Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Real-Time Visibility for Contact Centers | Fred Stacey
Transcript
- Gina: Good morning everybody. Today we are happy to have Fred Stacey back, who is the CEO of Cloud Tech Gurus and co-founder of Peregrine. Thanks so much for coming back, Fred. Fred Stacey: Yeah, thank you for having me. Gina: It's this time we're we're not gonna really talk about cloud tech so much as we're gonna talk about something new that you are bringing to the market. So how about we start with for anybody that might have missed last episode, give us a quick reminder, who are you and what what do you do? Fred Stacey: Yeah. So I'm the CEO for Cloud Tech Gurus. We're what's called a TSD, but really, you know, for layman's terms, it's a you know, think of us as a broker in between all of the buyers and sellers and consultants and companies that operate within the customer experience practice realm. you know, so in other words, you know, because companies come to us when they need help with selecting a new AI vendor or, you know, they're trying to decide between build. buy, you know, how do they go, you know, how do they bring artificial intelligence into their in into their company? and we bring in the right advisors, the right team members, everything from, you know, people like you, Gina, and you know, PLLM builders, data scientists, engineers, you know, whatever a client needs. we have resources on the bench or available for literally anything in customer experience. Gina: Excellent. And why don't you give us the elevator pitch on Peregrine? Talk a little bit about what it is. I know it's been out on the web Fred Stacey: Yeah. Gina: a lot, but let's let's get into it. Fred Stacey: Yeah, so I I'm a big believer in stories, right? And You know, so the story of Peregrine really started over a year ago. I went to my co-founder, Eben Hall, you know, who's the CEO of Peregrine. He's a a partner, you know, with us at Cloud Tech. And you know, I it's always been a struggle for me how hard it is to switch from one CCaaS to another. And that's how this started, right? the simple idea of You know, why not with agentic technology and AI? Why can't we figure out a better way to do this? To do it without the scope creep, without the pains and the difficulties. And we've all seen, and it and likely if you've been in this practice of of contact centers, you've felt the pain of converting from one system to another. You know, so that's how it started. You know, really where we're at today is we're the command and control center for contact centers. And how we show up in particular today is inside the CCaaS suppliers initially. you know, so the CCaaS tools most people don't realize under the hood, there's not just all of the data that we that the administrators of these systems interact with everyday IVRs, agent controls, skilling, you know, routing rules, all these DID assignments, all the stuff that goes into running one of these systems. There's thousands of features, right? You know, but under the hood, there's also config files. you know, so there's data and information that is not generally accessible through the UI for even the system administrators sometimes. so we pull all of this in you know, and allow for a systems admin to to be able to to manage like a development server to a production server type of tooling. you know, it for those that are in the development world, get you know, is a pretty common tool. where you can propagate new code from a development server to a production server after you've tested it, roll it back, you know, move data from multiple servers. You know, it's funny how many how many CX executives don't even realize that they have, you know, oftentimes multiple instances of a single company's platform. in-house, let alone multiple systems. You know, there are plenty of orgs that through acquisitions, they end up with a, for instance, a Genesys and an Amazon instance and a NiCE instance. There's no visibility across any of that stuff. So bringing that all into one user interface, you know, showing all the tooling, getting notifications on any errors, you know, because as you know, and the audience probably does. The average CCaaS system connects to, you know, at least a minimum of a handful of other systems through Gina: Mm-hmm. Fred Stacey: APIs, through now MCPs, you know, and all these various different interaction points that if one of those fails, customer experience gets damaged. and nothing out there has ever solved for this. you know, so a you know, really Peregrine is designed to be the command and control center. you know, for the contact center for the technology staff. Gina: I love that. And you mentioned a situation situation, but let's talk about when a customer could or should use Peregrine. So Fred Stacey: Yeah. Gina: As you said, moving platforms. I I love the moving from, you know, promoting code from development to production. What are some of the other uses that that might be out there for Peregrine? Fred Stacey: Yeah. So the the simplest use case that's easy for everybody to understand is DIDs, TFNs, APIs, all these interactions, we call them endpoints. What they really are is fail points, right? In between multiple different technologies. There's no tooling out there that monitors all of those and then can quickly indicate when something's starting to show errors, you know, giving a yellow like warning, you know, hey, you need to take a look at this. even worse, you know, when the critical errors happen, you know, notifying the administrator right away and getting those notifications via email, text, via whatever ways they choose. you know, that's a common, very common use case. you know, maybe it's not a tool that somebody stares at twenty four seven. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't recommend it. You know, but you know, having that monitoring tooling in the back end to be able to know. not guess, but know when stuff goes bad. and 'cause I'm sure you've been in a center where you know toll-free number goes down or you know, a routing Gina: Yeah, but Fred Stacey: is stuck, you know, or something happens that for some reason you're you don't have any visibility that anything's going wrong until a customer calls some other number, comes in through chat and says, Hey, your toll-free number is broken. And usually Gina: Yeah. Fred Stacey: You know, that's days, if not weeks later, you know, where you find out, no, you know, we haven't been able to get any of these calls through this number or this, you know, interaction is failing. that's an easy one. Right. Gina: And with that one, Fred, there's testing tools out there. So is is Peregrine also like, is it making calls out to those 800 numbers? How is it alerting that the 800 numbers down? Fred Stacey: No. so what we're monitoring again is the endpoints, right? You know, so from a technology perspective, there are testing tools out there, right? You know, they there's plenty and they're great companies. you know, we've talked to plenty of them. And and that's great when you're testing the routes, but nothing's telling anybody, you know, when an API starts to fail. Gina: Mm-hmm. Fred Stacey: and as you know, you know, as we continue to progress down the path of AI, you know, especially conversational voice. Half a millisecond delays cause serious problems in the interaction. Gina: Absolutely. Fred Stacey: you know, so having no visibility into all these endpoints you know, is a serious problem. you know, but it's Gina: Yeah. Fred Stacey: a problem we've all accepted because quite frankly, until the last few years, the technology wasn't available. I mean, you Gina: Yeah. Fred Stacey: know, to be able to map these instances and you know, get access and visibility and bring it all into one system, it just didn't exist. Gina: Who would you say your ideal customer for Peregrine is right now? Like is it built more around, let's say, the fifty agent shop still kind of figuring out its stack, or is it enterprise kind of seed operations, as you mentioned, running multiple platform instances? Fred Stacey: Yeah, I mean the the beauty of it, look the way we've got it set up right now, let's the you know Peregrine is available today in Genesys Cloud and Amazon Connect. now this is early access phase. So what we're looking for is people that want to dive in, you know, get access to a cutting edge technology and work with our dev team and product team to to really make advancements in the tooling. You know, so but the ideal client Is really anybody that has two instances, a development and a production, all the way up to enterprises that have multiple instances across multiple different platforms. now, as we build it out, clearly and add, you know, our intent is to take this well beyond CCaaS and interconnect all of the tooling inside a contact center. you know, then then that that opens up to everybody, right? But we built it and architected in a way. That the front end of this is really not that expensive. you know, that's the intent is we want to provide the tooling you know, to the administrators so they can easily, cost effectively have visibility across their entire stack. and and normally I'm not a big believer in talking about, you know, the the price tag. but in reality, you know, when you when you're using artificial intelligence under the hood for the what where our patent lies. and where all of the AI tooling exists is under the hood in the mapping. you know, whereas the actual interactions, notifications, I mean, you know, sending text, sending emails, notifying of errors, that's relatively low, low friction, low cost, you know, sets of of activities. So we don't need to charge that much for that kind of tooling. Where the real power comes in is as you start expanding and you know, adding instances of different, you know, different platforms, then the visibility becomes holistic across your whole org. you know, so and there's a lot of future roadmap things we could dive into where we're heading, but not to disclose too much. You know, but we want to make this real easy, you know, real simple for people to sign up. All you need is your systems admin. You know, you need them they need their credentials to be able to log in as an admin into their platform. and that's it. The mapping engine does the rest of the work and brings it all available. Gina: And you guys are offering a free trial right now as well, correct? I I think it's called Discover the Initial Platform or How Does Fred Stacey: So yeah, there's there's two different levels of free. so right now, because of early access, we're looking for shops that have, you know, a dev and a production or multiple instances that want to get in on that. Now they're getting free access to the whole platform. The Discover tool, the Discover Plus, and the Manage tooling. you know, because this is early access, right? We're trying to, you know, you could be the best developers in the world, with the the most experience around platforms and build something and think it's right. And you know, in reality, once the customer gets their hand on it, you know, they may use it in 20 different ways that we never thought of. Or may Gina: Right. Fred Stacey: tell us that there's there's a tool. If you could just add this, I mean this is a no-brainer. So that's the phase we're at right now. you know, so that that is for special cases, you know, the the for clients that fit that that criteria. we'll definitely onboard them and give them full tooling access for free. likely like like a 90-day beta, right? You know, for free, all the way up to manage. But the free discover, the ability to to actually get your, you know, put your credentials in and get visibility, get every 30 days, it'll refresh the data so you can get new warnings. that's free forever. we want to put Discover and the ability to to actually view. your whole system in single pane of glass for free. We truly believe that that tooling in itself, given away will create a ton of value for administrators. And let's be frank, system admins, they don't get much love. I mean they don't have many tools. Gina: No. Fred Stacey: You know, they're like the people in the back room that, you know, when an IVR goes down or a new campaign has to be built, Then it's their emergency. You know, everybody else's lack of planning becomes their emergency. And I used to administer these tools. So I know, I I know firsthand. there's nobody out there giving love to the system admins. Gina: Well, and it's funny because founders and products like this usually come from personal experience of pain, right? So it's it's Fred Stacey: yeah. Gina: a great, great view to know that you have felt it and that's why part of why you you built this. I love Fred Stacey: Yeah. Gina: it. Is there anything else, Fred, you want the audience to know that I haven't asked you about, Peregrine, to to get in there? I know we're gonna put a URL in in the notes so that people can you log in and and get it for free, but is there anything else you'd like them to know? Fred Stacey: Yeah, yeah, I think it's important to understand you know, this technology is really just the beginning, you know, of where we're heading. I mean, I I think what we're seeing globally, you know, across all of our clients in CTG is it's built in by, you know, when it comes to artificial intelligence. you know, the the the CCaaS and the CRMs are not going away. you know, I it People that say that, I always giggle because they've clearly never done an enter enterprise transformation. They have no idea what it means to actually go in and do change management across an entire org. you know, the customers are not going to stop calling. you know, there's there's so many implications that people aren't thinking about. You know, our but our market is changing, you know, very much so. so having visibility across, you know, whether you're building a a private large language model in-house, your buying point solutions, you're still going to have your CCaaS you're still going to have your CRM. These things are not going away. They may go headless. but you need the tools and your systems admin especially need the tools to be able to to really observe and govern this this world that we're going into. I mean, you know, we see everybody's launching new MCPs. Everybody has APIs. You know, these are all things that are not going away and it's not getting easier. you know, this whole world is getting more complex. yeah, so you gotta get you gotta have the tooling. so Gina: And you bring up a good point, right? Like so typically we talk about, you know, what makes you better than the competitors in the market, but the problem that you said is really there isn't anything, right, that that sysadmins can use to do this. So it's breaking new ground in a constantly ever changing environment, really. Fred Stacey: It is, it is. And and what gives us comfort is it the underlying engine. you know, when you're able to build, you know, AI tools along with supervised learning to to to make the model so that, you know, we've already more than halved the in the time it takes for to get an instance mapped in Gina: Okay. Fred Stacey: in just this short period of time. and we're gonna continue to have that. We fully anticipate that it'll take us Within the next six months, we're targeting to try to get to less than a week for a new a whole new platform to be mapped. you know, and then as that continues to cycle, you know, a and it gets smarter and better, you know, the those mappings will get easier and easier. So you know, that's that's where the the magic lies is that you know, today, Genesys Cloud, Amazon Connect. it isn't gonna take us long to to start rolling out a lot more. and you can extrapolate without giving too much detail, you can extrapolate where that's heading. and there's a lot more tooling that wraps around this, right? You know, to to manage all of these interactions and endpoints. There's a lot of things that contact centers don't leverage today, that there may be bits and bops throughout the industry, like like you said, IVR testing tools is one. not that we're trying to become a testing tool, not at all. Gina: Right. Fred Stacey: you know, but there's there's other things like, you know, the agent endpoints and you know, the you know, all these various tools and their you know, how they interact with the environment. so really, yeah, yeah, I'd what I'd say is it's an exciting time. We're we're super excited about getting this out. you know, but The long-term vision of this is really again the command and controls, the governance and observability across the entire ecosystem. and that's where we're heading. And, you know, we're we're excited to to bring something, to do something no one else has done. and I, Gina: Yeah. Fred Stacey: you know, the what I love, and you can appreciate this, because we talk a lot about conversational bots. you know, and and really a lot of companies are driving towards that because it drops, you know, it drops a Gina: Mm-hmm. Fred Stacey: lot of. value back to the bottom line by replacing humans. Well, we get to talk about, you know, giving the humans the tools to be able to see stuff they've never had visibility and solve problems and fix things and you know, manage things that they just don't have today. and that part excites me. I I love, you know, we're not talking about you know, another conversational bot out of the thousands that are out there today, right? You know. Gina: Yeah. Fred Stacey: We're talking about some tools that actually bring some value. yeah. So yeah. Gina: It's very, very exciting times. Can't wait to see you know, as customers begin to adopt it, what changes and and like you said, there'll probably be brand new uses of it that you guys are like, never even thought of that. This is perfect, right? So Fred Stacey: Yeah, yeah. Once you open all that data up, it's super Gina: Yeah. Fred Stacey: fascinating to watch people realize, I've never even been able to see all of this data in one place, let alone, you know, do stuff with it. Gina: Manipulate it. Yeah. Make decisions, make business decisions based on it. to wrap things up, Fred, you know I love to end with some rapid fire. So, Fred Stacey: Yeah. Gina: what's a sound or noise that you love? Fred Stacey: What's a sound or noise that I love? the clanging of weights. Gina: Haha, that's awesome. What's a sound or noise that you hate? Fred Stacey: I I tell you lately, I okay. because Gina: Mm. Fred Stacey: as you know, I ride a motorcycle. Gina: Mm-hmm. Fred Stacey: you know, so there's nothing quite like somebody, you know, n next to you or you're in Colorado they just made it legal so you can split lanes. the screeching of a tire, yeah. Gina: Usually spells disaster. Yeah. Fred Stacey: Yeah, yeah. Gina: what profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Fred Stacey: What profession other than my own? gosh, that's a tough one. I love what I do. I you know, I mean I I literally Gina: Yeah, yeah. Fred Stacey: I obviously I'd have to. I I'm insane to to to Gina: Ha ha ha. Fred Stacey: do what I do. but I love it. you know, what would what else would I do? I would probably, you know, I'd have to reverse my age a bit. but you know, maybe Yeah, go into personal training, bodybuilding, stuff like that. 'Cause I love the weight room. Gina: Yeah. Fred Stacey: I love the discipline and the you know, that the way that you you go through bulk and cut cycles and, you know, the physical and mental challenge of it all. So probably that. Gina: Awesome. And Fred, if somebody wants more information on either CTG or Peregrine Discover and to get on the wait list for maybe one of the platforms you haven't mapped as of yet, who should they reach out to? Fred Stacey: you let's l let me let me give that little plug. Everybody reach out to Gina. Gina: It would Fred Stacey: you know, but if you don't reach out to Gina, reach out to me directly. LinkedIn is always the easiest. I I'm always on LinkedIn. but cloudtechgurus.com for anything generally related. yeah, and then for peregrine labs, it's https://www.peregrinelabs.io yeah, to to find that. you can sign up. yeah, through like Gina said, the link in the video. that's the best way, in my opinion. Gina: Perfect. Fred, it's always a pleasure having you on. And what you're building with Peregrine is clearly exactly what the industry's been missing. So thank you. And we're really Fred Stacey: Thank you. Gina: glad glad to have you back on. Thanks for your time today. Fred Stacey: Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks.