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Unleashing Communication Synergy: Clerk Chat's Integration of AI and VOIP in Corporate Messaging

• Evan Kirstel

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Discover a world where your team's communication transcends traditional limits with Clerk Chat, as our expert guest Alex unveils how this game-changing messaging application is revolutionizing the VOIP ecosystem. Imagine seamlessly connecting through Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, and Zoom with enterprise-grade messaging that not only meets compliance standards but also integrates with your existing phone numbers. Throughout the episode, we explore real-life scenarios where Clerk Chat's innovations streamline workflows, making professional interactions as effortless as texting a client from a golf course or engaging high net worth individuals with personalized communications.

The conversation takes a futuristic turn as we investigate the synergy between artificial intelligence and human insight in workplace communications. Learn how AI can serve as an immediate first responder or as a tool for employees to fine-tune, significantly reducing customer support tickets by up to 90%. But it's not just about flashy AI; we also uncover the less conspicuous yet critical evolution in CRM integration, ensuring that the user experience on platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom is continuously elevated, marking personalization in the AI-powered corporate world.

As we wrap up, we look beyond the product and into the key alliances and international ambitions driving startups like Clerk Chat forward. Get an insider's perspective on how strategic tech partnerships and the bring-your-own-carrier approach are essential in today's telephony landscape, and join us in celebrating the power of networking and collaboration, from the fruitful connections we've made to the promising partnerships, like with Scipio, that are shaping the future of business communications. While I regret missing the next big industry event, the spirit of innovation and accomplishment in our discussion is a testament to the thriving energy found in the connections we make and the collaborative victories we celebrate.

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Speaker 1:

Hey everybody. Great topic here on a beautiful sunny Friday. Looking forward to hearing how Clerk Chat is reinventing and revolutionizing team communications here with Alex. How are you?

Speaker 2:

Good, good. How are you, Evan? Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:

I'm doing well, really excited to have this chat, as we've been talking a number of months and I'm really intrigued by what you guys are doing. Maybe you could start with introductions. Talk about the origin story of Clerk Chat, the problems that you're addressing and the inspiration, maybe, behind its creation.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely so. Yeah, we've been building ClerkChat just under the last two years. It is a conversational messaging application for the VOIP ecosystem. So we really bridge the gap of for lack of a better, I guess, terms the missing piece in messaging across Microsoft Teams, cisco WebEx and Zoom Teams, cisco, webex and Zoom. So we found that our customers really had no enterprise-grade communication platform readily available to them, despite maybe Zoom or WebEx having kind of like what they call their vanilla out-of-the-box offering for messaging. So we really enabled SMS, whatsapp for business and we're working on Apple Business Chat slash, imessage and then Google's RCS as well, so allowing really the enterprise on VoIP to enable messaging for all of their colleagues.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that's no small goal here, and I see your tagline creating conversations that convert, that sell, that engage, that, that delight. Really interesting proposition. So you know, maybe let's dive into the product and the service. You know what are some of the features that set it apart from you, know the built-in tools, capabilities of those apps, as well as other automation tools that exist out there yeah, yeah, I think the the messaging ecosystem over the last 10 years has definitely been crowded.

Speaker 2:

It's a crowded space and it's a question that you get asked very often. Um, but really, for within again, that voip landscape that we're going after right now is the fact that a lot of these enterprise companies don't have, so one is. There's just this there's been a convergence of bringing the hard phone into the soft phone, right. So allowing, you know, these millions of folks who have literally a hard phone to migrate to Microsoft Teams, literally a hard phone to migrate to Microsoft Teams, zoom or WebEx, where their telephony can now exist alongside their video platform, which has been really a big moment since COVID has occurred For the last four or five years, this has been a big trend that we've seen in the market and, interestingly, there's been no messaging platform that can meet these customers where they are, and the enterprise. So, from a big perspective, there's compliance requirements that these companies have. So that means saving these conversations for auditing or e-discovery purposes, and this is really why a lot of financial institutions are coming to us, a lot of healthcare companies are coming to us, transportation and logistics companies where that data, that conversational data, is really sensitive are coming to us as well.

Speaker 2:

So those are some of the features that folks look for, but the major one is being able to wrap around the existing business phone number. So a lot of messaging applications will have you port to a third-party carrier, which obviously, when you're dealing with calling we all know that that's kind of, you know, it's like heart surgery, if you will, for these IT folks that are managing this complex network of telephony. So that first one is, you know, enabling that existing business phone number, and we did that through a partnership with the underlying cloud, telco, with bandwidthcom, and so Microsoft has a product called Operator Connect, and so we basically were the first resellers of that product and then happy to talk more about, like our CRM integrations or anything but at a high level. That's really what we've been able to do and how we've been able to wedge into this ecosystem.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic, yeah, great company. I know them well. And maybe talk about some scenarios of how you're helping certain businesses. Is there an industry in particular you're getting a lot of traction in? I mean, what does it mean for streamlining their business communications workflow? What's the value there for them?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so you're a large company, a mid-market company. You have hundreds of your employees who may have again their own business phone line and you now need to message, right, folks are not, you know. We know calling minutes are dropping, unfortunately, and the main channel that it's actually update has has seen a large uptick, other than email, which is also dropping in terms of how many people like will open or respond to it has really just been messaging, and that's because it lives at the center of of really where people will live and play, you know, with their family, right, you can imagine this is like the most concentric part of of a phone screen for people is that the messaging inbox. So having enabling employees, a company to enable an employee, like a financial institution, as an example, customer has all of their wealth advisors now being able to text you from their business phone. Imagine one of the use cases we get is you know, all my customers are on a golf course and so you know they don't. They don't want to hear from me on a on a Friday afternoon before Memorial day. You know I'm calling them about something that we have to do. They'd rather just do it asynchronously through through a text message.

Speaker 2:

Others. There's NFL sports teams again using it for kind of high net worth individuals. They actually have like a concierge, like a CX team, like personal assistants that they that they will literally dedicate to corporate suite holders and box holders. So before the game, during the game and after the game, on kind of NFL Sunday, they'll they'll literally dedicate a person or a team just to you and your organization. And that messaging because it's hyper-personalized, it's again human-based, it's all technology but it's all human-based at the other end is really how companies are leaning into this modality of communication.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, fantastic Value prop and talk about all the channels you support. It really is extraordinary. Extraordinary not just like slack and teams, but iMessage for business and, of course, sms and whatsapp rcs. I imagine is is coming um. Is that the goal? Any, any channel, any, any message right.

Speaker 2:

So just the same way. What shocked us and building the company is yeah, sms is available. It's a very old protocol, in fact but WhatsApp, the same way, as a consumer, you pop in your SIM card and you have all of these channels available to you as an enterprise. It's not that simple that VOIP number. You have to go to all these different places and you'd have to know there's really two ways you'd have to go through.

Speaker 2:

You know Twilio as a developer to enable all those things, and actually us as developers, going to Twilio, we found out actually you can't enable WhatsApp very easily. It's a very manual process. So what we've done is we've just made it super easy for a company to go in connect SMS, connect WhatsApp. For business, we have rcs, uh and prototyping and development. Right now it's pretty new protocol actually for google as well, and then apple business chat we're working on as well. We just uh. You know the apple ecosystem is a very walled garden, so we just require the uh, almost like a papal level blessing. Oh, it feels like tim cutt who almost goes through each of these one by one. So we're waiting for that blessing from Apple to go live.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic, can't wait to see that. Yeah, very powerful tool and you know you're talking with large enterprises who have security, and privacy, data protection at the fore. I mean, how does that work, integrating into these workplace communication tools with, you know, end-to-end encryption and all the other requirements that you run against?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so SMS is unencrypted over the air. We can encrypt it kind of end-to-end, and this is why the enterprise has been leaning so heavily into our solution. So because we integrate with Global Relay, smarsh and Bloomberg as well on the backend, all of that data can now be pulled to a centralized third-party database that all of these companies, the enterprise, will plug into. So for auditing or compliance purposes. It's not sitting on clerk chat servers. We're actually pushing it to this trusted third party that they have already built a connection or they have an MSA or a contract with. So we could literally think of it as a pipe all of the conversational data into their trusted resource where they already have their security keys and dirty keys and their Microsoft Purview or Azure storage as well. We can really push the data to any again any of those e-discovery tools of their choice.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic opportunity. Maybe talk about some of the industries or verticals you're getting traction in. I'd love to be able to text my doctor, my doctor's office. Natively, no, doesn't happen. But where do I see the biggest traction today and moving forward?

Speaker 2:

healthcare professionals. Definitely it's less the, the doctor's office and more of these larger institutions, um, and then financial institutions is where we're seeing it, but really, um, those are the two major industries that we're seeing is kind of financial and healthcare. If you think about like this ecosystem, uh, as being like pretty horizontal, the, the, the beachhead within the beach. That I guess you could say in kind of like, uh, business talk has been those two sectors and that's because the, the level, uh, or the, the sensitivity of the data. Imagine you're communicating with your healthcare practitioner right around phi, you know your personal healthcare identifier data, right, so you're talking about something sensitive to you. That's where we're locking into their ERPs or to these third-party compliance tools, and again, it has to be on that same phone number. So that's where we've had a lot of product market fit. And then the financial wealth managers, financial institutions, have been leaning heavily into this again, because they're all migrating away from like a different you, a different hard phone solution, and then Zoom on one other's end. They're just converging into one platform and they're looking for this robust, enterprise-grade platform. And again, where the data involving financial decisions has to go to a third-party source, trusted source as well, those have been the two major ones that we've seen.

Speaker 2:

But it's really, evan, it's been really pretty horizontal, pretty cool to see how many different industries have leaned into Clark Chat and it's been incredible. We're getting dozens of installs every single, almost a thousand unique customers just organically installing Clark Chat every day, which you would think messaging has been kind of solved right. It feels like it's a problem that it's like unsexy and boring to a certain extent and very self-aware. There's so many messaging platforms but for this specific industry, where there's 40 million PSTN connectivity licenses that are just highly underserved, there's been no enterprise-grade platform. It's just baffling. So I guess that's a long answer to say that it's really industry agnostic. But healthcare and finance is really where we are finding a great pull.

Speaker 1:

That's fantastic. And these thousands of customers joining maybe describe the onboarding process. That's fantastic. And these thousands of customers joining what is maybe describe the onboarding process. You know how many is it hours, days, weeks to kind of get service started and what does that look like from like a self-service standpoint?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's a. It's a great question and thanks for asking that one. So what's what I'd say is really unique and incredible here is how much emphasis we put on the onboarding process. So what you can do is actually go to our website right now and you can click. You'll see a button that says activate my existing number and we can actually check in real time and kind of 90% of the cases, we can just activate what's called SMS hosting and we can check that phone number in real time and literally wrap around it in seconds.

Speaker 2:

So, having gone through other platforms where it is days or weeks or months before you can even get a demo scheduled, we just open up the platform. You can click through, create an account super fast. You log in with your Microsoft Teams, zoom or WebEx ID it's all the same authentication token and because of our partnership with bandwidthcom, we're able to again verify that phone number and just enable messaging literally within three clicks. I think we try to do that. We have this like mentality in Clerk Chat which is like if it can't be done within three clicks, then it's probably not a good user experience, like if it can't be done within three clicks, then it's probably not a good user experience. So we've tried to enable that as fast as possible.

Speaker 2:

So and that is enterprise customers of course would want to check you know our security protocols and you know go through a more robust demo but really getting it to the free account. So there's three plans. There's a free and then kind of upgrades to a paid account. But the free plan includes 103 messages right away and you can invite as many members to your organization and enable as many phone numbers as you want right out of the gate. So effectively, we don't think we should punish people for wanting to try the product. We want people to try the product and see for themselves. So again, it's just seconds or minutes to get started.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic. Well, it sounds so easy. I could even use it, which would be a big leap forward. Talk about automation and AI. You have an AI agent capability today. How is that being used, and sort of, what was the big idea behind your AI agent?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so the AI agent system is. What we saw is that there are companies that will have a workforce that's available, you know, for customer support or CX or even sales, that's available within certain hours you might think of like the nine to five, you know, workday and the AI component works in really two ways, because there's a lot of reluctance and skepticism around. You know, ai it's such a big term right now Everyone's talking about it, right? The way that we implement it is in two ways. One is it can actually be as a co-pilot to steal from Microsoft's words is in two ways. One is it can actually be as a co-pilot, to steal from Microsoft's words, so it can live on top of the conversation that an employee is having, and this is how I use it every day. It will give me a recommendation on what to respond.

Speaker 2:

So we have right there what you're seeing is the assistant, and we can actually set it to be AI first or AI second. So the AI second version is you can time gate it, so meaning it will respond. If a message hasn't gone responded to within two or three minutes, the AI will kick in and give a response, or it will stay kind of in what we call like awaiting review mode, and then it's up to the, to the employer, to the user, to manually review what the AI is is suggesting as a response, and they can go in and edit it or they can just send what it's proposing out of the box. We've seen both kind of modalities used. So the immediate one, which is like AI. First we went through an AI accelerator program in San Francisco, very reminiscent of HBO's Silicon Valley.

Speaker 2:

Well, hopefully not too reminiscent, but but very fun show yeah oh, I don't know, yeah, I don't know, art imitating reality or something, but but effectively this company, contigo uh, was scaling to about 120 000 weekly active users over whatsapp. They were just literally had one person texting and and then, as their company kind of you know, went bananas and was scaling, they implemented our AI agent to help this. The CEO respond to all these support tickets and we were able to get a 90% deflection rate. So for us, that's where the AI first model can really help as a co-pilot and to set the AI up as well. To set it up to be a conversational agent literally takes minutes.

Speaker 2:

So if you're familiar with, like the chat GPT store, there's still like a level of building and configuring that you need to do. So we've created a panel where you just do a little bit of fine tuning. You can upload all of your knowledge we call it like a knowledge base like your JIRA, your Confluence, your website. We can pull like PDF documents, csvs, really any kind of data that you have about your company, and it's all private, it's all still yours, it's just shared with Clerk Chat, but we don't share it back to ChatGPT or anything. It literally is just informing our agent to know about your company and then respond on behalf of your company as well. So this is kind of like the future gazing stuff. The innovative stuff that we're leaning in towards is embedding around the one-to-one messaging and amplifying. That's what we mean when we say amplifying human agents.

Speaker 1:

Wow, super powerful, intriguing idea, and you must have a lot on your plate in terms of roadmap and feature functionality development. Can you give us a peek into the direction you're going in? Where do you see yourself investing in the platform? And yeah, just the next few months, through the next year, through the next year?

Speaker 2:

Sure, it's actually. I know we're speaking about AI and all this stuff, but it's actually all the unsexy things I think are really exciting. So integrations into CRMs, deepening our integrations into Salesforce, deepening all those enterprise features, even getting things that you would think are silly, like notifications on Microsoft Teams, like natively enabling an SMS message to pop up the same way you get a chat message on Microsoft. We realized that this is the stuff that employees care about. The AI stuff is cool and shiny and nice, but it's really about how amplifying the user experience. So, in terms of roadmap, it's really refining it so we have the best user experience possible. So being able to identify quickly your messages, being able to respond to them across any channel that you want.

Speaker 2:

So the SMS, rcs, imessage, and then those those deep CRM integration so you can kind of glance over at your at your side panel and know, oh, oh, I'm talking to evan as opposed to just some random person. I know exactly when the last time we spoke was what we spoke about, um, and how to like really drive a hyper personalized conversation your way. So those are, those are really what we're looking to do, and then we're I think we're actually publishing to the zoom store today, so hopefully we get approved. Uh, in case anyone from Zoom is watching. And then we just published to Cisco two weeks ago, to Cisco WebEx two weeks ago, so a lot coming out in terms of those platforms.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic. Wow, that's great news. And yes, I'm followed by Eric Wan at Zoom and many, many others, so hopefully he's watching. How do you see the big tech players here, from Microsoft to Cisco to Zoom and all the others? Are they just integrations, or do you see yourself in their app stores? Are they partners, or some of them even competitive in some cases? What does that look like?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a great question. Sound like our VCs here in San Francisco, I'd say, for by and large, they are definitely our go-to-market channel partner. We're published across their app stores and the reason why they're partners, rather than if they were to come out with like an enterprise grade solution or just copy paste us right, which everybody's going to be thinking like why should I, why should I take clerk chat as opposed to just waiting for the zoom solution and it's going to be, I have one neck to choke, right If something goes wrong for calling and texting. Um, we've spoken to leadership at both Microsoft and zoom who have both confirmed hey, like it would take us months, if not years, to redevelop what you guys have built. And not only that, but they're not a telco ecosystem themselves, they want to partner.

Speaker 2:

So 80% of the calling licenses or the PSTM licenses that are purchased on Zoom, webex and Teams are through the bring your own carrier motion. So you might have like a new wave as an example as a carrier aggregator behind the scenes, that with their iPilot system, that they power a ton of the telephony, or you have like even Verizon or AT&T coming direct. So all these enterprises are relying like these direct to carrier relationships and they are the ones lacking an SMS service. So even if Microsoft or Zoom or Webex came out with like a you know clerk chat competitor tomorrow, they would only be serving 10% to 15% of their total market. So there really is a need. That's what gives me reassurance and helps me sleep a little bit more at night is that there really is a need in the bring-your-own your own carrier motion here within this ecosystem.

Speaker 1:

For sure. Well, exciting times. And what about serving markets outside the US and Canada, North America?

Speaker 2:

I imagine that's a huge untapped opportunity as well. Absolutely yeah. We're seeing it's actually funny because those are the markets that have adopted messaging first. Like, if you look at the messaging ecosystem, it's very crowded outside. I mean, the US market is crowded, but not in this ecosystem. You go to, like you know.

Speaker 2:

I was in Italy last summer, very, very thankfully, and everybody uses WhatsApp. Like, the business owners are like oh just, you know, WhatsApp me. You go to, you know, APAC or Aladdin everybody says, oh, just, WhatsApp me. You go to APAC or LATAM, everybody says, oh, just, WhatsApp me. And the US has been a laggard, but in any case, they all use WhatsApp and that's something that we can support. So, enabling the same way as you as a consumer, you can enable your same phone number for iMessage, SMS, WhatsApp, we can do it for individual phone numbers on WhatsApp as well. So if you're a wealth management advisor, you're a healthcare practitioner and one of your patients or customers lives in Italy, you don't have to text with a localized American number. You can actually just WhatsApp them. So that's been a really big boon of business for us is being able to lean in internationally too.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic. Well beyond enjoying the sunny, sunny long weekend ahead of us, what else are you looking forward to over the next weeks, couple months, any, any travel or events, or just heads down helping customers?

Speaker 2:

No, so we're. We'll be at the PAX 8 beyond conference and we have some partners that will be there as well, which were really there were some things just recently announced in UC today, actually just yesterday. One of our partners is Scipio, so we just partnered with them to offer Scipio messaging with Clerk Chat. So we'll be at the PAX 8 Beyond Conference, happy to talk about that in real time. That will be in Denver from, if I'm not mistaken, june 9th to 11th.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic. Well, I won't be there, but I'm sure I'll see you at one of the many industry events, meetups, get-togethers, and congratulations on all the success Onwards and upwards. You're on quite a trajectory. It's very impressive to watch. Thanks, alex.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, evan. Thanks for hosting me. Love your show and shout out to Dino for DePalma for connecting us, so I appreciate that as well.

Speaker 1:

Ah, yes, my neighbor Dino here in Massachusetts and thanks everyone. Thanks for watching. Look forward to your feedback and until next time, take care, have a great weekend.