with Alex McBratney and Aarde Cosseboom

Don't have time to listen? Read the full transcription.

Alex McBratney (Host) 00:00

Hello, and welcome to Another Cloud Podcast, a podcast designed to bring you stories from the smartest minds in IT, operations and business and learn how they're using cloud technology to improve business and customer experience. Well, Justin Borah, great to have you on the podcast this afternoon. Justin is with NICE inContact. And it's a really good journey that I've seen on LinkedIn. Justin, just how you got inContact. And what I'd like to you like for you to explain is just, what's that journey been like? How did you get started? Where were you before and how did you get inContact a little bit about that journey?

Justin Borah (Guest) 00:39

Yeah. God, it seems like forever ago, but I guess originally kind of out of college started out in marketing with a company kind of an online fashion retail subscription type of company, and then from there, kind of pivoted into the customer experience had an opportunity with customer service team. So then took that opportunity over and then with that group actually kind of became the systems and tools and integrations and reporting and kind of Excel, all that kind of guy wore a lot of different hats. And then that kind of eventually graduated into a role really overseeing a lot of contact center technology, the core of the technology, the architecture, leading the vision for the tools and technology behind, you know, multi 1000 agent, contact center group so that's kind of how I got to that side of it being a customer. And then from there, you know, had relationships with some of the providers that I had been using and been through several sales cycles myself as a customer and built some relationships, and always was a bit curious to kind of test the waters so to speak. So, when an opportunity popped up, it was kind of the right time for me, I had been at my current company for over 10 years and was, you know, ready to try something new and I had a lot of experience with the product and NICE and contact as a customer. So, felt pretty comfortable with the product and talking about it so I wanted to give it a try. And that's kind of how I landed at NICE inContact about three years ago now.

Alex McBratney (Host) 02:23

Yeah, so you've been there three years and what I found really interesting is that you don't, in the sales world, typically you don't have someone that actually was a user of the product before they actually go work for the carrier, right? It's Hey, I started as a BDR, SDR I worked my way up. Now I'm in a big enterprise a lot for you, you actually were using the product for many years before and then made the jump over to the to the product side. I find that really interesting and I'm sure there's a lot of nuances that you knew about the solution that a regular sales rep at the company had no idea what this solution did how it did it, you know that you know, the ins and outs of it? How's that benefited you just at being inContact on the sales side?

Justin Borah (Guest) 03:05

Yeah, you know, it's funny, because it's 100% true, I, I constantly am finding that I know, things that the typical salesperson wouldn't add at this company or at any company for that matter. And also, even in some cases, I wouldn't necessarily say more, but maybe more practical knowledge in terms of the engineering side of things, right, how to set things up that actually can be used from a more hands on practical perspective. So, it's been interesting, kind of having that knowledge and bringing that into some of these conversations I'm having with some of the prospective customers and talking to you about their requirements, their challenges, their goals, and, and so forth. So, it's been fun. You know, the thing is, I only have this experience of what I know so I didn't kind of come from a traditional sales background. So, what I can say is that customers seem to enjoy when I bring up my experience and how I might tackle some of these challenges, if I were sitting in their shoes, so I think that has been beneficial through not only for me, but also for my prospective customers.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 04:20

And Justin, you and I, we've known each other for quite a while now we actually met for the first time at inContact before it was NICE and contact just react conference a probably a decade ago. I don't even know what year that was. Yeah. Now let's talk a little bit about inContact and their origin story. So, you've been a customer for a long time, 10 plus years, probably 15 to 20 years. And you know, you started working for them three years ago, a lot has changed over that time. So, give us a little bit of a background like what’s the difference between NICE what's inContact, I know you have a cx one product, walk us through that lens.

Justin Borah (Guest) 05:01

Yeah, it's an interesting story. In 2016, NICE, acquired inContact, you know, hence now why it's called NICE inContact. So, prior to the acquisition both NICE and inContact, we're both large, successful and publicly traded companies on their own. After NICE acquired, contacted, absorbed inContact, but NICE in context still operates as its own kind of wholly owned subsidiary of NICE, the real interesting part is the reason why that happened. So, there's been some interesting consolidation in the space over the years. I think I'm a little biased, I'll admit that. But from my perspective, I think that this was probably one of the most strategic consolidations in the space that we've seen, or that I've seen. The reason why NICE acquired inContact because back in 2016, and even prior NICE was in and still is the leader. As far as web workforce engagement, management goes workforce management, quality management, so on and so forth, but traditionally sold in an on prem type model. So, they were, you know, trying to figure out a cloud strategy, everybody knows things are shifting to the cloud, at a very rapid tilt. So, in doing so, they look to kind of build or buy, they went through that kind of analysis. And you know, where that lead, they acquired NICE inContact. So, interestingly enough, inContact is basically born in the cloud, from day one. Whereas NICE was always on prem. So, it was a very good marry, or merge in that way. But also, because we have an ACD IVR, where NICE, doesn't NICE has the WFO, and we didn't have that. So, what we've done, or what NICE is done now is kind of basically taken the inContact Cloud platform and built into it all of the other products and technologies they have around workforce management, workforce engagement, quality management, speech, analytics, so on and so forth. And that which you referred to, when you said cx one, that is what the platform now is called. It's called NICE inContact cx one. And it's really unique in the space, we think that it makes things a lot easier on our customers to have everything kind of under one roof, to have one place to set up a user, as opposed to set up a single user in multiple systems, and then try to marry or integrate those two systems together. We all know how that goes with, with the data sync breaking and things like that. So, cx one really is aimed at addressing that with every really every feature functionality kind of tool component, you would need to effectively run a contact center, all in one single platform.

Alex McBratney (Host) 08:11

Yeah, and this was the only scene with inContact and how great it is to have that one single platform, right and taking like the behemoth that NICE was or is and inContact emerging that together. So, when you're working with a client, what do you see as like some of the main challenges they're trying to solve for when they come to you for, you know, consulting and getting the getting a new platform?

Justin Borah (Guest) 08:34

You know, it kind of runs the gambit, as you can imagine, but I'd say if there was a common theme really to pluck out of it, it's that these legacy, ancient platforms that they're using today or yesterday, they don't have the customer experience capabilities that that today's companies expect to be able to deliver and that today's customers expect to be able to receive. You know, you can think of something, I'll make it a basic example. When you call a company, and they're experiencing a long wait time, you don't want to sit there with the phone glued to your ears for an hour and a half. Right, you would be pretty appalled. If that was the experience they delivered, you would much rather I'm assuming have them call you back when it's your turn, right? So, you can kind of do other things and go about your day and an hour and a half later received that phone call now that an agent is available to talk to you. Right, it's your turn. So that type of thing is possible, you know, in in an on prem kind of legacy type contact center environment, but it can be a nightmare, trying to get something like that set up, right, you've got to potentially go to a third-party vendor, talk about integrations, they're going to have their own costs associated with it. And, you know, there's also going to be all of the telco nightmare with trying to figure out how to get the calls over there because the telephony is routing through your on prem network, most likely So it just becomes kind of a bit of a nightmare right? Now flash forward to the cloud, because it's a shared environment, right? a multi-tenant environment, we've provisioned this platform to kind of be clicked to enable type functionality. That type of functionality is available out of the box, right? Instead of doing complex customizations, you're really just doing a quick configuration.

Alex McBratney (Host) 10:25

Yeah. I'm always curious, like, what's when's like the breaking point, right? Because you have all these client customers or, you know, businesses that are on prem, still, they're using Avaya. They're using Cisco shortall. Wherever you, you name it. Like worse, that breaking point, you know, is there a specific department that you see pushing, making the drive to make that switch is probably not it? But where do you usually see that coming from or being pushed down from?

Justin Borah (Guest) 10:51

Yeah, it's, it's also a mixture, I would say I have seen it from it. But generally, it's coming more from the business, right? Those types of systems that you mentioned, can be very complex to administer. Whereas some of these new c CAS or cloud providers like NICE inContact, it is night and day, much easier to administer. So traditionally, the business users have to go to it to request, what are today's simple changes, right in a C cast environment. And they're starting to wise up to that, and they're starting to put pressure on it, to make that migration to a model with a platform that they can manage themselves, instead of having to open a ticket that then doesn't get addressed for six days or potentially weeks. They can just go in there and do it themselves in six minutes. So, there's a lot of pressure coming from the business at this point. That's what I'm saying.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 11:46

Let's talk a little bit about some out of the box functionality that you have integrating into other clouds and ecosystems, you guys already have your third-party ecosystem where you could click to enable turn features on and off or even use third parties that are certified. What about other ones that are important, like integrations into CRMs? like Salesforce and us? What does that look like? And how do you guys solve for that?

Justin Borah (Guest) 12:12

Yeah. So, CRM integrations are one of the most common types of integrations that we do almost every single customer that we have, want some sort of CRM integration, some of our customers want multiple CRM integrations. So, it's a very common thing that we do. And you know, we've done it 1000s of times at this point. And we have a lot of different ways to integrate into CRM. When people say CRM integration, that could mean a bunch of different things. So, I'll just kind of go through a couple different CRM, CRM integration. So, one of the most common that people like to purchase or talk about is the embedded agent experience. So, what that would do is put the call controls or the chat interface, you know, whatever the agent would be interacting with the, the customer through, it puts that or embeds that into the CRM, you know, whether it be Zendesk or Salesforce like you had mentioned. And we also offer open API's, if the customer has a homegrown CRM, they can actually develop that same interface within their own CRM, we have a developer kit to be able to do that. So that's one of the most common CRM integrations, CRM screen pop, right? When the incoming call gets answered, or chat gets answered, popping to the right place, maybe you want to pop directly to that, that customer's order, if you already know they were on the order page, when they're chatting in with you pop directly to that order for the agents, they can kind of follow along or talk about that order. Or just pop to the account. You know, that's a big one, when somebody calls in, this is another CRM integration that's really popular is actually looking that phone number up in the system of record or the CRM, and then popping that account to the agent as well. So that's another one. And then on top of that, there's all kinds of self- service that you can do within CRM integration realm, as well. You can do things like account balance or order status, read all that back within the IVR. You know, you can even introduce natural language, bot type experience, which can be a lot of fun. So that's, that's some of the stuff that kind of comes to mind in terms of what we support when it comes to CRM integrations. But, you know, we've done a lot of different custom things that kind of run the gambit.

Alex McBratney (Host) 14:43

What's one of the most unique solutions that you guys have come up with for a client that's not just right out of the box, but you had to do something unique to solve for their needs or for the challenge that they're having?

Justin Borah (Guest) 14:56

Yeah. I mean, that's probably a good question. Never want to come back to you on we've done a lot of different things. To me a lot of the things, they're not as unique as maybe other people think they are just because every I look at customers as each kind of customer has their own requirements. So, in a way, they're all unique. I've actually never seen two customers that have similar requirements. In a way, they're all kind of unique on their own, right. But that is an interesting question. So, I'll probably come back to you on that one.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 15:32

Yeah, let's maybe let's talk a little bit about how customizable you can make your toolset. So there is out of the box functionality, but also give us the ability to orchestrate call flows, and you said it earlier AI automation and self-service and integrated into one or multiple CRMs, where you can pull information from here or even open source information, or you could acquire the data through like big data. It's talk to us a little bit about the studio tool or the orchestration. Like what, can you do anything or does it have its limitations or, is there a lot of power behind that engine?

Justin Borah (Guest) 16:15

Yeah, the studio tool that you're referring to is our call flow or interaction flow scripting tool. And, as a customer, it was one of my most favorite pieces of the platform, it was just so fun. And my sales engineer, Rick likes to say that if you can whiteboard it, you can do it with studio, it is a essentially a drag and drop type interface, where you kind of draw arrows connecting one thing to the next to indicate the flow of the call or the interaction. And it has all kinds of conditional things like if this, then that where you can kind of branch things out. But it's highly customizable, and it's a lot of fun. So, the other cool thing about studio is that it is our single tool to be able to control these flows across any type of interaction on the CX one platform. So not only IVR and voice type of experiences through, you know, including things like self-service within IVRs, but also chat, also SMS, email, all of those types of flows and how they get routed, are all handled through the studio tool, which helps minimize the learning curve, right, instead of having to learn multiple different tools and how to set up the routing logic across all those different tools. It's been pretty streamlined within the studio application.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 17:41

Now let's talk a little bit more about what makes you guys different than your competitors. Obviously, everyone knows NICE and contact because you're the leader, upper right quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant, you guys have a huge, huge list of companies that use your platform and your products, huge wealth of industries. And not only the customer sizes down to like single seat call center to you know, 10s of 1000s plus. But one of the things that sets you guys apart, that usually comes up in the conversation and is often forgotten in this process is that you guys are also your own carrier. And there's not a lot of your competitors that can say that they can provide telephony services, at least to the expanse that you guys can and all the different geographic locations and regions. So we'll talk a little bit about you know, bring your own carrier or, you know, using you guys as the carrier, how does that work? Does that come in the sales process? Does it come into the conversation early, late? Or is it often forgotten?

Justin Borah (Guest) 18:49

No, it's never as far as I can remember, it's never been forgotten. As part of turn up, we need to know how we're going to get those calls. So, it's part of the connectivity discussion, we have it with every single customer who signs a contract, we need to know how we're going to get those calls, before we can even route them or do anything with them. So, but yeah, you know, you bring up a good point, NICE inContact before it was NICE inContact was inContact before it was inContact. It was actually a company called UCN which stands for United Carrier Network. And it was a telephony or telco company. So, it actually NICE inContact has a heritage, a very strong heritage as a telco company as a carrier, and have held on to those that infrastructure that network all of those capabilities. And as a result, we now have a very strong telephony infrastructure that we can offer to our customers as a service, right. The big thing that we're doing is contact center platform cx one but we do Have the value added service of polyphony, which, you know, To the untrained eye might go unnoticed. So, I'm glad that you brought it up because it does offer a lot of value, right because we are carrier and are fully meshed into all of the other carriers. You know, you can think Verizon or CenturyLink lumen level three, all of these other ones. When we are the carrier, if one of these has an outage, if a carrier has an outage, we can actually swing that traffic over to another carrier during that outage until the outage has been restored. And at which point we can move it back. So if you know, you mentioned the bring your own carrier, we do support that option. And to us, it doesn't really matter if you have good reasons to bring your own carrier, that's fine. But if you bring your own carrier, and you know, you bring in a Verizon trunk, and that Verizon has an outage, week can't do anything to help you, you have to wait till Verizon has that that service restored, and then it will restore services all the way through to our platform. But if we were the telco provider, like I said, we could switch that volume over to a different tier one provider. So it adds a lot of benefit to customers for disaster recovery, you know, different situations like that. And, of course, we don't we do offer really good competitive pricing from a carrier perspective as well, because we have been a carrier for so long and we also offer world telco as well. Beltone, pretty much anywhere in the world that you would want dial tone. So, we offer, you know, toll free the IDs, pretty much everywhere. And it's really NICE benefit to our customers to have that a lot of people say, single throat to choke, I always like to say that single back to Pat, little bit nicer. And, you know, hopefully, we'll be doing the right thing, and you'll be patent backs instead of trying to choke.

Alex McBratney (Host) 22:03

So, let me ask this question. So, you know, for the for the customers that are on prem or they're just they haven't expanded their contact center into the cloud world, like, what are some of the quicker wins that they'll get just in their contact center, whether it's through efficiencies or, you know, productivity? What were some of those KPIs that you see just getting increasing right away when they implement a new system? And do that?

Justin Borah (Guest) 22:30

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so some of the KPIs that are going to be impacted, that you can expect are going to be things like ah, T, right, or the wait time in queue. But those also are very dependent on are the agents doing anything differently, right. So, if you have things like CRM screen pops, with NICE inContact, or with a C cast provider, and you didn't have that before, that's going to save the agent, maybe like 30 seconds on each call, right, instead of having to manually find the account, which is going to shave off h t. So those are some of the things that you can expect to get when you switch over to a C cast provider, but it has to be done correctly, right? Just because you went from Prem to cloud, that doesn't mean that you're going to reduce your HT, you also have to think strategically about implementing some of these benefits that cloud providers can give you like, seamless and easy deployment of screen pops right to make it easier for your agents to see the account as opposed to have to find the account manually. Make sense?

Alex McBratney (Host) 23:37

Yeah, absolutely. So it's really, and Aarde and I have talked about this a ton, right? This crawl, walk, run approach, and you can throw this Ferrari of the phone system into your contact center. But if you're not utilizing all of it, it's not, it's not going to get the benefits that it actually can do. And so it's really taking bite sized chunks out to make sure okay, let's get this thing. The screen pops down first. Okay, great. Now our average channel time is going down. They're not trying to be the agents aren't trying to get rid of the customer quicker. It's just that things happen faster, right? We're dipping into a resource library, you know...

Justin Borah (Guest) 24:10

And as a customer, I would want that, you know, as much as I love, you know, when people want to spend a lot of time with me and things like that. I also don't want to spend unnecessary time, right, if the agent spending a lot of time just looking for my account. That's going to be frustrating.

Alex McBratney (Host) 24:28

Right. Is that so we were on we had a podcast the other day. And Brett over at Sun basket was talking about the customer effort, effort score, and that's one of the biggest ones that they track from there, because they're, you know, they do retail food delivery. So it's very important that they get it right. And then when the customers do call on that, it's easy to get it fixed because it's you're ordering food. And so that's one of the biggest, you know, KPIs that they see. And it sounds like it's kind of the same. It's one of those that maybe it gets forgotten a little bit because everyone talks about Average handle time, you know, and you know, all those different all these different ones that Aarde talks to me about but anyway, so customer effort or do you see clients focusing on that more or less or even talking about that?

Justin Borah (Guest) 25:12

You know, they do. I don't see it as a huge focus as much as I would expect most of the companies that I'm talking with are more focused on cost, right? How is this going to cost compared to what we're paying today? And, you know, what is the total cost of ownership? What's the total economic impact or buyback, period, payback, period, things like that, so, but there are some of those customers that are very customer experience focused, and they are thinking about these things. I'm in a few opportunities right now, where they're talking to me about that they want to have that white glove experience for their customers. And, you know, how can our solution deliver that?

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 25:53

So quick little story, I was watching a local news station, this was probably about three or four years ago. And they're interviewing someone at a 911 operator. And I saw in the background, the TV wallboard was a NICE and contact wallboard, and I'm, you can't tell us who that were, they figure I'm not going to tell what police department but you know, I thought I was like, wow, if 911 is using them or other services like that, I know, you guys support like, 411 I think 511 a lot of the, those different companies. two things. One, your uptime has to be 99.999, you know, plus or whatever. And you also have to have some pretty amazing compliances making sure there's the proper phone recording scurrying of data that's private or, you know, not supposed to be recorded or saved. So, talk to us a little bit about compliances and uptime, and how that works.

Justin Borah (Guest) 26:55

Yeah, we take both compliance and uptime very seriously. We, we guarantee our core platform, at least four nines of uptime, 99.99%. Or better, we, we have financial implications against us if we are not able to exceed those for whatever reason. So it's one of those situations where we really put our money where our mouth is. Another interesting, I believe that's unique to us is, you know, every provider out there is going to have maintenance windows of when they're doing upgrades, updates, that sort of thing. Our maintenance windows, if there's an outage during the maintenance window, we hold ourselves accountable Still, we, we treat maintenance windows, just like every other window, if there's an impact to our customers, we see that as a serious thing. A lot of other providers out there, they treat maintenance windows, like a freebie if there's an outage during that, while it was during a maintenance window. So we said there might be a type of thing. But that's not how it is with us, we let our customers know there's a maintenance window. But we do not expect any type of outage. And you know, it's a bit interesting on how we do that how we maintain the platform without any type of outage during an upgrade. It has to do with our architecture with the platform architecture being what's called active. So not to go on a tangent, but it is interesting, I think worth noting that our platform run simultaneously, concurrently in two separate data centers located geographically redundantly. So they're actively mirroring each other, which means that if one goes down, the end user, the agents, the people on the phone, they don't potentially even know because the other one is still up and running. And, and has basically been the failover and that's exactly how we manage our updates and upgrades, we essentially bring one of the mirrors down, upgrade it, put it back online and then bring the other one down, and then upgraded as well. So we offer basically no outage during these updates unless something goes wrong or what have you. But um, but yeah, so that and then also, security is extremely important to us as well, you know, we maintain pretty much all the standard contact center security protocols that you would imagine PCI, HIPAA TCPA. You know, all of those we are we are complying with all those but a unique one is a believe that's unique to us is FedRAMP. So FedRAMP is the authorization from the federal government to do business or to work with them. And that is a very stringent methodology of how things need to be handled with regards to the data and, and so forth. And we are the only cloud contact center provider, I believe at this point that is FedRAMP HTO or FedRAMP. authorized and we have been for quite a few years at this point.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 29:57

Yeah, oftentimes Alex, we talked to people and help consult them or support them. And they're in the insurance or banking industry, which technically doesn't have to have that level of compliance, you know, the FedRAMP compliance. But oftentimes, we'll be talking to them. And we're, immediately we're like, well, you just eliminated all of them, except for maybe NICE inContact with one another, and the other one in there just as a comparison, but you're pretty much you have to go down that path. So do you see that a lot? On the sales side, you see a lot of insurance companies, banking, financial institutions that, you know, they don't have a lot of options, so they have to go with you guys. And you guys are prepared for that. Do you still see that on the sales side? You know...

Justin Borah (Guest) 30:44

We certainly see that in the government sector and you know, when FedRAMP comes into play, generally, I would say, outside of FedRAMP, the rest, you know, talking about PCI GDPR, those are table stakes. And I'd be pretty shocked if a company was talking to a provider that didn't support those. Yeah. But yeah, when it comes to the requirement of FedRAMP it from what I've heard, you're right, it's basically NICE. inContact? Or, or stay on prem?

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 31:18

Yeah. Makes sense.

Alex McBratney (Host) 31:20

You mentioned we're talking a little bit ago about the customer effort and looking at the different KPIs that customers are trying to improve upon. But then you said a lot of times are looking at just the cost and what the total cost of ownership is, you know, things like that. What we run into a lot on the UCAS side, for phone systems, like just on the business unit size of the phone system is that oh boy, we have a we've already paid for this PBX, it's so as five years left of life and like they're paying very little sip trunks, because you can, you know, you can have one sip trunk for 10 people in the office. So, there's really not a way to justify, not necessarily justify, but it's always going to be more expensive to go to the cloud with UCaaS because you're paying $1,000 a month versus $6,000 a month. How do you see that playing out like with the contact center platform and knowing that it's going to be more expensive, most likely than their Cisco or their Avaya and how do you help them justify those costs and then show how they're going to save it in the long run?

Justin Borah (Guest) 32:21

Yeah, that's, you know, a really interesting point. And I think that's why we're seeing that there hasn't been more cloud adoption to date, right. We're seeing a big wave happening currently but it's been a little bit delayed from some of the other cloud adoptions, like, you know, CRM, for example. But nonetheless, it is definitely picking up now. But I would say, I like to help companies look at the total cost of ownership of cloud versus Prem the right way, I think a lot of them are just looking at what is my annual maintenance from my current on prem, right? Because I've already paid for it. So, what is the annual maintenance on it? But versus what is every single penny that I'm going to have to pay to this cloud provider? Which is a way to look at it, but I'm not sure it's the best way to look at it, right? Because it's, it's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, when you're looking at just paying maintenance on an old telephone, right, versus getting a perpetually upgrading product that's always current. And always, you know, there is only one version, because it's the latest version every time you log in. It's that the newest version, it's a different paradigm. Right. And the other thing is what we talked about earlier is there's a heavy it involvement with some of these on prem deployments, which means that you have to or you should, I would say factor in it, time it bandwidth IT resources in maintaining these infrastructures, right. And a lot of times, they don't, and a lot of times, the companies that are doing the analysis, it might even be it so they don't want to factor in their own time or their own, you know, cost into because also that could kind of reduce their requirement at that company or their job security. Sometimes it is all in favor of like alleviating the business's need to come to them, right. They've got their hands full with enough other projects, but sometimes it's somebody whose full-time job to be the Avaya administrator and they get a bit nervous with projects like these.

Alex McBratney (Host) 34:42

Absolutely, we call them curve protectors.

Justin Borah (Guest) 34:46

I call them box huggers.

Alex McBratney (Host) 34:49

Yeah, either way you slice it, it's they don't want to jeopardize their job or importance in the organization. And we've seen that a ton with you know telecom managers or system admins that basically focus just on the on that PBX. And it's hard. And that's where it has to be a really big push from the business side, that really the need has to be there, right? It's not just, hey, we've had our system for 10 years, let's go flip it to the cloud. Now, they can milk that for another five to 10. If they're really good. So there has to be a really strong reason, you're allowed to really move to the cloud, because there are those organizations, especially the larger ones that have, you know, someone dedicated as an admin for those systems.

Justin Borah (Guest) 35:32

Or several. Yep.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 35:34

And, Alex, we've worked with a couple of those and we've actually seen some amazing success stories, people who, you know, worse Avaya or short towel, and they loved it. They were the system admin, going through migration to the cloud and learning this new toolset, not only helped them, but also the organization understands that now, they're a valuable asset, because they're the people who did the migration, proprietary information migration from Shoretel, or whatever, to the new tools, and now are irreplaceable for the new tools, because they're the ones who really did the full rollout implementation. So, there's our success stories. It's just how do you frame it in a way that makes sense that person?

Alex McBratney (Host) 36:19

You have to align with the change, because it's coming so you might as well get up to speed and be the one spearheading it, right?

Justin Borah (Guest) 36:25

Well, the other thing that I like to think about too is, do you want to be the guy with the Ferrari or do you want to be the guy with the Civic? I don't know, as somebody who was on the customer side, I really got excited about the powerful toolset at my fingertips and what I could do with it. It was so frequently, I would find myself just getting a quick call from somebody on my leadership team saying like, hey, do you think this is possible? And you know, I'd hear about their idea. And 30 minutes later, I'd say, hey, call this phone number. Tell me what you think, you know, so great. It's just so it's just so fun being able to do things like that.

Alex McBratney (Host) 37:07

We don't have to do it tendency has a lot of times as siloed from the rest of the organization, but if they learn to collaborate with the business unit, then all of a sudden, your team and they're calling you up, like you said, Hey, can you do this and you provide it for them? They're going to love it, right? And they're, they're going to start getting creative and figuring out well, what else can we do to really drive value for our customers, for our team, the agents, you know, all of that.

Aarde Cosseboom (Co-Host) 37:33

I remember the day that the pandemic hit, I was actually in Hawaii, celebrating our wedding. And I got a text message from, from my boss, then he said, we have to move to 1000 agents. These are BPO agents in rural countries to work from home. By Monday, this is Friday, by the way, by Monday, can we do it? It was a text message. And I was like, we already did that seven years ago, 10 years ago, like we were already in the cloud, like we had those capabilities already. So, it was no sweat off my back. I didn't lose an ounce asleep, flew back on that Monday, and everything was already done. So, it's, it's not only the Hey, it'd be cool, if we can do this, let's configure it, we you don't know what's going to happen in the future, you want to have those options, you can drive a Pinto, you know, across country, you can maybe drive a Ferrari cross country, but you want to have that option sitting in your driveway so I think that's a great call out to not only cloud technology, but also what you guys provide on the on the other things that often we forget, like, carrier redundancy. That's something that majority of the contact centers don't really have in place today. So, your carrier goes down for a day or for an hour, it could be detrimental. And you guys having solutions for that? And thinking ahead of the curve is awesome.

Justin Borah (Guest) 39:00

That's right. And when the carrier goes down, it's that horrible, dead tone. It's not a you don't even have the ability to let them know you're experiencing technical difficulties so it's a bad experience.

Alex McBratney (Host) 39:13

It's no good all around. Well, Justin, this has been great. I wish we had more time to talk because once we get going, and we started talking shop and all these stories and examples, we can get off on tangents really easily, which is fun. But I don't want to take up any more of your time. We've already been, I think about 40 minutes or so. But I really appreciate you jumping on and taking the time with us. And I know you Aarde go way back. So we really appreciate it.

Justin Borah (Guest) 39:39

Oh, absolutely. A lot of fun and maybe we could do this again and talk about some exciting topics around AI or natural language and different things like that.

Alex McBratney (Host) 39:48

We'll definitely have you back on, for sure.

Justin Borah (Guest) 39:51

Cool. All right! Well, thanks, guys.

Alex McBratney (Host) 39:52

You got it. Well, that wraps up the show for today. Thanks for joining. And don't forget to join us next week as we bring another guest in to talk about the trends around cloud contact center and customer experience. Also, you can find us at adleradvisors.com, LinkedIn, or your favorite podcast platform. We'll see you next week on Another Cloud Podcast.