
David Levy: Well, we see it—you said loyalty—and you see it in the loyalty programs. Airlines are really good at tiering their customers. If you spend more money and you achieve a high status, we spend more time with you and we cater to you. Maybe when you call your special number as a gold member, you go directly to an agent. I think what AI is going to be able to do is to size that down to everybody so that whatever the next thing is for anybody, they get that.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah.
David Levy: As opposed to just simply the people that spend the most money. You may not be in the highest tier of spender, but to move you forward in your lifetime value, to increase that loyalty, just giving you that next best action or treating you in a more personalized way—that’s what’s going to truly shift things for CFOs. They’ll see how to provide that to every segment of their customer base, not just the biggest spenders.
Closing Thoughts on Contact Center Transformation
Dom Nicastro: Lots to digest here, David, and we appreciate your insights so much. You're sitting at the intersection of a huge transformation in a huge space. We see the most transformation happening in customer service, support, and AI—not marketing. No offense against your world, but we think it’s contact centers, BPOs, customer service, and support where the biggest transformations are happening right now with AI. So we’re excited to have you talk with us about it on Beyond the Call.
David Levy: Absolutely.
Dom Nicastro: David Levy, CMO of the U.S. market at Foundever, can’t thank you enough for your insights.
David Levy: Thank you, Dom. Great conversation. Anytime.
Dom Nicastro: Yep, have a good one. We’ll talk soon.
David Levy: Thank you.
