Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Convoso Dialer: How Medigap Life Tripled Revenue with AI-Powered Outbound Sales
Transcript
- Gina Gibson: Welcome to the Tech Matchmaker, the show where contact center challenges meet their perfect tech match. I'm your host, Gina Gibson, and in just 15 minutes, we serve up the smartest, coolest innovation shaking up the contact center industry. Whether you're searching for your next solution or just love staying ahead of the curve, we've got the insights to keep you in the know. Let's dive in and discover what's next. I promise you it's going to be fun. Thanks for hanging out with us on the Tech Matchmaker. I hope today's spotlight sparked some fresh ideas and real solutions for your contact center. Want to dive deeper into the tech we featured? Hit up the show notes for all the links and extras and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if there's a challenge you want us to tackle, don't be shy, reach out. I'll catch you soon with more innovation, more use cases and more ways to keep your business moving forward. Good morning, everybody. Today we are chatting with Darren Kohler, the head of partnerships with Convo. So Darren, thanks for joining us today and welcome to the podcast. Darrin Koehler - Convoso: Great, thank you. It's a pleasure, Gina, and I'm really looking forward to it. Thank you. Gina Gibson: Excellent. So we always start with the basics. tell us a little bit about yourself. Darrin Koehler - Convoso: Absolutely. Yes. name is Darren Kohler, like you said, and I'm the head of partnerships here at Convosso. I've in the sales and partnerships space for about 20 years now. And that's anything from IT infrastructure to telecom and contact center. And so my career has been all about not just building revenue, but also relationships. And so when I joined Convosso about three and a half years ago, it was to ⁓ Gina Gibson: Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. Darrin Koehler - Convoso: help expand not just our routes to market and our revenue capabilities, but also in our abilities to work through channels and marketplaces, different integration partners to make our powered platform even more accessible. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Now tell us one thing about yourself that we might not find on LinkedIn. Darrin Koehler - Convoso: ⁓ okay, sure. Fun fact. You know, I'm fascinated by the universe's profound mysteries. I that sounds a bit funny to say, but these types of questions, they keep me thinking at night, like, why is it that we're still not able to reconcile the different models of physics that we have, right? Like gravity and quantum mechanics, or even pondering what the nature of consciousness is and where does it come from? Does it live in the brain or does it come from somewhere else? So if you were to look at my feed right now, you'd probably see a mix of science, philosophy, religion, and also probably a lot of EDM music, colorful, vivid art, like this piece I have behind me here from James Jean. Gina Gibson: That's wonderful, love it. Give us your elevator pitch, tell us about Convo So. Darrin Koehler - Convoso: Yeah, well, Convosso a leading AI powered contact center. We're a dialing platform that's designed specifically for sales and lead gen teams. So we were founded in 2006 and we provide cloud-based omnichannel solutions, including advanced dialers, sophisticated DID reputation and spam mitigation tools, and power and the intelligence under the hood. that's necessary to create unmatched performance outcomes for our customers. So this means higher contact rates, reduced idle time, increased sales, high confidence dialing in today's heavily regulated environment. Gina Gibson: Love that. And let's get specific. So you talked about lead generation. are some of your top use cases that you're seeing or what are the problems that you solve customers? Darrin Koehler - Convoso: That's a great question. Really, it can be boiled down to two major areas. So on the one hand, performance is a key element. Many of our customers, they've outgrown their existing dialer, needs have really scaled as they've grown. And it comes to scaling outbound, there really aren't that many options that are counting it as a core competency the way that we here at Convoso. And so customers... If they can carve out even another couple percentage points in efficiency or in their connect rates or in reducing agent idle time, some of these key KPIs, then the revenue outcomes are tremendous. We can get to a case study in a little bit, but seeing a multiple on revenue in 3X, is not unusual for us. And then there's that other side, which is compliance. So outbound dialing is becoming very, very highly regulated. And for that reason, Convosso has doubled down. We've made this our passion so that our customers can dial outbound and to do it confidently without worrying about being hit with regulatory hurdles. Gina Gibson: And you mentioned outgrown, like when people outgrow their dialer, what does that look like? What does that mean? Like for a customer, how do they know if they've outgrown their dialer? Darrin Koehler - Convoso: Yeah, well, that's a great question. And it does look at those two categories. So it can be that you've outgrown your dialer because maybe you've got too many agents. Like for instance, a of outbound contact centers will start with five, 10, 15 agents that are dialing outbound, whereas many of our customers will have hundreds and hundreds of agents that are doing outbound dialing. And to give you an idea, for a contact center that's doing mostly inbound calls, you might need to do 10 phone calls before you connect to a real live person. Whereas when you're doing outbound, it could take you 100 or more calls before you can connect. And so for that reason, being on a platform that can scale, that can guarantee uptime, and to be able to have these high performing tools at your disposal really makes all the difference. And then on the compliance piece, as your Gina Gibson: have. Darrin Koehler - Convoso: dialing needs become more sophisticated as you're dialing across broader regions of the United States doing state to state dialing or the the sun. There's regulations on a per state level. There's regulations in even on a per zip code or area code level about, know, who you can call, who you can't call, how often you can call them. And that can be a significant hang up. for a lot of our competitors. And at ConvoSo, we've really taken that on as a core competency. we lead the way in making sure that you're able to do those dials with high conviction. Gina Gibson: Excellent. how, kind of talked a little bit about that, but how do you fit into a company's existing stack? So say a company has a platform, do you have to replace everything or can they just bring in your dialer? How does that work? Darrin Koehler - Convoso: Right, that's another great question. We've worked with customers in a multitude of different models and we can be very flexible with how we fit in. Let me give you a couple of examples. So with a pure play outbound contact center, know, let's say it's an outfit that's doing outbound insurance sales or home services like solar sales or bathroom remodels or something like that. A lot of times, because this is all that they're focused on, we are a core part of that tech stack. However, we have other customers where, let's say it's a brand and they have their own, they're owned and operated that they are doing both customer support and lot of inbound as well as doing outbound for appointment scheduling follow-ups and ⁓ sales and sort of thing. And so in those scenarios, we're able to with the CRM, like a sales force, so that they have shared data between more of an inbound specialized contact center, you know, that's doing CX whereas we will help that company to be a high performing for their outbound section as well. Gina Gibson: Mm-hmm. And is there a sweet spot or an industry or a vertical that you work best in? You mentioned like the home services kind of arena lead Is there a use case where you guys are just crushing it or do you kind of work across all? Darrin Koehler - Convoso: We do a lot of insurance. do medical, like Medicare, home services, and there's a lot of categories in there. Everything from to pest control to solar. There's the financial services industry that we do a lot of, and that can be like debt consolidation, settlements, and relief. And then also in performance marketing, lead generation, and qualifying leads and selling leads. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Do you want to share that case study that you were chatting about your success story for ConvoSail? Darrin Koehler - Convoso: Yeah, absolutely. One that really stands out that I love to share is Medigap Life. So they are a Medicare lead gen and sales contact center. ⁓ were really struggling with their dialer. They were dealing with low contact rates. had call quality issues, leaked And after switching to Convosso, they tripled their revenue in months. Their contact rates jumped 40%. Voicemails dropped significantly. And with our AI tools, they're 200 plus agents. had about 200 plus agents there in their contact center could handle scale without any downtime. So it's been very, very rewarding for us to see how our platform was able to turn their frustrations into growth. And still optimizing in our CS team, which is one of our core differentiators, which I'd love to talk about is a great customer success team story. Gina Gibson: I love that. Feel free, take us down the path of what an implementation looks like and kind of all the different touch points within ConvoSo. Darrin Koehler - Convoso: Sure. Well, and just to give you an idea with some of our differentiators, what really sets ConvoSo apart. So we focus relentlessly on speed, scale, compliance in a way that's built for high volume outbound campaigns. So unlike more of a generic CCAS platform or maybe like a dialer light products that you might have on a larger platform, we proprietary tools like ConvoSo Ignite, which ⁓ automates caller ID reputation management. in real time to boost connect rates by up to four times. So we've built our dialer from the ground up for speed, meaning while a competitor may take ⁓ connect with a hot lead, we can do it in seconds. And your value the ones that are ready to buy now, the difference between minutes and seconds might as well be from zero to one. So we're not just the software though. I always have to make sure to mention this. We pair every single one of our customers with a dedicated success team, a dedicated success manager where they're getting not just proactive support, which is very, important, but optimization and configuration guidance as well. Because ⁓ thing that we've heard over and over again as have come to ConvoSo is that on the other platform, ⁓ It was just kind of drop shift on their front porch and they had to figure it out. here ⁓ are a partner that really ensures you're going to make use of every part of our system to carve out every single percentage point of efficiency that we can. Gina Gibson: I love that and I think too having that outside view sometimes for customers like an objective view being able to optimize their business is a necessary step that does get overlooked a lot. So that's a great differentiator. What's for ConvoSof? What's on their horizon? Darrin Koehler - Convoso: are gearing up for ⁓ major growth here in 2026. So I'm forward to expanding our channel partner relationships, you know, with TSDs like Avant, you know, who I know that Gina, you're very happy to work with. And even in relationships, Gina, with yourself, it's really, really great working with you so far. Very highly recommended. And as we're deepening those we're also looking at rolling out enhanced features for ourselves. We've got the ConvoSo Ignite products, which I just mentioned that makes our DID management even smarter. on the ecosystem side, in terms of integration partners, I'm really excited to be deepening integrations with CRMs like Salesforce to make ConvoSo even easier to adopt for our customers. So overall, we're doubling down on innovation to help move revenue teams navigating a very rapidly evolving CCAS landscape. Gina Gibson: That's fantastic. there anything else you'd like the audience to know about that I haven't asked you or that we haven't had a chance to cover today? Darrin Koehler - Convoso: Yeah, you know, I love to, always like to take the opportunity to just talk about the trends, you know, what's going on right now in our, in our landscape. And honestly, I'm really thrilled about the emergence of agentic AI. I know this is a buzzword, right? But it goes beyond just the simple assistance intimate, like it beyond just agents individually tackling tasks, but it's a lot more about streamlining Gina Gibson: Mm-hmm. Darrin Koehler - Convoso: the full customer journey from start to finish. And that's something that we're looking forward into really leaning into. So at the same time, we're gearing up for increasingly stringent regulations that's going to become even more outbound, our platform with these advanced capabilities for real time number or sorry, monitoring. And outbound, it's a tough nugget to crack and a lot of the platforms that are out there are just plagued by issues like poor connection rates or the evolving compliance standards are just too difficult to stay up with. But it's why so many contact center providers have shifted their focus away from doing outbound as a primary strength. And it's for that reason that we've even focused on the feedback we've received from our own customers and from, you know, industry leaders and thought leaders in this space to know that we are going to make this a core competency for us so that, know, well, let me just say this, there's no substitute for a genuine human interaction. when we can supercharge that with AI to enhance the precision of it, the speed of it and the impact of it, there's no doubt that that human level of connection is here to stay and that we will be the supplier of choice to help make that happen. Gina Gibson: That's excellent. Thanks for sharing that. things up, Darren, I've been a fan of James Lipton, and so we do a few little rapid fire questions at the end. What is a sound or a noise that you love? Darrin Koehler - Convoso: sound or a noise that I Wind chimes. That feels nice. I love that. Gina Gibson: Excellent. And what's a sound or a noise that you don't like, that you hate? Darrin Koehler - Convoso: Very easily when a fork scrapes a plate, that's just, it sends my whole nervous system over the rails. Gina Gibson: And what profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Darrin Koehler - Convoso: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, often imagine myself in another life doing something creative like being a musician or an artist. But time I look into doing that, it looks like staying as a hobby is probably the best bet for me. Gina Gibson: Excellent. And Darren, if somebody wants more information on ConvoSo, who should they reach out to? Darrin Koehler - Convoso: Sure, well, you're certainly welcome to reach out to myself. Again, Darren Kohler, I'm head of partnerships here at Convosso. You can reach out directly to me, the contact details to follow. But honestly, Gina, you're in good hands with Gina. So any questions regarding Convosso or how we can help you, please reach out to her and she'd be happy to help as well. Gina Gibson: Thanks so much, Darren. And thank you for joining us today and sharing your insights and sharing a little bit of a peek into Convosso's window. It's always great to have you here and learn more about systems in the industry. Outbound as you said, it's always been part of the overall CCAS. And so to have a company that that's your sole focus, it's a good option for customers out there. So thank you so much. Darrin Koehler - Convoso: Great, Gina, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.