Ah, the great outdoors. In Canada, we are blessed with an abundance of wildlife, majestic mountains, pristine lakes, and seemingly endless forests. Since the 1970s, if you were an experienced outdoorsman seeking to explore the authentic, raw, outdoors, then a trip to your local Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) was in order. Customers came to MEC stores to buy the best hiking, rock climbing, and back-woods skiing gear.
Back in 2008, then CEO David Labistour looked at the tea leaves and saw that “the times they were a-changin.’” The granola-powered, anti-consumerist community MEC relied on post-inception was steadily being replaced by a more diverse, urban cohort. As a result, they engineered a shift away from their original mission statement of encouraging “self-propelled wilderness recreation” to one that wanted to “inspire everyone to get off the couch and out the door.” The gambit paid off: For the second year in a row, MEC topped the list of Canadian companies with the best reputations, compiled by market research firm The Reputation Institute.
This is the little-told tale of how MEC put the customer first during the company’s transformation from niche purveyor of mountaineering equipment to hub for outdoor lifestyle enthusiasts. The results speak for themselves: In the intervening years, MEC has doubled its brick-and-mortar locations and nearly doubled its membership, which currently tops five million people, during this period of transformation.
Last week, Fonolo hosted an insightful live discussion on the current state of AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP). The expert panel discussed how NLP relates to the general field of AI, the pros and cons of different approaches to NLP, and more. To save you some time, we’ve extracted video snippets showcasing highlights from the discussion.
Back in 2009, 
Picture it: A young American family booking a flight to a city in another country via Air Canada. Imagine them having to wait for more than 20 minutes before a customer service agent gets on the phone, only to then be transferred to another department.
As Harry Truman famously stated, “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” Wise words. Although this is true, how do customer service leaders strategically read to a) learn how to turn themselves into optimal leaders; and b) transform their teams into the high-performing customer service engines they aspire to be?
With the powerful tool of social media, customers everywhere now have an expansive platform with which to voice their feelings about their customer service experiences. This puts a huge amount of pressure on call center agents to perform. Of course, companies hope that their customers use these social platforms to sing the praises of their brand. But, of course, this is not always the case: An IBM study found that customer service operations are often both pricey and inefficient. Companies spend $1 trillion on 265 billion customer service calls each year and 50% of the complaints were unresolved.
More and more call centers are offering a call-back option as an alternative to putting customers on hold. At Fonolo, we see this trend through the increased demand of our own call-back solution. We also see it in survey results such as 
