Jim Tennant Regional VP, Channel - West at Talkdesk on Talkdesk as a Business Solution
Welcome to the tech in 20 minutes podcast where you will meet new tech vendors and learn how they can help your business. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. Hi. I'm Max Clark, and I'm talking with Jim Tennant, who is the regional vice president for West at Talkdesk.
Speaker 1:Hi, Jim.
Speaker 2:Afternoon, Max. How are you?
Speaker 1:I'm excellent. Thanks. Thanks for
Speaker 2:having me on the show.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for joining. So, Jim, tell me what does Talkdesk do?
Speaker 2:Talkdesk, if people aren't familiar with contact center software, Talkdesk provides a enterprise grade level of software for all types of use cases now, but generally designed for companies that have agents that are behind the phone or behind a computer screen that are adhering to or answering inbound, outbound calls in a contact center space.
Speaker 1:And it's also I mean, contact center is a lot more than just phone calls at this point. I mean, you're did did we talk about different communication methods as well? And you support a lot more than just phone calls.
Speaker 2:Exactly. So when you think of contact center today versus maybe 10 years ago, it goes into what we call omnichannel or multichannel, or, you hit a website and someone has a chatbot talking to you, or someone says, hey. Can I call you back in 5 minutes? The whole time is an hour to, you know, all call queues or multimedia type of channels. So collaboration's a big part of it.
Speaker 2:Chatting is a a very significant part of it. Skill based routing where those calls go and route. Screen pop ups, CRM pop ups, they wanted to integrate with an application they have. Complex center today versus even 5 years ago is so much more complex. Feature functionality and the requirements that that clients have today.
Speaker 1:You know, another thing that comes out of a conversation with people on in the contact center industry is this idea from some enterprises of we don't run a contact center because they don't think of it in terms of, oh, we have an agent and and cubicles and wallboards and these things, but that's also not exactly accurate. Right?
Speaker 2:That's correct. That's correct. In fact, it's funny as you bring it up. In the midst of what we're going through right now, right, unheard of and precedent at times with COVID 19, we're finding all new use cases where it could be simply I need to know how Jim is functioning at home. I need to see his KPIs in a report at home.
Speaker 2:Everyone is now being forced to work from home. So a case scenario we had just a couple weeks ago, a financial institution who the hedge fund managers were manning $1,000,000 portfolios of clients said, please don't call my hedge fund managers agents. They're people and they're managing $1,000,000 funds. But in our world, in our turns, they were agents working from home. Right?
Speaker 2:So the idea and the concept is I want my same work environment that I have remote the same as if that person were in the office. So, you know, nowadays, there's no commute to or from and so you have expanded hours of different people, we'll call them, not necessarily agents. But generally, world of contact centers, agents, admins, supervisors that need to see analytics, KPIs, reporting needs, and are generally the function of inbound or outbound activity, any type of communication, like you said, not just calls.
Speaker 1:So the hedge fund is an interesting example. I mean, if if you were talking to somebody and they said, well, we we're not a call center. We're not a contact center, but we need to do blank, blank, blank, blank, blank. You'd say, oh, well, you need a contact center. So what are other examples of, like, those blanks that people would say, oh, you know, well, that actually is us, and we we we need a contact center.
Speaker 2:Great question. We we hear from people all the time where either I don't have bodies to fill the chairs in my local geography. I don't have or can't find the talent that I need in a particular geography. And our response to that would be, well, why are you limiting yourself to that geography? You know, your skill set or your talent could be nationwide, could be global wide.
Speaker 2:So it's not uncommon for you or I to when we can travel again, you're you're in a hotel and you're calling room service when you think you're calling the 20 phones downstairs. When you've actually reached a contact center off premises of the restaurant making that order for you, that is then feeding that menu or order that was taken back to the kitchen for the chefs and sous chefs to prepare that meal for your room. Another use case might just simply be, as I mentioned, the financial institution. Anyone think of it this way, anyone needing a data dip, anyone needing access to a serum system to say, oh, Max, you've you've called 800 car service and you're driving a car that offers that car service from your steering wheel. And now that car service has said, well, you've never called before and it's the middle of the night.
Speaker 2:And based on your records of never calling before and our records of people calling in the middle of the night and based on the GPS of where your car says you are, you're in a dangerous area and a very cold area because we just checked the thermometer, right, in our system. So in the meanwhile, this is all happening in milliseconds where now we're getting deep into there's artificial intelligence. There's records from previous people calling in the same spot you were in the same conditions you were, and the system recognized that you don't frequently call in. So it's immediately gonna attract you to someone who's a skill setter person to say, Max, you've never called in. It must be cold where you are, and we'd like to get you some help right away.
Speaker 2:We have your location in this vicinity. Is that correct? So the speed of which customer experience now is moving towards, these examples are so much more common than someone simply saying, I wanna put bodies in the seats. I wanna put someone behind the phone and or I wanna just shorten my hold times and my, you know, hold times for people that have a lot of calls coming in.
Speaker 1:You mentioned customer experience and you and you kinda ended there with talking about hold times and and more of like traditional contact center KPIs of how many calls did an agent take or a person take in that span of time. But I mean, as it goes to to customer experience, if a company if an organization doesn't transition into a modern, sophisticated context center environment where they can integrate and you you talk about these analytics or CRM or application dips real time. I mean, what's what happens if they don't? I mean, what's the what's the the outcome if it's a, you know, maintain the status quo?
Speaker 2:Great great question. And and you can't move them out in overnight, and it will take time. But what you refer to and and majority of the contact center systems today are still on premise. Right? So I built this.
Speaker 2:I built it on premise, and and I will buy additional servers and cards to ensure that, you know, what I have is is ready for the future. But those that don't move to more of a automated, and I'll say cloud solution, have the quandary of, okay, I have what I have on premise to what I have on cloud. Can I have 2 of these platforms talk at the same time and share the same instance? Can they have the same record of a certain client? And do I, as a entity, wanna manage a premise solution and a cloud solution, right, as I forego and where I wanna scale and grow?
Speaker 2:It really depends on the the type of clients your call center is providing. I think, there are some that will maintain premise for for years to come and have no problem with that. But I also think there's some that will say, look. You know, our customer is expecting more from us now. So in order to compete with who I have out there, I do need to consider how I either augment what I have or is it time now to move what I have to the cloud.
Speaker 2:Right? Let someone else manage the infrastructure for it. Allow me to manage the call flow with it and manage the software that I use because we dramatically see SaaS applications, not slowing down at all. They will continue so that will become additional burden for anyone who's managing all of this on prem. And then it's a matter of the companies realizing, okay.
Speaker 2:How many how how many software applications can I integrate with? I'm talking about the client now. And they might have cloud silos and sales organization, operations, and product, and marketing that have gone out and I want this SaaS application to work with our agents and the IT staff is just burdened with all these different cloud silos that are being worked in every enterprise organization. So it's it's tough to manage when you're doing everything on prem.
Speaker 1:So in the contact center space, Talkdesk is a relatively young company. Why Talkdesk versus, you know, an another contact center provider? As people are making this decision and evaluating this choice and looking for maybe it's they're they're starting up with a contact center scratch because they need to solve a problem with, like, conversational chatbots or WhatsApp integration or these different things, or they're on prem and they're looking to go off prem, you know, cloud based. I mean, what is the driving factor into Talkdesk? I mean, what is it about Talkdesk that that you excel at?
Speaker 2:The the appeal and traction, I think, for Talkdesk now is people are recognizing and if they're okay with someone coming into a marketplace and being a disruptor, if they can build an understanding of what the platform is, and we talk about our platform in in the first call we have with a client, they'll understand the scalability, elasticity, the the growth opportunity with someone like Talkdesk that's on a microservices. It's like DoorDash, like Uber. It's like our iPhones. I personally choose to go out and buy a phone that has these features and functionalities that I can scale and grow with. I could go back and I sold Motorola's foot phones in the day.
Speaker 2:I I could go buy that. And, okay, it's limited to so much, I know, and it's limited so much capacity. And, yeah, new 5 g is gonna help me a lot with my broadband. But, you know, I'm also to the tune of, okay, if there is something out there that is proven and it's technology and Talkdesk, as you mentioned, we're just shy of 10 years old, the youngest and fastest company to be a leader in the Gartner Quadrant, being recognized by the Gartner's, IDCs, the Forrester's, to be able to say on this platform, a, we don't have to manage something that we did legacy and I'll call it Gen 1. We don't have to manage an instance or thousands of clients that might have the need to move into the cloud that because of my limitations, I can't do that for you.
Speaker 2:I have to manage you over in this other platform. B, oh, I wanna go with someone who I can scale and grow with that I'm not I'm not paying perhaps an enterprise cost to go that way because my foundation in itself is on microservices that allows me to say, you know, I don't have 5,000 seats. Sorry. I just have 50 seats or I have 5 seats. Can can you help me if I'm really small?
Speaker 2:We don't have to overburden or charge clients, just because, you know, they don't have the need to have compliances or integrations. They might have a simple contact center solution, which we we have to be careful not to oversell, but we also have to be responsible to let them know what is out there because it's the old adage, you don't know what you don't know. So let me let me show you where you can go, where you may wanna go in a couple years from now, and they may not culturally be ready to go there today. But we we find it both of producer responsibility and technical responsibility to educate clients on what we see and their use cases and their industry that are happening today to align them for when they're ready to move step and and forward that.
Speaker 1:I mean, you mentioned seat counts and a pretty big range. I mean, what is the range of customers in terms of actual contact center seats with Talkdesk? I mean, what's the low end? What's the high end? And what's what's your your normal fit?
Speaker 2:We used to we used to talk about, sweet spots, and we used to talk about swim lanes. And you gotta stay in your swim lane. And, you know, there's nothing too large or too small. I will tell you that, we'll we'll go as small as 5 seats for any client today, but we now have clients that we will call enterprise because they have over 500, a 1000, 5000, 10000 seats. Now they're not looking at that saying, here's my 10,000 seats.
Speaker 2:Spend them up tomorrow or spend them up in, you know, weeks period of time. There are accounts that we generally have had and they're growing with us or they find new needs with other business solutions within their organization that we would call an agent or someone working from home. But I would say within that balance, it it really depends, Max. You're looking at clients, that are under 500 employees, anywhere from 10 to 50 to a 100 agents, depending on the vertical it is. If you look at the bulk of the business, I would say it's probably within the 100 to 500 agent seats from a revenue perspective of types of clients.
Speaker 2:But, you know, each quarter, we see additional larger sizes come in and a larger majority of the companies themselves that have a higher density of seats. Take for example, a client that has a 1,000 employees. They could very well have 5, 600 agent type what we would call agent type of seats that in the traditional age that started with 20 or 30 agents behind a wall board and I'm writing notes after my call versus, you know, I'm on call or I'm available for a queue. They might have the need to have dramatically more because of the business needs or because what might be happening in the environment and and have a need for that elastic ability to spin up and spin down environments. Not just, not just holidays anymore.
Speaker 2:It's not just Valentine's or Mother's Day recently of the flower shop being opened to have the capacity to do that. We're seeing that, in businesses that need it tomorrow, need it next week, and frankly, just don't have the time to wait 3, 4 months before we figure out what the IVR or ACD looks like as they go through the call volume. They need it, like, ASAP.
Speaker 1:So, I mean, Jimmy, you talk about how, you know, companies, wouldn't necessarily do, like, a slow transition. But at the same time, Talkdesk has several examples that are public of very large enterprises switching to Talkdesk very quickly. And that was before COVID. And post COVID, Talkdesk also has, you know, programs to accelerate this and to help people making these transitions. And and can you give me a little more details of what that actually is and and what you've seen so far?
Speaker 3:Sure. Sure. No. I appreciate the question because now more than ever, the time is so critical to listen to the clients. And I say that and and that everyone's saying, listen.
Speaker 3:Of course, you listen. I'm talking about, are you triaging? Are you hemorrhaging? What do you need tomorrow? What do you need spun up ASAP?
Speaker 3:And let's let's walk through what those steps might look like, what those phases look like. Because what we're finding are people, everything from, I pushed everything out remote. Now I'm not compliant. Now I'm in trouble. So they're bringing it back in and relaunching again.
Speaker 3:But we have products such as Talkdesk Now, n o w. We call it Talkdesk Now because early March, everyone was calling in saying, I need it tomorrow. What they're really saying is, I need it very quickly. And what will really help me is if you get dial tone to my remote workers tomorrow, and then let's worry about the other KPIs by Friday or next week or the reporting next week. So for us, setting up expectations on how fast that delivery needs to happen is paramount.
Speaker 3:We talked about the microservices earlier. With microservices, that allows us to build on top of that platform. So the adage of, well, I have to have everything in a Visio. We have to know where everything is gonna flow tomorrow doesn't necessarily hold true in this scenario. It's simply, let's how fast can we turn you up?
Speaker 3:How fast can I get a DID number to work remote? And once we're in that point, now it's a matter of, okay, let's work the ACD or the IVR or what data tips do you need? What integration do you have to have? What call recordings? You go on a plethora of all different applications.
Speaker 3:And by the way, that's when people start looking at our AppConnect store where we have 60 out of the box AppConnects already written. So long as a customer has a API at rest, there's a high probability that we can write code and we can work together to, you know, figure out their homegrown system as well. But we also have an AppConnect store that people can go in and try and click not codes is what we're known for. So you're not tasking a pro services team to write code to ensure there's integration there. And literally within minutes, they can effectively be up on an AppConnect that they may not have had the ability to before.
Speaker 3:Another product, Max, would be, our Max or our, Talkdesk boost. I have a premise phone solution, but I really need a contact center. And I may not have everything I need in that contact center with my premise phone solution. So I'm gonna look elsewhere and see if someone can come over the top of my phone system. Or I might be locked into a contract.
Speaker 3:I might be locked into a maintenance agreement. I might be locked into the hardware that I just bought, and now my needs for contact center are exploding. We have a product called Talkdesk Boost that allows integration with an existing Cisco, Avaya, Mitel solution that allows the Talkdesk platform to come over the top of that phone system and provide them interoperability with a contact center. Two examples of of what we're instituting, every day now. A third would be mobile agent.
Speaker 3:Audience can't see us, but, you know, mobile agent is simply taking your cell phone, your tablet device, and using it just as you would in the office, right, as either a backup or even a primary. We've seen in cases where I need to be up tomorrow and I've shipped my hardware, my desktops, or what have you to my to my end users, but I really need to accept phone calls as soon as tomorrow. With the average of having a mobile agent attached to your license, you can have that same feature and functionality remotely. Right? And and and again, thus, you know, you're beating UPS mail.
Speaker 3:You're beating FedEx. You're using what, you know, devices are out there today for someone who needs that service right away. So yes. I mean, the 24 hour service is there. I think, again, it's setting up expectations.
Speaker 3:You know, what do you need in a few days versus a few weeks versus a few months? And, agreeing on what those, you know, phases look like. Writing up a statement of work for that and making sure the client knows what the expectations are when they start receiving things and getting calls from project managers. And because, you know, believe me, we wanna spin them up as fast as we can as well, but we wanna do it the right way too. So they know what expectations are there.
Speaker 1:And we we talk about, you know, voice as a channel a lot, but, you know, in the Talkdesk world isn't exclusively voice and it isn't an all in all an all or nothing thing. I mean, people maybe wanna keep, you know, their voice channel or their email channel or social media channel in different systems, or they could bring them all in into the Talkdesk system. I mean or they they need to augment and say, hey. We need to support Apple Apple Business Messenger. We need to support WhatsApp or something.
Speaker 1:And and you have people as well that that start with Talkdesk just to solve a specific communications channel that they need to bring online. And then do you stay there? Do you expand? I mean, that that becomes a flexibility option that you offer.
Speaker 3:Exactly. Exactly. And so we oftentimes see people ebb and flow for I need voice over here or I just need speech analytics here or I need data tips over here, and I just need to see these reports. We continue to this year is a big year for us. We have our, what we call our 2020, over 200 patents in the year 2020 with many of these products, 20 of which are being announced in the 1st 20 weeks of 2020.
Speaker 3:So, you know, whether it's a a cloud proxy, whether it's a storage of call recordings that are needed, whether it's a we are product called Studio allowing the IVR to be custom made and, you know, click and drag rather than write Visio. To your point, whether it's a a business transformation engagement where we have a pro services team that engages with a client to really look at what benchmarking are you looking for, what customer experience and CSAT scores would make your board happy, where do we need to go, and how do we deliver whether it be a predictive dialer, whether it be a speech analytics, whether it be, you you know, the things we talked about earlier on how fast you can deploy. What what is your industry looking for and enabling you to do, and how can we be part of that? And then where where do we need to be for you to see recognition and value within that? We offer those services to help a client build that roadmap, that that customer journey, if you will, to ensure that they're providing their clients with what their clients expect.
Speaker 1:Can you ballpark your pricing for me?
Speaker 3:Ballpark your pricing? I'm missing baseball myself.
Speaker 1:I can't help you. I see your stuff in the background. So
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. No. I I mow my grass. I don't my friends, I mow my grass more than once a week just to, you know, smell the grass, the fresh smell.
Speaker 3:No. On a serious note, we have we have, what we call pro licenses, pro plus, and then enterprise. Within each of those 3, obviously, if it's it's the enterprise is is the higher grade, a 125 for enterprise, 85 for a pro plus is is low as 65 for a pro. Depending on what ancillaries, what skews, what's needed on top of those. Right?
Speaker 3:Each one of those come with the other one's prerequisite types. So 3 base prices, and they start there, and then they can grow from there.
Speaker 1:And then term and quantity comes into factor and everything else. You know? It depends.
Speaker 3:Term, some some want at 1 year, some want 3, some want 5. It depends. Yeah. Depending on what they have there. It's not uncommon, like I said earlier, that, they're phasing in.
Speaker 3:So we're gonna look at various things we can add and have a cotermus, right, agreements. Are they all in at the same time? It's not uncommon for them to add on expansions of which. So those are all up for discussions on what that looks like and how they wanna ebb and flow. Seasonal.
Speaker 3:Right? I I know my business is seasonal. So can I tell you ahead of time when I need more seats than not? And we have different pricing structures for people that need seasonal. Alright.
Speaker 3:We we've done this. It's an engine. It's not a matter of, oh, let me, you know, ICB or individual case base what you're talking about and see if we can write something custom. Add ons, expansions, seasonal, those are all typical contract types of terms that we know of in different industries. So we'll, you know, offer things up like that because
Speaker 2:the clients may not know they're available.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Jim, thank you so much for your time today.
Speaker 2:Max, appreciate your time.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I love your show. And let's do it more often as well. Thanks very much.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Bye. Thanks for joining the Tech in 20 Minutes podcast. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before.
Speaker 1:We can help you buy the right tech for your business. Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.
