# Meeting summary
The prospect is a cross-functional team from a company operating contact centers, represented by Maya (Contact Center Operations), David (IT and Risk), and Priya (Product for Digital Service). They are evaluating Rhyme’s hyperrealistic conversational AI to address issues with current speech generation vendors, specifically aiming to improve call quality, reduce handle time, and provide a more natural, consistent voice experience across channels. The main outcome was alignment on key pain points, success criteria, and a proposed pilot structure, with a follow-up scoping call scheduled for next week.

## Pain points & concerns
- **Flat, robotic-sounding calls**: Noticeable especially on longer calls, leading to customer impatience, reduced trust, and negative impact on QA metrics. Severity: Moderate; not catastrophic but enough to affect KPIs.
- **Integration complexity**: Current solutions risk becoming "science projects" and are hard to support. Business impact: Delays and increased IT overhead.
- **Inconsistent voice experience across channels**: Jarring tone shifts harm customer journey consistency and brand perception.
- **Increased handle time**: Poor voice quality causes customers to talk over prompts or ask for repeats, adding seconds per call and raising cost to serve.
- **Customer trust erosion**: Robotic voices reduce trust, reflected in lower CSAT and higher escalation/repeat rates.
- **Need for expressiveness and tone range**: Different call types (e.g., claims, denials) require different emotional tones.
- **Implementation speed**: Preference for solutions that can go live in weeks, not months.
- **Brand voice customization**: Need for voices that reflect company-specific tone.
- **Latency**: Technical concern about balancing low latency with high voice quality.

## Success criteria for the new technology
- **Reduced handle time**: Quantitative improvement (e.g., 10%+ reduction).
- **Steady or improved CSAT and QA scores**: No decline in customer satisfaction or quality assurance metrics.
- **Positive agent and customer feedback**: Smoother, more natural conversations.
- **Improved containment/task completion rates**: Fewer repeats or escalations, higher task completion.
- **Reliability**: No negative impact on uptime or technical performance (table stakes).
- **Consistent voice experience**: Across all channels and customer journeys.
- **Cost to serve**: Lower cost per interaction, measured by handle time and support overhead.
- **Expressiveness and brand alignment**: Ability to match tone to use case and reflect brand voice.
- **Measurable pilot outcomes**: Clear, agreed-upon KPIs tracked during a timeboxed pilot.

## Decision process & criteria
- **Pilot sponsorship**: Maya (Contact Center Operations) sponsors; David (IT/Risk) leads technical assessment; Priya (Product) defines use cases and success metrics.
- **Pilot involvement**: Contact center leadership, enterprise architecture, InfoSec, procurement, and executive sponsors.
- **Evaluation**: 4-6 week timeboxed pilot, measured against current performance on agreed KPIs (CSAT, handle time, containment/task completion, reliability).
- **Approval process**: If pilot metrics are positive, internal approvals required from security, procurement, and executive sponsors.
- **Final decision**: Cross-functional, with one executive owner making the ultimate go-live decision, informed by Maya’s recommendation and David’s technical sign-off.
- **Preference for real-world validation**: Not just demos, but measurable improvements in production-like settings.

## Timeline
- **Pilot duration**: 4-6 weeks.
- **Next meeting**: Scoping call scheduled for the same time next week to define pilot success criteria and logistics.
- **Implementation urgency**: Preference for going live in weeks, not months; urgency signaled by desire for fast rollout if pilot is successful.

## Next steps
- [ ] Schedule and conduct scoping call to define pilot success criteria and logistics — Colin Heilbut (Rhyme) & prospect team
- [ ] Prepare pilot plan with clear KPIs (CSAT, handle time, containment, reliability) — Prospect team with Rhyme support
- [ ] Identify and confirm all pilot stakeholders (contact center, IT, InfoSec, procurement, executive sponsor) — Prospect team
- [ ] Provide additional technical details on latency and integration with NICE orchestration — Colin Heilbut (Rhyme)
- [ ] Share benchmarking/user study methodology for voice selection and quality validation — Colin Heilbut (Rhyme)
- [ ] Set up pilot support channels (Slack, phone) — Colin Heilbut (Rhyme)