Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Why Contact Centers Choose Dialpad | The Tech Matchmaker Podcast w/ Ryan McKenzie
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 afternoon, everybody. Today we are chatting with Ryan McKenzie, the head of partner sales from Dialpad. Ryan, thank you so much for joining us today. Ryan McKenzie: Yeah, absolutely. It's great to be here, Gina. Always a pleasure when I get to spend some time with you. So thanks for having me. Gina Gibson: Thank you. And let's start with the basics, right? And so tell us a little bit about yourself. And I always like to ask people to tell us one thing that we won't find on LinkedIn. Ryan McKenzie: think I got, I probably got one for you. It's career related. We'll go with. So yeah, my name is Ryan McKenzie. I'm based out of Denver, Colorado. I'm the head of partner sales in North America for Dialpad. So U S and Canada is what that means for us. I've been with Dialpad for six years and I spent years before that helping build partner programs at another. Gina Gibson: Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. Ryan McKenzie: supplier in our same space. I'm not going to give away any free advertising today, but you want to look at my LinkedIn, you can easily find, track that down. So I lead all of our partner teams. have a pretty partner ecosystem in the U S so, so my group makes up about 30 partner managers that are in the field working with the likes of Gina and you know, a ⁓ Gina Gibson: Yeah. Ryan McKenzie: An exciting platform. think my reasons for coming to Dialpad from where I was before was really platform based. But once I got here, I realized like we've got executive presence from the top down that's willing to get in the field with us, stay in front of our customers and just build this thing up together. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Wonderful. And now normally, Ryan, I ask people to give us their elevator pitch. However, due to the vast features and functionalities of Dialpad, feel free to give us a full overview of your suite and we'll call it the Eiffel Tower elevator. Ryan McKenzie: Yeah, yeah, perfect. I think that's a good setup for me because we do have a pretty broad suite. So ⁓ really boil it down, Dialpad at its core is a AI powered communications platform. And what we mean by communications platform is we do the unified communications as a service. We do contact center as a service. We do virtual agents. We have a meetings platform. We also have an agentic AI play. But I think the thing that really is unique about the way that we do all those things is it's a single stack on our side. So we own all of it. It's 100 % proprietary from the top to the bottom. There's nothing that you're going to come to Dialpad and we're going to try to offer you for a solution that we don't own and build and maintain. So when you talk about what that looks like for the user, it's a seamless experience. If I'm a UC user, I see the same platform on the front end that a contact center user would see. There's a couple minor variations that kind of, you know, differentiate those two platforms, but ultimately it's the same piece of software. And then take that to the back end, the analytics portal and the admin portal. That means that if I'm the person maintaining the platform, I'm maintaining it from a single pane of glass as well. So I can make changes to the UC piece. I can make changes to the context center piece. I can make changes to the agentic piece, all from that same portal. And then the analytics side, where that comes into play and is beneficial is if you have a call that comes into somebody that's on a UC license and transfers over to a contact center agent and then transfers back, we can provide analytics on that entire call journey, which is really unique in our space. But the biggest thing that I'll probably want to hammer home today is, the piece for us, which is also proprietary. So we've been doing AI in unified communications and contact center longer than just about anybody out there. We started in 2018. And we started with kind of a basic form of AI where we were just in real time transcribing everything that was happening on a voice call or a video meeting. But what you can do when you transcribe all that information is turn it into analytics and turn it into data. And can garner a lot of cool insights from that. So really, when you look at the way that AI functions in our contact center and our UC play, it's all based on the transcription. which is again, is done in real time. So if you look at some of our competitors in the space that are doing some of that same stuff, a lot of it's delayed by an hour, in some cases, 24 hours. So you can't really make on the fly decisions or provide insights on the fly real time. With Dialpad, you can't. So if you go to our website and you look at the product stack, there's a couple of names that you should know. So connect for us is ⁓ that's UC. Support and sell are our contact center plays. support, you know, pretty obviously is, designed for support agents and mostly inbound contact center. but we can do things like AI powered QA. So quality assurance where we don't need somebody to just go randomly pick some phone calls and say, I'm going to listen to these five today and figure out ⁓ what, be going on in my context center. We automate all that and we'll give you scoring on a hundred percent of the phone calls. We can also do real time compliance. So if the agents are supposed to follow certain scripts or say certain things on certain scenarios, we can make sure that that happens before the interaction is ended. Real time assistance. This one plays big in the but also the next product that we have in our contact center is called sell. ⁓ for sales real time assistance is helpful for both of those. So what that is, is if the customer a question, Dialpad can actually in real time identify, I know the answer to that question and pop up assist card on the screen for the agent that will give them the answer. So you can ramp agents very quickly for both inbound and outbound. can empower people to answer questions that normally they would have to put somebody on hold for, or call them back for. They can do it in real time because AI is delivering all that data to them. We do things like AI powered CSAT scoring. So if you're using CSAT scoring in your business today, the statistics are probably not a surprise to you, but two to 3 % of the people that call into your contact center are actually going to take that survey that you asked them to take. With Dialpad, because we know what's being said in real time, we can apply a CSAT score on our algorithms on % of the phone calls in that contact center. So again, in the support side for us, this all just boils down to agents being able to do their job more effectively. which ultimately in better customer experience. And then you look like you were gonna say something there, so I'll pause. Gina Gibson: I just going to say, that we've worked together on different but the single pane is definitely something that sets you apart in the market. ⁓ with so point solutions out there, is a welcome, welcomed by many to just have to go to one place and have everything. from the analytics to the QM to the, know, agentic side of things. It's definitely a platform for people that sick of having to manage multiple across ⁓ network. is, that's definitely one of the things that I've heard that ⁓ customers like the most. Ryan McKenzie: It's a huge thing that sets us apart and we have a lot of customers that choose us because we're able to do it all in, know, in that one stop. If you build a Venn diagram with all of the different tools that people are using for communications, collaboration, CX, you can find Dialpad right in that overlap between all three of these, know, you've got things that are doing like ⁓ transcription and the analysis. You have ⁓ talk piece, you have the agent piece, but to be able to bring it all together is very unique for us. So appreciate you calling that out. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. that's ⁓ of the unique features. Are there any other ones, Ryan, that your customers consistently rave about? Ryan McKenzie: I think, I mean, the AI piece is great. I think, for us on the sales side, which, which I didn't get fully into, it's really designed to help sales reps ramp faster, provide better interactions to their customers and close business easier. So things like playbooks, if you're running a specific sales methodology, you can tell dial pad, Hey, ⁓ we're, running pick or we're running spiced. and you can input the different criteria. And Dialpad will in real time follow along on that conversation and it'll alert the agent to say, hey, you've covered, you know, four of the seven criteria here. Here are the ones that you're missing. So make sure that you cover those before, before this interaction ends. Gina Gibson: you have any stats from sales organizations, Ryan, of how their sales have improved by having that kind of capability live in real time for their agents? Ryan McKenzie: We do. and they're, they're all over the board. They're overwhelmingly positive. But what, ⁓ I can tell you is there's, we've had a couple of deals that we've closed recently where the ramp time was cut, cut in half for, for new either support agents or sales agents, three and four X increase in, revenue just by implementing dial pets. So there's real ROI there. And that's something that I think on an individual basis. Gina Gibson: That's impressive. Ryan McKenzie: If we have the information that we need, we can help build ROI for a potential customer before they make the decision using the data that we have. Gina Gibson: And those are really impactful numbers too. They're not small. Yeah. Ryan McKenzie: They're big numbers. They're big numbers. It makes for an easy conversation once you get kind of get into that piece of it. Gina Gibson: Definitely. you want to share a couple of examples, your real world kind of success stories? You just mentioned, you know, some that you were seeing with the ramp time being cut in half, but share us a couple of success stories where you've had a measurable impact. Ryan McKenzie: Yeah, so I will share that we just brought on recently. I can't name names for this one. We're working releasing kind of case study for it right now. It's a newer deal, it's a large one. It's a law firm. It's of the largest in the US. They have presence in all 50 states. You've probably heard of them and seen advertisements for them. They were operating on a very disparate platforms, right? So they had their, their case management software. They had a customer manager, a customer relationship software. They had a couple different pieces of communications that they were trying to kind of like piece piecework together or patchwork together. and it was a very ⁓ old PBX based And when you're talking about integrating that into, you know, case management or ⁓ customer relationship management software, doesn't work well. And this is, again, they're, they're huge and they're geared towards bringing on as many new clients as they can, as quick as they can. So they were looking for help with figuring out how they could get a new communications platform that would make it easier for their case management workers, for their paralegals, for their attorneys to interact with not only existing clients, but, but potential new clients to get, to grow their business. And so what Dialpad did, I think the features that they use the most for us was the transcription piece and then AI recaps. So we give a recap on every conversation or interaction that happens that says, Hey, here's kind of the gist of what this conversation was about, which you can imagine if you're an attorney and you're having multiple client conversations about different cases every day, it's helpful to go back and say, okay, here's the stuff that we covered. And those are customizable by the way. So you can give a recap that's four or five sentences. or you can give a bulleted recap that's however many bullets you tell it to make. It's all operating off of our own proprietary LLM, is probably a sidebar but they were able to take this stuff, grew their business, but for them, I think the biggest benefit was it allowed new members to ramp quicker, which we've covered already. So they were having people that were having these first conversations with potential new clients and they were able to cover you know, kind of the methodology that they use when they bring a potential new case on. And it was all automated. Gina Gibson: Did they use the sales playbook that you referenced earlier? Like was that part of it or like a checklist of Ryan McKenzie: That is a huge, that's a huge part of it for them. Yeah. Cause again, these are, are, the type of attorneys that have billboards. Just put it that way. And then, you know, their goal is like, many new clients can we get in? And so they have entire teams that are designed for business development. And, you that's, that's a role that sometimes has high turnover depending on the industry. So anything that, that they can provide them that says, Hey, your job is going to get a little bit easier. Gina Gibson: Yeah. Ryan McKenzie: by using this software and we're gonna kind of help you through these initial conversations what they were looking for and that's exactly what we were able to do for them. Gina Gibson: That's perfect. Is there any other features or functionalities you want to talk about with Dialpad or anything that you want people to make sure they know that, hey, if we think of Dialpad, think of this. Ryan McKenzie: Uh, yes. And I'm glad you brought that up. I will go back to the LLM piece. So that's something that I didn't get into. Um, but that is important to understand. So because we've been doing this since 2018, because we've had so many conversations come through our NLP machines, um, and our machine learning engines, we were able to essentially source data on 11 billion minutes of long format business to business conversations. So We can take that data, we can build our own LLM. When you look at some of the other options in our space, they're using things like Anthropic Chat GPT, OpenAI, which is essentially a ton of information from random sources like the entire internet ⁓ from four or five years ago. So the output that we give when we're talking about things like, what's the term I'm looking at, recaps. Gina Gibson: Mm-hmm. Ryan McKenzie: We can give output that makes sense. are very few hallucinations. It's super accurate. The conversation recaps that we provide are very, very strong. There's nobody else that's been doing it as long as we have that has the kind of data available to them to build LLMs. So you're seeing a lot of like bolt on third party AI applications enter our space right now. You don't get that with us. It's all in-house. Again, going back to that single pane of glass, that's where it lives. Gina Gibson: Fantastic. What are the emerging trends you're seeing in our industry? And I know everything is AI. We see it at every conference or whatever. But other than that, or included in the AI side, what are you particularly excited about? Ryan McKenzie: I think the biggest thing for us, there's two ways to answer this question. The first is nobody knows what AI means really is the biggest thing that we're finding out. through, you know, through Gina ⁓ and us, can help businesses understand like, how do I actually apply this? How do I make AI tangible in a way that benefits my business? The biggest ⁓ AI feature or kind of like trend is it the agentic piece AI that can like do solve real problems and accomplish tasks. So that's something that I think we're pouring a lot of resources into right now. That's going to be, I think, a big part of the future when you look at AI, just in tech in general, is AI that can offload menial tasks from actual live people that cost a lot of money to employ ⁓ take care of those so that those people can go focus on things that really matter for the customer that you need a live person to take care of. you know, an example for us would be you can go onto our, our agent, take AI chat bot. You can schedule a doctor's appointment and it will be able to interact with you through that whole process of, I'm having shoulder pain. I'd like to see a specialist. They can say, okay, give me some of your personal information. Tell me the dates and times that work best for you and go all the way through that process without ever having human interaction to schedule a doctor's appointment for you. And that's just, you know, that's one example. That's the tip of the iceberg, but that's kind of where things are headed. Gina Gibson: Absolutely. just to wrap things up, Ryan, I've always been a big fan of James Lipton. And so to end the podcast, we do some rapid fire questions. So first one is what's your favorite word? Ryan McKenzie: Go. That's a great question and I don't think I've ever thought of it. tell you the word that I have the hardest time pronouncing consistently is statistics. ⁓ that might be my favorite one just because it's presented me with a challenge for quite some time. Gina Gibson: ⁓ Excellent, what is your least favorite word? Ryan McKenzie: No. Gina Gibson: and what excites you the most. Ryan McKenzie: I, in a business context, I think kind the future direction of, ⁓ of AI stuff is something that I like to nerd out on. I would say personally getting to go on adventures with my kids and my wife. I'm a big fan of like kind of showing them what the world looks like. And we, do a lot of adventures. We try a lot of new things together and that's kind of what drives me behind the scenes. I forgot to tell my one thing about me that you that you might not know. before I did this, in this space for close to 15 years now. Before I did this, I sold motorcycles. Yeah, I graduated college. I don't know if I had a whole lot of direction. And so I had a buddy that was doing it. And he was like, you should come do this. And that lasted until I hit the first winter in Colorado and realized was not a profitable line of work in a state that snows for six months. Gina Gibson: Yeah, fire away. That's awesome. if somebody wants more information on Dialpad, who should they reach out to? Ryan McKenzie: I would point them right back to you, Gina. always here if you need me, but Gina knows where to find me. And she is a great resource for you on all things, not just Dialpad, but technology in general. Gina Gibson: Thanks so much for that, Ryan. And thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your insights on Dialpad. much to cover and so many features and functionalities to jam into a short period of time. So please reach out and we will get you in touch with Dialpad and you can dive deeper. Have a great day and thanks again for joining.