Truly Unified Communications with DialPad (Guest Dan Pecher)
I just finished recording with Dan Petcher, a solutions consultant for Dialpad. This one, I took a little different. We didn't focus on features and benefits and speeds and feeds and the technology widgetry that comes into most IT conversations, but instead tried to maintain a dialog around business outcomes and business drivers. In this case, related to phone systems and contact centers. What's fascinating about the conversation to me is really this exploration around analytics and data.
Max:Being able to pull analytics and data and intelligence out of your interactions, whether that's a phone call or chat or message or, you know, something whether it's inside of the company or external to the company and what you can glean for that information and how you use it. It was a fascinating conversation for myself. I hope you enjoy it. Hi. I'm Max Clark.
Max:This is, IT broker tech deep dive. I'm here with Dan Petcher who is solutions consultant, not architect. Sorry. I was gonna say architect. Solutions consultant with Dialpad.
Max:Dialpad is a does a whole bunch of different stuff. So we're gonna get into this in a moment here. But, if you follow Gartner, Dialpad is in the UCaaS and CCaaS space and is overlaying a lot of that with artificial intelligence. But as much as I want to talk about that Dan, I want to talk about something else first. We're gonna do this a little differently.
Max:It's gonna be different from the normals. Let's see here. About 6 7 years ago I was, meeting with a client and I had to look it up because their phone system was almost as old as I. This is circa 2018 ish and, their phone system was running on a 46sx66 and it was the stereotype of you walk around the office and there's phones with, like, sticky notes on it and the and it's like keys don't work or whatever but, you know, here we go. We're we're, you know, this phone system is probably at that point, you know, been in this this business for easy 20 years.
Max:And the conversation started because this phone system was having problems and going down and they had a consultant that could come in and work on it for them in the mornings, but he could only show up at 6 AM in the morning and be there for 45 minutes before he went to his day job, which was not related to phones at all anymore. And and I was talking with the, I was talking with the the COO of the company of like, you know basically you guys should get ahead of this stuff. At that point we weren't calling it UCaaS yet. It was still hosted VoIP but, he said something to me that has sat with me ever since. And what he said was we don't care about our phones.
Max:And I laugh about this because they were a phone based sales business they were interacting with their customers via their phones their crews in the field via their phones their suppliers via their phones a 100% of their business was phones and I know this because every time their phone system went down it was a big panic now since that conversation I've had plenty of conversations similar to that with people saying things along the lines of effectively we don't care about our phones or we don't care about our phone system or a more modern version of that being we're just gonna give everybody cell phones and they don't we don't need a phone system because everybody has a cell phone and that's how we're gonna work. So as somebody who is in this full time sitting in your seat that's the foundation of the conversation I want. So so Dan we're having it we're talking I need a phone system and I tell you something along the lines of like I don't need phone I don't need I don't care about phones or I tell you something like oh we're just gonna give everybody we're gonna give everybody in our 200 person company cell phones and we're just gonna use the cell phones there's a lot that you miss with that and so that's I'm gonna I'm gonna stop here, and I'm just gonna let you go for a little bit.
Max:And then let's do this.
Dan:I think I think you stated the premise there, pretty well because they don't care about phones until they don't work. It's like then it's like, well, why did this happen? Right? How do we fix this? How do we make sure they don't go down again?
Dan:How do we make sure that even if they go down, we have a backup plan or, you know, some kind of redundancy built in? And, I think, you know, Dialpad, especially, just the way we were designed, has a lot of those, things in mind. Craig Craig Walker very, very much from the beginning. You know, redundancy was important. Accessibility was important.
Dan:Being able to just have the access that you need to do your daily activities, you know, over the phone. The the cell phones can work. Obviously, it's it's a technology that's been around for a long time and it it's absolutely capable of of handling, not only your everyday phone calls, but, you know, it's a smartphone now. It can do all these other things that that we had no idea was even possible. Right?
Dan:But I think the the important thing is to continue to continue your point. As you said, you lose a lot. You don't have visibility into, you know, everyone's activities if it's just on a cell phone. Even with the the old phones that have sticky notes and are, you know, don't unplug or don't turn off or, I've seen them all. Right?
Dan:I used to work for several others telco companies that that we had. Even internally, we had phones like that. But, yeah, it's it's the visibility. It's it's understanding the infrastructure and making sure that, you know, we have things in place to to accommodate those situations when when things happen because things are going to happen. Right?
Dan:It's it's inevitable. But just making sure that that we've got the ability to to stay on top of it and make sure that business continuity is is there. It's extremely important.
Max:So, I grew up in Southern California. So every few months, I had to have a conversation with somebody related to the, you know, 15 point o earthquake that was gonna hit and take the city and, you know, it was just gonna be ocean. But I'm I have yet to find, you know, BCDR be a be real driver and behavior changes even even in the event of outages. You know, if they're not already there where it's like we have a priority for this, it never it it it never ever doesn't become a priority. Right?
Max:Like, you either either value certain things or you just don't. If you don't value that thing, like, having an outage for a day doesn't seem to be like, oh, we should make sure our phones don't go down again you know because they weren't they weren't that way in the first place but what I kind of wonder about and for me it's not it's not about like physical phones on desks it's more about like, what what's what's the expression it's it's like you know the job is being done or we're getting it done or we're getting by and we don't know any difference you know and it's it's and I don't I don't wanna I don't get into this from like oh you know go into a cloud based phone system gives you you know high availability or redundancy or all these different things because you know I mean a small percentage of people actually are are shopping for that and they're aggressively out there in the market or they've already shifted. So that's not like a driving point for somebody to make a massive technology shift or you know platform change. Right? It's it's more like I'm curious about these things that are like you know if you give everybody a cell phone they can make and receive phone calls.
Max:Okay? So like your your core thing is is like we can make and receive phone calls because everybody has a cell phone but you're losing a lot without realizing that you're losing a lot and you know you you bring a visibility as one which is interesting but it's more than just visibility there's a lot of other stuff that you lose yes
Dan:absolutely I think I think the phrase I was thinking of when when you asked what's the what's the phrase it's like almost just in time Like, just enough to keep things going. Right? Making making sure you got the phone calls, making sure you've got the ability to answer phones. It's just a basic business need, and it's, again, just in time. Just make sure it works.
Dan:Right? Just make sure that we've got something there that that our salespeople, our support people can do the job. Doesn't have to be the most redundant. It doesn't have to be the all the bells and whistles. But no.
Dan:Absolutely. It's it's not just visibility, but it's also the the management of those individual devices if it's all spread out. If it's everybody has their own individual individual cell phone, there's really no way, you know, to to mass configure them to, make sure that everybody's utilizing them in the same way. But then also how do you how do you get the personal text messages off of that cell phone? Right?
Dan:The the individual messages that somebody might be sending that you want insight into. You don't have any you don't have any way of doing that, and you're not gonna have the person send you a 100 screenshots of these conversations. Right?
Max:Why would you need that?
Dan:I think what if they leave? I mean, what if the person leaves and then you lose all that contact information for that individual? Maybe they don't turn their cell phone in or they factory reset it before you can get that information off of it. Right? All of that data could be lost potentially, because that person, you know, either did it maliciously or just didn't know.
Dan:You can lose that information pretty easily that way.
Max:I don't care. Okay. Why is that important?
Dan:Right? I I mean, I think it just
Max:I'm serious. I'm gonna be hostile with you on this on this on this topic. I you know, you signed up for this. So I'm gonna be I would I I'm gonna play I'm gonna play the role here. We're gonna do a little role play here.
Max:I don't care.
Dan:Okay.
Max:Like, why you know, like, oh, you know, what difference does that make? You know? Sure.
Dan:Maybe and maybe it doesn't. I mean, there are segments of the business where it doesn't necessarily matter. But if it's a prospecting or a sales organization that a person has, you know, a 100 conversations with about orders or about, you know, their guaranteed SLAs or anything like that. I mean, it's it's gonna be a problem if you don't have that historical data into that customer's profile, what what they signed up for, what they agreed to when they expected things. You know, you could if it's a $100,000 order, I mean, that's a that's a good chunk of business that you could lose potentially because you don't have that information any longer.
Dan:But if that doesn't matter, again, like you said, you know, I just think having a dispersed form of communication, for lack of a better way of putting it, a non unified communication system, can be potentially damaging, just because, again, you don't you don't have that visibility into what's going on. Being able to to capture that information and then make decisions about what's actually happening can change your business, and we've seen that personally here, at Dialpad. We've seen companies change the way they've done business because of the information that they are able to capture.
Max:K. What's an example?
Dan:There's I don't know how much I can name drop on a call.
Max:Don't name drop. Just just give the give the use case.
Dan:Absolutely. They're, they're a customer of ours, and they utilized our contact center, license. Right? So they've they've got the transcription running, the recordings going for all of their contact center calls. And they are a high end retailer of a specific type of footwear.
Dan:And it wasn't so much the products they were offering. It was the inquiries that customers were having about a product line they did not have. So they were running reports because anecdotally, they were hearing stories, custom you know, reps were saying, oh, I think I heard this. Somebody asked me about this the other day. And I I ran a I ran a purse or I ran a, sales development team a couple years ago.
Dan:And things happen like that all the time. People say, oh, I heard this. Oh, I heard that. This might be an issue. This might be a thing.
Dan:You'd have to go back and listen to the call. Right? That could take an hour depending on where that was because you couldn't really pinpoint it. But what this company was able to do was to run a filter on all of their conversations over the last fiscal quarter, and they found over 60,000 mentions of a product that they did not offer. Their competitors did.
Dan:And then basically, the the rep either had to say, oh, I can't help you with that, but here's a product we do offer. Or they just say, we don't offer that. Sorry. Go to, you know, go to somebody else. The contact center managers took it to, you know, their executive leadership.
Dan:Executive leadership said, wow, there's an entire market share that we're missing out on. Our customers want this. Not only is it now their most popular line of footwear, but it's also one of their highest margin products to produce. So it's kind of a, a multi factor, almost an exponential amplifier of producing a product they didn't even know their customers wanted, but then also doing it at a margin where they're making, you know, great profits off of, the cost there for for actually producing the item itself.
Max:That's not a conversation you have with an IT department. And, I think the and the lines between UCaaS and CCaaS, unified communications and contact center, the lines between Gartner's definition of UCaaS and CCaaS are becoming more and more blurred. Right? You know? So Dialpad offers UCaaS and it offers CCaaS, but it's the same platform.
Max:It's not like you're going and getting a phone system and going and then getting up a contact center platform. Right? You're integrated. But so the the this example that you just gave. Right?
Max:You know, if you're in a traditional procurement sourcing sales cycle which, you know, is dominantly controlled by an IT team. Right? How would you even surface that kind of, you know, outcome in in that selection process? Right? Because an IT team isn't necessarily focused on what the, you know, salesperson is doing day to day.
Max:Like, their job is to make sure that they can get access to the systems that the company has selected, make sure they're they're working and, you know, it's not necessarily, you know, selecting features or or or choosing, you know, it's like that's it's it's a little disconnected in that way. Right? But saying, you know, hey, here's a here's a use case of a company that was leaking revenue to competitors and was able to use our and our platform to generate intelligence to go out and actually change their product line to go out and, a, acquire more revenue but stop leaking that revenue to, you know, and and market share. You you understand I'm a little flabbergasted. Like, how do you have that conversation?
Max:Like, where does that come up in the source of this? Because, like, oh, you know, do you have a Doctor? And what's your what's your what's your BCDR plans? And are you SAW compliant? And what devices do you run on?
Max:And do you have to fit you know, like like, that's the talk track that a lot of this stuff gets down to very quickly of, like, you know, oh, we still wanna use our phones. Can we use our physical phone? Like, you know, it's like, okay. Great. The phones work.
Max:You know, can we move on and talk about something else? Right? Like like, how how do you segue into that?
Dan:Definitely. I think, you know, for me, when I'm talking to an IT, you know, CIO, CTO, what have you, I just your everyday IT guy, it's how long does it take you to provision users? How how much of your time is spent creating a phone tree or rerouting, an IVR? And for me, it's how many, again, how many applications are you utilizing? Right?
Dan:Is it a separate contact center application and then a UCaaS application that you have to have 2 sets of login credentials, not just for the end users that you have to provision, but also as the admin, you have to maintain 2 separate portals. It's a different set of questions. Right? I I feel like sometimes to
Max:I I mean, I get that line of of interaction, but you're you're you're selling you know, that point, you're you're going down a path of saying, you know, personal pain that exists within the IT department that the the rest of the organization doesn't recognize or care about. Right? You know, like, how long does it take you to provision a new phone? Like, the sales, the CRO, the CMO, the c o I mean, like, they don't care about that. Like, this isn't, like, driving business for I mean, it's you can you can get into it from, like, saying we're trying to improve efficiency or trying to drive down costs, but, like, that's that's not like, nobody's having a board meeting saying, oh, we've increased the time to provision a phone by 42%.
Max:You know? Right.
Dan:Right. Well, okay. Let me take a different angle then. From an IT person's perspective, how often are you resetting passwords or somebody gets locked out and you don't know how to quantify? Maybe maybe we could redirect what kind of internal trainings are happening because these same five issues keep coming up all the time because people keep doing these the the wrong steps with their with their computers and their and their personal devices internally.
Dan:Right? That's another aspect of IT that if there's some sort of internal help desk that they have to call, we can capture that and quantify it to say, okay. You know, the IT team needs to needs to spend less time troubleshooting these things, and here's how much time they're spending currently. Right? What can we do to improve the end user experience for the everyday user?
Max:So let's say it's a mid market company and you've got 2,000 employees. Mhmm. You know, at 2,000 employees, you're probably running I mean, I don't know. I'm hoping that you've got 20 people in IT at that size. Actually, that'd be high.
Max:Probably be, like, 12 to 15 ish. You know, it's just kinda like a normal ratio. So thinking about the revenue being generated from a 2,000 person company and the expense of maintaining a 12 to 15 person IT team and department, you know, relative to that revenue or the rest of the operations, is that a selection process that's going into and really changing how a CFO is purchasing a phone system or approving a phone system purchase? Right? You know, that organization, it's not the the technology infrastructure that companies reporting into some line of business.
Max:Usually, it's a finance team. Right? And is that IT director or VP coming to the CFO and saying, hey. You know, we're gonna we're gonna save our ticketing time 15% in order if we implement this thing for our users? Like or I I don't I what I'm saying is is, like, I don't feel like that to me, it's a fantastic thing to have, but that's not a, like, oh my god.
Max:We gotta get this system right today. You know, like, now. Like like like, holy smokes. Like like, stop everything. Throw that other thing out.
Max:Let's go let's go put this into place.
Dan:Right. A really interesting way of putting it. But I think, you know, you may need to if it's a CFO you're talking to and you can tell them how much time and and effort we can save in IT, I do think that would register. But just being able to quantify it, right, I I think is the important piece, that I I think that would resonate with that with that CFO. Right?
Dan:Because if it's IT team spending way too much time in the weeds doing repetitive mundane tasks, like, that's not what we're paying them for. Right? We're trying to make sure that they're, you know, maintaining the infrastructure, doing the things that they need to be doing to to make sure the company's running, you know, in the right way.
Max:This is this isn't like an anti IT thing for me. This is just a Yeah. I know.
Dan:I
Max:how the organization thinks about this stuff. Right? So if we if we limit this to saying, the difference between having some sort of on prem system that you probably fully depreciated or you're in subscription support agreements, you know, you've got a, a a Cisco unified call you know, you've got a Cisco call manager. You've got a whatever on premise. Right?
Max:It's a big forklift. It's a big forklift for a company to go down these paths. Right? So I don't I don't see, you know, so my reaction to that again in the context of my, you know, my my my COO friend from from back in the days, I don't see this being like, oh, we're gonna improve your IT department's like response time being the driving factor to get off of your phone system when you look at it and and driving factor to get off of your phone system when you look at it and and you have to, like, then quantify that in terms of, like, you know, a TCO or an ROI evaluation being, like, oh, you know, we're gonna make our IT. You know, like, that's that that what I'm what I'm looking for is, like, what what is the organization?
Max:You know, and and I think we get stuck very easy when you're when you're intact to start talking about, like, oh, you know, the features are so great or the technology is so cool or we can do this thing or we can do that thing. And what what gets disconnected really quickly is if you're if you're intact, you care about this stuff because it's awesome. But if you're not in tech, you're like, who cares? And and so I'm I'm I'm I'm really fascinated and curious about like this like, okay, you've given an example of a c cast company that was was leaking revenue, but, you know, so that's specific to c cast. Like, how does this how would this fit inside the UCaaS side of the house where people maybe aren't running a I mean, the the line between UCaaS and CCaaS is blurred.
Max:Let's talk about that next. But, you know, for your, you know, vanilla, you know, small small mid you know, small medium enterprise, you know, company isn't running a contact center making these decisions and thinking about these things. You know, it's like, what's what's the other unlock they get out of this?
Dan:You know, and and Dialpad has trademarked our our a phrase called true cast. So having the the unified communications and contact center all in one platform. But more than that, even just instant messaging and, you know, being able to collaborate on one application instead of having to toggle back and forth between your drive and your desktop application and truly trying to put everything in one window. From a dial pad perspective, the ease of use, is something that that we take pride in. But, you know, being able to do do your daily functions of taking and making phone calls, sending messages internally and externally.
Dan:Right? Maybe you're confirming appointments outside the company. I think, what was it? Confirming appointments or even just, you know, sending confirmations for, you know, ticket numbers and things like that, can all be done from from one application. So I to me, it's streamlining the amount of systems that that some of these individuals are using every day and not having to have them toggle back and forth between 10 different windows or or a bunch of different tabs, trying to put all that right there on the screen.
Dan:And and we are very much of the idea that you can you don't have to have it all. Right? You don't have to have it all at once. You can sort of work your way up to what you think you need. You don't have to have the full blown contact center right away.
Dan:Right? If you're happy with your other solution, get your foot in the door with the UCaaS. See how that works. Try that on for size. If it doesn't, no big deal.
Dan:And then we can go you know, if if you like it, things are going well, you can jump into the the the whole thing. But
Max:In the Dialpad world, what's the difference between UCaaS and CCaaS?
Dan:Great question. You know, and and I'll frame this around a question that I get a lot. Being on the channel particularly, I'm I'm talking to partners, and they're like, what's your ideal, like, deal size? And and where do you see, like, the mix? Like, what is what is the mix of contact center and and UCaaS?
Dan:And typically, it's that sort of mixed play where you've got maybe it's a 200 customer 200 employee customer, and they've got, you know, a 10 or 20 person call center. I think to your earlier point, the idea of a call center has gotten has changed. It has evolved over the last 3, 4 years because we're not in these brick and mortar, 300 people sitting at a you know, in in a bunch of cubicles answering the phone anymore. But the mixed play with, you know, some UCaaS and then a small CCaaS contact center, really is where we where we do well just because it it gives it gives everybody best the best of both worlds, but maintaining that single login for all users. I'm not sure if I answered that question for you.
Max:In the Dialpad platform, what is the difference between UCaaS and CCaaS? Like, where's the line of functionality or or enablements or features or widgets or what it what you know?
Dan:Yeah. And not to feature dump because I know we we were just talking about that, and then it's like, oh, this is cool. But, like, Dialpad as a platform, you'll get transcription and recording regardless of your license type. So you have that dataset available to you, this sort of blind spot in a lot of organizations about what are we actually talking about these you know, every day. Whether it's a voice call, whether it's a meeting, we will do that across the board.
Max:Let's talk about that for a second. Mhmm. That's an interesting point. Give can you give me an example of that of actually being used by a company to generate some sort of intelligence around their operations? Because your your statement was, what are we even talking about every day, and, like, what are we doing?
Dan:Not to get too in-depth on the features, but there's a thing you can create called moments in Dialpad, where you can create a filter and tag all your competitors into it. So as you're going through all of you can search through all of your conversations that are happening within the organization. You can stratify permission sets for who's visibility and as a manager, what you can see and things like that. But you can take those conversations and find out how often, you know, internally we're talking about competitors. Who's coming up most this quarter or last quarter?
Dan:What do we need to do to change our approach in the market to say, okay. Well, are we discounting enough? Are our SPIFFs where they should be? Really trying to understand those conversations, even the internal conversations that are happening. Obviously
Max:This is internal and external? This happens? Okay.
Dan:You can turn it off if you don't want it on. Right? And, again, you can stratify how you you know, whose calls you want reported, whose you want transcribed, whose you don't. You know, that's all the admin's role within the organization. But we, you know, we do it all the time for definitely competitor mentions, discounting, you know, if there's deals that need to be closed, if it's if it's I'm not ready to sign yet or or they kick the can down the road for whatever reason.
Dan:We have phrasing that we recognize and we pull those reports for the sales team. And then that's a coaching opportunity even if it's not a contact center. Right? System just an AE that needs to learn how to close better, providing that insight to that manager so they can then, you know, coach that that person the same day instead of having to do it, you know, a week later.
Max:Let's let's wrap about this for a moment. So in a traditional sales organization, let's actually make it a little farther. Let's talk about revenue. Right? So you have a marketing team, and the marketing team is supposed to be driving awareness and inbound, you know, so MQLs into the business.
Max:And in the sales organization, you can either have an SDR BER that's attached to marketing or attached to sales. Right? So you you know, that that kinda goes back and forth. But so you'd have this like marketing BDR usually to an AE to then maybe an AM. So, you know, sales development to account executive salesperson to account manager, you know, relationship main.
Max:And then you've got maybe you you have his hand off into an operations team for delivery. Right? So, like, you've got kind of this pipeline for this organization. And, there's lots of sales enablement tools. Right?
Max:So you've got Outreach, SalesLoft, you've got Gong and Chorus and all these different things to help give you conversational intelligence on top of, like, traditional sales enablement platform which is really kinda like your BDR and and AE specific team. But then that doesn't really get licensed into the AMs or into marketing or into or into operations. I I'm I'm putting all that out there because I think it's important with the point that you just made is Dialpad gives you that functionality across every touch point that you have with a customer. So I'm hearing you say, like, if you've got somebody in your accounting department talking to a customer and the customer saying so and so competitor is giving me this price option and they're having a with finance. That's gonna get flagged in your system if you've got that turned on?
Dan:Correct. Correct. You can run you can set these reports to run, you know, as frequently as you want, whether it's on an individual level, whether it's a team level, whether it's the entire office or the you know, we we call them offices, but the entire offices but the entire organization. Right? You can cast as wide a net as you want, to to really truly understand, you know, what's being said.
Max:Okay. So that's an that's an interesting little, like, something you could do that you couldn't do beforehand. So, okay. So we were going going back. We were talking about it, like, UCaaS or CCaaS.
Max:You're saying that UCaaS includes the conversational, you know, moments. You're talking about moments of being able to capture moments and then report on it.
Dan:But where we where we start to see the contact center, build out is more on those features. Right? So we start with the baseline of the transcription and the call recording, which are absolutely separate technologies, by the way. So our transcription, our Dialpad AI, as we call it, can be running in a meeting, on a phone call, and you don't have to record the call. A lot of the competitors that you were just mentioning are usually dependent upon that call recording where it would get sent out, and then it'll process it and send it back to you with the transcript.
Dan:Right? We do it in real time, and we have over 40,000,000,000 minutes of conversations, which I don't know if you can do the math in your head, a little over 7000 years worth of actual conversational data. Simple questions like, hey. Play this song or add this to my grocery list. Actual contextualized business conversations.
Dan:But where where that starts to take take, the next step is in the contact center license where we can do screen pops because of a keyword being mentioned. So if I'm in the billing team and I get somebody that calls in asking about a support question, I can put an assist on the screen for that agent to at least help that customer along even though they called the wrong place. Or if it's a newer agent or somebody that's remote and they don't know how to access things or or how to troubleshoot right there on the phone, I can pop something on the screen for them. We call them real time assist. That will then walk them through that process.
Dan:So before they automatically escalate to a supervisor or go find their team leader, put the call on hold and go digging through their bookmarks to find something, I can put all that information, including a link to that resource right there on the screen for them in the contact center space. Some manager functionalities are also different in there, but, you know, barge, monitor, whisper, you can message them on the side, pretty standard call center functionalities. Dialpad's also doing a 12 month campaign for new AI features, and I'm happy to show anybody what those are as they come out. We started in April, and the first one was AI recaps. So generating just a 4 sentence summary, everything that was talked about in the conversation so you don't have to read through the entire transcript.
Dan:We're actually leveraging a private instance of chat GPT for that summarization engine. But then this month's, or I'm sorry, May's May's AI release was AI scorecards. So automating the process for the call center manager of setting out the criteria ahead of time. So, again, if you're a BDR team or sales development and they have to say these certain things in an order or they have to read some disclaimer verbatim at the beginning of a call, you can set that on a scorecard. So it automatically once it's done, it checks it off.
Dan:And even if you're only getting 40% of your grading, you know, done automatically, that's 40% of your time you're not listening to that call. So you have the rest of that time to you have that time back. I I know everybody likes to say that these days, especially with online meetings. We're ending early. I'll give you your time back.
Dan:But, you know, again, that one resonates with me personally because I used to run a sales development team, and it was pulling those calls, listening to those recordings for hours. And just being able to automate some of that not only would have saved me time, but it just it would have made me such a a much more effective supervisor in that role.
Max:I think the tweak that you wanna probably say there or I would say is, you know, your goal as a as an SDR manager, right, is to make your team more efficient so that way they can drive more revenue for the business. So if I'm if I'm playing my, like, hostile, like, COO guy role, right, I think your pitch to me would be more along the lines of, you know, your your sales managers can get more you know, can make your, you know, new hires and your sales team more efficient faster or, like, selling you know, like, that's so, like, okay. You can't, like, quantify it. Right? Would probably be my follow-up to that, which is probably be pretty I don't know if you could quantify it or not, but you could demonstrate it and say, hey.
Max:Look. You know, this is what we see on our stats. I've seen case studies and use cases. There was one that actually really surprised me. And this was this was a while ago, but it was an auto dealership, that had converted over to to Dialpad.
Max:Do you know this case study? And they were talking about it was specifically related to marketing intelligence And it and it triggered in my mind because, of what you were talking around, like, conversational intelligence of people just calling in. And and, and it was if if memory serves, it was wrapping back up until, like, what their marketing departments are doing in terms of advertising and then service and service repairs and all these other revenue touch points that they were getting with their customers.
Dan:Yeah. So there's a couple things we can do, in that regard. You know, car dealerships, as we know, are are extremely dependent upon surveys. Right? They almost always ask you to fill out no matter what you're doing with them, whether it's in the service department, whether it's, you know, the sales the sales guy that that got you the car, we can actually automate the CSAT scores that they that they wanna send out.
Dan:So, you know, we obviously still do the touch tone 1 through 5. That's pretty standard, I think, across the board, but we found that the data that is driven from those is, number 1, skewed extremely negatively, and then also that, the participation rate is extremely low. So not only are you getting low participation rates, you're also getting very skewed scores. So we're able to to quantify, you know, those conversations and grade those in real time, as they happen based on what was actually said in that call. So from a customer service perspective, being able to, you know, understand the the cost the end user customer experience, you know, pretty rapidly by automatically scoring a call based on the interaction itself is is something that that we rolled out last year, year and a half ago, and and found found it to be great success, honestly.
Dan:You know, and and think of it like I know we don't think of it as a call center, but most car dealerships have people that are calling outbound and and prospecting or people that call in because they are responding to a lead, or some kind of campaign that that's been put out there. Not only can we capture what number they called so that way, you know, we can tie it back to that specific campaign or whatever, you know, the the outbounding was. You know, we can then also understand that entire customer journey as they go through that process. Is that the use case you're talking about?
Max:Yeah. So so I mean okay. I mean, customer journeys are interesting. You can generate customer activity either by calling. So if you, you know, a classic SDR function and people cold calling.
Max:Or you can be marketing and, you know, to new new customers, prospects, or to existing customers, When when you start talking about capturing that customer journey and and, like, you know, what's an example of, like, intelligence or, you know, enhancement? What's the word I'm looking for here? You know, it's like, oh, we were if we had this you know, previously, this is how we did it, and we didn't have this. And now we do it this way, and we have this other thing, which is awesome for us.
Dan:You know? Sure. Self-service, I find, is is a is a hot topic, in that regard. Being able to find your own answers. You know, we all have been victim of the chatbot that goes in circles and doesn't help you.
Dan:But what if you apply another layer of intelligence that can not only remember what a good answer was. So if if I ask the question, it gives me the right answer, I go on my way. But then when you call in, Max, or you you message in, remembers what it gave me as an answer. And then it populates that because it got a good response or the chat ended because I found, you know, what I was looking for. You know, being able to see the things the customers have asked questions about before through a true omnichannel experience.
Dan:So one of the campaigns could be a Facebook, you know, messaging or Facebook, ad that runs out there. We can capture that when they message in over Facebook. Say, hey. I saw the ad, you know, and then capture everything that they've talked about in a single pane for whether the different ways that they've interacted, whether it is via the web bot, whether it's a social media platform, whether it's an email campaign. You can see the entire customer journey.
Dan:So as an as an agent, I'm not asking this person, hey. How did you hear about us? I already know when they when they, you know, contact us regardless of what form it is. You know, customer journeys, I've I've I love seeing this stuff get automated and then also just populated for the agent. It's just the con the context that it provides, to be able to have that better conversation and also get that person when they decide to escalate to a real live agent, getting them to their destination more quickly and more efficiently because you're not going in circles constantly.
Max:Big issue with you talk about, like, virtual agents, you know, and chatbots and things like this is is programming them. You know? Historically, you have to go through and somebody has to program that chatbot with potential inputs and outputs. And then, you know, there's an inference engine that can then apply it. And then depending on sophisticated thing is.
Max:And and now with LLMs coming on the market, I'm imagining these things are gonna start getting really sophisticated really quickly. But within the Dialpad world, like, how are you if if if you were either building out agent assist, you know, from a pop up, you know, and I mean, this isn't like an instant thing. Let's say, you know, Dialpad is running for within a company for 6 months, and you've captured, I don't know, some number of calls, 10,000 phone calls, you know, 10,000 interactions. Is there a way for the customer to start seeing that and seeing those patterns and auto create stuff based on pattern that's Dialpad's capturing? Like, how sophisticated has this AI and this reporting gotten to the point of it being like, hey.
Max:You know, we looked at this and we read through the last quarter's worth of phone calls, transcriptions, and this is your fill in the blank top x items and, like, you know, here's how you, you know and solve this first one first or program it or change it or publish it or add it to your IVR or do whatever the thing is and then be able to work down that list and actually have, you know, kind of like a guided direction.
Dan:So I would say there is gonna be some lift up front. Absolutely. I mean, I think that and and, like, you even just changing out desk phones. Right? There's gonna be a little bit of a lift when, you know, we get started.
Dan:And, you know, but most companies that we've worked with who who decide to go with the real time assist or, you know, provide those those cards, you know, they've already got a 3 ring binder that has every SKU imaginable in it, and those SKUs exist somewhere in a document. So at that point, all you're doing is copying and pasting. Right? The the configuration of these things is not coding. You're not having to go in and learn how to Python, you know, code this interaction into the database.
Dan:You're literally copying and pasting what you wanted to say, adding the attributes, whether it's the, you know, the SKU number, some nickname for that particular product or the product name itself. And you hit save and you apply it to the team that you wanna see it, you know, on there. Now I will say going forward, we are we are we are attempting to automate those processes as well to the exact use case that you were talking about where, you know, over over a quarter, we've seen these trends or this is the most common word that we've seen come up, so this is important. We do have word maps that that absolutely show you that information, but then you have to go and take that and make the decision on how to change the real time assist guard or, you know, update the talk track or the the way that the the self-service mod is configured. Because we can do those static if then statements.
Dan:Right? Are you looking for this? Yes. Okay. Here's your options.
Dan:Right? That that's pretty standard. But the really cool thing about our AI self-service is that it has the ability to scan multiple sources of unstructured data. So you can point it at a 100 page PDF and you don't have to say, I want you to pull answer you know, the answer from paragraph 3 on page 5. Like, it will go find that and then populate it for you.
Dan:So there is some self learning and self correction that happens, as is as it continues to learn. Skynet's not self aware yet, but we're getting close.
Max:Is Dialpad doing I mean, this is you're talking about, like, from the self-service bot. I mean, are you are you doing voice interactions, or is this all text?
Dan:So the self-service bot itself is text. Right? But we do have the automated IVR workflows for, you know, tell me why you're calling today. I wanna speak with a pharmacist or, you know, whatever. There is that component to it as well.
Dan:And even from the chatbot, you can escalate to a voice call if that was something that you were wanting to do.
Max:Should I be expecting to hear some announcements soon of, you know, Dialpad has gone to, you know, in leveraging GCP's Dialogflow or your own engine to actually make, you know, a a a voice based IVA?
Dan:That may be above my pay grade. However, I would say that that's sort of the direction we're headed. You know, our our development team, we put 40% of our of every dollar back into r and d, because we feel like we're at that hockey stick moment, right, where this is it's even in the last 6 months with chat gpt. Right? AI, everybody's talking about it, and we're in such a unique position to be able to continue to enhance these features, that I I think something like that is very much in the realm of possibilities.
Max:So now you have to exist inside of an ecosystem that's not I mean, this isn't like, what's what I'm looking for? You know, organizations are gonna have some sort of productivity suite. You know, they're gonna be I mean, for all intents and purposes, they're either gonna be on, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. And Teams has sucked a lot of the air out of the room from a, you know, text collaboration, meetings, and, you know, their voice platforms. We can get into an argument about whether or not the team's voice is good or bad.
Max:That's not really the issue. And Microsoft's plans around direct routing and then orchestrator connect and everything else that they're doing. Workspace is a more interesting anomaly. You know, I feel like, they're finally pushing and trying to figure out chat, but, you know, Slack exists because Google didn't have a chat thing that worked. And Google Meet is been pushing hard, you know, so now Google's actually working to create a a really good video product as well.
Max:You know, so these are two areas that were very, like, core inside of the UCaaS experience and inside of Dialpad. Right? You know, you've got your own video meetings tool and you've got, you know, you know, both a ability to SMS and chat externally as well as, you know, chat internally. And how how do these how do you guys coexist with these other platforms at this point? Like, what is you know, what what are customers really doing here?
Max:I mean, you know, the Microsoft customers are banned in Teams because they wanna use Dialpad for everything instead? Or you do you have to figure out how to cohabitate? And then what happens with your meeting platform because all your fun AI stuff runs on top of your meetings and not on top of Microsoft Teams meetings or, you know, Google Workspace or, you know, fill in the blanks?
Dan:Yeah. Definitely. So we you know, just off the bat, we do have full integrations with both Office 365 and Google Workspace. So pulling encounter events and, you know, active directory syncing with both platforms so those contacts are are pulled in at the same time. You're not recreating them within, you know, 2 different platforms.
Dan:Being able to sync those the that that data, absolutely, you know, goes hand in hand with with what Dialpad can offer. But no. Absolutely. I mean, Teams is a huge one, and we have the direct routing integration. We have a secondary integration that, should be, you know, released by the end of this year.
Dan:But being able to pull in those functions and you're absolutely right that, you know, the meetings platform is a struggle because we can pull in the messaging and the phone calls. But, you know, Microsoft obviously didn't want us to bring in our own meetings platform into their instance. But I've seen it go both ways too because I've been on a call with the CEO who saw the full suite of Dialpad and said, why are we on Teams? Dialpad can do everything in more than than Teams can, because we get all the data and the analytics right here within the application itself. But then I've also you know, there there's a lot of customers that are very much they dig their heels in because they've invested so much in in the the Office 365 Suite that they're like, hey.
Dan:You know, Dialpad contact center is gonna be standalone on the side, but everything else we're doing is gonna be within Microsoft Teams. So it's gonna go both ways, and it really just depends on the need of the organization. Because if, you know, if you're doing direct routing, there's licensing costs that are that are involved in that because you have to have the specific, you know, license types to be able to enact that. And if you're talking about a handful of users, maybe that's not a big deal. But if you're talking about an entire organization, maybe it does make sense to move over to Dialpad.
Dan:Just kinda depends.
Max:So going back to, like, our earlier thing we were talking about, and you were bringing up IT efficiency. Right? So a big push for Microsoft Teams specifically is just IT efficiency. We've already got this application. It gets bundled with every install that we do.
Max:It's already on the desktop. We don't have to do anything for now. Right? Okay. Fine.
Max:We can talk about it. No. It's okay. You know, the the the power of the bundle is pretty significant. And let's see.
Max:I mean, if even if the EU forces Microsoft to debundle Teams, I don't think that they could force Microsoft to charge people to use teams. They would just have to install it separately. Right? So so okay. So teams gets removed from the 365, like, office bundle, but it's still free for an organization to use.
Max:And it's gonna still deeply integrate with SharePoint and everything else that 365 is doing. And you just have to deploy it with your Intune instance anyways. You're like, okay. We're install Word and install install Teams. I I will see.
Max:We'll see what the EU does with this one. But, I'm sure there's lots of people that would would would love for something to happen there. But, anyway, so so that that, like, push to, like, IT efficiency, you know, that's I I that is a big push with teams. Like, it's not a cost driver, by the way. If you don't know those teams is as expensive.
Max:Right? So voice enabling teams and doing meetings in teams, it's not cheap. Like, it is expensive. It's not there's cheaper options out there if you're trying to optimize for for cost. Teams is probably not where you wanna go.
Max:But it has the whole oh, we already have it on it's already running everywhere. We don't have to do anything. It's easy for our team IT team to manage from a single console in theory. You still have to do a bunch of PowerShell and all those other fun stuff. I feel like the more I've pushed you on some of these things, the more that that's come back to it, which is exposing and being able to report and provide analytics and and and kind of, like, opening up this other untapped element of data that people don't currently have.
Max:Like, nobody's profiling their Slack instance for conversations inside of their company for what's actually going on. Nope. Nobody's doing that for teams. You know, there's DLP tools looking for people trying to, like, exfiltrate stuff they shouldn't, but it's not like this is what your company is talking about. I I find that very kind of interesting here of of like you know why should you care about doing something and running a dial pad or running you know you can ask x cas c cas true cas block has right as a platform could help it I don't know.
Max:Like, it's you know, it's like so that's that's interesting to me. You know? It's like all of a sudden you say, hey. You know, business leader, you know, do you know what your people are talking about? Not like a like a creepy I'm gonna spy on everybody way but like, you know, what's going on with the market?
Max:What are customers asking for you? What are they saying? You know, I'm assuming you guys I think you actually know the answer to this question. You guys do sentiment analysis. Is that in just the CCAS or you get that in the UCAS side of the house as well?
Dan:UCAS and CCAS have the the Oh, really? Assessment analysis. Mhmm.
Max:That's cool. So if somebody calls up and is just, like, calling an extension in your office, like, randomly and, like, starts, like, swearing at the person, you're gonna be able to flag, like, something happened to her.
Dan:Absolutely. And and I think, you know, even to that end, you asked the question around, like like, how many nobody's really running these reports. Nobody's really doing this. I just to me, it's always been a blind spot in these regardless of the, you know, whatever the organization is. Being able to understand the call habits of a rep that's calling into an IVR, and they only hit the IVR and then they hang up.
Dan:Typical typical call center or typical even even just on the UCaaS side, before that, it was just peg tie peg counts and timers. Right? You knew how many and how long. Well, what did that person actually do when they got to the menu? Did they hang up and then say, yeah.
Dan:I made a 100 dials today, but they were all 10 seconds long. Being able to understand that that's a coaching opportunity. And even if No. No. Keep going.
Max:I'm I'm I'm just like my my now I'm churning. I'm now we're onto something here, Dan. Like, let's this is this is getting interesting.
Dan:And now I I wanna tie this back to sort of the conversation around the training element, but then also, you know, how do you talk to somebody internally regardless of title? If you can train someone up or train them out because you understand their habits, because they're not taking the coaching, you know, think about it now. You hire somebody, you give them a 6 month runway to figure it out, and then you put them on a PIP because after that, they're not performing. You give them another 3 months to get the 90 day PIP going and figure that out. You've wasted almost a year trying to get that person up to speed.
Dan:But if we can shorten that cycle, give them the tools they need, and you're making a decision within the 1st 6 months as opposed to the 1st year, you're saving that company x number of dollars for that new hire. And maybe I misrepresented the story, but that's one of my one of my reps always likes to tell.
Max:There's this, like there's a certain thing that I see with, like, with, like especially with the work from home and remote where it was like, oh, we have to monitor and keep track of what's going on with our people. And I hate that. I'm not a fan for this. I'm not trying to say, like, do screenshots of people's desktops and, like, monitor them. Because, I mean, again, you have to go back and, like, figure it.
Max:You know? Like, what what are you doing? Like, just don't do this. There's there's better ways to, like, score and measure productivity. What I think what you just said that really was fascinating to me that really triggered a a thought process for me more anything else was like, the organization scale by identifying, you know, creating lines of business, creating processes, understanding the input and output, hiring people to do the in between of that.
Max:Right? And whatever function it is. Right? Or we're I'm gonna get I'm gonna get cream for this one because I'm distilling people into, like, robots. Right?
Max:But but then as you scale that company at that organization, right, you have absolutely no idea what's actually going on. Right? So it takes a long time to build goodwill and a relationship with a customer and it takes one interaction to kill it and so you start thinking about it. It's like, well, every time a person from inside your company is on the phone call with an external anybody, customer vendor, government, you know, agency, like, whatever it is, like, what's actually going on there? And not from a creepy way of being able to, like, surveil everything that's happening inside of your company, more along the lines of something really went sideways on this phone call and, like, maybe you should know what it is.
Max:You know, I mean, that sounds like a really interesting piece of mind conversation. Like, you know, hey, hey, COO. Do you you don't care about your phones, but would you care if your foreman is cussing out a $50,000,000 customer? I mean, maybe that maybe that would be interesting for you.
Dan:Definitely. And and the way that I like to think about it is the customer experience starts with your internal user's experience. And if they have 20 windows open and they gotta find different information over here and over there, it's gonna it's gonna be a longer phone call. It's probably gonna be a follow-up or a second call resolution as opposed to that first call resolution. Truly believing internally here at Dialpad also that the customer experience starts with our individual.
Dan:Because if we're not doing our job, it's it's it's a poor experience for the outside customer as well. So I think that's extremely relevant to the use case you just said as well. Like, just making sure that we're providing the standard of of care and quality that our our customers expect. Being able to quantify that. Right?
Dan:Brand is extremely important, you know, to any organization. Or we we know the big behemoths out there in the world, when you get your coffee, when you order something online, like, there's a certain service level that we're all accustomed to with those different organizations. And it's like, if you have an off brand experience, you you tweet at them or you you fill out a survey and they give you rewards points, but they sent you something else because it was that bad. It's that important to them that the end user experience is is good. And and I think I think spot on with that with that executive to say, like, this is what your informant's doing.
Dan:How does that reflect on the brand? How does that help your, you know, your organization as a whole, or how does it hurt it? I think that's a huge I'm gonna have to steal that because that's I think that's extremely important.
Max:What other information are you gleaning out of data, you know, within within this platform? Right? We've we've talked about it in terms of, like, you know, agent assist and cards popping up of, like, you know, this this caller is calling about this thing, and, like, here's an answer to the question before you have to go look for it. You know? Talked a little bit about programming chatbots.
Max:You've alluded a little bit into, you know, chat gpt and driving these interactions. But, like, what what other, like, example I mean, because you think phone system, everybody immediately goes like a CDR. Like, I wanna know who called, who, when, and how long the call was, but it doesn't really CDRs don't tell you anything. They're just like a it's a it's literally a billing record. Right?
Max:So things of data and analytics, have you seen people use or or, you know, you wouldn't immediately think about and go to?
Dan:So my sales reps are traveling constantly. They're on the road. I have one sales rep that will drive anywhere under 10 hours. He's he's unreal. But he's constantly on meetings in the car, and he has to be hands free.
Dan:So being able to host his meeting and not have to pull over and take notes because the transcript is running. So if he says, oh, you know what? I'm on I'm on the road. When I get to the hotel, I'll send you that information. Tags it as an action item, puts it on his profile.
Dan:So that way, when he gets the summary, not only does he have the entire conversation summarized in 4 to 5 sentences, he's got a list of action items that he can complete or send out to the rest of the callers to say, hey, Dan. You said you were gonna follow-up with some text technical documents. I'm gonna send him a quote. Let's get this done. So when he's stationary, he's got all that stuff right there for him.
Dan:So our that's our Dialpad meetings platform. I mean, he's on like I said, he's on the road constantly. So being able to do that hands free, not have to worry about missing notes. Right? It's a valuable tool that we use internally all the time.
Max:That's a fun one. Right?
Dan:Yeah.
Max:It's not we're not this is this is different. Right? We're not having a speeds and speeds conversation here. Right? This isn't like, hoping at this point the dial pack can make and receive phone calls and have voice mail.
Max:So, like, let's I wanna talk about that.
Dan:Table stakes. Right? I mean, the yeah. And and that's the thing. You know, it's it's trying to find those those things that people need that they they haven't thought about yet.
Dan:You know, that they're just kind of used to doing things a certain way, and how can we make it easier for them and acts accessible. Being able to access your own your own call recordings and transcripts to find out, oh, you know what? That call didn't go quite well. Let me go review that myself instead of having to wait for somebody to point it out to you, you know, giving you some tools to do these things.
Max:Somebody replacing a phone system and looking for the cheapest option to replace a phone system is very different from telling them I can help your sales team be more efficient and do these things that you can't do today. I can help I can help you scale customer interactions and preserving your brand. Right? Like, that's that's an that's an interesting nontechnical outcome that people care about.
Dan:Absolutely. And, honestly, like, I mean, we'll just qualify a deal. I mean, if if somebody's just looking for dial tone, we're most likely not gonna be the right fit for them. Right? And we'll tell them that because go I used to work for Telco that did POTS lines.
Dan:Go get a POTS line. If that's all you need, get some copper, and and and we'll talk to you we'll talk to you later. But and there's the you know, some people there's businesses that can run that way, and that's fine. And and we we're not a fit. It's really the outcomes that people are looking for that that that's where we wanna deliver because it it provides value, provides the the monetary, you know, implications for them trying to wrap our heads around where we're going and and and what they need next.
Max:So, this is a feature question. I'm not sure if Dialpad does this or not, but something I saw recently and it was, actually, I had 2 I had 2 I had 2 experiences recently that were really surprising to me. 1 was I called into a company and went through a phone tree and and it ended up, like, being directed to voice mail. And I I hung up the call. And I got a callback in a couple minutes with, like, you know, hey, I'm returning your phone call, you know.
Max:And it wasn't like I called into, like, an individual person's voice mail. Like, it and so so it was surprising me because the comp you know, this this wasn't expecting this organization to have like, nobody's ever called me back when I've hung up a call, like, calling into a you know, any company ever before ever. So that one was shocking to me. And then second one, it wasn't like I had called and, like, like, a person had she had missed the call and, like, called me back from her cell phone or something. It was like you could tell it was actually integrated to the system.
Max:So that was that was pretty cool. So is there is there an option to do something like that with Dialpad?
Dan:Yeah. So I I place test calls into my system all the time. So that's what I do. I demo all day long. And if I dial it and and I and I hang up, as long as it hits the menu, it will show as a missed call.
Dan:You can set the parameters for how long a missed call actually is. Right? Anything over the Internet is gonna take a second or 2 because you gotta make the three way handshake, right, for the connection. But, yeah, we can absolutely do that. And then, if you leave a voice mail or if you hit the voice mail, it's gonna show as a missed call because somebody didn't answer it.
Max:So, that's still, like, manual driven. I mean, there's there's, what was the feature most contact centers? Virtual hold, my favorite thing of all time. Like, you you don't have to wait in queue. You can just press the button.
Max:We'll call you back when it's your turn. Can you can you insert missed calls into virtual holds?
Dan:You know that? I don't know that off the top of my head. I wanna say yes, but I I don't wanna speak out of turn. I'd have to I'd have to look at that.
Max:So the other one I'm starting to see now and I've had and I've I've seen this in a few places where you call and maybe it's after hours. Office is closed. They don't answer the call, whatever. And an automated text message comes back. Sorry.
Max:We missed your call. And and it's not again, it's not person driven. This is an absolutely 100% automated, like, with with a kind of, like, a menu prompt, almost like a chatbot of, like, you know, directions, hours, you know, like, some basic stuff in the initial message, but then, like, additional information to get more details out of them. Is this I mean, also, you know, you talk about, like, interactions with Facebook Messenger and, like, these different things. Can you, you know, is this something that you're supporting you can roll out and you can start talking about?
Max:Because, I mean, this this goes back again to, like, just capturing it's so hard to to get somebody to call you as a business, and you don't wanna lose them when they finally do.
Dan:So first things first, we can do, you know, the automated callback if you opt into it. So I just want to clear on that one. Now if somebody hangs up before that gets there, I don't know about that. Opted. I got it down on the if you're on a dial pad meeting, I'd have a action item to follow-up with you.
Dan:But the automated text you know, thank you for calling. It's, you know, it's after hours or nobody's available. Yes. Automate that text message sent out. They can reply to it, and that text will then go to that main line of that, you know, call center or that department or that UCaaS user depending on what level, you know, where where are they called.
Dan:But, yeah, then then from there, you're still gathering more information. Right? And I think if I just hung up and it's or, you know, if I dialed in and it says it's after hours and it automatically sends me a text message and I'm still looking at my phone, I'm gonna reply to that text message and say, oh, here's the information you're asking for.
Max:Is that something that's built into the CCaaS side of the house, or is that available as possible on the UCAS side of the house?
Dan:It's available on the UCAS and the CCAS because I can set that on my personal number as well to say, here's my automatic text message after hours. You know? Here's my boss's number, or here's the guy that's on the West Coast. Whatever that looks like, I can go ahead and auto pop I can populate that information to go when my working hours are over.
Max:I have okay. I'm gonna give you a scenario. I gave you a situation. And I and and I think I know the answer to this one, but I wanna hear it from from you directly. I know a guy who, runs public storage.
Max:He's got a lot of self storage facilities. It's not public storage, but it's, you know, self storage facilities. And, basically, there was a conversation about how he he discovered that his, you know, his his team, his staff. You know? So they they spent a lot of money marketing to get people to come rent, storage units from them.
Max:So billboards, advertising, Google, whatever it is. Right? So there's a a significant amount of advertising that goes out into getting people to come in and rent these things. They try to automate it much of the process. You can go to the website and you can rent by yourself, yada yada yada.
Max:But there's a lot of scenarios where you end up calling and you call and you speak to a person. And what he discovered by accident was people were calling in to rent units in facilities and that unit was unavailable. It's like, oh, we wanna rent an 8 by 8. Oh, we don't have any 8 by eights. And and his employees were not saying but we could give you a 10 by 8.
Max:We've got these 7 by nines available or whatever, you know, whatever these variations were. And so he discovered this and his response to it, of course, was like, you know, extreme concern. We'll use that phrase and started recording every single phone call that was going into these phone numbers for the, you know, that were being answered by his team and started listening to every single call to do. And it was, you know, it was a coaching driven activity. But, like, now I don't know what I don't know, and I need to know what I don't know.
Max:And I gotta listen to all these phone calls, and I'm hoping he was listening to them sped up and not just, like, you know, like, wasting his life because this guy had much more valuable things to be doing with his time. So if you were at a dinner table and you heard somebody say this to you or you heard somebody talking about this, what is your I mean, then you put your Dialpad hat on. Like, paint a picture of a different world and how this works differently with Dialpad.
Dan:Sure. So I would start asking him questions around how much time and effort goes into that particular activity because I wanna hear one of the one of the tips I got early in my sales career was ask somebody what's going well because, inevitably, they'll tell you, like, 1 or 2 things that are, and then they'll tell you 3 things that are. Like, oh, but this could be better. You know? And and you get the conversation started, and you start to understand what their problems are without asking them what their problems are.
Dan:Because they'll start telling you things even just voluntarily because you want you're asking them about the positives, and then inevitably, it'll something negative will come up. So I would start asking, you know, these questions around, first of all, how much time that's taking him? And then what it would mean to him if he could ramp those individuals up or or provide suggestions in real time to to save that conversation or save that customer from going somewhere else where they have 8 by eights available. That's that's how I would do it because then he would say, oh, that'd be great. You know?
Dan:But how do we do that?
Max:And I
Dan:can say, oh, well, I can show you. But then you can also, you know, see the in the in the contact center space or even in your your UCaaS space. Being able to see, like, a stack ranking of who's talking for how long, what are the sentiment trends. Right? The up and downs of the of the week.
Dan:Being able to see that information, so you can make decisions on, again, coaching up or coaching out. Right? If you need to get rid of somebody and and get a better somebody better suited in there, you know, what kind of value would that bring to your organization to know that you've got at least you got 4 rock stars here that that just need a little a little push. Right? And giving that that real time assist or giving them more consistent feedback, what kind of a difference would that make?
Dan:That's my answer.
Max:So he had a very he had a very fundamentally core, you know, issue. Right? So he had he had, his core issue was he was losing revenue. Mhmm. And then there was, like, what was actually causing?
Max:What was the root cause of losing revenue? But, like, really the fit the issue here is what he was looking at is, you know, in the real estate space, you know, the the valuation of your properties is based on operating income. Right? So how much revenue do you have coming in the door? Like, it has massive swings in terms of what the value of the asset becomes.
Max:So his his basic problem was that he was losing revenue. He was spending money on marketing, and he wasn't capturing the revenue that he was spending the money on marketing for and didn't have a way of quantify how much money he was actually losing. So there was this fear around the perception of I'm losing an unknown amount of money, but I know I'm losing money. And how much how much money are we actually losing here? Like, what is the actual impact to the business and the asset?
Max:And, like, from that fork, there's almost, like, there's, like, 2 things that you solve in technology. Right? We talked about with Dialpad. The first thing that you solve is, like, can you give that agent a prompt when somebody calls in and says, are there 8 by eights available? And they're saying, no.
Max:There's no 8 by 8, you know, 8 by 8 available or 10 by tens or 20 by 20 or whatever it is. You're talking about using an agent assist and prompting that agent to say, but wait, there's more. You could have this other thing instead. Right? Agent assist or 2, actually giving him analytics and sentiment, which says this is what happened with these calls and this was the disposition of the call.
Max:Person called in. They got what they needed. They didn't go. They needed. They they leased a unit.
Max:They didn't lease a unit. You know? And what is that actual analytical trend of it? Right? So capture more revenue, make your agents more efficient, you know, training opportunity live, but also actually being able to quantify and say, what the heck is going on with all these calls?
Max:Because, you know, you can't listen to, you know, 500 calls a week. Like, it's just not gonna happen for them.
Dan:Yeah. So and and I'm I'm I love this use case. I think it's extremely relevant, and Dialpad does have a place at in this example. The next 2 AI features that we're releasing are called AI Playbooks and AI coaching hub. AI playbooks is a talk track generate sorry.
Dan:An AI generated talk track, that that shows up on the screen. So instead of just having the real time assist, which are great, the next best action for this call. So to that example, if 8 by eights are gone. Okay. Well, we don't have any of those left.
Dan:Okay. Then what? Pop the next you know, pop the next line item on that particular, you know, screen, the side panel that says, try and try a 7 by 9. Try a 10 by 11 or 10 by 10, whatever that looks like. So that next best best action that's appearing right there live for that agent.
Dan:And then the coaching hub is how you take all of this information and present it to the coach, to the manager of that of that group to say, this is who's performing well. This is the sentiment trends. These are the most common phrases. These are these are the call outcomes. These are the most common, you know, these are the most common outcomes.
Dan:These are all the dispositions. Centralizing that into a hub for the coach to say, you know, even just to report to their supervisor. This is how we're trending. This is what we're doing. Right?
Dan:Use case fell right into my lap because that's exactly where we're going the next 2 months.
Max:Is this can you do this both on inbound and outbound? Because you have an outbound so so this is the same thing. So if you're doing outbound prospecting, you get this data. You can you can surface these things. You can do assists.
Max:You can do you know, eventually, you'll be so playbooks are available outbound. Playbooks are available. And now this is cool. Okay? Took us a little while to get here, Dan.
Max:But this is this now becomes this isn't a phone system. This is a make more money for your business system. Right? Like, it's, I'm going up. I'm gonna You
Dan:can't fit that on a car. You can't put that on a billboard, though. Right?
Max:Yeah. Yeah. We it it's not very elegant. Right? You need something a little more elegant.
Dan:We'll do refine it.
Max:We'll we'll we'll come up with something. I'll trademark it, and I'll I'll, we'll we'll sell
Dan:it back to me. Yeah.
Max:I'll sell it to Craig. So this is actually okay. So now this gets very interesting because now we're talking about, like, capturing data and analytics internally and externally to then figure out what is actually going on. We you know, not like this subjective. We think this is happening, but what's actually really happening.
Max:Being able to do sentiment analysis against that. Are people happy? Are they not happy? Was the call good? Was the call bad?
Max:Are we offering upsells? Do we not? Are we prompting, you know, things like we're having this problem? We see now. See, this is this is those are more fun comp see.
Max:We've we've gotten to the business side of stuff. It took us a little bit, but we got there. So let's go back to my first thing. Right? You know, we're we're talking and I'm a I'm a grumpy COO and I say I don't care about phones.
Max:Right? Well, your follow-up would be something more along lines of, well, do you care about making more money? You know? Like, I mean, probably not that hostile. That's a really probably not not wise not wise kind of response.
Max:Right?
Dan:Depends on the persona. But yeah.
Max:If I'm a grouchy, you know, construction COO, maybe maybe that is the appropriate response. Very interesting. Okay. What else is on the roadmap for I mean, have you announced how how much of of this AI roadmap has been announced? Like, how much you know, it seems like to a certain degree I mean, I'm sure I'll be surprised.
Max:But, like, in terms of, like, features, there's there's only so many features you can introduce to a phone system. I mean, at that point, it starts talking about, like, how you use those features and how you use the data and what the analytics and now in your case, like, AI and how you can enable more things out of this AI engine. Right?
Dan:Yeah. So, officially, the 4 that I've mentioned, the AI recaps, the AI scorecards, the coaching hub, and the playbooks, those are those are the 4 that have been released. Now they've given us a couple others that that are they don't have due dates yet. So I they haven't really told us, like, when we can talk about them yet. But, you know, I I have a feeling given that our third one's gonna be released here in the next 10 days or so before the end of June, that they'll have to tell us something because everybody keeps asking me that same question.
Dan:Okay. What's next? What's happening? Like, what what can
Max:we talk about?
Dan:But, no, I just I think you know? And and it may not even be an internal feature enhancement. Right? It could be another leveraging of the 3rd party to make make more out of the data or make it more concise or, you know, we have this plethora of of information with our number of analyzed minutes. But, like, what can we do with that to provide better outcomes and help customers make more money, right, to to to tie kinda all back together?
Dan:But yeah. The
Max:I would love it if you guys released some sort of agent bought integration. I don't know what what the proper terminology is. You know? So when somebody sends me a Teams or a Zoom or a Webex or, I mean, endless variation of different meetings, that data could be captured for me out of those meetings as well to, like, one place. I didn't have it in 15 different places.
Max:Because as much as I try to control, like, what video conferencing platform I'm on just for my own sanity, like, you know, it's each each I could be on 8 in one day. Like, it's no joke.
Dan:Yeah. And and that's that's kind of the, I would say, the one drawback. Right? We don't we don't lay over onto a bunch of other technologies. Right?
Dan:The Dialpad AI is is proprietary.
Max:But That's my official feature request. Tell them to figure out how to do it.
Dan:You're not the only one. But, great. But yeah. No. It's it's gonna stay within the Dialpad meetings platform and and maybe some of the allure to it.
Dan:Right? To to get people to come over. But
Max:Dan, any last words? Anything we haven't touched on that you think we should talk about and and get into or or something that we glossed over that, you know, we should probably spend some time on a lot?
Dan:You can't spell Dialpad without AI. Somebody dropped that on the
Max:Oh, it's backwards, but it's
Dan:It is backwards. It is backwards. So, it is not it is not Dalepad. It's Dialpad. But, but, no, somebody dropped that in a meeting a couple weeks ago, and and I've just it's it's it's great to see people's eyes roll when when I say it.
Dan:But
Max:It's the perfect dad joke if you're in tech. It's just so funny.
Dan:But, no, I mean, just Dialpad truly thinks of itself as a as an AI data company who happens to work in telephony and and communication space. So
Max:For now?
Dan:For now.
Max:To soon to take over the world when Skynet activates.
Dan:Right.
Max:Alright. Dan.
Dan:Enjoy this conversation.
