Balancing AI & Empathy: Mario Baddour Speaks About Redefining CX

Transcript:

Alicia Shapiro: Hello, my name is Alicia Shapiro with a AiNews.com, and welcome to another episode of our Driving Tomorrow: Conversations with Industry Leaders where we explore the latest developments and newest innovations in the world of artificial intelligence.

Today I’m excited to be speaking with Mario Baddour, CEO and President of InteLogix, a company with more than six decades of experience delivering customer experience and accounts receivable management solutions worldwide. With operations spanning the United States, Canada, the Philippines, and El Salvador, InteLogix blends human engagement with digital innovations to help organizations across industries deliver lasting value to their customers.

Mario brings decades of leadership in the customer experience and business process outsourcing sector, helping companies outsource critical functions like customer support, billing and compliance so they can scale more efficiently.

With a proven record of scaling global operations, driving digital transformation, and unlocking growth for complex organizations, his focus on pairing innovation with integrity and empathy has shaped InteLogix into a future-ready partner for companies navigating rapid change.

In today’s conversation, we’ll explore how InteLogix is leveraging AI to enhance, but not replace, human empathy in customer experience, where Mario sees the biggest opportunities for innovation, and what the future of customer experience means for businesses and their customers around the world.

So, thank you for joining us today, Mario.

Mario Baddour: Thanks so much Alicia for having me. I’m excited to be here and I really appreciate the introduction. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Alicia Shapiro: I’m glad to have you here, too. And for those who may not be familiar, can you start by introducing InteLogix and the services you provide, and then from there, how the company has evolved from its early days to today’s AI enabled customer experience solutions?

Mario Baddour: InteLogix operates in business process outsourcing. And for those who aren’t aware of what that may be, business process outsourcing is an integral part of the supply chain of any brand where agencies and firms and companies like ours deliver an end-to-end service delivery for the brand.

And by end-to-end, I mean the entire customer service journey or lifecycle. So that starts with the moment a customer starts to interact with a brand all the way to when they leave.

And that’s unique to InteLogix, because not only do we help facilitate an introduction to the brand and answer questions or any inquiries that’s related to the brand, we help support the customer when they are with the brand whether they bought a product or are using the brand services.

And what’s unique about InteLogix is we also are in the account receivables management vertical where we collect on payments and receivables that are past due all the way to delinquent, which is essentially a collection agency and is what I mean by when you’re no longer with the brand.

So truly it is the end-to-end customer lifecycle journey from acquisition to rehabilitation.

Alicia Shapiro: And I bet the early days of your company were much different than what it is today. How has AI helped with those solutions?

Mario Baddour: I think various things have happened here at InteLogix. The brand was called GC Services early on and it’s an organization that was founded in 1957. So, we just celebrated our 67th year and you can imagine that through almost seven decades the brand has gone through multiple transformations and journeys.

It started as a financial institution in the account receivables management and it evolved to collecting for government organizations on behalf of financial institutions. Student loans and regulations has changed significantly in the past 10 years with different regulatory and policies and legislations that impacted the way you collect money and there was a need for GC Services to evolve.

Plus, COVID happened and many of these activities were put on hold. The assets obviously suffered some of the repercussions of that given the fact that the collection business wasn’t as healthy as it used to be during COVID. So, there was this need our investors saw very proactively, whereby they assembled the team to transform the organization and hence the birth of InteLogix.

And by transforming the organization it’s really looking at the asset, at our capabilities, and the potential opportunity to be more than a collection agency and account receivables management. But also we’re in the tolling business as well and customer experience not only in the US but internationally. Hence why you mentioned in your introduction how we’ve gone from being a US delivery focused organization to El Salvador, Philippines, Canada, I think we didn’t mention Egypt. We recently went into Egypt as well and we continue to look at strategic geographies where we can expand our footprints and further.

But yes, so to summarize it really the company evolved so much and the makeup of the company has changed significantly. The industries that we service today through our customer experience arm is very vast and covers healthcare, e-commerce, retail, automotives, hospitality, travel, fintech, telecommunication both wireless and terrestrial etc. So, InteLogix really is a much different company to what it used to be just five years ago.

Alicia Shapiro: Sounds like it. That’s awesome, though.

Mario Baddour: Exactly. And I think you asked me something about digital. I think we’ll delve into that further here in a bit.

But that is truly the definition of our brand. So, when you look at InteLogix, I always love to explain to people what it means because it may sound nice and fun and modern, but truly it was intentional.

Intel is typically attributed to the human brain, to intelligence. Logic is usually the main board on a main PCA or on a computer. It’s the logic board. So that’s digital and technology. And X, it’s really that intersection between humanity and technology, digital across all platforms.

We love our name. It means a lot to us. It’s intentional and it truly represents our vision to be that digitally enabled organization.

Alicia Shapiro: And I know that customer expectations are shifting rapidly especially with AI becoming more mainstream. What new trends are you seeing in what customers want to experience and maybe what are the biggest challenges in balancing technology with human empathy and customer experience?

Mario Baddour: We are embracing AI and automation to its full extent here at InteLogix. We never doubt or question the fact whether AI is going to limit us or AI is going to take jobs away or AI or customer service will be fully automated.

On the contrary, we truly believe that AI is the future for us and AI is all about human augmentation. How do we elevate our capabilities? How do we elevate the human capability at the desktop, at the workstation to deliver a frictionless interaction with the customer?

Look, we may we probably are going to be forced to evolve and transform even further and pivot to something different while remaining the human aspect and factor of it all will remain there. But we’ll probably have less reliance on humans and more reliance on digital.

And perhaps I should give a real example here. The cost of acquisition or the cost to service has become very competitive and you cannot continue to pass on these expenses to clients.

At the end of the day, clients also have a product and a brand to compete with. And take your cell phone bill for example. Your cell phone bill cannot become a thousand-dollar bill just to pay for customer service.

It is incumbent upon us in the partners network in the supply chain to figure out how do we reduce our cost through automation. How do we reduce our cost through automating our tools to be less dependent on humans?

And that way we can invest more in paying our employees a better salary, a living wage, where they could be considered a career that they can hang their hat on without necessarily passing these expenses and these costs on to the client.

And we have to continue to innovate. And you can do that by reducing your expenses and by extracting capital out of the field.

Yes, there will be a day where I think AI will handle the mundane volume traffic, the kind of simple questions.

But there will be the value traffic and the more complex traffic that will require a human to interact with another human across the phone, chat, or whatever channel they may be using.

Alicia Shapiro: I think that is so true because even though like ChatGPT has some sort of personality embedded in it, it really doesn’t pick up on the nuances that humans can and especially with empathy involved and customers have problems and so it does take a human touch with that training to be able to resolve those customer problems. So I think that is correct. I like that example.

Mario Baddour: You know, Alicia, it’s getting there. If you want to delve into it here a little bit, I’ve always talked about the journey of AI digital.

We refer to it as robotics in the beginning whether it’s RPA or RPO and then generative AI surfaced and we started to talk about Gen AI and what it was it was more of an LLM content database large language model that housed all the content or the knowledge that the AI is coded to use as a source to answer our questions.

So, it was more of a prediction model. AI was good to predict to go into the source and answer questions or queries from the source and predict through some regression analysis. It could calculate probability and deliver some predictions.

And then it evolved to decision creation. And with creating content from the previous content, that allowed AI to now make some decisions because now you can create content, you can predict content.

So, you can start making decisions within that limited pool that you have. And then it evolved to being strategic.

Because now you can predict content, create content and now you can put it all together and start predicting possibilities and that’s decision making.

When you start predicting different possibilities and then you can start to evaluate which possibility is better than the other and this is what I’m describing here is truly what we’re talking about agentic which is that where AI is going.

Now one could question could agentic really show empathy? Could agentic study our emotions? And could agentic, based on the emotions that we exhibit, put it all together, think of it as different emotions in the LLM content?

And could AI predict what kind of emotion I should show here? I would go to the extent to say yes, we’ll get there.

But here’s where I’m having difficulties reconciling with. And I think we could all agree on the mere fact that if the customer realizes that even that agentic is not a real human and if the customer is sharing with that AI agent some personal challenges they’re going through if it’s for example reconfiguring a health care plan to meet their new illness or it could be a terminal illness and there’s a lot of emotions involved in this conversation.

The fact that the patient recognizes that this is a digital agent and not a human, no matter how good that digital agent is, it takes away the authenticity from that conversation.

And that’s where I think brands will be very aware not to subject their patients or consumers or the marketplace to this kind of experience. That’s not authentic.

Alicia Shapiro: You want that authenticity especially in those sensitive topics.

Mario Baddour: Yeah. And this is where I go back to say you have got to leverage technology to augment and not to replace the human capabilities.

Alicia Shapiro: And from your perspective, what sets apart organizations that are excelling with AI driven customer experience from those that are maybe struggling to adapt?

Mario Baddour: Great question. I think many are not truly diving in to understand how AI works and AI has become very sophisticated as we know.

The AI source is very critical and hence why the marketplace is truly aware right now. The calculus has shifted from the capability of the AI tool to the ethics of the tool, the morality of the tool, because we just established a few seconds ago that truly no matter how sophisticated the AI tool is it’s pulling from the LLM from that large language model from the content.

And I would like to give an example of a well. If the water is contaminated in the well, no matter how great that well is and no matter how functioning it is, if that water is contaminated, it’s a toxic water.

You could pump it up to the surface and in the most efficient way possible, but it’s still not healthy to drink that water.

The LLM is very similar to that concept. You must have content that’s ethical, content that the fidelity of the information and in that LLM is very critical in the marketplace.

Believe it or not, there are some bad actors out there and there are some tools coded in different parts of the world that don’t have a good source and you can sell that license much cheaper than another software who took the time to analyze and build credible content.

That license will cost you more. Many brands will go in and basically just buy the cheaper license, but they get in trouble after with the ethics of that AI.

I think we’re starting to see some of that on social media. We saw that during the elections, how everybody tried to kind of manipulate the rhetoric. Content is king. We see that every day.

Another point I’d like to make is let’s say you have the right content, the right AI, the ethical AI and all this. Where companies fail is that they start adding AI on top of chaos in the organization.

And by that, I mean you have to have a data warehouse with structured data. Then you can bring automation and lay it on top of the data warehouse to automate workflows and to make life easier for the employees within the company and for customers and clients etc.

But if that data is not structured first the AI can do so much and the AI still has to look at a source that is structured.

And this is where I encourage every company to first go back to basics. Go build a data warehouse that’s well organized, well-structured and then assesses which part of that data would you like to automate?

Alicia Shapiro: Yeah, that’s so important. I think that’s great advice. And can you share an example of where AI has helped in InteLogix enhance customer interactions while preserving or maybe even strengthening the human touch?

Mario Baddour: Yeah, absolutely. In our platform, it’s fully digitalized and it’s automated.

And by that I mean, let’s take a traditional interaction where a representative is talking to a customer. There are so many things to work on. You have multiple screens. You have a knowledge base to refer to so you can answer the question appropriately.

And then on top of all this, you have to annotate the entire conversation and still be present.

You know, the concept of multitasking has been challenged multiple times, right? Is there really such thing as multitasking, right? We lose a lot of attention to details and to details that matter in a conversation when we’re multitasking.

I think we are at a place today where we’ve eliminated all this. We have call annotation that’s fully automated. We have a widget on the screen. We enabled our desktops with a widget on the screen to actually listen to the call, validate in the knowledge base what the answer should be, and provide that answer to our employees right on the screen.

So truly our operator is now focused on being present on truly having that one-on-one conversation. Pay attention to details. The answers are provided to them on the screen. The call is being annotated to them automatically.

And now your entire energy and focus is on building that connection, building that relationship, being present, being effective and efficient, and ending the call in the shortest time possible while making it the most memorable experience possible.

And that is only possible with that automation that I’m talking about that leaves customers with a good experience, a memorable experience. And that leads to repeat customers.

Alicia Shapiro: I like how you’re combining AI with humans. Like we heard from Salesforce, they’re cutting another 45% of their employees because they’re like, “Oh, AI is going to do everything.” And I just think it is so important to balance that human touch with the AI. And I think that’s so smart of what you’re doing.

Mario Baddour: Yeah. Look, I don’t want to comment on Salesforce and their strategy, but I also we may be at a point, and I think all brands have to face the fact that we’re going to be at a point, where we will have to reduce our workforce because we’re automating a lot of the tasks.

But I go back to say we are focused on leveraging technology to augment and not to replace human capabilities. At the end of the day in our business there’s a person always at the other end of every brand interaction.

And what I didn’t say until we get to a point where Alicia, you have a personal assistant that’s an agentic PA and I have an agentic PA and we go tell our PAs to go talk to each other and come back and give us a summary of the conversation and represent us on our behalf.

I think that’s far down the road right now. We don’t have to solve for it.

But I go back to say that AI can handle high volume of routine inquiries. It should free up human operators to focus on complex high value interactions that require empathy and problem-solving skills and emotions.

There is a customer survey, and I continue to see those surveys come in my way that basically found that three quarters of shoppers today and consumers say they would rather speak to a live customer service agent when experiencing a problem.

And nearly half said they don’t trust the information from AI powered chat bots.

Because I think consumers are becoming very knowledgeable and very aware. Most of the things I share today around the fidelity of the content in the LLM is pretty known to consumers.

And if you know that, then you start questioning and you start doubting.

So we’re not there yet.

I’d like to give you a very fascinating example that someone shared with me.

It’s this family that’s trying to plan a vacation and they went into a ChatGPT and said plan this itinerary for seven days for me.

I’d like to go to this particular country. Let’s just say France.

I’d like to visit all museums that are relevant to the Renaissance. And I’d like to visit the history museums. And I’d like to visit museums from World War II.

And I’d like to also be in areas where there are beaches in France so we can just break away a little bit and have some relaxing time.

And I’d like to experience French cuisine. And I’d like to see the different various things.

And I’d like to experience the metro or the subway in Paris and experience all that.

A ChatGPT within seconds pulled a 7-day itinerary that outlines to the infinite detail all that.

And then they said, “You know what, just this is great. We don’t want to miss any of these things. So break down that itinerary for us by the hour. So we have a very detailed plan.”

And sure enough, they got that.

And that was a five-minute planning.

But guess what happened? They went to see where that beach was to see how long it would take them to get to that beach and they couldn’t find that beach on the map.

Alicia Shapiro: Oh no.

Mario Baddour: The museums that were recommended were all booked. So the hotels that they were recommended weren’t available for the days they were there.

So, it’s in a way it’s almost like AI is a dreamer now and we are the executors.

What was supposed to be a five minute itinerary ended up being a four hours, six hours planning for a trip because the human was executing on figuring out a hotel, trying to negotiate perhaps tickets to that museum that was oversold, figuring out a way to get to that beach that’s not showing on the map.

And it goes back to the content and the LLM and the fidelity of that content.

The minute I think we get to a point where we get this itinerary and we say great we love it go make all the bookings for us give me back confirmations and give me back the ticket numbers that becomes very interesting this is where AI is also executing on our behalf not just dreaming on our behalf.

I thought that example was very relevant as to why we’re not there yet, but we could be pretty soon.

Alicia Shapiro: It is it’s exactly right and I’ve even experienced a little bit of that in my news writing because I do use ChatGPT to help me draft the initial article and then I go back through and edit and when I go through my editing process I’m like I could see where ChatGPT was trying to go but there wasn’t any relevant fact about that and so I was like can’t include that ChatGPT we have to take that out and it’s it is it’s close but it’s yeah it’s not quite there yet where it can completely do things on its own without any problems.

Mario Baddour: And look, we shouldn’t be oblivious to the fact that it’s close. And I think brands and companies and businesses like ours; we should skate where the puck is going, stay ahead of it.

Yeah. And solve for it and evolve with it, embrace it. And I think this is our philosophy at InteLogix at the end of the day.

Alicia Shapiro: Intelligence supports clients across all industries like healthcare and retail and financial services and others. In which areas have AI driven the biggest changes in customer experience for you guys today?

Mario Baddour: Again, all areas. I don’t think there’s one. I mean this is why we’re having this conversation and trying to see how you deal with this with this concept that’s touching all facets of life whether it’s at home or at work.

You go home today and the kids are leveraging AI in the classroom and at home to do their homework and our automation in the household is also AI driven and AI enabled.

Same thing at work.

If I look at finance, the fact that you can invoice automatically today, so you no longer have a finance team working on invoicing, that’s definitely impacted by AI.

The fact that you could impact it positively in my opinion. It reduces the error rates, it automates, you can get invoices out on time on day one, you know how powerful that is because now you can get it early to your customers and clients, well then the earlier you can get paid as well.

So, it works. It’s a win-win for both parties.

You look at HR today, if you can have an employee through an automated solution get their FMLA filed right away.

If you want to go get a loan and you need an employment letter, you can get it at the snap of your finger and you can customize it because if you don’t like exactly what the letter says that’s truly not AI that’s digital automation.

But where AI comes into play if you say I’d like you to adjust it to do XYZ and if we have a framework and guidelines to the AI to actually if it’s acceptable what the employee is asking for then go ahead and do it for them then all that adjustment can be done just in time and you get your employment letter and you walk to your bank etc.

So, all that used to take days when you file a request, you go to the HR office you have to talk to someone etc.

Interviews from a talent acquisition standpoint you used to go through various cycles of interviews and humans talking to humans.

You can achieve a lot today by having a contactless hiring platform and interview someone and being able to, and I’m talking about certain jobs not for all jobs right, to gather enough information to know if that individual will be successful and ready to join your organization or not.

Frankly, sometimes it’s even better because it takes the bias out of the interaction and you’re really sticking to the facts and whether this person is capable or not.

So, in operations we talked about how our desktop is automated and digitalized.

And I think AI is touching all facets of the organization and the areas that it hasn’t, yet we should go seek to understand as to why and make sure it happens as soon as possible because this is the only way where we can reduce our cost, remain relevant, remain competitive.

The supply chain cannot continue to pass on that cost to clients and clients can no longer realistically pass on these costs to consumers.

It has to start at the supply chain level.

Alicia Shapiro: I think that’s smart. And looking ahead, how do you expect AI to shape customer experience and what steps does InteLogix take to prepare for that future?

Mario Baddour: I think companies should never abandon their AI ambitions. We establish that AI is there.

I think a meaningful AI strategy leveraged to streamline processes and empower agents can transform the customer experience and the brand to achieve the objectives that the brand wants to achieve with greater speed and greater reliability.

In our business, that means shorter handle times. It means lower repeat calls, which leads to lowering total cost of ownership and higher first call resolution, which is what customers want.

If you’re calling to solve a problem, you would rather Alicia not call five times to get that solved.

So if there’s a digital automation that augments the human capability at the desktop, allowing the agent or the operator to help you solve that problem the first time you call, not only you’re happier, but the total cost of ownership for that brand to deliver a service is lowered significantly as well.

I think we’re going to continue to see AI shaping the cost in general. We’re going to see AI removing a lot of bias from interactions.

And I think AI will allow brands to compete better.

The level of analytics that we can get out of just in time telemetry as a result of AI will help us be smarter about the products we build and help us be better at improving the customer interaction, the customer experience because we’re no longer relying on some surveys and some invalid sample size to go cure a problem that may not be a problem.

And then we realize later it’s not a problem. So, we change plans, we bring different consultants, and then we’re like, “Oh, oops. We missed it the first time. The target isn’t here. The target is here.”

AI will help us hopefully remove most of these human errors and get us to resolution much faster, which translates to a much more meaningful, memorable customer experience in general.

Alicia Shapiro: That’s great. And for leaders who are just beginning to explore AI and customer experience, what advice would you give them to help ensure that AI is used to amplify and not replace the human intelligence aspect?

Mario Baddour: Look, embrace it. AI is here. This is a way of life. It’s the new way we interact, we live.

I’ll give you an example. I was meeting with a certain state that we partner with, and their department of transportation is partnering with couple car manufacturers to turn a smart chip in the car and make it a wallet basically.

So, you can go through toll roads and your car can interact with a toll plaza or the toll expressway and just pay for whatever mileage you used. You can go through a drive-thru and you don’t have to pull your wallet. Basically the car will pay for your order on the drive-thru.

And it is really a way of life, and we have to embrace it.

And I think my guidance to anybody who’s entering the workforce or anyone who is still trying to figure out how to deal with AI is embrace it. Educate yourself on it.

And AI needs you as much as you need AI.

And by that, I mean you need to understand AI well so you know how to deploy it and how to configure it to maximize the effectiveness of that AI.

And this is where AI needs you.

AI left alone is not going to solve the problems.

AI needs a human to configure it, deploy it, knows how to use it, how to direct it in order to maximize the effectiveness of that effectiveness of that AI.

I truly think of that statement and reflect on it.

I would tell everyone AI needs you as much as you need AI and delve into that and understand how to kind of take control of AI in a way and that’s how you start embracing it.

Alicia Shapiro: I love that. That’s such great advice and I never thought about it that way, but you’re right. AI can’t do anything without us humans yet. So yeah, it needs us just as much as we need it.

Mario Baddour: Absolutely.

Alicia Shapiro: And before we wrap up, I always love to ask when you step away from your work, what are some activities or hobbies that you’re passionate about?

Mario Baddour: I think work consumes us significantly that the biggest challenge is how do you balance time with a family?

How do you become a better leader? But because even by the time you spend time with your family, by the time you spend time in the office and in the market engaging in the marketplace, you cannot it is unrealistic to think that you can continue to be a healthy strong leader if you’re not kind of practicing some self-care and self-care is also me time.

And that time for me, I’m fortunate in a way. I live in Utah. It’s an amazing state. We love nature.

And I think I try to maximize that time by just spending time in the mountains and trying to be present, trying to reflect and to expose myself to things that aren’t necessarily what I’m exposed to at work.

And whether it’s art, whether it’s certain music, whether it’s engaging in the community, spending time with friends, I think these are all healthy to create a healthy mind and a good life balance.

So, I try to spend it doing things that I’m necessarily not exposed to at work and or in my career.

Alicia Shapiro: I love that. I know. I like to spend time in nature as well.

We live right by the ocean here in San Diego. So, I go take a walk along the ocean and just kind of relax for a while and take in the sights and the ocean air.

And it’s just a wonderful way to reset myself and get me back in mindset.

Mario Baddour: Yeah, I think it is. It is. It’s very healthy and it’s good to do things.

I love to talk to individuals, believe it or not, that majored in history or majored in literature, etc., Because I think with everything being automated for us right now, you find that these are the individuals right now that are still capable of critical thinking more than most that are in front of their system coding all day long, because AI is doing all that for you.

And the more we rely on AI, which is a great tool, but the more I think we can also expose ourselves to a lack of critical thinking in a way.

So, it’s always good to balance it and as we embrace AI and as we continue to capitalize on AI capabilities, I think we owe it to ourselves to also go do things and get engaged in things.

And it could be history, it could be art, could be languages, anything that’s not automated.

We can continue to exercise these powers in our brains that allow us to critically analyze something and to critically think.

I think that is important too.

Alicia Shapiro: Well, Mario, thank you for sharing your insights on AI and the human empathy and how it can transform the customer experience.

I know for many organizations keeping up with all the customer expectations in the digital era can feel overwhelming but I think what InteLogix is doing and building shows that there is a way forward and I just appreciate your time in coming in and sharing that.

Mario Baddour: Thanks Alicia. It was great connecting with you and let’s do it again.

Alicia Shapiro: And if anyone would like to learn more about InteLogix you can visit their website InteLogix.com. Keeping you connected to tomorrow today. This is Alicia with AiNews.com.