Episode Transcript
[00:00:22] Speaker A: Hello, everybody, and thanks for tuning into this episode of Metrosite, a podcast for Metrogy. I'm Beth Schultz, vice president of research and principal analyst at Metrogy. And with me today is Barbara Dondiego. Barbara is the CEO of Avoxi, which is a provider of premium voice services delivered over an international cloud platform.
Now, I've had the pleasure of working with Barbara and her team recently on some research around the state of international Voice services for the contact center. So today we're going to talk about some of what we learned in that study. But first, let's get to know a bit more about Barbara and her company. Barbara, welcome to the podcast. So I just promised listeners that we'd first get to know you and a little bit more about Avaxi. So let's get started.
Hear your a little bit about your career overview and your ten year old Avaxi.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: What are the, yeah, happy to do that. So I've been at Avoxi for nine years, actually, really on the whole journey to build the cloud platform and really do something that we felt is innovative and different and international voice for contact centers. I've been the CEO for two years. That's been really fun. Before that, I was the chief operating officer and worked directly for the former founder and CEO here. So it's been a really great run. My career before that, I've worked a lot in the infrastructure space and the communication space. Anything from voice services to data services, fiber infrastructure, data centers. I used to. It's funny, when I first started my career, voice was kind of the first communication technology that was used to connect customers and businesses together.
But then really it was kind of taken over or sort of usurped by all the data services that came out over the past 25 years. So that when I started my career, that was just really starting. So I started at a company called Worldcom, which was later MCI Communications.
Then I kind of did the rounds through communications infrastructure, a lot of it in product management, product development, business development, marketing. Also worked for level three communications.
And so I really, I was really very happy to find an opportunity like a vox here. I could take all that communications infrastructure knowledge and really all that experience working in the legacy side of the business and then really apply that to a software driven company, which is what we are here, and really do that, do all those different processes in a more modern way, and that's what we deliver to our clients.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: That was a mention of Worldcom was definitely a blast from the past for me. Yeah, I can remember meeting with Bill McGowan oh, yeah, totally.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Yes. All that. Yes. Yeah. It was a different world. I always find it kind of funny because voice was sort of something that I would have never touched as a young in my career because it was like the old thing to do. And then all the data services were new. And so I find it kind of ironic that I'm running, like, this voice company that really is delivering voice in a really modern, innovative way, so. But happy to do it. And I think there's a great need.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: For it in the marketplace coming full circle here. Right?
[00:03:22] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: Okay, so you shared some about your professional career. What can you tell us about your personal, any fun facts that.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: Oh, fun facts. Oh, there's a lot. So I have three kids. They're all still in school. So I'm like school aged children, and I have an eight year old, twelve year old, a 14 year old, and then I'm married. I live in Atlanta. I like to do a lot of different things, like to do active things. My team always gives me a hard time that I make them do all these crazy, like, team buildings. I'm always like, who wants to go on a bike ride when we're in Kuala Lumpur, when we're visiting clients?
So I like to do fine. I like to do things like that, and I like to garden. So those are some fun facts.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Okay, great. Well, you sound like you're quite busy at work and also outside of work. Yeah, definitely.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about voice.
You talked about voice kind of going out of favoritism, I guess, as data services came into being. And today we see within the contact center, everybody likes to talk about those digital channels. Right? And there was always voice. Was that sort of first outreach for customer service, but then digital channels took over.
That's what's new. That's what's Moderna. But you can't deny that voice is very much here to stay. And that's something that we've certainly seen in our research outside of what we did with you guys, our CX optimization research. We talked to CX and it leaders responsible for communications. We talked to consumers. I want to share a few of those stats with you, Barbara. Just get your opinion.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: So let me go through them. On the ITCX leader side, when we talk to those folks, nearly three quarters of companies, we find, all have customer service and support interactions.
I'm sorry, nearly three quarter of all customer service and support interactions use voice. Still today, either initially or because they've had to transition from a digital interaction that they did came in first.
Additionally, most companies say voice will remain a vitally important channel for them into 2027. And then when we talk to consumers, we've learned that when they're trying to address a problem with the product or service, slightly more than half of them, about 51%, they still prefer talking with an agent over the phone versus over a digital channel, whether that's text or web chat or email or working through self service.
We also see a significant percentage prefer voice over these other channels when they're making appointments or doing things like filing warranty claims. And then here's one that I find really, really interesting. 61% of consumers studied even say that they won't do business with a company that doesn't have a way to reach them by phone. So I find that pretty interesting.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: Yeah, totally.
And all that really makes sense to what I'm seeing with my contact center customers who are around the world. So the Voxi platform really works well if you have a contact center agent and a customer and they're in different countries, we help connect the voice channel for that type of solution. And so if you kind of think about it, we have lots of different Fortune 1000, global 1000 customers that are our clients. They have call centers all over the world. They deal with all different ages and demographics of people, and we're seeing some very similar trends. So sometimes people say, oh, isn't it just older people that want to call? Like, not really. It actually depends on the use case and the problem. So if you have, like, I always say, you know, when I'm traveling, I don't ever call to book a hotel room. Like, I do that online because I can. But if I need to have, like, an adjoining room or if I need to have, like, some kind of special service in the hotel, you really have to call to find out what's going on there, and you have to call in the call center and ask about that.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great, yeah.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: Or if you have, like, a, you know, we have, we have some, one of our clients does, like, a healthcare, an Internet of Things healthcare device. And so their tech support is real time. A lot of it's on voice because they're trying to literally do real time troubleshooting with a client. And voice is a great, universal, ubiquitous, real time, two way channel. So it doesn't surprise me at all. We're actually seeing that. And as more and more transactions move online and shopping becomes more digital, and all kinds of healthcare becomes more digital, and all these services become more digital, then you really, if you run into a more complex problem because you're doing more things remotely from somebody like right in front of you that you're procuring a service from, then if something goes wrong, you then need to call them because you need to have a real time dialogue to resolve it if you want to get off status checksure.
We all have, there's what, 6 billion active smartphones in the world, but there's like 8 billion active mobile phones. So pretty much both of those channels are very pervasive throughout the world. But we don't really see voice going away. We actually see it increase with our clients.
[00:08:34] Speaker A: So in this study that metrogy did on your behalf, we found that 56% of customer service sales calls today on average, are handled by a cloud service. And that figure is expected to grow to 63% in three years. So, you know, continued steady growth in migration to cloud. So I have two questions for you to start at least. First, what's the value of using a cloud voice service versus traditional telephony? What do you tell companies that haven't made that jump yet? And then second, why would you obtain international calling service from a global cloud voice provider like avoxy, rather than from another type of cloud provider? You know, you've got your CCAas in particular for contact center CCaaS providers, your UCAS providers, and you can also get cloud voice services from your communications platform as a service provider.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: Definitely, yeah. So kind of to your first question, Azure. You know, everybody, there's a huge trend to move all of contact center equipment to the cloud. And it's not just being driven by the, by the consumers, by the businesses, it's really being driven also by the manufacturers of that equipment because they are moving their equipment to cloud only solutions and they're end of life ing all these physical solutions that exist around the world. And that, that prop, that wave of technology transformation that's happening really then causes the need to go with a cloud voice platform. Because once you move the info, the physical PBX or the CCAAS platform to the cloud, then all the telephony that was hanging off of it, that's also physical needs to also move to the cloud. So that really necessitates going to a cloud platform and finding a partner like a boxy that can easily and seamlessly do the integration that can provide you a modern service. But I always think that's kind of like step zero in the customer's evolution is go ahead and move to the cloud, get off the physical, the actual truly physical voice infrastructure and make it virtual. But then, now that you have that in a virtual environment, all the different things you can do with that, because now you have visibility to your calls, where they're coming from, their aggregate duration. You can route across different platforms, you can put in place backup routing, you can do some intelligence around that. And that evolution of your infrastructure really helps your efficiency in the cloud.
To your point of why would you go away from legacy? Those two major reasons. One, just to get to the cloud in the first place, consolidate vendors. Make sure your edge infrastructure is matching your centralized infrastructure, which is definitely can in the cloud.
But then the next step is really what can you do now that you have access to that? And you can do so many interesting things with that data that you couldn't do before, you can really change how you operate the infrastructure.
So to your second question, on the cloud platform, why would you purchase services direct through an Avoxi platform and integrate that into your CCaaS or UCaaS platform versus just procuring a bundled solution via CCaaS or UCaAS? Well, really, customers have the choice. It just really depends on their strategy, their business structure, what their goals are. At epoxy, we sell about 80% of our business direct, and we sell about 20% through UCaaS and CCaaS platforms that they're bundling the Avoxi services into the solutions they're offering. It really depends on the client.
Sometimes the CCAs and UCAs don't have the same coverage that a direct provider like Avoxi has. Sometimes they might not be able, you might not be able to port a number or move your existing numbers as easily. If you're going through multiple parties, you need to go through, you know, one direct party. So it really just really, truly depends on the client and what their businesses are. What we're finding with our larger customers, say the top one third of our clients, is that they are choosing to go direct as a preference. And the reason they're doing that is so they have more control of all the different components of their solution. So they have one vendor that's doing the agent desktop solution, they have one vendor that is doing an avoxy vendor that is doing the telephony pieces of that, and then they can add in other vendors to do other different types of services in the contact center ecosystem for them. But they're doing more of a best of breed model, and that works very well. Right now, with the ease of integration that modern platforms like the Voxi platform can provide.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: You had to bring up the porting issue. Right. Because that's always such a, such a stumbling block when it comes to voice services.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: It can be, we actually turned porting into a managed service and we had to really wrap technology with our platform around that product, as well as global experts around the world from our team that understand how porting works in multiple different regions and can be, you know, literally live on the phone with customers when the ports are going on and understand how to work with all the different in country carriers to make sure they're as seamless as possible. But it is, it is a hard, it is a hard problem to do globally. I think we solve it really well, but we really had to wrap a lot around that.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: So you, you may have in part answered this next question that I had for you, which is, you know, companies that are dealing in, that have business across the globe, different regions, they often have multiple providers that they're looking to provide those global voice calling needs. So, but even so, that that brings about management challenges and they're looking to consolidate. So what do you recommend companies look for in a provider as they evaluate consolidation?
[00:14:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, and I think a lot of our customers come to us because they're trying to consolidate. So, I mean, I would say first you have to have a provider that's cloud based and cloud based in a real way. So that means truly a cloud microservices, architecture based platform, meaning that everything is going to be very scalable for you. You should have a lot of automation built into that platform. You should have an API toolkit that you can easily access. You should be able to easily and seamlessly in hours, really minutes, not days or weeks or months. Do integrations, the integrations you need and get access to the data that you need to run your business and start tying all these things together. So that would be kind of number one. The second thing is really, is really to have the right coverage. So to make sure that that provider and that platform is going to have all the different types of numbers that you need, the right formats, the local formats, have the knowledge on how to put that together in a way that's going to be compliant, but also, and very high quality, but also is going to look correct to your in country customers when you're trying to call them. And then I think the third thing I would say is really to make sure that you have the right customer experience from that platform, because all those things can be good. But then if you can't ever pick up the phone and call someone, you have a problem, which is sort of ironic. A lot of voice companies don't have that kind of support. We do out of boxy. We kind of really hang our hat on it.
You need to really be able to reach someone and make sure you have a stable team and a high level of support so that when something goes wrong, you need to implement a new project or a new location. You have the right feet on the ground, virtual feet on the ground to help you with that.
[00:15:43] Speaker A: That was true. Cloud coverage and customer experience, definitely. Okay. So in the study, we also looked at call center downtime, and it is a big issue for companies. 85% report periodic downtime, with almost 50% experiencing downtime multiple times, monthly or quarterly. So, Barbara, do you think companies are pushing providers enough on improving their services and infrastructure to reduce downtime, or are they being too complacent?
[00:16:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:16] Speaker A: What is avoxi done to assure call quality?
[00:16:20] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, it's such an interesting question, because what we have seen is that our customers, all customers, hate any kind of downtime or any kind of service disruption because it just costs them money.
[00:16:31] Speaker A: Right?
[00:16:31] Speaker B: Costs them money, cost them time. It costs some customer dissatisfaction. So you really want to have the most stable service possible. However, what we found is that even though clients report these issues of downtime, that the downtime causes their business issues, they don't really truly hold their carriers and their platforms accountable. And I think that's a little bit of like, the legacy mindset of communications, which is a very reactive, slow moving type of customer service experience. So at avoxy, we really, like, rejected that sort of, it's always been that way philosophy. And we take on more of a software approach to how we're running the business, not only how we're actually building the platform. So what we do is we, you know, we really want to have the best possible uptime and the best possible service for our clients. So we're doing some machine learning, modeling, and some really innovative intelligence around a proactive service model for clients. We're getting a lot of great, great feedback on the initial concepts and our initial models with that because we want to be fixing problems while, while you're sleeping. We want to tell you that we saw an issue and we fixed it on your behalf. And not just at the core service level, but all the way down to the phone number level, because the phone number level is what our contact center customers care about. They care if their customer in Taipei can't call them or if their customer in Saudi Arabia can't call them. Those specific numbers have to be in service with a high degree of stability, and that's what we focus on.
[00:17:58] Speaker A: So that's a great approach to call quality. I have to applaud you. What about security and data privacy? Because those are other big challenges that companies face. You know, what are, what are you finding in terms of expectations for your customers, and what are you doing to address those?
[00:18:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think we fill out a lot of security and compliance surveys for clients when we are taking on new clients or even part of their regular compliance process. So I think having being able to be well versed in what's going on there and making sure that you're operating with the highest level of security is really important.
What we are doing is we really just have a myriad of different certifications ourselves, because what we find is, like, we have PCI, DSS, we have GDPR, we have SoC two. So what we find is, if we go through those processes ourselves as a company, that not only allows our customers then to pull that through onto their own certifications for security, but it also then makes sure that we're really operating. It gives ourselves, it gives us an external check on the business to make sure we're operating in the best way possible.
[00:19:09] Speaker A: So I would be remiss, given that we're in 2024 and it is the time of AI, not to talk about AI with you.
In fact, we did ask, in our study, we asked companies about their plans for AI, and I was kind of surprised. 58% of them said that they are already incorporating AI into their customer service and sales voice chip, and 35% are evaluating. So those are really big numbers, high numbers, right? Yeah. Does this surprise you and why or why not?
[00:19:41] Speaker B: Yeah. And so it didn't surprise me that there was a lot of people working on it. I think that what I see is the extent that it's really offloading or assisting a lot of call volume, I think it's still pretty low. I think we're still pretty early days in those models. So a lot of our clients are working with AI models. They're trying to understand them. They're trying to figure out probably the top two use cases we see are also the ones seen in the research, which is AI offload. So can AI take certain calls that are more simple in nature and go ahead and answer them, or more defined in nature? I'll say, and go ahead and answer them. And then the second thing is agent assist. So can you take an agent who maybe doesn't have inherently the expertise you need to answer the phone call, but with AI assisting them, they can actually operate at a bit of a higher level. So we are seeing those two top use cases, we're seeing a lot of conversations about those, a lot of early implementations. But I think we're still kind of early days in AI for the call center, and our customers are certainly really excited about the opportunity for it. At Avoxy, we're actually really excited about it too, because for us, a lot of our customers offer voice as a premium channel in the call center, meaning that it's only for if you have a high ticket customer, if you have a high value item, if you have something that's gonna going to justify the fact that you're having a human be able to talk to your client. And the largest amount of that cost is really the agent, the agent cost. So as the agent cost can come down because the cost per call comes down because it's answered by a machine, or it's answered by a machine assisting a human, or it's answered by a human. That combination now can reduce the overall cost per call for the voice channel. And then that allows our clients to now start to ungate their channels because they don't have to be so bound by cost, and they can then offer a channel to their clients to say, how do you want to communicate with us, how do you want to interact with us to best solve your problem? And I think that's really freeing for the call center to really think about the customer in that way versus being so worried about the cost on the agent side. And for us, it's all just a call. So we're good either way. We still support the voice channel no matter who answers it. So we're pretty excited about those innovations for clients.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: That is pretty exciting to hear about. Any other recommendations you have about getting started with or incorporating AI into the voice channel, any kind of gotchas that.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: I mean, all those from our clients we've talked to, this is really new for them.
They're really used, our clients are really used to managing people and training people. They're not necessarily versed in training models. And that's what you really have to do with AI. You still have to train the model, you have to go through the work of, here's what you think this path is going to be, but then you have to work on that to get enough data, enough transactions with those specific scenarios to really make the AI work for you in an efficient way. And so that takes a bit more time. It's a different skill set. So I think just understanding that that's going to be a process and that's going to have a lead time to it, that's something new for your team is some advice I'd give to folks checking, you know, taking a look at implementing that.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great point. And then you also, then you have those virtual assistants, those AI assistants, and you have to manage those too, right?
[00:23:00] Speaker B: They don't, yeah, they're, they're like a living thing. They're, they're sort of like, you almost have to think about them as like managing another piece of your overall experience. You can't just like set it and forget it. You have to really work on those actively.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: Right. Right. Okay. So Barbara, I've highlighted a few of the findings. Are there others that stood out to you that we haven't talked about yet?
[00:23:18] Speaker B: I mean, I think the main thing for me is the stack rank list of problems that clients are experiencing with global voice and global voice calling channels and everything from call quality to coverage to stability to visibility of data.
All those things to security, all those things are what we are working on solving with the avoxy platform, with our current set of products and with our future roadmap that we have in place. So for us, it was pretty validating that we are on the right track here and that what our customers are saying is also the same thing as the broader market.
So I was pretty glad to see that. And we'll keep marching down our path here at Avoxi.
[00:24:01] Speaker A: Well, Barbara, that sounds like a great place to end the conversation. But before we sign off, where can listeners get the report and learn about Avoxi?
[00:24:09] Speaker B: Yeah, great. You can always find us on our website, www.avoxi.com. the reports there. We're happy to share it with you. We're also happy to talk to you about your journey to the cloud, your journey with your contact center and how we can better assist you. And we're always happy to share stories from our, you know, from our view of the market as well.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: Sounds great. And with that, I'd like to thank you, Barbara, for joining me today for this discussion around voice services and listeners. I'd like to thank you for tuning in. As always, Metro G appreciate your time and attention. Till next time.
[00:24:38] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:24:39] Speaker A: Take care.
