Outbound Contact Center
Outbound Contact Center is for sales and marketing leaders at B2C companies who want to make an outsized impact.
Every week we interview practitioners, leaders, and experts to explore how they build their B2C sales organizations – and the tools they use to win over their market.
You’ll stay up to speed on major themes in sales and marketing, learn how to win with a data-first mentality, and get actionable insights you can implement today.
Hosted by a B2C sales specialist, executive and CEO, Alex Levin.
Outbound Contact Center
E7: The changing landscape of patient care with Eric Hauser of Cadence
In this episode, join us for a captivating conversation with Eric Hauser, the Chief Technology Officer of Cadence, as we delve into the revolutionary intersections of technology and healthcare. From Eric's experiences in the tech industry to the founding story of Cadence, this episode explores the transformative impact of open-source infrastructure and the changing landscape of patient care.
Key Takeaways:
- Tech-Driven Healthcare Revolution: Eric Hauser's tech journey, coupled with Cadence's founding story, showcases the profound impact of open-source infrastructure on healthcare, illustrating how technology can revolutionize patient care, especially for those with chronic diseases.
- Challenges in Patient Care: The episode addresses challenges in the healthcare industry, emphasizing the role of Regal in overcoming issues related to patient outreach, engagement, and the increasing demand for on-demand healthcare services.
- AI's Deflationary Force: Envisioning AI as a deflationary force, Eric anticipates a future where generative AI reduces the cost of non-medical aspects in patient journeys, sparking a transformative shift in the accessibility and efficiency of healthcare services.
- Future of AI in Healthcare: The discussion explores the future of AI in healthcare, with a focus on ethical considerations and public trust. Eric highlights the potential for AI to enhance existing employee efficiency while providing a glimpse into the evolving landscape of patient interactions.
- Innovation at the Consumer Layer: Alex Levin underscores the significance of innovation at the consumer company layer, emphasizing that the real differentiator lies not just in the technology itself but in how businesses leverage AI to craft personalized, impactful customer experiences in healthcare.
To learn more about everything Outbound Contact Center, read more posts at regal.io/blog or email us at hello@regal.io.
this is Alex Levin, co founder and CEO of Regal. And I'm here with Eric Hauser, CTO of Cadence. Thank you for joining me, Eric.
Eric Hauser:Thanks for having me, Alex.
Alex Levin:So we were just talking about the fact both of us are in ski towns now. So it's the optimal time of year for this. Although I think, you know, out in Utah, you have a little bit more snow than Colorado. My brother lives in California and they have nothing in California. Do you guys get out a lot?
Eric Hauser:the snow is not quite as amazing as it was last year. It was the most snow they've seen here in 40 years. And by the end of the winter, our dogs were just walking over our fence in the backyard. We had so much snow. Unfortunately, I don't get out skiing quite as much as I'd like to probably in similar situation as you being in an early stage company. It's a little bit difficult to find time to get out there, but we try to go maybe once every, every weekend if possible but certainly not hitting the same number of days as most people who live in a ski town.
Alex Levin:yeah. So you're, you know, you work for a healthcare company. Now you got to get out and exercise and take care of yourself. You know, it's important. So we were talking about it a bit before, you know, you've had sort of very, three, very different experiences four, if you even go back to sort of GovTech at the beginning, you were GovTech, you know, then Martech, then in a hardware company and now healthcare. It'd be, it'd be super interesting to understand, when you started out, did you intend to have that kind of career where you went to different careers or was this sort of happenstance? Like, how did that end up happening?
Eric Hauser:I don't think any of it was really done with a particular intentionality throughout my career. I would say that I've mostly been focused on, you know, working with amazing people and really trying to solve hard problems. I was with exact target as we scaled up to an IPO and then got acquired by Salesforce. And that was a lot of marketing automation work. And then kind of shortly after we got acquired, I switched over to kind of be a VP of engineering and Salesforce platform group. Where we were working in the IOT space, which is why a lot of people kind of associate with me with hardware, although I've worked with very little hardware in my career always maybe a little bit partnering with hardware companies, I think, to deliver some solutions, but I'm not a lot of hardware engineering in general.
Alex Levin:So, you know, if you think about, you know, go back to like, you know, you just graduated from school and, you know, do you think, you know, it was a good decision to go to a GovTech startup or like looking back, like, you know, is it something you'd recommend to sort of other folks, like as a starting place?
Eric Hauser:Government's government was interesting at the time when, you know, this is now 20 plus years ago when I started in, in GovTech, you know, most, you know, today, I think everybody just takes for granted the fact that you can go online, that you can renew your driver's license. You can read your plate. You can basically do most of a lot of your interactions with the government, right, just through state websites at the time that that didn't exist. A lot of the early engineers that I, that I worked with in GovTech or spending a lot of their time writing screen scrapers for mainframes. So that we could actually put these, put these applications on the web. And you know, I think the thing that was great about being in GovTech at the time was it was still like very local. So even though I worked for a rather large company in GovTech, each, each essentially office was kind of operating independently. So it exposed me very early to kind of startup culture and startup environment. Even though it was much more in a larger company. So that was the experience I loved.
Alex Levin:one thing you can maybe explain to me as you were in this world, when I go and buy something online from whatever Shopify, you know, it's the normal 1 percent credit card fee. And, you know, there's not a, it's not a surcharge. It's just included. Still, to this day, when I go to the local government site, and I got to pay a bill or something. If I want to pay with credit card, it's like a ten dollar fee. Whoever I don't know, do they just have a monopoly on that so they could charge that kind of fee? Or is that, like, the government doesn't want to pay for their services and so they effectively use that to charge the consumer for the work.
Eric Hauser:Yeah, the, the company that I work for is named NIC and they, they were recently acquired within, in the last couple years by a company called Tyler Technologies. But most of these state state web portals didn't want, didn't have a way to essentially, to appropriate funding to build all of these applications. And so the convenience fees that they end up charging on top of the credit cards was the way that they essentially funded the operations. And the R and D to build out these web portals and all of these different applications. So the, the fee structures that you see there, that's, that's probably the main reason why. Granted, it's been, it's been a very long time since I've been in that world and, and thought about that. And so, you know, maybe, maybe those models have evolved a bit since then, but
Alex Levin:No, it makes sense. I've always wondered. So that, that's, that, that makes a lot of sense. So then, you know, you, you had this fantastic ride at exact target. I mean, not everybody even knows the exact target name anymore, but, you know, they were really the first ones to, from my understanding, to really look at how do you do a, you know, event driven marketing. How do you actually gather real time customer behavior information, create a unified customer profile, and then allow the triggering of, in this case, largely email, but you know, one way marketing out to a customer. So, you know, what was that sort of path like? Did it just, you know, take off or did it take a lot of time to convince people that this was a better way than the sort of old batch and send marketing?
Eric Hauser:yeah, exact target. You know, a really interesting story from my perspective, I think relative to a lot of. Companies that have gone on to IPO and be very successful. I mean, in fact, target started solely as, as an email marketing company. And you know, the growth of the company was good, but not amazing. I think they filed, we filed for an IPO. We pulled back with introduce the market things. I think maybe around 2008, 2009. One of the things that eventually really ended up causing the company to take off was exactly what you just mentioned was the introduction of. More event driven marketing. We built some functionality called data extensions, which is similar to like Salesforce custom objects. And all of a sudden we had some of the largest companies in the world, uploading a lot of their marketing data to our platform and then processing that data in order to run these campaigns. Around that same time, the big thing that really started to come into play was also cross channel marketing. You know, at the time SMS marketing, push notifications, other ways of like reaching customers wasn't really that prevalent in the industry. It was mostly email. And so cross channel came around and then I think around 20, probably around 2011, I was running engineering for the marketing automation team at at ExactTarget and Scott McCorkle, who was our, our CTO at the time. Said, Hey, we built this application with one of our largest customers, which is, which everybody would know is one of the largest companies in tech. And in 3 months, we want to go launch this thing to every, every customer we have at our conference. What can you do about that? So, there was a lot of long nights and long weekends involved, but essentially what came out of that was the journey builder product. And, and I don't know if exact target was the first company really to, you know, push journeys marketing and as really the way to go, but it, it was pretty novel at the time. Not a lot of other companies were doing it this way. And and I think now if you go look at the marketing, marketing industry, and you look at a lot of the. A lot of the modern platforms that people have adopted are doing this basically all customer journeys. It's a declarative user interface that allows marketers to very quickly create campaigns, very complex campaigns where before, you know, you're talking about, you know, 3 months of consulting engagements and a lot of ETL. Going on and a lot of jobs and a lot of rules to essentially create these, these very complex campaigns and all of a sudden overnight people were, were creating them. And so journey builder was one of that targets fastest growing products. And you know, as far as I understand, it was, was played a big role in our acquisition by Salesforce.
Alex Levin:Oh, yeah, for sure. I look at, you know, the companies that existed in those days, like there was a Responsys and ultimately Oracle bought. And then obviously Salesforce bought exact target and Salesforce made out like a bandit there. Turned out like that was the right one to buy between Responsys and an exact target. And everyone now knows it as Salesforce marketing cloud. So some people don't even know it really is just the exact target product. But really like to your point, like very. impactful for customers when they move to that way of doing it. And, you know, now I look at it and I'm so thankful that, you know, exact target existed and segment and mParticle. There are all these companies, these startups that went out, convinced people move from a database infrastructure where you're building a list and then treating them all the same to this real time Eventing infrastructure such that you can actually track everything the customer is doing. Like when we walk into a customer today, we don't have to convince them of that. Like they understand, at least for marketing, that that is a thing. What's amusing to me, sort of amusing to me, is When I go to marketing teams and I talk about event driven marketing, they don't get it. If I go to a sales team, by and large, and I say, Hey, let's go do some event driven sales. They go, do you mean based on a conference? It just, it has not, it has not gone into the sales org. What's fascinating to me is the technology that even on, on consumer companies that the sales org uses comes from B2B where sure they have. Cadences and excuse the pun. So like there's a sequence of things they want the agent to do, but there's no concept of a unified customer profile, no concept of a journey builder, no concept of customization per user, AB testing. None of that exists in B2B. And I understand why, because there's a much lower volume and it's a much higher paid salesperson. But the, the sort of shame is that a lot of B2C sales teams, high velocity sales teams. Took the B2B software instead of the marketing software and put some at a massive disadvantage when you're then operating at huge scale. Like the way I look at it often is like, you know, a small business. Does a very good job of like knowing everything about their customers interacting with them. But all of a sudden, now you're at internet scale and you know, at the last company, you're out in home services at Angie with millions of new customers, you couldn't possibly treat them like individuals. If you were trying to do it with the old technology, the only possible way was to use this new set of, you know, marketing automation tools to be able to do it. But they, when we were there, at least they didn't exist in sales. There weren't. Sales tools that would allow you to build a unified customer profile and do journey building.
Eric Hauser:Yeah, I think that's exactly right. You can't treat a B to C customer base like they're one cohort of individuals. Whereas in the B2B space, if you're, if you're selling, you probably have a few different personas. That you're generally selling to but, you know, as we're now I'm operating in the healthcare space and we're talking to patients, you know, patients have very different preferences about how they want to be communicated with how often they want to be communicated with what's the best channel to reach them. What's the, what's the best way for them to, to trust the communications that you're sending to them. And you're right, you, you need to be able to, to customize those flows. You need to be able to try different things. You need to be able to move very quickly. And, you know, in a, in a world where I think a lot of more sales software is a lot more rules based and you know, less configurable potentially than the marketing space. I think it just makes it very difficult to do those things.
Alex Levin:Yeah, the other thing, you know I was talking with the CEO of a company called Invoca the other day. The other thing that's a shame is in a lot of consumer organizations, the marketing team is on all this tech stack. It's very advanced about what sources leads come from and AB testing and trying different messages. You know, with huge success, and then a lead gets given to the sales team or support team, whichever it is with none of that information. And it's treated identically. Like when I think about when I used to run big support teams, forget sales, the handling for every single user was the same. When somebody came in, we deflected regardless what the user was, maybe at the most we had like a VIP segment, maybe that was considered sophistication, but forget any nuance on the source on what messaging marketing gave them, what discount they came in on, A B testing wasn't possible, it wasn't for lack of imagination, the tooling in contact center software didn't allow it, and so it was pretty crazy, the sort of difference in technology advancement in marketing versus contact center when I started working at contact centers. Yeah.
Eric Hauser:has traditionally evolved very, very rapidly and very quickly just because, I think the overall TAM of the space is so large. I'm sure you've seen the the MarTech infographics before, where you just, you can't even count the number of logos that show up, right? And you know, a lot of these marketing, they have very large budgets, right? And so I think that's why we've seen. Such rapid innovation in that space is because, you know, there's, there's room for a lot of different companies who are trying a lot of different things. And, and you're able to bring all those things in together and some pretty amazing platforms.
Alex Levin:There is another thing that I think has happened, which is that in Martech, you might have two CRM people in your email marketing system. So if the boss says switch, you need two people in a new system. In a contact center environment, you might have two admins, but now you have 200 agents. And so the. The rate of changing to new software is much, much slower because nobody wants to have to retrain their 200 agents on new software, even if they know that it's going to drive more revenue. And so I think part of the thing that I think I talk with customers a lot about is. Sort of understanding where they are on the maturity scale of process and technology and context in our software and recognizing how early they are, right? Some people think, okay, you know, if we're doing a great job of handling things very quickly and we're handling very few interactions, we're mature. Well, no, that's, that's super early on the, on the, on the sort of the lens of what is possible to do. In customer service or in sales, you know, when we sort of say, look, what real maturity looks like is being able to treat every customer in the right way, the right moment, the right message, what you were saying, the right channel. They go, Oh, we're nowhere near there. And we go, okay. Yeah. If you could get there, the improvement in customer lifetime value is double or triple. So we're not saying you have to go do it overnight, but at least know that there is a goal where if you get there, you'll massively improve your business. And that at least gives them motivation to start looking at making bigger changes in technology faster, because if you believe you're close to the maturity point, because you're doing a good job of handling things quickly. Yeah. You're not going to go invest in new technology.
Eric Hauser:Yeah. I think an easy way to think about it is, you know, how mature is your patient acquisition funnel versus your patient retention funnel. And I think most companies would say that the, the tech, the tech they have on the acquisition funnel is. Significantly more advanced than what it is they have in the retention funnel. And you know, maybe in, in today's world where everybody's focused a little bit more on capital efficiency and a little bit less on growth, you know, that's, that's a, that's a big opportunity for most companies to to advance what they're doing.
Alex Levin:Yeah, for sure. So, so I interrupted your sort of your trajectory. So you, you know, you, you, you were all of a sudden bought by Salesforce. You know, what was that like? Was that like everyone was celebrating and it was the greatest day of your life or was that sort of a letdown after sort of wanting to be a public company?
Eric Hauser:I think everybody was definitely excited. You know, also doesn't quite know what to expect because, you know, when you get acquired, there's this big, long, quiet period where, there's an announcement made, but then you don't really know necessarily exactly how things are going to pan out. And once it happened, I think once the acquisition went through you know, most of us were just excited to be able to start interacting with our Salesforce counterparts. And I was I was in a little bit different position than a lot of the company exact target actually started in the Midwest and Indianapolis, Indiana, which was where the majority of the employee base was. I had moved to San Francisco with ExactTarget you know, about a year prior. And so had a little bit more easier access, I think, to, to the Salesforce team that was, was there in San Francisco. But I would, I would say, you know, immediately from, from day one, it was clear that this was going to be a really big change for, for the company and for everybody involved. And, you know overall I think it was, it was very exciting change for the organization. I would say the, the thing that's probably, that Salesforce has done extremely well with ExactTarget is really integrating it into the sales motion very quickly, and its reason why the marketing cloud has grown, grown so quickly is Salesforce has, you know, just had a long history of doing this with a lot of their major acquisitions in, in Salesforce. Probably has the best B2B sales team. I may have a little bias for my time there, but Salesforce probably has the best B2B sales team in the world. And you know, very quickly and being able to integrate things like service cloud which was an acquisition marketing cloud and all these other acquisitions that happened into that sales funnel really, really drives. Significant growth in those businesses. And so you know, exact target was already relatively large by today's standards when we got acquired and the growth really just shot up quickly after that.
Alex Levin:Yeah. Phenomenal. So then, you know, after being in software businesses, how did you end up, you know, going to work with, you know, Michael at, at drone deploy? Yeah.
Eric Hauser:Yeah. So drone deploy I got into drone deploy through, so I had known Rory O'Driscoll at scale ventures through exact target. And Rory was on the board of drone deploy. Rory is a fantastic investor and you know, I think he's been on the board of like Box and DocuSign and
Alex Levin:I know he loves this space. Also, it's so fascinating to me with investors, particularly, I'd say about half investors hate Martech and they believe that there's no differentiation and that it's too easy for somebody to copy it. And there's a million companies and they stay away from it, like the plague. And then half investors go, sure, that's all true. But in email, there's 10, 10 billion companies. And in SMS, there's going to be 10, 10 billion companies. And then, you know, whatever phone marketing or, you know, sales is going to be 10, 10 billion companies. So. It may be true that it's sometimes easy for new companies to come in, but there are still big winners. So he's one of the converted, like he's, he really loves it.
Eric Hauser:yeah, I mean, just, I don't know if I've ever been around anybody who just is, is such a wealth of information on how to run a B2B SaaS company other than Rory. He, one particular piece of advice that stands out to me that I heard him say once is that he, he's never been part of he's never been part of a successful B2B SaaS company where the CEO hasn't been the best salesperson in the company.
Alex Levin:That's
Eric Hauser:And that, yeah, that's a really great piece of advice. I think, you know, cause as a CEO, like, obviously, you know, there's, there's a lot of sales that go on with customers, but there's also a lot of sales that go on internally around. You know, what are the next initiatives we're working on trying to recruiting things like that. And I think that that's very true. I don't think that has to be true. And I don't think Rory did either about like early stage founders, right? Like when, if companies first starting out, but as, as the company grows and as the company scales you know, he made it clear that he thinks it's extremely important for the CEO to play that role.
Alex Levin:Yeah. I mean, I definitely, I come more from the B2C world, like, you know, helping bring consumer businesses online. So this was the first SaaS company really, my co founder and I were part of, but, you know, and, you know, you pick it up quickly, like some of the basics, but I definitely think, you know, I'm still always on the side of, you know, distribution wins over technology every day. So I'd say that's a, your point sort of is related in that, you know, you have to have very senior people in the company who are very focused on like how you're going to get this thing to market. Otherwise, yeah, there's too much great technology out there that doesn't sell itself.
Eric Hauser:Yeah, I, I agree with that a hundred percent of it. And I think that's always been you know, early days Salesforce, right. It was just kind of a wrapper around Oracle. Database and the technology probably wasn't the best on the market. But they, they, they sure figured out distribution real quick.
Alex Levin:Yeah. Yeah. You know There is sort of like a different angle on it, which I think about sometimes. So there's, I can't remember who say it, said it now, but there's a famous expression in a market, the winner is determined by whether the incumbent can get innovation or the startup can get distribution first. So like, I sometimes think about that is it's not an absolute, the distribution always wins. It's who, you know, can you get distribution before the current players can get innovation?
Eric Hauser:Yeah. And I think in today's world, you know, the expectations are just high across the board because, you know, the barriers to entry and to build great technology have, have lowered a lot over the last 10, 20 years. You know, there's a lot of open source software out there that you can potentially use to, to do some complicated things. I'm, I'm sure that in your stack, you make use of a fair amount of that for all the events that you're processing
Alex Levin:Oh yeah, it's fabulous. Like we're very friendly with like the folks from Braze and Interbol who were sort of the next generation after ExactTarget doing some of this stuff. And when we were talking with them early about like how, what tech stack we were going to use, they were so jealous. Because like they had built everything in like completely the wrong tech stack and they've like obviously managed to build a phenomenal business. I'm not trying to detract from that, but yeah, we were so lucky to be able to go and use things that didn't exist even a couple years ago and allowed us to build you know, a journey builder that was much more advanced, you know, for sure. It still takes years to build a journey builder. It's not, it's not one of those things you can snap your fingers and just build, but because you have both the real time event processing. And all of the capabilities around the nodes that you're going to actually execute. But but yeah, it's, it's like definitely given us a huge leg up over the, the existing one. So that's, that's been fun for us. Cause I can go needle them and say, Hey, look at what tech we're on.
Eric Hauser:Yeah, that's right. I mean, I, we built JourneyBuilder once at ExactTarget and then we built essentially a very similar product for Salesforce Salesforce IoT, which is now just part of the normal Salesforce platform that they sell. But we, we build it to be on a scale that was multiple orders of magnitude higher than JourneyBuilder. You know, at IoT, we were processing billions of events per day for some individual customers. In order to power to power their journeys, and they would have been a very difficult to do if we hadn't been able to take advantage of a lot of the open source infrastructure that was available to us at the time.
Alex Levin:Yeah. Oh, for sure. It's completely different. So now, you know, obviously you've moved on to healthcare, you know, what's the sort of founding story behind, you know, cadence, you know, for, for our customer ultimately, then like, why should they be using cadence?
Eric Hauser:Yeah, cadence started in during the pandemic this company was bootstrapped by thrive capital. Chris Altschek is CEO, co founder, Karim Zaki, who's a investing partner in Thrive, is also a co founder of the company. And it really started around the idea that we needed to rethink how patients who have chronic diseases, you know, are managed in our healthcare system today. If you're a patient who has a chronic disease, you know, you need help when you need help, not when it's, you know, necessarily. Your primary care doctor is available to help you. You know, they have very busy schedules. It's hard to get an appointment. Potentially. You can maybe see your primary care doctor once every 2 weeks. If you're, if you're acute about something and and these patients need help 24, 7, 365, and they need it on their schedule when they need it. And so that that's what cadence was really founded to help solve. So we partner with today, you know, 8 leading, you know, academic medical centers and health systems. And we've built clinics for virtual heart failure, diabetes, hypertension, and are able to give care to patients 24 7. We've had some really encouraging outcomes from the program since we've started. That we've shared with such organization as the American Heart Association where, you know, we're able to drastically reduce the cost of care for patients that are that are on our program. We're able to reduce a lot of clinician burnout that comes from from getting constantly pinged by, you know, patients and having to answer messages in their and, you know, the, the clinical outcomes are also phenomenal patients on cadence, you know, for instance, in our hypertension program. You know, have have been able to lower their, their blood pressure by an average of 10 points just by being in the program. So that's, that's, that's what was started on. We, we do this through you know, it's kind of what's called remote patient monitoring which we give patients devices connected blood pressure costs, scales, glucometers that they take home. They measure their vitals on a regular basis. And then we have a clinical team and technology. That's essentially monitoring these patients 24 7 and kind of helping them through. Through their journey and to, to get to a healthier place.
Alex Levin:Yeah. So to your point, and you sort of already hit on this, but two of the major things we see within healthcare organizations, especially the more digital ones is one explosion of patient information. Partly because you're not giving them devices for them to actually be recording all this and to the mismatch, what I would call the mismatched expectations on the supply of medical professionals versus like what customers want. So it's not just that. Medical professionals are, you know, harder and harder to come by, which is true. But it's also the people expect the on demand economy. Now they expect constantly to have somebody available to them. And it makes it very hard to bring to life the, the customer experience that you guys want to bring to life because of all of that. So you know, obviously you guys have built a whole tech stack around this, like. I guess particularly when it comes to like regal Why did you guys use regal or where are you guys using regal in that customer journey to allow you to have? The sort of customer experience you want Yeah
Eric Hauser:it's helpful to understand, you know, really how we, we work a little bit, which is, you know, we certainly believe, and I know this is a opinion that, you know, Thrive believes in as well, which is, you know, really to disrupt the healthcare space, you need to do it from the inside versus the outside. And we're, we're lucky to, you know, have found some amazing partners, you know, in the healthcare space, a lot of the major health systems in the U. S. who are able to partner with us and work with us and we're able to work with existing physicians you know, as opposed to, as opposed to, you know, trying to set up and set up a BTC model where we're going after patients, you know, directly and competing with them or partnering with them and working with them. And so, you know, when it comes to regal, what we're really trying to do is. Yeah. We are, we've got a large volume of their existing patients that we need to communicate with and outreach to about the program and talk to them about the benefits on how they can get enrolled and how they can get on it after their physician, you know, wants places in order for them to join the program. And, you know, I think, as, as we were talking before, all patients are different. The channels that they want to be committed and how they want to convey is different. And so I think. There are just a lot of components that go into being able to successfully do that sort of outreach at scale, you know, you need to have a telephony system that has the right caller. I. D. you need to be able to train your agents. How to speak. You train a lot of agents very quickly. How to speak about the program, how to monitor them, be able to coach them along the way. How they're speaking, you need to have a workflow for reaching out to these patients in a, in a respectful way where you're not spamming them. You know, this is an order from their doctor's office. We're not trying to marketing blast them to get them to sign up. And so, you know, we started out with a very simple kind of like rules of based approach on our existing customer service platform more as we were, we were kind of testing this method of, of connecting with patients. And I knew very quickly from my, you know, marketing automation days that this wasn't going to work for very long. And as, as we went out into the space and started looking, you know, for different solutions, I think. You know. I was, I was extremely impressed. I'm not just stroking your ego because you're running the podcast here, but I was extremely impressed, you know, as I kind of found Regal because it basically you guys had. All of the features that, you know, you really want to be able to do this sort of like B2B, B2C, you know, outreach at scale wrapped up in a platform that essentially was just singularly focused on that where, you know, could you build these sort of things on, you know, some of the larger telephony platforms, you know, like a five nine or something like that? Yes, of course you probably could, but none of them do that very well. As far as I can tell, a lot of
Alex Levin:Yeah, I tried to. I've been on the last company. I was on five nine. Talk to us. Nice and Genesis over the time and the only way we could get it to work is we would put agents in those tools. The agent would sit in that tool, but their campaign management is super rudimentary. Basically, their campaign management is, you know, put somebody in a list. Put a user in a list and then call that list X times or X States. So three times a day for three days. That's it. What we ended up having to do is we built our own tools on top of the Contact Center software to do all of the decisions and segmentation, all of that, and eventually when we realized we're going to have to go build our own journey builder, effectively unified customer profile to do this. You know, it wasn't our business. Like, and we were, you know, pretty big company doing over a billion dollars in revenue and we weren't going to go put 30, 40 engineers on that project. Like that was crazy. And like, that's where Regal came from is we said like an email marketing, we would never think about going to build a journey builder. You buy braids or iterable or Salesforce marketing cloud. You know, why doesn't, you know, this exists. It's even funnier than that. We went to the execs at some of the biggest contact centers. We were about a 14 million a year account. So pretty big. And we said. Cool. Here's how Braze works. Build this for us. And they told us to pound sand. Said not interested. It's not our business. We focus on customer support and deflection. You're talking about marketing automation and, you know, things that we don't do, CRM, all that stuff. And so like, again, to some extent, I feel like I was forced to build Regal because this is insane. Like if we don't go and do something, customer experiences are going to continue to be. Don't talk to me. Don't talk to me. Don't talk to me. Like that's going to be where the internet goes, where it shouldn't, right? The internet should go the way of cool. There's this whole new digital layer, which is exciting and allows me to do things on my own. But when I want a personal touch, it's an amazing service experience in the same way where. You might walk into a club and they go, Oh, here's your favorite table, your favorite drink. Your music is playing and you know, we're going to go get you your dinner. They knew people and it made you feel special. Like why, you know what, what great brands are doing today. Like why I think some brands are really winning is they're going back to that model, understanding services, a differentiator, not just a cost center.
Eric Hauser:Yeah, I, I, the thing that was most telling to me is, is I, as I kind of reached out to my network, as I was kind of exploring the problem space. And you know, some people in my network are executives at those companies that you mentioned, they all gave me a different answer about. What solution I should be looking at which, which told me that that this industry quite, quite really solved this problem yet in a great way. And so I was, I was, I was very excited when I found Regal because it was kind of exactly what we had been looking for as a company.
Alex Levin:Yeah. Well, look, we're very excited to have you as a customer. So this is what we love is, you know, our North stars, how do we drive outcomes in your case, patient outcomes, right? That's what we really are in this for. The technology is just, you know, helping, you know, the businesses do what they need to do for those customers. So this is what gets us up every day and very excited. So, you know, as we sort of come to an end, you know, I guess one question I always like asking people is sort of, As a forecast, you know, going forward. So if you're thinking about, you know, the next couple of years, are there any sort of things that you're thinking about, you know, that forecast you'd like to make whether it be in health care or a lot of folks are, you know, obviously talking about AI these days, but you know, what do you think people should be looking out for in the next couple of years?
Eric Hauser:I think it's hard not to talk about generative AI a little bit, just because, you know, as I sort of think about technology and things that have just sort of made me fundamentally think a little bit differently about what's possible. I think maybe when I was in high school and the 1st time I saw the Internet was 1, I think when the app store came out for the iPhone, you know, I think that was maybe another event that stands out in my mind. And then I think the 1st time I used ChatGPT to help me write some code, I think that was probably it. Probably a 3rd, 1 that clearly sticks out. It'll be interesting to see how the technology curve progresses on generative AI, but it's very easy to see a world where generative AI and voice agents, whatever will potentially going to be better than humans at doing certain tasks, you know, let's say somewhere in the next 12 to 36 months. There's a lot of tricky questions around that and the rollout of that technology. There's, there's ethical considerations, there's whether how people will react to, you know, interacting with, with AI agents. But I think what's most interesting to think about there is almost every, let's take the healthcare industry, for example, all the existing paradigms are built around the, built around the fact that humans have to provide. The services to make it go work. So the scheduling of when you need it, how often you interact with a patient in a world where that cost essentially decreases by maybe 1 or 2 orders of magnitude, we really need to be rethinking the, we really needed to be thinking, you know, patient journeys, for instance, from the ground up. You know, what are those look like when, when it's, you know, towards magnitude cheaper to execute on when you don't have to worry about staffing shortages, things like that. So, I think, you know, there's a lot of things that happen, for instance, in health care that are really not medical advice, which I think it's going to be a much longer timeframe for, you know, AI to be providing medical advice that I think that everybody can trust. But there's a lot of parts of that patient journey that aren't. Aren't aren't medical advice where you can do those faster, you know, essentially, you know, gathering you know, gathering background data on a particular patients, you know, getting their histories, things like that, communicating with them about about appointments, making sure they're engaged, making sure they're following medication adherence. All of these things, you know, don't involve, you know, giving direct medical advice to a patient. And so that's something that we're thinking about. I think the trick for all companies. Is. Out there is where do you want to come in on on the technology curve here? I'm sure that regal is talking about this a fair amount internally as well. Driving inside info about that, but I'm sure it comes up a lot. And, you know, it's, it's, it's easy to see that as, as sort of how, as the technology is oppressed, there's going to become a point where. You know, certain things like voice agents are going to be relatively easy to do. It's not there right now. Right now that requires you to have a lot of great engineers on your team to be able to pull that sort of thing off and a long tail of kind of, like, iterating on that technology to be able to roll it out. But I don't think it's going to be very long before before we see that. So I think that, you know, that's that's I think that prediction is fairly obvious. Like, that that's
Alex Levin:No, I love the theme of AI as a deflationary force, right? And what, you know, what is going to happen at, to your point, as the cost of some of these pieces, doesn't have to be everything. Like we're not saying automate everything, but if, if all of a sudden X, Y, and Z go to zero price or very low, like what could you do with that money? Could you give people better service or could you lower the price so much that there's more people that could get access to care? So, yeah, I love the theme as a deflationary force. The other thing I think you're hitting on that, you know, I'll just end with is As some of these things become more possible for more sources. So, you know, yes, you mentioned chat GPT, but like, there's going to be five providers that are able to do it at the level that we want, and that'll become more commoditized very quickly. So as that becomes more commoditized, I think the differentiation is not going to be in the layer of which LLM do you use, but how as a business do you. I'm thinking of a, of a how do you to tune those models? How does a business, do you use it to, you know, create a customer experience, a customer outcome? And so, if I look at like where I think the innovation is going to come from, I think yes, obviously there's a lot of hard technical problems being solved, that are important, but I, I'm excited about all the innovations that's going to come on the consumer company layer, the experience that you guys are creating, or AAA is creating, or Angie or whoever, for that end customer using it which.
Eric Hauser:Yeah, I mean, most, but I, I can't think of a time in my career where, you know, somebody tried to, you know, start with technology and then build a product right off of it, where it's, it's, you need to start with a product 1st and you need to start with the customer experience figure out what problems you're trying to solve and then use the right technology for it. And I think, you know, AI, the general AI stuff that's been available. I think a lot of people are thinking about, okay, like, what's possible now with this. And I think if you really just maybe start from a first principles approach to thinking about the customer journey, how that might change now that you have some of these capabilities and how you would sort of layer that stuff in, that's, that's the right way to be thinking about it. And then, yeah, you just don't want to be too early cause you don't want to burn through R& D dollars and GPD dollars. Right.
Alex Levin:I was talking to, a senior, a very senior engineering leader just yesterday, where their whole company was built on having hundreds of engineers doing AI things, and they're about to transition to a model where they're going to use existing new LLMs and massively reduce the size of the team because that's caught up with them,
Eric Hauser:Yeah, we're very early in this curve. But I think it's exciting. I think it's very exciting. And, and, you know, there's obviously certain concerns about realistic concerns about potential downside for AI, but if you think about how AI can also help better enable existing employees, making them more efficient I think that there's just so many opportunities for upside here. That as a, as a society it's something to be really excited about,
Alex Levin:yeah, Eric, thank you for joining me. So if, if people want to learn more about cadence, where should they go?
Eric Hauser:They can go to cadence.care which is a website. We've got a lot of information up there about the company. And we recently kind of released our outcomes report for 2023, where we talked about all of the patients we have in the program, the outcomes they were able to achieve it's really a fantastic piece of information. If you really want to dig deep into kind of the company and what we're doing, I'd start there with what the patients are experiencing.
Alex Levin:Great. Thank you very much.
Eric Hauser:Great. Thanks for having me.