Boosting Productivity and Visibility with AI

Matt McKee:

Thanks everyone for joining the call today. I’m Matthew McKee, director of client transformation at Bluewave. Today, I’m very excited to have the opportunity to showcase how Dialpad is transforming the cloud voice space with AI and ushering in a new age of TrueCaaS. With us today is Dani Pickens from Dialpad. Dani, let’s talk about AI.

Dani Pickens:

Yeah. No, I love it. Excited to be here today. We’ll just go ahead and jump right in.

Dani Pickens:

As Matt said, we’re here to chat about boosting productivity and visibility with AI. Really excited to share a little bit more here with you guys. Webinar with our strategic partner of, Bluewave Technology Group. We’re so excited to do this and be a part of their series with all of their customers. Check out their website where you can see more there.

Dani Pickens:

But jumping in on who Dialpad is, we are a truly unified platform, UCaaS, CCaaS, AI analytics, and completely open for APIs. This will help set the stage as we continue to talk about the differences and how Dialpad addresses the very saturated market of the communication space. That whole work from anywhere is pretty popular nowadays. So we’ll talk about how we can differentiate ourselves and why that matters to you. Talk, message, meet, definitely the core of any UCA product out there, and then contact center and cell all layered on to one platform, again, our TrueCaaS vision.

Dani Pickens:

So, a little bit about our Dialpad Talk. This is our core UCaaS offering, our phone system, that can replace the on-prem PBXs, of the world before moving into the work from home era. There are many differences here for our product, offering 100% uptime SLA, that most companies don’t really value or propose to their customer base. The built-in voice intelligence, we’ll talk about here in just a little bit. Again, one of our differentiators for Dialpad. But we are in over 70 countries worldwide, and actually 30% of our usage comes from outside the United States.

Dani Pickens:

Dialpad Messaging. Again, another part of being a core UCaaS offering is this chat and message and share from any device; mobile, your application. You can be on any device and have the application I’ve been running and be able to use it in sync in between the different platforms. This also helps reduce email clutter and a big champion is a lot of folks have that internal emails back and forth, back and forth. This helps you move into the Dialpad chat system where you can have that with your collaborators, internal, and have it all consolidated there, so it’s not that email back and forth. And then again, boosting productivity through better organization. This is going to help consolidate apps and get you into a friendly user application where everything’s not so cluttered for you to keep with.

Dani Pickens:

Dialpad Meetings with AI. So specifically here, yes, there’s a lot of meeting opportunities or excuse me, meeting platforms out there. You’ve heard some of the big guys I’m sure, but what’s a little bit of a differentiator for Dialpad is how we’ve threaded AI through the entire platform. This is going to help you in transcribing everything in real time. It’s going to give you advanced meeting securities and personalized video layouts and meeting insights. This is a really exciting time because it’s not just recordings, but it’s proactively noting intent and memories and summaries within the meeting as it’s actively being recorded.

Matt McKee:

Dani, quick question. We’ve spoken a lot about those, what you call traditional UCaaS offerings and obviously, as you mentioned, there’s a lot of players in that space. So what is Dialpad doing to differentiate themselves and what makes the platform that Dialpad brings to the market truly that TrueCaaS versus UCaaS environment?

Dani Pickens:

Absolutely. So with Dialpad, we do have that TrueCaaS vision. A little marketing term there, but that truly unified platform is the talk, message, meet core products of any UCaaS offering out there, but we also have our contact center and sale, all on one application. So that’s one application for IT, teams, admins to work from, and they’re not using multiple systems. They’re not using multiple logins to manage the entire platform. This makes it easy to work in and scalable, again, with the AI threaded through the entire platform, giving you additional insights into the business conversations that are happening every day.

Matt McKee:

Thank you.

Dani Pickens:

Yeah. Yeah. And then to round out, again, what makes us a little special and unique in the market is we, do have our contact center and we have our outbound cell contact center. So this one here highlighted, is our inbound contact center product. This is designed to deliver exceptional customer experiences, right? There are advanced analytics, any device anywhere, again, for agents can work from anywhere in the world from any device. But this is really unique in how we can deploy contact centers, in minutes. We just get in the portal, get them added and they’re up and running, in about the time you can grab a cup of coffee, as my channel chief likes to say.

Dani Pickens:

But what’s really great here, is we understand contact centers can be complex, can have high attrition, can be hard to ramp up new contact center agents. So we have additional features within our contact center a platform. That Real Time Assist cards is my favorite, conversational guidelines. This is helping reduce agent training time and attrition. As customers, and I won’t still, I guess my own thunder, but we’ll cover this here in just a second. But as agents are talking in the contact center, as highlights come up, whether that’s competitive mentions, whether it is specific requests like a tracking number, there will be Real Time Assist cards that pop up that give the agent and guide them through how they should answer or respond to customers. So even if a agent is fairly new to the contact center, they can look like an absolute pro because we’re helping guide them through that customer experience with the RTA cards and conversational guidelines. So more to come there and show a little bit later on.

Dani Pickens:

One thing I cannot forget to mention though, is this last line here, “Live customer sentiment and moment analysts to capture important trends and boost customer loyalty.’ What that means is as the call’s going on, there are AI analytics happening in the background, listening, and it’s navigating how the sentiment is coming along in the call. So if something happens to go a little off into the red zone, the supervisors are alerted and they can jump on and listen, help guide and coach that contact center agent. Or if things get too fussy, then the contact center supervisor can actually jump in and take over the call. So, really amazing things here to help that contact center agent be the best that they can be in their job, and have the confidence to stay on with that company for a very long time.

Dani Pickens:

Dialpad Cell. So this is our outbound, AI powered, sales communication tool. So this is really hot and focused on sales teams, outbound calls. They can use Salesforce as a power dialer. And this AI embedded into this particular product enables sellers to give guidance, automated information for every call. So before they’re even making calls, they have the analytics on the person of the company that they’re reaching out to, maybe previous calls, previous notes, things that were mentioned prior, so that they’re armed with having that conversation and knowing exactly where … Hopefully know where that conversation will go with the person on the other end of the line. Real time transcriptions again, moment analysis, that’s all from the AI embedded into the platform just to help them be superheroes when they’re making those calls in to potential customers and companies.

Matt McKee:

So Dani, we’ve seen most of our current contact center and CCaaS customers looking to make this pivot to agent anywhere. And you talked a little bit about how your contact center platform can be delivered to any device, anywhere. Is this the model that you see most of your clients going to? Kind of the web browser agent. And how have you guys been able to put that technology in their hands?

Dani Pickens:

Absolutely. Obviously, that’s all been very much accelerated over the past few years, but if you have an internet bandwidth connection, you can get on the system. If you don’t have an internet bandwidth connection, you can go out through your carrier, on your cell phone and use the mobile app, so you can always be connected. Not sure if that’s always a plus for everybody, but we can give you access. You can be on the system and be able to complete any task, do your job, even with this work from anywhere approach. Contact centers are no longer the room with 400 contact centers tied to desk phones. We’re mobile now. We’re anywhere device, anywhere in the world. So it’s a really exciting time.

Matt McKee:

Great insights.

Dani Pickens:

So to recap the products that we’ve seen … But still, why Dialpad right? So again, the any device, any mode, work from anywhere in the world, that TrueCaaS vision, that unified UCaas and CCaaS. I like to call it the convergence. You see this everywhere. Some of the larger players in this space are looking to partner up [inaudible 00:10:13] there lots of mergers and acquisitions happening in our industry. And so this is our approach and we own our platform, which makes it really special. We don’t have to answer to anyone when we want to release updates, which by the way, we do that every Friday afternoon. So this is the last “phone system” you will ever have to buy. Updates, feature releases all included in your service from day one.

Dani Pickens:

Built in AI. Again, this is the magic, the secret sauce for Dialpad. It is truly a game changer. We are giving business insights and analytics into services, products that companies are using and don’t have access to anymore. When you hang up a phone call, it’s gone. There’s no data there, there’s no analytics. And so we’re really revolutionizing that approach. And to make sure that this is a true mining experience so that we’re giving you opportunities to make your business more productive and efficient. Beautifully designed and easy to use. The platform is truly beautiful. It’s very easy to navigate and intuitive. And we find that our user interface is highly applauded for ease of moving through the platform, adding new calls or, excuse me, new users. And so that makes it really special and so that it’s not a clunky feel or hard to navigate.

Dani Pickens:

The biggest thing here that we will continue on to the next slide is always reliable. We have a very unique, modern cloud architecture built with microservices. And we’ll get into that here in just a second. But we are cloud native. Founded right around the time of the iPhone we don’t have, what we like to call, tech debt. So we don’t have old servers somewhere that we’re having to maintenance. There are no maintenance windows when it comes to Dialpad. We push out those updates every Friday, and there is no downtime. There’s no maintenance windows because we are truly a cloud born company.

Dani Pickens:

The Dialpad difference. So I was chatting about that, again, very scalable, can deploy in minutes, whether that’s UCaaS or contact center. We have smarter call routing with global carrier network access, localized services, and the call quality, again, 100% uptime SLA. We stand by, and put our money where our mouth is, right? Native reporting and AI. Automated transcriptions, custom reporting. So we can change the reporting. We can have the dashboard set up the way that’s important for your business and how you guys want to run. So this is really exciting on how we differentiate ourselves and really make the experience for our customers more powerful.

Dani Pickens:

That split cloud architecture, definitely want to touch on this and keep you guys the visual here so you can see it. This is important in the sense that the Google Cloud is there a bigger Google… Is there a bigger cloud than Google? We put all of our microservices on that, but our data centers are ours and they are owned by us, of course. 17, over the world. And this is where our voice traffic goes. So why that’s important is because you cannot have everything in the cloud because you’re fighting for bandwidth, you can’t scale. And so we weren’t willing to give up quality of service either. So it’s that split cloud architecture that makes us very unique.

Matt McKee:

And so Dani, it looks like Dialpad’s kind of adopted a hybrid cloud architecture where they’re having their own data centers, as well as leveraging Google. What does that mean for a customer?

Dani Pickens:

Yeah. What that means for a customer, again, scalable, no downtime, no maintenance windows, 100% SLA. That’s not the approach that a lot of the carriers in our saturated space take.

Dani Pickens:

So we’ll jump over into the voice intelligence. We’ve prepped you, we’ve told you about our products, but again, these are all core products of a lot of the platforms that you can find out there today. This is where the magic comes in. The built in AI just changes everything. As important as the products that we have and how they’re delivered, how they’re set up, this amplifies everything times a hundred, times a thousand. This gives you insights and gives the ability for you to take action on things that may have been missed in a plain on telephone call. There are moments, there are notes, there are action items that are sent as follow-up after every call, after every meeting. And so this is a really unique approach and being able to learn from customers the reason for their call, what intent, and it is more accurate than any competitor out there. We love to talk about that. We have a stronger AI transcription award and recognition from some of the biggest players in the space, even outside the UCaaS world, such as IBM.

Dani Pickens:

So, again, learning from your conversations is the name of the game, right? How do we make our companies better, bigger, more efficient, more productive for our employees, right? So the keyword mentions here, as you can see on the screenshot, you can filter these. So this can be really unique, in the sense that if you’re running a promotion, if you have your outbound sales teams reaching out to customers, and they start mentioning the same words over and over … Or maybe it’s an inbound for retail, they’re looking for a specific product, maybe one that you don’t carry today, more at the end on that, but this is going to give you all of the view and visibility, the dashboards to find this information, to make the company better, to make it more powerful in the hands of your agents or your users today.

Matt McKee:

So Dani, you’ve kind of already maybe alluded to this, but what’s one of the most interesting insights that you had a customer get out of the AI that’s driven through the platform.

Dani Pickens:

Ah, no. I love that you asked that I actually have a little story at the end. It’s my favorite customer story and a little special to me being a Texas gal too. So, I will touch on that here in just a second, because we do have a really unique story on how we were able to help a customer find new business opportunities within their own retail line. So more to come there.

Dani Pickens:

This here is coaching your team in Real Time at screenshot. This is the Real Time Assist card that I mentioned previously. Again, we’ve got the transcription and the analytics call monitoring, all that’s really wonderful. But as customers, as you can see in this walk through on the screenshot, you can see … Well, that just changed the negative. But you can see the call isn’t going so well and so you can see the live transcription. Now, this is a call between Jessica and Leo. So contact agent and the customer, but from this view, it is the supervisor view. So as soon as that call goes red, a [inaudible 00:17:21] or excuse me, a supervisor, is flagged. And so they can go into the call and they can see the real time transcription as though they were on the call before they ever go into a whisper monitor barge situation. So we can give you insight.

Dani Pickens:

It could have just been a negative word or the customer cursed a little bit, but didn’t really mean anything by it. So you can have visibility before you hit the panic and all the alarm bells and jump into the call. But this again is our keyword based assisted answers or Real Time Assist. You can have it set up and completely customizable for your industry. There’s a lot of acronyms in telecom. There’s a lot of acronyms out there for every single industry, so you can go in and add those specific flags so that you’re
alerted to that as they come up.

Dani Pickens:

Speaking of every different industry, we find ourselves in every single one, with every background. Financial services, real estate, retail, any company that has to do with compliance or billing certain hours, say, legal lawyers, law firms love us. We have a really big law firm customer base, because, again, that transcription here is included at no additional cost. You have the history of those calls in the data, free storage forever. So this is a really great additional service that we include at no additional costs for companies. Again, technology, real estate, healthcare. You name it, we are in it. And it’s really exciting to see our own customers use the services in sometimes ways that we didn’t even dream of. They’re evolving the platform as quickly as we are sometimes. So we really love to see that. And as we wrap up … Yeah.

Matt McKee:

GO ahead, Dani. I was going to say, based on the slide, I think everyone on here has probably talked to someone on your platform because there’s some really big logos on here.

Dani Pickens:

Yes. Yes. And to circle back to your question about that unique story, what use case really stands out. This one is by far my favorite. I’m also a Texas girl. So I’ve got a pair of Tecovas in my closet, but they came to us at 108 users. I’m going to go ahead and guarantee that’s a little bit higher now, as this was a win back in 2019. The solution that they were using, it did not offer a unified view of all the customer interactions. There was no visibility into the customer journey. And so we were able to offer this outstanding customer support and ease of mind and simplicity when it comes to using the product.

Dani Pickens:

Something here, though, a little special that we’ve come to learn, as we closely work with Tecovas now on new events, but they realized that they were getting calls every week for square toed boots. They didn’t sell square toed boots. Now, once the contact center agent brought it to the retail manager and the production team, they realized that there was really a big ask for this, a big market. And so they’ve put square toed boots into production and it’s their number one selling boot in the world. It’s such a fun story, because you hear a lot of providers go, “Hey. We’ll help you with what’s keeping you up at night. We’re going to solve those problems.” But we’re finding business opportunities, new revenue streams, new product lines for our customer because we’re giving them insight into business analytics that they never had before.

Dani Pickens:

Okay. So what’s next? I know we were chatting on this and we’d love to offer from the Bluewave technology group and Dialpad. We have a dedicated team for Bluewave and we’d love to offer up a demo and a free needs assessment and ROI for any Bluewave technology group customers. Best thing to do is to reach out to your Bluewave tech group contact to get that set up, as we do have our dedicated teams just for these guys. And we’re happy to help with any questions and give you a customized demo of the product and how we can see maybe it’ll help build new opportunities for your business and ultimately find productivity and visibility into your system through our unique approach with AI.

Matt McKee:

I just want to thank everyone. Dani, you, especially for putting this together for us. I know our customers are going to love the conversation and the understanding around how AI can help drive something as every day as voice conversations and really turn that into a business opportunity. Again, for anyone who’s listening, if you want to have a customized demo and discussion about how Dialpad can drive AI into your business and voice operations, don’t hesitate to reach out to your Dialpad account manager, account director. Or if you are a new client and don’t yet have a contact feel free to email info@bluewave.net. Thank you. And thank you Dani, again, for the time today.

Dani Pickens:

Yeah. Thank you, guys.