Andy Lee had no idea that he’d end up in the “people” business.

He began his career in the

software business, creating one of the first cloud-based customer relationship management
(CRM) applications. The Internet really took off in the 1990s, but was still mainly consumer
based. He saw the power of the Internet very differently, and he knew it was going to change
enterprise applications forever. And while it may not seem like much to others, but to him,
changing the way they design applications equated to brands transforming how they manage
their business.

It motivated him to start a CRM software company that not only had a layer of real-time
applications, but also the data and analytics to effectively run and grow a brand. The concept
was simple — create the software so you’d have all the data, then use that invaluable data to
gather analytics/insights, which in turn would allow you to better understand your customers,
develop your products accordingly, and ultimately provide the best customer experience. But
then as his clients got to see the software and the power behind the data and analytics, they
wanted help running their operations as well. That led to the birth of Alorica 22 years ago — a
people company delivering customer service — and he never looked back.

Email response was one of the earliest projects they worked on in the 1990s,and this was
almost 22 years ago before Artificial Intelligence (AI). He recalls a firm promising to pay him $1
for every customer email response. So he sat down next to a customer care worker to check
how many emails they could handle in an hour. What he found was that the majority of the
emails were about the same few topics and questions. He then worked with their engineer to
create what is now known as “AI”. In one week, they developed an app that allowed agents to
respond automatically without having to type out the replies by using pre-populated answers.
They went from sending 1 email in 10 minutes to 1 in 60 seconds and made $20 million off of
that account. It’s incredible to think that the idea of AI back in 1999 — even before it was a fully
baked concept — is still so relevant in today’s marketplace.