Outbound Contact Center

E11: The evolution of outbound contact centers with Adam Saad of Tech Stack Advising

• Courtland Nicholas • Season 1 • Episode 11

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In this engaging discussion, Adam Saad, Founder and CTO at Tech Stack Advising, and Alex Levin, CEO and Co-founder at Regal.io, delve into the evolving landscape of outbound dialing and AI in contact centers. They explore how traditional outbound methods are becoming obsolete and how personalized, data-driven approaches are crucial for success. Saad emphasizes the importance of integrating data effectively with contact center technology to optimize performance, while Levin highlights the role of contact center expertise in managing AI agents. They discuss the need for continuous testing and adaptation, stressing that AI agents require ongoing training and refinement, similar to human agents.

Main Topics Covered

  1. The decline of traditional outbound dialing methods and the rise of personalized, data-driven approaches.
  2. The integration of data with contact center technology for improved outbound dialing.
  3. The challenges and opportunities in managing AI agents versus human agents.
  4. The importance of continuous testing and refinement in AI agent performance.
  5. The role of contact center expertise in the effective use of AI agents.


To learn more about everything Outbound Contact Center, read more posts at regal.io/blog or email us at hello@regal.io.

Alex Levin:

Hi, this is Alex Levin, the co founder and CEO of Regal.io. I'm here with Adam Saad, the co founder and CTO of Tech Stack advising. Thank you for joining me, Adam.

Adam Saad:

Thanks for having me, Alex.

Alex Levin:

So, you know, I have to embarrass you a little bit at the beginning of this. Like when I first met you, I was just so impressed. Having been the top salesperson at past companies, going off on your own, just your level of understanding of the contact center space. You know, I would have hired you in a nanosecond if you weren't already, you know, starting your own thing, but you know, I knew I had to bring you on to the podcast and I'm excited today to learn a little bit more about your background and, how you thinking about the contact center market today. So maybe to start, folks are always interested in, how you got to where you are today. So, you know, tell us a bit about yourself and your background.

Adam Saad:

Yeah, I appreciate that, Alex. I'm impressed with everything you've done and building Regal. So again, the feeling's mutual and thank you. So yeah, as you said, my name's Adam Saad, founder and CTO here at Tech Stack Advising. Before starting Tech Stack Advising, I spent my entire career in SaaS early on selling marketing automation to SMBs. Then I entered the contact center in 2014 and really never left. So for the past 10 years, I've been working with organizations to help them modernize their contact center to go through digital transformations. And what I realized in that decade plus of experience is that most organizations, I mean, they have to go through these strategic transformations and one, they don't often have a trusted partner to guide them and two, they're under resourced internally. So that's why I started Tech Stack and it's been a fun ride ever since.

Alex Levin:

So yeah, tell us more of a tech stack. what is it that you guys do? who's your typical customer? how are you usually advising them, helping them?

Adam Saad:

Yeah, absolutely. So we are a boutique systems integrator and we help businesses achieve massive success with strategic contact center technology. So we have. Three vertically integrated services. number one, strategic vendor evaluation and selection number two, implementation and migration, and three ongoing success programs. We work with organizations of all shapes and sizes. We have fortune 500 customers. We have customers and organizations with 15 seats that no one's ever heard of. And we love working with those organizations and everything in between. Thank you. I'll make a joke that the only thing we don't do is government.

Alex Levin:

Yeah, where did you learn the most about contact center? Or like, who did you learn the most from about contact center? where did That knowledge all come from.

Adam Saad:

I'll never forget 2014. I'm in a training at Five9 and the SVP of sales at the time. Was teaching us contact center for the folks like me who are new to the, to the industry. And the first introduction about contact center was around the migration away from legacy on premise infrastructure. And he had explained to me, he said, you know, before the cloud, we, these IT organizations would live in data centers and they'd have, they'd have to rack and stack servers and manually plug them in and wire them up. And the amount of effort and time and sacrifice these, these customers had to make to set up these legacy contact centers is crazy. And that's why we at Five9 are in the cloud. the best learning about contact centers has actually been from the customers I've been dealing with for the last decade. The customers have taught me more than anything else. Really.

Alex Levin:

Yeah. You know, the irony of, of some of this is that even when you're in the cloud, there's still like servers you need to like upload and do things with. when I first ran a contact center, we were in this little space on 29th between Broadway and fifth. I literally remember the office. We had probably 20 people in the contact center where I started. And, you know, by the end in this 3000 square foot space, we had like a hundred people in the contact center, which is like, you don't want a hundred people in a contact center in a 3000 square foot space. But we were very early customer actually on Talkdesk. So we had a cloud contact center, but the switches to actually connect, the computers to the internet. We're too small. So every time we added another class, everything would go down. And I somehow became IT guy and had to figure out how to like buy switches and like plug them into the wall. And like we, you know, then we found out. Oh, well, our Internet provider, you know, went down. we need. Two or three internet providers. And then we need to have resiliency on that. So it was a funny first experience of like, even in the cloud, there's still all this like hardware you need, but that was my initial contact center experience.

Adam Saad:

It, well, you know, you're not alone. It's, you know, it's amazing. The big promise of the cloud was that IT would no longer have to manage these applications and all the onus would be on the business and you're living proof that that's just not the case because these platforms, one, they're strategic, two, they're mission critical three. they're technical and complex. And four, they're just robust. So now what we're seeing in the industry is a true partnership between IT and the business. But the problem Is IT has a hundred applications they have to manage, so they don't really have time. All they can do is be reactive to the business's request. They can never be proactive to help make these applications work. And I think there's an opportunity for organizations*wink wink* like yours. That can provide a really good, easy user experience for the business to manage most of the platform.

Alex Levin:

Oh, for sure. Before we get too far in the contact center, you know, one of the questions I ask a lot of guests is, you know, what's like, you wish you had known earlier in your career, if you could go back to your 21 year old self, as you're starting working, like, what would you have told yourself.

Adam Saad:

Oh man. you know, entrepreneurship is the ultimate self development academy where you get to learn every single day and the skills that it takes to go to zero to 1 million to one to five to five to 20, I mean, all those are different skills. You know, I think early in my career being a sales guy, a recovering sales guy. Now, I thought that sales was the most important part of the company. And of course, sales is very important, but I found that as I've gotten wiser, I realized that product or service is really the most important part of the business because having an excellent product, That is one of one, it makes marketing easier and make sales easier. It makes service and support easier. So if you have a great product and or service that is, I think the key to winning in business.

Alex Levin:

Yeah, for sure. Particularly in the contact center market, you know, there's 400 something contact center, you know, software is today. And a lot of them are doing a very similar thing. They're saying, Hey, if you're on prem come to the cloud, like it's the same features, but it's in the cloud. And, I'm suspicious that, you know, that value prop won't last forever, right? You got to say more than just we're in the cloud. You got to say, Hey, we have. some very special technology in the cloud that allows you to do something that you couldn't do with your old technology. And there's lots of great examples from, you know, we have friends over at Santa's who are helping change, accents into accents that are more familiar to people. Like, that's very cool. Or, you know, we have, friends over like a customer that in the contact and are inbound sports side. We're one of the first ones to use customer data. To make it easier to personalize the interactions you're having, or to your point, regal really focuses on how do we improve outbound contact center. So I think there are these spots. And, one of the things I struggle with is. there are early adopters always. But a lot of the bigger contact centers, it feels like they're so reluctant to go to these new tools. So, I call it sometimes a Goldman Sachs IPO problem. If you're going to take your company public and you choose Goldman Sachs and they get it wrong, no one's getting fired. Everything's fine, right? You know, but if you choose, you know, a smaller player like cool and Loki, let's say, you They may be better than Goldman Sachs. In fact, I think they are, but you know, if they do it wrong, you're the one who has egg on your face. So I think like there's a lot of innovative products that are quite unique and one of the challenges is how do you make sure that as a, if I were the CEO of those big organizations, that you're empowering your contact center leaders, your it leaders to go and get those products and not feel like your job is on the line. You know, if you do that, because if you, if you're making your people worried that if they try a new product and their job is on the line, you know, it doesn't work, you're never going to create the customer experiences that are really top of the line.

Adam Saad:

Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. there's always a risk factor. And I think human psychology says people are more motivated by avoiding loss than achieving gain. there's a lot to be said about the psychology of how humans are making decisions. I think the responsibility is both on the customer and on the vendors from a vendor perspective, the go to market strategy should, especially for the newer entrants. be a land and expand. Situation, right? Let me earn your trust on a small subset of your business where We mutually see a great opportunity to make a great impact to achieve whatever objective it is, So it's okay, If we're a new vendor and we want to get into a big account. It's okay to start small, build trust, and then expand the relationship over time because that's really what it is. It's a relationship. And on the customer side, really thinking about how these new technologies can impact the financial statement. No one really talks about this, but you know, you think about these organizations and they have to think about their customer acquisition costs. and their customer lifetime value and then how those two play together with an LTV to CAC ratio. We know that we can reduce customer acquisition costs by having a more efficient outbound dialer or a more efficient acquisition process. We know that we can increase customer lifetime value if we provide excellent customer support and reduce churn. So if you can start thinking as vendors and as customers and as trusted advisors here with tech stack about how the PNL and the balance sheet and the financial statements are affected by these decisions. Then we have a really good opportunity to make it a win win for everybody and decrease that risk significantly.

Alex Levin:

Yeah. So let's dig in a bit to, what I call outbound contact centers. I think when I was first taught about contact centers and probably you, like I was taught, contact centers are a call center. Mostly about customer support, do everything you can to deflect customer inbound If you're going to talk to them, make it all the same, right? Treat everybody the same. So it's really efficient. That's kind of the playbook I was given. And then I went into a business, in the home services industry at Angi's list where sure we had that side of the business where, customer service is a call center and we deflected, but there was this other really fascinating part of the business where we had customers. Let's say we're moving where we call them and say, Hey, you're moving. You know, you already got the moving company. Like, do you need your TV hung? Do you need something else? How can we make sure this goes well? And we actually found that talking to the customer, like calling them proactively having a conversation. But to a better customer experience and ultimately more revenue for us, and this was like the antithesis of everything I've learned. So, you know, over time, I've now talked to hundreds, thousands of these outbound contact centers. let's start there. You know, what is an outbound contact center? Like who has them? Why are they making outbound calls?

Adam Saad:

Yeah. Well, Alex, having you heard that outbound is dead.

Alex Levin:

Yeah. So When I was at Angie we used, I won't say their name, but a big, you know, common contact center software. And I went to them and said, outbound is a thing for us. Voice is a thing for us. And they told me, no, no, no, you're wrong. Voice is going away. Outbound is going away. You're wrong, Alex. And I go, how can my software provider tell me that I'm wrong about my own business? That's crazy.

Adam Saad:

Yeah, it's unreal. I mean, obviously we know that outbound is not dead and it's not going anywhere. I think the old school method of outbound is probably dead where you upload a giant lead list into a parallel dial and you call these people till their ears bleed. Three times a day, five times a day using a local presence number. The consumers have gotten hip to what's going on in outbound dialing. people aren't answering and it's data. The marketers know this. I think what's interesting, I've encountered more CMOs that own the contact center. it makes a lot of sense because the chief marketing officer has been using data to do outreach to their customers across text based channels, like email and social for a long time, and now they're leveraging data the same way to do proactive and customizable and personalized outreach via the dialer. And that is what's alive and well. And that's how you win in today's outbound dialing world.

Alex Levin:

So what, you know, let's talk about that. So you're a CMO, you're now all of a sudden put in charge of contact center and you know, using data to do personalization helps and you're given. Again, I'll pick on them a little bit. You know, you're given Talkdesk, Five9, Nice, Genesys, who don't use any data, who just say, Hey, give us a list and we'll dial them anytime. What do you do?

Adam Saad:

you know, I think what you do is you spend a lot of money on custom development, integration, and your CRM. Like if you're using these legacy solutions, right. If you're going to use a legacy solution and. You know, just upload lists and try to use data. It's going to cost you a whole bunch of money in I. T. And development to do that, because you have to connect all these different data sources. The best thing you could possibly do is find a solution that can already hook into your data providers and aggregators and make smart decisions to do your outbound dialing.

Alex Levin:

know, my story, like we literally did this at Angie. We went and. had 20 engineers building stuff. And I had this like crazy idea that like, we'd build it and then we'd be done. And like, that was it. And of course it was like, not like that. It was 20 engineers forever. And every time I wanted to do a new test is back to engineering. And so, that's where Regal came out of is, this idea of like, how do you use first party data to start driving better. outbound and in general, like how do we build a product that is going to keep innovating on outbound tooling, outbound calling, other channels for conversation, because there are businesses that really value this. They're businesses that know that it's critical to their success, you know, in healthcare, education, financial services. Local services like this is a huge part of their success. So, you know, we've really, I think, tried to get into this world. What I've noticed is, it's not a people problem. The people run contact centers very smart, very with it, very hip. It's a technology problem. Like they're limited by their technology. It's a incentives problem. Like they're being told by their boss, cut, cut your cost center. Stop, telling me you want engineering. So even if they wanted engineering resources to do something, they're not being given it, so like it hurts innovation there. And so I think they're in this weird position, you know, the sort of, I'd say Regal's now what four years in. So like the early adopters that came to us, I think got huge value out of it because, you know, this is like an arms race. It's like marketing, right? The one who gets the tool first is the one who's going to get that huge advantage and all their competitors. Companies and I won't say their names. We're saying, Hey, you can't tell these four companies that we use Regal because they knew that if they got regal, they would get a structural advantage over that competitor for some period of time. But ultimately, yeah, I think to have, whether you do it with, if you're going to go choose to do it yourself and build that, on top of, I don't know, Amazon Connect or Twilio Flex, which some people do, or you're going to go and take an off the shelf solution like Regal, you've got to move in that direction of starting to figure out how you're going to invest in better outbound tools, or a year from now, your answer rate is going to be worse, your on call conversion is going to be worse, your revenue per lead is going to be worse, and your business isn't going to be around anymore.

Adam Saad:

yeah, I mean, absolutely nailed it. I think, you know, what I'm seeing in the market, I agree wholeheartedly. I think the big guys out there, right. The fortune organizations that have unlimited engineering resources, they have those resources. And even them, sometimes the resources aren't being allocated to the contact center for various reasons, right. Then you have this huge segment of the lower enterprise mid market. That's still need to compete in the contact of, and they just, they don't know where to go. You know, I think it's interesting that, you know, I talked to so many customers that are just now in the year 2024, they're sitting there and they're telling me, Hey, we need to improve our speed to lead buddy. Yeah, we, first of all, we do need to improve our speed to lead, but that's just like, people have been doing that for the last decade. We need to start thinking bigger and better about not only speed to lead. But the cadence in which we call our contact center customers best time to call based on the data that we have and when people answer based on their demographic or what product we're selling, there's an amazing opportunity. I think there's an amazing opportunity for Regal and Tech Stack to put out data to the customer. Say, Hey, this is where the industry's going for outbound. These are the new metrics you need to be leveraging. If you don't have this data, you're missing out. Right.

Alex Levin:

I think the famous study was in HBS Harvard Business Review. they were showing what percentage of the time you win a deal if you call within 30 seconds, an hour, you know, by 24 hours, it's like, It's amazing. Like you went only 10 percent of the time in home services. We knew at Angie, when we gave the lead to three different providers, if you were the first provider to call the customer 50 percent of the time you want, like, so, you know, definitely there's a speed to lead is something that people understand. There's good evidence. And I agree like that is not doing it. Start doing it. I think the pieces that people are not as aware of are two things. One is, Okay. You know, how do you use, you know, things like the source of the lead, the behavior of the lead, the first part of the day, about the lead to even personalize that first interaction because there's a lot of variation you can do there. You know, if somebody is calling from the south, you know, maybe you should have somebody with a southern accent, you should be talking about, a football game in the south, you shouldn't be talking, about what happened to the New York Yankees. Right. So I think there's a lot of interesting stuff that, you know, folks like centerfield or. A couple other organizations have done to demonstrate how much value there is from that variation, even on the first call that people are starting to learn, but the people will forget that there's now often four or five calls in a sequence. And over that time, what's happening is you're learning more about the customer. You need to listen to them, listen to all their digital behaviors, any surveys or feedback they're giving you, what are they saying in the conversations and use that to change your point, the cadence. The timing what channels are reaching out, what the messaging is, who's engaging and what the value prop is and, you know, certainly in the contact center, but also passing all that data back to your marketing team so that the marketing that they're presented is right, So if you tell me on the phone, you're in the market for an SUV and you go back to the website and I'm showing you a sedan, that's a missed opportunity. And, you know, on the other hand, if you were to show them the SUV in the color they were interested in, the customer's mind would be blown and they go, Oh, my God, this brand actually listened to me and they cared about me, not just like selling cars in general, but me. And so I think your point it's how do you link marketing and in the contact center together and use data as that connective tissue to make customers, you know, just wow them because you can treat them like one in a million.

Adam Saad:

Yeah, I think it's, I think you're spot on. It's simple, but all of that is not easy. Right. I think that's probably a good, you know, everyone wants to talk about AI today. Right. I don't think we can go through a discussion without mentioning something about AI. Right. And I think this is the opportunity where we can start thinking about how to leverage AI to have more personalized conversations, but do it efficiently. Right. So, you know, you mentioned if we have a customer in New York, let's talk about the New York Yankees. I think a cool use case for how we can use AI in these situations. Okay. We know about the customer. He lives in New York in this particular zip code. And the odds are that he's a Yankees fan over a Mets fan is X. let's put a dynamic script. In front of the agent to leverage that data, create that dynamic script and give the agent the opportunity to say, Hey, Alex, you know, I see your New York City. That's amazing. Did you see that? The Yankees beat the Astros 5 to 3

Alex Levin:

So that the challenge is no longer does the data exist. The data exists. It's out there in the ether of whatever the interwebs, right? The challenge is how do you get the data into the place where you can act on it? So like having a real time data pipeline that can act, you know, within milliseconds and put all that data on one record. So it's not just all over the place like that's actually quite a challenging problem. And then the other problem is to your point. How do you get it? The person on the line, whether it's an agent or an AI agent to be able to actually do it. And it's actually much easier for AI agents because, you know, they're not limited by the mental capacity of a human. If I were going call to call to call and you on every call had to use a different opening line, my brain would explode. But, you know, for an AI, their brain doesn't explode or whatever their circuitry doesn't explode. So I think what Regal solves particularly well is. First, that aggregation problem. How do you listen and put all the data in one place? And then second, how do you start doing the personalization? We always knew that AI agents would eventually probably be involved in this. But until recently, like AI agents were pretty terrible. Honestly, the delay was too long. They couldn't handle interruption. They couldn't handle questions that they weren't ready for. And so we panned it. But about I actually literally remember the demo. I saw a demo about six months ago where I go, Oh, my goodness. Like it wasn't the LLMs that changed it. It was the ability to, handle it faster, handle interruptions, like it got good enough where I said, this is going to be a thing. So we started investing much more seriously in AI agents and we have a couple of customers now using our agents and. Obviously, I'm biased, but head and shoulders above what else is in the market like there, you know, we have made real advances in it. So I'm very excited. I think in the next month, we'll start publicly launching this. It's amazing, you know, in terms of, not the most complicated use cases, let's say for for qualification, basic inbound routing, scheduling, It's amazing how good the agents are and they can pivot, right? If you tell them it's your birthday, like they're going to now tell you happy birthday. if you see your point, if you're telling them they're a fan of the Yankees, they're going to somehow bring in Derek Jeter, right? And it's amazing how well they do that.

Adam Saad:

I think there's a good opportunity to test that, right? Like, you know, I think everything that Regal does is amazing from an ABCD testing perspective and how easy it is to do. the only way to accomplish this successfully is to AB test, let's put an AI agent in front of one campaign and AB test it versus the agents that have dynamic scripts versus the agents that kind of just wing it with the training that they have. And let's see what works. Because that's really all we can do in business Put volume through the test funnel and then see what comes out the other

Alex Levin:

Yeah. So a lot of people are out there testing AI agents. And I think a lot of people are thinking of AI agents like building software. They think they're building a code. It's going to be tested once they're going to do the thing. They're not going to look at it. And I actually think it's just inherently wrong. And I think the people who are going to be best suited to using AI agents are contact centers because an AI agent is much more like a contact center agent, you have to train them. You have to go through it a hundred times with them to see all the, cause it's not deterministic, it's stochastic, all the variations of their answer. You've gotta coach them, you gotta QA it and then you gotta try a different way and try, you know, slightly different approaches. actually I have this like strongly held belief that the people who are just out there, trying to build agents like code are gonna massively fail compared to contact center folks who know how to run agents really, really well. So to some extent, if you're a contact center manager today. You should start getting ready to be like super in demand for managing AI agents in all different kinds because you have a unique skill set that most people don't have because they think of software and AI agents are not like software. Well, Adam, we lost you there for a second, but I wanted to thank you again for joining me. Any last message, like how should people reach you if they're interested in your services?

Adam Saad:

Yeah, absolutely. I was great to, great to be here. Really good conversation. If you want to reach me, you can find me on LinkedIn. Just type in my name, Adam Saad I'm with Tech Stack Advising. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm super active there. Follow me there if you want some insights on contact centers.