Episode Transcript
[00:00:23] Speaker A: Hello. Welcome, everybody, to our latest episode of Metrosite. We're glad to have you here today.
I want to start today just by talking a little bit about what we're seeing here with technology leaders and their demand for unified platforms that provide communications capabilities.
You don't want to have just a single platform, necessarily for one technology in the contact center, another on unified communications, for example. So we see a lot of companies want to integrate those, but not all platforms are created equally. In addition to working with a single vendor and a single platform, other innovations we see also differentiate some of the providers in this space. For example, you could have the application of AI capabilities being a key differentiator, along with architecture and acquisitions that enable new products or services. So today I am delighted to be joined by John Finch, who is senior vice president of worldwide product marketing for Dialpad. And he's going to talk today about what Dialpad can do. I mean, they're definitely one of the leading vendors as far as unifying and integrating all these different capabilities onto a single platform. So I want to ask John some questions about what Dialpad can do today, where it's heading, maybe how it differentiates from competitors as well. So I just am going to start, John, by asking you to give our viewers and listeners some background on yourself. And then just a brief history of dialpadous.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me, Robin. It's always a pleasure to work with you and always such an honor to be a part of the work that you guys are doing. So thank you.
My time in the contact center space and the unified communication spaces spend, I would say, 100% of my career, which is quite some time. The gray in my beard sort of shows this, but I think that my time, most recently I spent at Zendesk. So kind of in the CRM and I, the digital customer communication space. Prior to that, I spent some time really looking after everything that was contact center at Ringcentral. Prior to that, I was at Dialpad, the first go around when the company was much smaller.
Even before that, I've spent time at companies like Genesis launching new products. And so the time that I continue to spend in this space, we see such great innovation. I think I've had conversations with you and lots of other analysts in the space, and we're like, okay, are we at the pinnacle of innovation with contact center and customer service and then turn the corner something new? And I think that's what keeps me interested every day in what we're doing. And ultimately, we all understand and experience the challenges of poor customer service.
We want for better. And so striving from a technology perspective to enable brands to have that better technology to service customers better benefits everyone across the globe. So it's a good thing.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: No, I totally agree with you on that. With just how CX and that whole customer engagement space, it just changes all the time in a good way. There's always something new coming up. Of course, you've got some things where it's like, wait a minute, weren't we doing this five years ago or ten years ago? There's some things that kind of get rehashed, but there are so many cool new innovations, a lot of them, of course, using AI.
But Dialpad definitely has had some really cool acquisitions that have shaped the company for sure. So I wanted you to talk a little bit about these acquisitions and how they have advanced the company already and what you see them doing moving forward.
[00:03:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. We've done a few and sort of off the cuff. The most recent. Well, I'll go back a little bit further. In the 2018 timeframe, we acquired a company that our chief strategy officer, Dan O'Connell, founded. And I know you've talked to him extensively as well, which is called Talk IQ. And from the perspective of taking what is artificial intelligence or the natural language processing capabilities that we have innately built into our core platform, that was the technology that Dialpad had the foresight, also a Google cloud product and founded from Google, bringing those together foundationally, since 2018, it's been a native part of our platform, which is was pretty cool and pretty unique.
The other two organizations that were acquired in the 2021 timeframe, just prior to me coming back to Dialpad were really around contact center and innovation in contact center. And so the offering from Dialpad had been a voice technology up to that point for contact center capabilities and solving customer problems. But being able to take that to the next step and being able to offer the digital services. So web messaging, web chat, whatever you want to call it, access to twelve different channels across the board and even the self service components and integrating that into the AI pieces really became part of what we acquired two companies. One is called care and the other one is called Cupid. Those two organizations were founded by two amazing individuals. One of them was at Google as well, and that was the team that we brought in to bring in the search capability. And then we had the Kubit acquisition, which then came in as well. And it's a team of people that were in Bell Labs and so long in the tooth as well. In terms of their understanding of the deficits in customer service and customer engagement. But that really brought in what we have today with respect to sort of the digital self service, the digital components of the product offering. So we've made it very robust. And our ability to bring these technologies together quickly is all because they're all on microservices architecture and Google cloud specifically. And our ability to sort of bring those things quickly together and unify the experience has been completely innovative in anything I've seen before.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: Yeah, and you talk about unification. I mean, I know there's unification that takes place, you know, when you're as a customer, you're in self service, and maybe you're gonna, you know, go into a live agent call for whatever reason. You know, there's unification there. But I mean, there's also unification between UC and contact center platforms. And that's one of the things I know we've talked about a lot over, over the years.
How would you say that dialpadous compares to others with its truecast platform, focusing on, let's say, your cloud architecture, your AI development platform, how does that all come into play to make truecasts, in your opinion, better than what else might be your competitors?
[00:07:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I have a good voice and a good perspective on this. Right. So, you know, most organizations can sort of claim from a marketing perspective that they've got a unified product. And UCAAs and CCAAs, obviously lots of decisions are made because one company is bringing together a set of solutions. But you have to sort of break that down into how it's architected and without getting too technical. I think foundationally what we have is this core platform. It's an open platform. It has the ability, there's open APIs. It's built on Google Cloud. It's a microservices architecture. At the core, it was built that way. You know, enough said on the technology front from that perspective. But what's innately a part of that is elements like artificial intelligence, the natural language processing, right? So the services on both ends, from a UCAS perspective and a CCAAS perspective, share that technology. Right? So even if you're having a meeting and we're on dialpad meetings, we're capturing notes, we're transcribing, we're processing all that information, we're calling out action items, we're doing things to enable a better work experience for those knowledge workers inside the organization. We're doing the same thing also with that same intelligence for customer engagement activities. And so because it's a shared service across those different platform or those different services within the platform, they're all taking advantage of that same technology, right? So a customer service rep that's having an engagement or a sales inquiry engagement is going to be able to take and leverage that same technology to enable them to be better. So for example, we can infer customer satisfaction with AIcSat inside of our contact center platform with all of the NLP that's occurred across the whole platform where millions of conversations are happening every year across meetings and across voice interactions. So they're not isolated in the way that we're doing that. And I think that's what's unique. At the same time, that telephony infrastructure that we're so good at. And again, because this is a Google group of individuals that are building this product, came out of Google voice, built this technology that scale to millions and millions and millions of users was brought in at the very front end before we even had customers, right? So the foresight to build something at scale to handle huge volumes of interaction from a telephony perspective is not an easy feat. And building that in a modern architecture like GCP and Microservices really is the foundation. So all of that perfect storm has come together and enabled us to have this great technology which then every week we are initiating new innovations into the product. So every week we have a feature launch. We're always improving. It may just be bug fixes or enhancements, but everything is coming all the time.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: So along those lines, I mean, obviously we've had some interesting launches over, not just with weekly feature, but new offerings, new products, new services. I've written and spoken about some of them specifically for me. I found predictive AI CSAT and AI agent assist to be very, very interesting. I find them to be innovative. I can see that it's one of those light bulb moments where like, oh, this could really be cool. So I don't know, would you agree? I mean, are there others that you put ahead of those two?
I just, I'd like you to talk about like, which launches. I know you already mentioned AICCF, but maybe you can explain a little bit more.
Are there specific launches that you think have even more potential or would you agree?
[00:11:09] Speaker B: I don't know.
You know, I'm amazed and excited about those launches. I think that they are super innovative and as you mentioned, you were a big help and helping us influence that in the market and I think that it's game changing.
No other organization that I'm aware of really has this AI at the core component that we're talking about. And so being able to talk about things that were, from an agent assistance perspective, empowering agents to actually do their work and feel great about it and work in a remote world, whether you're not sitting next to your pals on either side and supervisors within arm's reach, you can actually get information because you have a digital pal that's going to bring you the right stuff from the knowledge base or wherever that information is stored for the company to do the best thing. And even if you're a new employee or a new agent, you have that access to it. So you feel confident when you're having calls, you're solving the problems for customers, not putting them on hold and trying to figure out the answer, make it up as you go. So that agent empowerment piece with agent assist is huge. You know, that that's the one thing when we think about those employees that's inside the company, the agents are the most important. They're the ones that are representing your brand to your customers. Right? So that's. That's huge. So I completely agree with you on that one. I think the other piece, too, that you'd mentioned as well is just the component of the insights, right? So AICSat, for example, being able to ascertain based on a myriad of interactions across that or a myriad of data points across that interaction, that brings together a customer satisfaction rating. So we take the best and the information on sentiment and everything else and sort of infer a CSAP rating, which in most cases, as we all know, in traditional, you're sending out a survey, and the survey is either someone's going to respond if they're really happy, but they're really pissed off. There's nothing in between, and there's so much underneath that iceberg that we just can't uncover. So based on information that we're gathering both from those kinds of surveys as well as inferred throughout those conversations, like we would be having right now, the pleasantries or the anger or whatever it is, the frustration, the swear words, whatever, we all have seen it. We've been there. That information then gives a real time satisfaction rating to the agent, to the supervisor to take action. Right. And then it gets to the next step. It's not about, just give me that information and we're done. What can you do with the information? You take it to the next step. You actually go through coaching. You can go through, you know, supervisors can help you through whisper barge, and all of these things can happen in real time, too. As you go forward. So it's actionable insights in real time to individuals to feel better about their jobs and to provide better customer service.
[00:14:09] Speaker A: Yeah, it's just I love the idea of being able to get essentially ratings from almost anyone you interact with. Even though some are real, they're real feedback and some are inferred and your accuracy is pretty high on this. I know you do testing on this all the time, and just to be able to have that, to be able to act on it right away. I'm a data geek. I love having data, you know that I love looking at data. I'm actually doing research right now in the whole customer insights and analytics space. So this is very timely to me. And I just think that adds so much value for companies because if you're making decisions on what technology you're using, how you're training your employees, what you're saying or not saying all sorts of things, how you're scheduling people and you're not basing any of that stuff on data, you could be making big mistakes. So I think it just really helps companies to make these changes or decisions or improvements based on some data, based on what's really happening out there. So I think that's pretty cool.
[00:15:03] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: Talk about this for hours.
[00:15:06] Speaker B: But we could, you and I, geek out on this all the time.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: A quick question that we can certainly delve into deeper in a future metric, perhaps, but what are the biggest trends right now? That dialpad is thinking about looking ahead. So you've been pretty innovative in the AI space.
What are some of the things you really give us some insight into what's next?
[00:15:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I'll drop a few breadcrumbs here for you, and I'm sure Dan's done the same throughout our conversations. I'm not stealing his thunder and saying this because we just had some conversations with some great customers this week about this as well. But as we get further into who we are, it's less about ucaas and ccaas and more about the analytics and the data and the hexats. Right. And so when you start to think about us, you start to think about that platform that you brought up, you start to think about AI customer intelligence, right. What is it that you're doing to help the biggest revenue generation components or saving the revenue, keeping the revenue components of your customer base. And that's sort of where we want to lean in. So you start thinking about AI sales. Right. So being able to take things like the automation behind sales. Right. Some of the things like coaching and insights and script adherence and regulations and other things that would go on in certain vertical industries and having a technology that would automatically provide you with that capability and keeping your individual employees or agents or whomever they are on task, following a sales playbook, making sure that they're saying the right things based on certain mandates depending upon what industry you're in. Customer support, same thing continuing in that area which we just talked about. We talked about customer intelligence and insights there with AIcSaT and obviously taking that to the next level with some of the things in terms of agent assist and breaking that out even further. But we can even think of other things like we do a lot of work with some big organizations that are heavy hitters in the world for recruiting and so providing those in some vertical industries as well. So across business communications, it becomes broader for us as we're looking at it, versus just telecommunications, it's across selling. And think of it from our talk product, from a voice product perspective, PBX replacement perspective, all the way through to meetings, all the way through to collaboration and being able to collaborate with one another. And that's sort of the UC product, all the way through to the contact center and the sales product as well. And then we start to get into things too inside of that with regards to employee assistance. So you start thinking about what we're doing with agents and being able to kind of cut train cost, get access to accurate information, improve job satisfaction, all those great things. Think about that from just the worker inside the organization too. So from an HR perspective, you're looking for like what are my benefits? I can actually get that information and utilize the AI within dialpad to get that through our messaging platform. Right.
[00:18:15] Speaker A: I think there's so much value to what companies are doing in the context center that could be expanded out into other areas of the company for sure. But I love all the analytics type of things. So I'm excited to see what you guys have coming up and.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Yeah, and then you start going into other things too. But like, you know, there's, from a sales perspective, there's, as I mentioned, like Playbook adherence, you know, making sure you're on script. Right. From Medicare's perspective, there's a lot of script adherence stuff that you've got to do.
Think of the things from the insights that we're going to bring in. We've talked about CSAT, but net promoter score, customer effort score, call categorization call summary churn prediction, starting to really get into what it is that you need to do in order to satisfy all these things. And really what NLP and sort of AI brings together for us is our ability innately to do this at that platform level. And so it's just taking this technology and turning it into where within the product does it make the most sense for it to be discoverable? And we talk about the polish of the product, right? You think about Apple, for example. It started here and now it's here. And every year that something releases, you get more and more discoverable and more rounded edges, better look and feel, easy discovery. That is the approach we're taking as well. It's not clunky, it's not fine, it's not a book you need to read that's this big in order to use it. It just happens for you. And that's really our vision of what this product is doing and we'll continue to do is get better as we go along.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Yeah, that sounds great.
So to wrap up, I mean, the way I look at dialpad and maybe this is just me because I cover CX and I cover contact center and all the customer engagement type of technologies, but I almost sense that it's like you're focusing increasingly on customer experience and customer engagement. So, question for you, would you say that you're transitioning sort of into a CX provider that also delivers ucaas? Would you say that's a priority moving forward?
[00:20:25] Speaker B: Maybe it could be. It could be. I think that's from the perspective of looking at innovation. You look at people like myself that have been in this customer engagement space for some time and others that are leading our product. There's folks that I've worked for for years, since back at Genesis that are here. We're building this product in this way because the most innovation can come there and branch from that. What was traditionally looked at as a more complex set of technologies that needed to be brought together to provide the best customer experience.
We have it together. We're just now going to offer it as one package. So you don't have to go buy the best of breed CX product and then the best of breed AI product and the best of breed coaching and workforce management product, you have all these in one. And so we're leaning in that direction because it's taking what it was once super complex in that way from a buyer, a buying perspective and setting it up perspective into something that is just turn it on when you're ready to use it. This is the price for all these things. There's a couple different tiers you choose from you're ready to go?
[00:21:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
Awesome.
All right, well, I think that's all the time we have for today. So I've been sitting here today talking to John Finch, who's, as I mentioned, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing at Dialpad. Thank you so much for your insights. I appreciate you taking out the time, as always. You've always got something interesting to say, John. And thanks to all the listeners and viewers today. Until the next time, have a good day.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: Thank you.
