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Jim Iyoob is President of ETS Labs and Chief Revenue Officer at Etech Global Services, a…
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Jim Iyoob shared thisA short history of most AI initiatives. Month 1: An executive reads an article on a plane. Emails the leadership team at 11pm. Month 2: Task force formed. Named something with the word "Horizon" in it. Month 3: Fourteen vendor demos. All of them show the same three slides. Month 5: Pilot approved. Scope is one intent, one channel, 3 percent of volume. Month 8: Pilot is going great. Nobody can define great. Month 11: The champion gets promoted, leaves, or gets tired. Month 12: The executive reads a new article on a plane. The failure point is almost never the technology. It is that nobody put a number on the thing before they started, and no single person owned that number. Pick the number. Name the owner. Most of the rest is calendar management. #AI #Leadership #ChangeManagement
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Jim Iyoob posted thisA client asked me once for the raw QA data behind a quarterly review. Not the summary. The underlying file. That request is a test, and most operations fail it. Not because anyone is hiding something, but because the summary and the raw data were never going to tell the same story. The summary was built from a sample somebody chose. The raw file shows how small that sample was. I have been on the vendor side of this for a long time. The moment a client works out that your reporting is a construction rather than a readout, you do not lose the account that quarter. You lose the benefit of the doubt, which is worth more and takes a lot longer to rebuild. The fix is not better reporting. It is having nothing left to construct. QEval™ scores 100 percent of interactions, so the client report and the internal report are the same file. There is no second version to prepare, and that is the entire point. If a client asked for your raw coverage data tomorrow, could you send it without scheduling a meeting first? That is the question worth sitting with. #QEval #BPO #ClientExperience
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Jim Iyoob reposted thisJim Iyoob reposted thisI am super proud to see Hoomanely featured in TechCrunch today. I wrote one of the first checks into Hoomanely. Looking back, it was not just an opportunity to get in early. It was an opportunity to invest in a company capable of creating a double bottom-line impact. Of course, investing is about generating exceptional returns. But some companies can create enormous value while fundamentally improving the lives they touch. Hoomanely is trying to give animals a voice when they cannot tell us what is wrong. Animals are remarkably good at hiding pain. By the time a problem becomes visible, it may have been developing for weeks. Hoomanely is building the technology to continuously understand changes in how an animal eats, drinks and behaves, so pet parents and veterinarians can identify potential problems earlier. What begins with dogs and cats can eventually extend to horses, cattle and many other animals. It could improve their longevity and completely transform how we approach animal healthcare. This is a space very close to my heart, and Supriya is also a very dear friend. Even when she was starting out, her ambition was never limited to building a smart feeding bowl. She wanted to build the data infrastructure that could make animal health continuously readable. Seeing that vision recognized by TechCrunch feels surreal. Congratulations to Supriya and the entire Hoomanely team. I feel incredibly fortunate to have been part of the journey from the beginning. I am sharing the TechCrunch story in the comments.
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Jim Iyoob shared thisAn AI vendor tried to scam us a few years ago, and that's a cautionary tale I'd like to share with everyone evaluating AI today. We were running a champion challenger evaluation for a speech analytics platform, and they asked us for a sample of our calls to analyze. I decided to have some fun in the process, and really test if they were legit. So, I gave them around 1000 calls of agents we were about to fire. I had listened to a bunch of these calls myself, they had missed disclosures, dead silence and almost all the textbook failure points you can think of in the CX world. This vendor came back beaming and said that their platform reviewed our calls and gave a 96% CSAT. I asked them to show me how that score was calculated. They gave me the usual answer - secret sauce, proprietary, trust the system etc. They never heard from us after that. This is the challenge in AI world today, the vendors are taking take home assignments, writing the exam and grading themselves. And if you are an exec who wants to feel good about himself, you'd take their 96% CSAT and wear it as a badge of honour. I still run this test on everyone who wants my business, and I'd tell any operator to do the same. Pull the calls you already know are bad. Your performance improvement folder is sitting right there. Send those before you send anything else, and see what the report says. If it comes back telling you those agents were excellent, you just saved yourself a seven figure contract for the price of a data export.
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Jim Iyoob posted thisA team quality average of 91 can be twelve agents at 94 and one agent at 61. The average is fine. The average is also the reason nobody looked. Every operation I have been brought in to fix had a distribution problem, not an average problem. The dashboard number was acceptable. The variance underneath it was not, and variance is what the customer actually experiences. QEval™ scores every interaction individually, so the outlier shows up instead of getting absorbed. Pull the distribution behind your team average this week. Not the average. The spread. #QEval #ContactCenter #CX
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Jim Iyoob shared this30 years ago, I told Matt that I want his job! That was my 2nd day as a call center agent, and he pulled me into his office asking what I want to do in my career, and I looked around his big office and said, "I want your job." Instead of laughing at me, he decided to mentor me. That was more than 30 years ago. I have technically had two jobs since, both working for him, across two companies. He is now the CEO. I never did take his job, which is one of the career failures I am comfortable admitting publicly. When I tell this story, the takeaway is often 'be bold' and 'think big,' but that's my side of the story. The real lesson is on Matt's side. He was a director who walked the floor and met every employee, including the temps. He asked a new agent a real question and listened to the cocky answer. And he spent thirty years turning that answer into a career. That conversation cost him ten minutes. It set the direction of my entire life. And there is no line on any leadership scorecard for it. Nothing in his quarterly review measured whether he walked the floor that day or asked anybody what they wanted. Which means it only happens if a leader decides on their own that it's going to happen. Most leaders are too busy for it now. I get it, I've been that busy. But somebody on your team is waiting for their version of those ten minutes, and they are never going to ask you for it. The ambitious ones almost never do. They assume you're too senior, too booked, too far from their chair to care what they want. Ask one of them this week what they actually want. Then let them finish the answer without correcting it.
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Jim Iyoob shared thisLisa Strohman, J.D., PhD Lisa shared this and it deserves more than a scroll past. Most of my work sits on the analytics side of conversations. At Etech and ETS Labs we build systems that review millions of customer interactions and surface the small fraction that carry real risk. The lesson from that work applies well beyond contact centers. Scale is no longer the hard part. Deciding what to look for, and who acts when something surfaces, is the hard part. Online child exploitation is the same shape of problem with far higher stakes. The volume is beyond what any human review team can cover. Detection models can narrow the field to something a person can actually work. What models cannot do is care. They cannot testify, sit with a family, or push a platform into changing a policy it would rather leave alone. That is what Lynn Shaw and Lynn's Warriors do. If you build detection, moderation, or trust and safety technology, this is the highest use of skills you already have. The technology side is ready. The advocates are ready. What is missing is both groups in the same room. Watching closely to see what comes out of New York. #ChildSafety #OnlineSafety #TrustAndSafety #LynnsWarriors #ProtectOurChildren #AIJim Iyoob shared thisThere are people you meet in this work who remind you why you started fighting in the first place. Lynn Shaw is one of those people. What Lynn has built through Lynn’s Warriors is extraordinary—not simply because of the issues she takes on, but because of the tenacity with which she refuses to let children become statistics. After spending time with Lynn and talking more deeply about this work, what struck me most wasn't her résumé, her reach, or even her ability to take on some incredibly powerful interests. It was her heart. In the most difficult space, her strength and love for the children was obvious. She is one of the most authentically beautiful souls I have encountered in this space. She cares deeply, she shows up relentlessly, and she has a tenacity that is very difficult to replicate. Child exploitation, trafficking, online predation and the harms being created in our children's digital lives are enormous problems. They require people willing to keep pushing when it would be much easier to look away. Lynn doesn't look away. I left our conversation even more convinced that those of us working from different corners of child protection need to find ways to bring those efforts together. And I have a feeling there may be something very exciting ahead for us in New York. 💙 Stay tuned. Warriors may... actually, WILL be joining forces. #LynnsWarriors #ProtectOurChildren #ChildSafety #OnlineSafety #HumanTrafficking #DigitalSafety #ChildAdvocacy #NewYork https://lnkd.in/grrcpWRyDr. Lisa Strohman Sounds the Alarm: The Youth Mental Health Crisis & How We Protect Our KidsDr. Lisa Strohman Sounds the Alarm: The Youth Mental Health Crisis & How We Protect Our Kids
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Jim Iyoob shared thisYour AI agent needs a manager. Not a data scientist. A manager. Somebody who reviews its performance weekly, coaches it when it drifts, knows its top five failure modes by name, and can tell you what it costs per resolution. We would never put 200 human agents on the floor with no supervisor and check back in a year. We do exactly that with models and then act surprised. Same job. Different employee. #AI #Operations #ContactCenter
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Jim Iyoob shared thisYou cannot manage what you cannot see, and most companies deploying AI right now are flying blind. Ask a contact center leader how their bot is performing and you will usually get containment rate. That is it. One number. Nobody can tell you what the bot said when it failed, which intents it is guessing at, or how many customers it handed to an agent already angry. We ran the numbers on a client last quarter. Reported containment was 42 percent. When we listened to what happened after the transfer, real resolution was closer to 26 percent. The gap was customers who got a confident, wrong answer and called back within 48 hours. The bot scored a win. The customer experience was a loss. Nobody caught it for seven months. Managing AI takes the same discipline you already apply to human performance: Define what good looks like before you deploy, not after. Sample the failures, not the successes. Score every interaction, not 2 percent of them. Give the model a named owner with a scorecard, the same way you would a supervisor. An unmanaged model is not an asset. It is a liability that gets more confident every month. #AI #QualityAssurance #CX #ContactCenter
Jim Iyoob commented on a post
1h
Congratulations! 🎉
Jim Iyoob replied to a comment
1d
Nissim Yves Ohayon yes sir. Agree 100% the demo is clean for sure - I have seen so many -
Jim Iyoob replied to a comment
3d
Simon Black you are welcome anytime - hope to see you on the circuit this year!
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Jim Iyoob liked thisJim Iyoob liked thisI am super proud to see Hoomanely featured in TechCrunch today. I wrote one of the first checks into Hoomanely. Looking back, it was not just an opportunity to get in early. It was an opportunity to invest in a company capable of creating a double bottom-line impact. Of course, investing is about generating exceptional returns. But some companies can create enormous value while fundamentally improving the lives they touch. Hoomanely is trying to give animals a voice when they cannot tell us what is wrong. Animals are remarkably good at hiding pain. By the time a problem becomes visible, it may have been developing for weeks. Hoomanely is building the technology to continuously understand changes in how an animal eats, drinks and behaves, so pet parents and veterinarians can identify potential problems earlier. What begins with dogs and cats can eventually extend to horses, cattle and many other animals. It could improve their longevity and completely transform how we approach animal healthcare. This is a space very close to my heart, and Supriya is also a very dear friend. Even when she was starting out, her ambition was never limited to building a smart feeding bowl. She wanted to build the data infrastructure that could make animal health continuously readable. Seeing that vision recognized by TechCrunch feels surreal. Congratulations to Supriya and the entire Hoomanely team. I feel incredibly fortunate to have been part of the journey from the beginning. I am sharing the TechCrunch story in the comments.
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Jim Iyoob liked thisJim Iyoob liked thisBig day in Dallas! Sanas took home the Excellence in AI-Driven CX Transformation Award at the GWFM Americas WFM & CX Summit 2026. Our Co-Founder & CTO Shawn Zhang took the keynote stage with "Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges: How AI Unlocks CX Superpowers" — a look at how real-time speech AI is reshaping the contact center experience. Proud of this crew who made the trip: Devon Murray Drew Northcutt Veronica V. Brady Sebok Tiffany O'Malley. And thank you Dr. Shiva and the GWFM team for having us. #SoundslikeSanas #SpeechAI #CX #WFM
Experience & Education
Volunteer Experience
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Advisory Board Member
The CX Lead
The CX Lead is a professional community and online publication providing resources and expertise for CX leaders in technology.
As a member of the CX Lead Advisory Board, I collaborate with other CX thought leaders to shape the conversation around emerging trends and help CX professionals excel in their careers. I do this by providing mentorship, creating educational content, and sharing my knowledge and insights with the community. -
Judge
The Stevie Awards
Judge of the 2020 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service
Category: Customer Service/Contact Center Team Awards -
Judge
The Stevie Awards
Judge of the 2019 Stevie Awards for Sales and Customer Service
Category: Customer Service/Contact Center Individual & Business Development -
Advisory Board Member
Customer Contact Week
- Present 8 years 9 months
Advisory Board Member for Customer Contact Week, the world’s largest customer contact event series. As an advisory board member, I help advise and support the growth of the events by contributing my experience and expertise in the customer contact industry.
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English
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IQPC
Advisory Board Member
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PACE
Past President - South Central Chapter
- Present
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