Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Automated Call Testing Every Enterprise Needs | Michael Kinsella (Klearcom) on The Tech Matchmaker
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. Hello everyone, we are chatting with Michael Kinsella today from Clearcom, who is the Enterprise Solutions Manager about automated testing. Michael, welcome to the podcast all the way from Ireland. Thank you, what an honor to have Michael: Yes, Gina. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Gina, obviously met you in person a good few times over in the US and you know, it's great to do this. Absolutely. Gina Gibson: Why don't we start with the basics Michael tell everybody a little bit about yourself Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. Michael: Yeah, of course. Yes. So I work as a enterprise solutions manager in clear com and just to tell you, I suppose I've been in the industry now for I'd say over eight years in total. Before that, I had a kind of a varied history in banking. Don't don't hate me. And but I've been in telecommunications now for eight years and basically in clear com and very simply, I suppose, if you boil it down to exactly what we do. And we help, you know, some of the biggest companies in the world, whether it be U.S. domestic or multinational companies, you know, ensure that the experience of their customers is good when they're dialing through on like a toll or toll free number and navigating through the IVR. I suppose we're like the crystal ball that, you know, sits out there and, know, if there are issues, we're spotting those issues and we're letting you know as soon as we see them. They're all human verified. And once you get something from us, means, okay, we need to drop everything and we need to go and we need to take action. Gina Gibson: And Michael, I know you and I were just chatting for one of our mutual customers the other day about, because everybody's, or not everyone, but a lot of people today have moved to a mobile experience, right, using their mobile phones. ⁓ Talk to us a little bit about how that testing works and how you guys cover off for every scenario, you know, because not everybody's at home on a landline that's quiet. They might be in the car, they might be using remote, you know, hands-free, whatever the case may be. Michael: Absolutely, yes. That's something obviously that we see more and more ourselves when we're out and about, you know, that tends to be the time that you're, you know, you're going to do those calls. And so I suppose if I think of it and I boil it down to first of all, an example, so say, for instance, if I'm, you know, dialing through to my bank, say for instance, or if I'm on holidays and there's an issue with like my MasterCard or my visa, it could be lost or stolen. I'm dialing through, I could be in like a hotel lobby. Gina Gibson: Thank Michael: I could be in an airport or it be on the streets. But that call is critical. I need to basically get through on that call. If there's a voice box, I need to be able to dial through and I need to be able to say why I'm calling. If it's something critical, like my car has been stolen, I need that voice box to be able to recognize exactly what I'm saying. And that's not just if it's in a perfect environment. It's if there's street noise or any kind of background noise, it's going to make you know, that voice bot difficult to understand because we don't want to be stuck in that. We've all been stuck in that loop. I suppose if, know, I didn't understand that, can you repeat that or and then the call drops or we get rerouted back to the opening message and where they're going, ⁓ I don't have time for this or whatever. So we ensure basically by, know, we can test all of those different scenarios so we can add background noise. We can test different, you know, personas, male, female. and different, you know, I suppose nationalities ⁓ and ensure that basically, you know, that what all of our testing is replicating the exact experience. even to go back to what you said first of all around the mobile testing, we've got the largest coverage of any company in the markets, when you vendor in the market. So nobody else does the testing like we do because we do the number testing and the IVR test. as one test. So basically we can dial through on the toll or toll free number right down to the IVR to the end agent that's done in a single test, a single platform. And we do it in a hundred percent non intrusive way. But I suppose the huge thing behind that is our global coverage. So we have, you know, carriers in over a hundred countries. We have around, I think it's three hundred and forty carriers that we use. And we do that across fixed line and GSM or mobile. headlines which means that you know you can isolate and you can see you know if a number is failing we can test from all different carriers the customer can test from all different carriers to ensure that okay this number say for instance not working through you know AT &T but it's actually dialable through T-Mobile so you can isolate and you can say ⁓ maybe the problems with AT &T and you know that's just an example of I suppose where things can go wrong and how we help. Gina Gibson: Absolutely, and I'm glad you kind of went to your differentiators in the market because one of the differentiators I think of when I think of clear calm is your customer experience, right? So as a customer that day two and maybe you want to talk just a little bit about it and I know you kind of touched on it you said like Every notification that needs to be looked at we're on top of it And that's you guys providing that service for the end customer, correct? You want to just kind of a little bit? Michael: Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. say, for instance, you know, this was the most simple of kind of failures or alerts that we would send through. So say a call fails to connect or this incorrect messaging on a on an IVR or a node within the IVR, you know, fails to connect. Well, basically, you know, we've got a whole team behind that. So we will validate those actual and, you know, they have alerts and those failure types. Gina Gibson: Thanks. Michael: and we're going to then do that process in the background and then we're going to send those alerts to the customer. So we're the only again, vendor in the market that does this. Nobody else does it like this. So we have that full backing and our customers obviously have that full backing of our testing support team. And it just means that I suppose nobody wants noise this day and age. know, if you've you're know, you're busy telecom team and you're already dealing with, you know, your day to day job, it's It's complicated enough to be sending down noise and false alerts. Nobody wants to be dealing with that. We've had customers that have switched off certain alerting tools because they just get noise. And we never want to be noise. We want to be, I suppose, just the clarity piece of their day-to-day job that they know, OK, that's clear-com. We need to scramble the jets and solve things now. Gina Gibson: Yeah, I love that. Do you want to give us one of your use cases, one of your success stories with your customer and kind of talk about what you solved, what your stats improved, like what stats improved for them? Just give us ⁓ an overview so our listeners can kind of relate to what could happen if they use Clearcom. Michael: Yeah, of course. Yeah. So I suppose one of the key things when we bring a customer along to clear com like your typical, I suppose, big multinational might have a lot of numbers. They might have a lot of toll toll free numbers or D.I.D.s. And what we'll do first of all is we'll take those numbers and do a health check on the numbers. So what we see actually on that very simple health check is that, you know, some of those numbers actually had a customer just yesterday that had, you know, Say for instance, I think they had around 200 numbers and they hadn't tested them and some of those numbers had been recycled. So if you're not testing a number at a certain cadence, you know, I think by law that number could actually be recycled by the carrier. So, you know, that first piece of discovering what's out there, discovering, OK, is that number, you know, still mine? I'm paying for that number. So first of all, I suppose that's the key thing. The next step is say, for instance, you know, beyond that, you know, and I suppose we've had the likes of Pfizer that have used us for like huge migration projects where they want to discover, you know, are these numbers working? And then post migration, are these numbers working? And is all the messaging correct? Is everything, you know, how I expect it to be? Because anybody that's doing migration, Gina, help customers do this the whole time. They're usually migrating for a reason. that they want to ensure that the experience is better for them and better for the customer. So they want to basically establish how did I look pre-migration and how did I look post-migration. And that's one of the key things that we've done, I suppose, interviews with the likes of Angela in Pfizer. And she would have spoke about this on how we helped her through that process. And they're the things that we love, getting feedback from customers and You know, we've had a lot of, I suppose, wouldn't call it good fortune, but we've had a lot of examples of where we've helped customers where like that numbers, because we're testing not just the number, but right down through the actual number in the IVR, we're seeing that, okay, this number, it was connecting maybe for two seconds, but it's getting disconnected. And because we're testing that number exactly how a customer would dial it. we can identify those issues. And we've had some of the biggest brands in the world that have issues like that. I don't want to get, I suppose, too specific on certain things, but I suppose, you know, it's some of the biggest brands in the world that we use for that kind of reason and just ensure that, you know, if there are issues and in certain markets, we had a large pharmaceutical company that had, say, for instance, a number in Panama. And that number we discovered actually after a lot of trial and error, because that number was actually only dialable from a very small carrier within Panama and you couldn't dial it from the incumbent carriers. That pretty much ruled out of I think 90 % of the population, you know, from dialing that number. And I suppose that's the kind of thing that we can pinpoint because we have that global coverage. And as I said, nobody else does it like that. Gina Gibson: Very impressive. And now you've talked a little bit, you know, clearly there's no vertical that should, you know, is excluded from doing testing. What is kind of the threshold to where, like, how many 800 numbers should a company have, or is there a call volume, or how do they decide if they need automated testing? Michael: I think it's down to, I suppose on a case by case basis, it's really down to the critical nature of the numbers. So that's really, if you have, say for instance, a lot of numbers, but I suppose it's all down to, know, what do you deem to be, you know, the customer relationship like, so what way do you want to treat your customers? You want your customers to have a good experience when they're dialing through. you don't want it to become, say, brand impacting that these numbers are not working. So there is no, I suppose, a phone call exact number. So it depends if those numbers like you could have, say, a large pharmaceutical company, they could have thousands of numbers, but maybe they have 50 clinical trial numbers. Those numbers can't afford to be down. These are like literally life and death numbers. So, you know, if you're in a clinical trial, you'd be giving given something akin to like a credit card, it'll have the number on it that if you start to have problems, here's the number to call. So you can't afford for those numbers to be down. I suppose in that example, the customer might have hundreds or thousands of numbers, but they might have one number or they could have 20 numbers that are clinical trials numbers and they're critical. yeah, I suppose it comes in all different shapes and sizes. So yeah. Gina Gibson: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So with everything in technology evolving so quickly every day, you know, it seems like we're learning something new out there. What's next for Clearcom? What is kind of on the roadmap for Clearcom as far as what you guys are looking at releasing out into the market? Michael: Yeah, I can't tell you that. I'm only joking. So ⁓ I suppose what we're doing in Clearcom is we're always looking at what our customers, you know, needs and wants. So we're first of all, you know, we've developed something that's really good and it's really powerful, but then we're taking feedback the whole time. And I suppose one of the key things with Clearcom is all of our development is done in the house. There's nothing that's outsourced. We've got an amazing development team. So they will work on new releases of our platform that happens very often. And then also we'll have bespoke requirements from different customers. And they will go off very quickly and develop these things. But I suppose to be more concise, to answer your question, I suppose the key thing is a lot of people are moving towards and probably circles back to what we said at the start around conversational AI. ⁓ Gina Gibson: you Michael: You know, if somebody's dialing through, you know, again and you're you've got a voice box, you want to be able to test that is the voice box picking up much said and keywords. So first of all, if you want to do that, say in a pre-production in a lab environment, you want to really test it robustly. You might want to test all different phrases to make sure that it's working. But then when you do your live testing, you don't necessarily want to do that. You just want to test, you know, certain things like like the example I gave, like if it's say for instance MasterCard or credit card company and you say, you know, that's okay. Something critical like, you know, my card has been lost. You want that call then to be rooted as quickly as possible to an agent. So I suppose there are some of the key things that we've worked on. Like I said, different personas that we have on the platform and also, you know, the likes of background noise and we'll be obviously looking for, you know, branching out into omni-channel testing. So and but we want to do better than what's out there in the markets everything I suppose that we've done before nobody else has done it and that's the way we look at those other and I suppose things that are on a road map we don't want to release them until you know people go okay this is different so Gina Gibson: Yeah, that's fantastic. And I think that is another differentiator for you, Michael, mentioning it is you are so agile and adaptable for your customers that if they do come to you with something that you guys are able to go ahead and and, know, depending on product management, of course, but work it into a release for them. So that's fantastic. ⁓ To wrap up, Michael, I'm I've always been a fan of James Lipton. And so we end the podcast with ⁓ Rapid fire a few rapid-fire questions. So What is your favorite word? Michael: Go first? Yep. Gina? Gina Gibson: you. ⁓ You're awesome. What's your real favorite word? Michael: ⁓ Family. Gina Gibson: What is your least favorite word? Michael: Fight! Gina Gibson: And what excites you the most? Michael: New experiences? Sorry, that's not one word. ⁓ Gina Gibson: Thanks. Michael: It's... You let me wait with that one, will ya? Yeah. Gina Gibson: When you're okay on new experiences. Michael, if somebody wants to have a further, a deeper conversation about ClearCom or get more information or a demo, who should they reach out to? Michael: Well, in the first instance, think ⁓ Gina. So Gina Gibson at Think Forward, because Gina, like we've worked with you before with several customers, you've brought them to us and I think you've been really kind of, I suppose, pleased with the service that we've provided them. And in the first instance, Gina. Otherwise, you can contact me directly, Michael Kinsley at Clearcom, ⁓ but also you can go onto our website as well. Gina Gibson: Thank Michael: clearcom.com should be easy to remember. And also we're on, you know, the likes of the Instagram and we're on Twitter or X as we call it now. And also we're on for the young people, TikTok, which I have no idea what it is, but there you go. Gina Gibson: Yeah. Michael, it is always a pleasure to talk with you, but such a great honor to have you on the podcast and for you to share your time with us today. So thank you so much. Michael: Thanks so much. Brilliant, Gina, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Gina Gibson: Thank