Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Conversational Commerce Revolution: Agentic AI, Messaging & Payments in One | Corey Reed (CM.com)
Transcript
- Gina Gibson: Hello everybody. Today we are chatting with Corey Reed, the North American Partnership Manager from CEM. Corey, welcome to the podcast. We're really happy to have you here. 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. Corey Reed: Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here and be a part of the podcast today. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Let's start with the basics. Corey, tell us a little bit about yourself. ⁓ Corey Reed: Yeah, so I'm the North American channel manager at CM.com. I cover the Midwest region I've with CM for four years in September. Previous, I'd spent a couple lifetimes ⁓ in ⁓ 17 at AT &T and three years at a competitor before that. And then a couple different verticals before that selling just about everything. I've covered the gambit in my career so far. Gina Gibson: Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. years and years. So, I love it. I love it. Now, I always like to share with our listeners so they can get to know you a little bit better. Tell us one thing about yourself that we might not find on LinkedIn. Corey Reed: Yeah, so I kind of hinted at a few things, but I think a couple are noteworthy and stand out. So I'd mentioned that I'm a foodie on LinkedIn page. And while that's true, I've kind of doubled down in the kitchen and become what I like to think is a pretty decent cook. My latest experiment was smoked El Port Pastore tacos. I smoked those for about eight hours, made the salsa verde sauce from scratch, and they were phenomenal. So I thought that was noteworthy. And then the other thing I would say is, think it says globetrotter world traveler on my LinkedIn page. I in September an upcoming non-hunting safari in South Africa. How cool is that? Gina Gibson: That is phenomenal. Always been on my bucket list. I can't wait to hear how it goes. So tell us a little bit about CM, Corey. For people that might not be familiar with CM or CPAS, how would you describe what it does in everyday terms for our listeners? Corey Reed: Yeah, so I think important to know is we're a global company. We are a Dutch based company. We're celebrating our 26 year in business. We're leader in the conversational commerce software space. Our software helps brands ⁓ with ⁓ customers through channels like business messaging, voice, email, payments, and now agentic AI. We have a full circle communications platform that powers that customer journey from the first touch ⁓ the final transaction. Gina Gibson: you 8, go. Now. Corey Reed: across every channel. We believe in meeting customers on their channel of choice. And what we know that email has a single digit open rate, while SMS is still hovering over 90%. But we also know that brands are now leveraging channels like Facebook, Instagram, and the RCS channel will be the future of e-commerce. And in a nutshell, we empower brands to know their customers as well as they possibly can through first party behavioral data. Gina Gibson: You Love that. How do you help brands kind of decide which channels are right for their audiences or do they know going in or do you guys kind of help with that determination? Corey Reed: Yeah, so it's a mix of both, right? So we tried to look at what they're leveraging today and how they're leveraging today, and then kind of pair that with what we're seeing in that industry, right? And so sometimes we've met with clients that are a little further ahead of the prospect that we're in front of, and we can give that consultative advice. Or more times than not, we see customers that are maybe lifting these channels. on their page, but not really leveraging to their full extent. And that's where our experience and consultancy comes in handy. Gina Gibson: love that. And you mentioned different verticals being, you know, some verticals, it's vertical specific. What verticals do you work across or do you work across all of them or where do you see your greatest successes? Corey Reed: Yeah, that's great question. We do very well across retail, travel, hospitality, education, finance, just to name a few, but not limited to. And really any organization that communicates with its customers and wants to increase speed, reduce friction, improve service without hiring a small army. Gina Gibson: that. And so I know CM integrates payments with communication. Talk to us about some of maybe some of the use cases that opens up for our listeners. Like would that look like? What would a typical use look like for payment and communication? Corey Reed: Yeah, so think about a message from a brand that you love. And so this is a brand that you've been loyal to over the years, that anytime you need to maybe upgrade your wardrobe, or maybe it's outdoor equipment or anything like that, sends you a message based off of previous insights. So maybe was they looked at your previous purchase history on items that you had bought and paired those with some new items that may complement or are really in line with what your purchase history was. They send you a marketing campaign message. You agree that you'd like to learn more, click through the message where their products are listed. You find a couple that are really of your fancy and you want to move forward in purchasing solely within that message. So that would be a great example of a really cool experience with a brand that you love, kind of custom tailoring that message off. previous insights through first-party behavioral data and purchasing within that message. Gina Gibson: And does conversational AI come into play with that as well in your product suite or how does, like as far as that, would I be able to chat with a bot or how does it come into play with CEM and your products? Corey Reed: Yeah, and that's a great question. And so our ⁓ product, Halo, which is an AI agent that fluent in 150 languages, ⁓ it the gatekeeper to your brand. ⁓ It works around the clock, doesn't take a day off, won't ask for a raise, and typically costs less than one human headcount. It's fully with Teams and Slack, but all of those fun messaging channels like Facebook, Instagram, Gina Gibson: Thank Ready? Corey Reed: RCS, WhatsApp are all also integrated within the chat solution. Gina Gibson: What would you say sets your product apart from the competitors in the market? What's your competitive advantage? Corey Reed: Yes, a lot of companies are experimenting with generative AI and we were as well, but that was beginning at end of 2023, beginning of 2024. And we've come a long way and what we're focusing now is agentic AI, which means our solutions don't just generate responses. They get things done, whether that's scheduling a delivery, escalating a service ticket, walking a user through an application flow. Our platform empowers AI to complete full tasks safely and securely. Gina Gibson: Thank you. Corey Reed: And the other really cool feature to our agentic component is it's completely agnostic. And what we've seen out there in the competitive field is either are having a third party bolt on or requiring and customers to forklift their entire solution. That's one really cool feature about CM and our products is we can provide an Gina Gibson: Thank you. you Corey Reed: customer experience providing both the inbound, the outbound, conversational AI and now agentic AI. But if a customer that has an existing contact center just wants to enhance that customer experience with the agentic portion, we got you covered no problem. Gina Gibson: We should be ready. Excellent and for our listeners that are kind of just beginning to rethink their communication strategy, what's one piece of advice you'd offer them? Corey Reed: that agentic software is really going to be a part of every standard business operating practice here in the next 12 to 24 months. And the way that I see this in talking to my audience today is kind of twofold, right? I look at Gina, you as my customer, your customers are your customers, right? And with that said, going back to the 12 to 24 month purchase, what we see forecast, your customers are going to be buying agentic solutions. They would rather buy those solutions from their trusted advisor and you, and we'd love to partner. So let's multiply. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Corey, you share a success story with us so everybody can see and hear a use case and kind of understand a little bit more about how you've helped your customers? Corey Reed: Yeah, so I have two and I kind of touched base on one previously, but I'll put this back on you, Gina. would be pretty cool to have your own personal stylist, right? Yeah, I thought same thing here. And so we an agent built that can do exactly that. So again, your favorite brand ⁓ has history, first party data on you, what you spent with them, what you bought. But we can take it a step further and provide insights as to ⁓ Gina Gibson: Yes. Good. Corey Reed: how long you may be hovered over a product, your clicks, your opens, your engagement, history, all of that stuff, right? And based on that, we can send a marketing campaign across any channel from WhatsApp if it's international, SMS here if it's local, Instagram, Facebook, you name it, right? You receive that campaign and it's about a new product line. We're heading into fall here soon. Gosh, I hate to think that, but we're heading into fall, so they give you information on the new fall product line and you're interested to learn more. Gina Gibson: Right. Corey Reed: So as you're communicating back and forth with an AI agent that feels very human-like in nature, it sounds like you're talking to myself or you, but it's really our AI agent. And you're having a back and forth, asking questions, the AI agent is making recommendations. And at one point you say, you know what, I just bought this outfit that I really like going into fall. Here's a picture of it. What can you do to help me? That AI agent then cross references your picture using optical recognition. With their whole products, you have 2,000 products and now is making recommendations to go with your outfit, taking payment. If you have to process a return, can do all of that front to back, just like a personal stylist could. So that's one, yeah, really cool use case. Gina Gibson: Absolutely, I'm gonna have to get the name of that from you after. Corey Reed: Yeah, yeah. And then if I have another minute, I'd like to share just another one because I think it resonates well. And when I say that, think about, you know, if you've traveled to a big resort, whether that was for work or whether it was for personal, right? So when I think about work, this happened to me at Channel Partners. This past year, we did not stay at the Convention Hotel. We stayed offsite and it was a beautiful resort. I won't name names just to keep things copostatic. Gina Gibson: Good. Corey Reed: But it was a beautiful resort. room was fantastic. It was spic and span. I think it was brand new. Tons of great eating options. And thing that I forgot to pack was my massage gun. You know, after going to Channel Partners, being on your feet all day, working the calves and the feet out is a great thing. And guess what? They had me covered with the massage gun in the room. But all that said, I will associate more pain with my stay at this resort than pleasure. And here's why. So leading channel partners, we would have two armfuls of things that we didn't want to leave in our booth. We went back to our hotel. And the idea was, guys, contact your families, drop your stuff off, take 10 minutes, let's meet back in the lobby, and we're going to team dinner. So I make my way up to my room, drop things off, only to find out that my key card didn't work. So what then I found myself doing is going back to the lobby, two armfuls of stuff, weight in line. Gina Gibson: My Corey Reed: to get my keycard reprogrammed, to go up, to go back down. So instead of being decompressed, I was hangry, right? And not a good look. if that resort would have had a digital Butler concierge on my phone that I could have done one of two things, either reprogram my keycard on site while I was in outside of my room, or case scenario, just sent somebody to my room and I could have just parked it the hallway. After standing on my feet all day, that would have been amazing. Gina Gibson: next Yeah. Corey Reed: And if brands that we loved had that type of convenience and experience, we would spend more money with those brands. And we have both of those agents built on Gina Gibson: We need to solve this. Very cool. That's an incredible bonus, I would say, as somebody, and I'm pretty sure everybody listening to this that's traveled to a conference can relate to the key card not working. it's great example. How do you envision CEM evolving over the next three to five years to meet the ever-changing customer needs? Corey Reed: Thanks Yeah, so a couple of things come to mind. We're rapidly expanding our partner network and integrating even deeper into additional CRMs and industry platforms like Salesforce, Shopify, and hospitality PMS tools. And we're making it easier than ever to for businesses to plug in and let Halo go to work. We're currently building a marketplace, adding ISVs and platforms daily. So that's kind of what I see is ⁓ roadmap looking like for expansion. Gina Gibson: That's perfect. And Corey, if the listener here today only remembers one thing about CM after this episode, what should it be? Corey Reed: Yeah, and this is something that I had kind of already mentioned. But over the next few years, we see agentic AI becoming a standard of every business workforce. And think it's the biggest technological breakthrough since the advent of the internet. ⁓ it's not a replacement for people. It's a force multiplier for lean teams to get more done with less at any hour of the day. And again, when I think about my audience today, Gina Gibson: We are. Okay. Corey Reed: as partners, you are my customer, your clients are going to be buying Agentic AI solutions for the next 12 to 24 months. They prefer to buy from you and their trusted advisor, and we prefer to be your partner to monetize that mutually. So let's get to work. Gina Gibson: Excellent, I love it. you mentioned you'd seen some episodes, so you know how we close out that I'm a big fan of James Lipton and we close it with a few rapid fires. So what is your favorite word? Corey Reed: skedaddle Gina Gibson: What's your least favorite word? Corey Reed: Shite. Gina Gibson: and what excites you the most. Corey Reed: Traveling to remote areas of the world, eating amazing food with great company. Gina Gibson: Sounds perfect. Corey, if somebody wants more information on CEM, who should they reach out to? Corey Reed: Yeah, well, I'm certainly on LinkedIn, but the preferred method would be collaboration with my pal Gina at Think Forward. Gina Gibson: Perfect. Thank you, Corey, so much for joining us today for sharing your insights ⁓ a little bit more about what CEM is doing and the communication lines. Really appreciate your time. Corey Reed: Thank you so much for having me.