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Enhancing Communication: Ziro's Microsoft Teams Migration and Automation Tools

• Evan Kirstel

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Unlock the secrets of modern telephony systems with Steven from Ziro, who shares his incredible journey from Cisco engineer to co-founding Ziro. Discover how Ziro has revolutionized the telephony market by identifying key gaps and transitioning from consulting to managed services and innovative software solutions. Learn how the shift to cloud-based solutions, specifically leveraging Microsoft's open platform, has enabled Ziro to deliver unparalleled value to enterprise customers. Steven also sheds light on how Ziro's automation tools make migrating to Microsoft Teams a breeze, cutting down operational burdens and saving customers substantial time.

As we dive deeper, we dissect the complexities and advantages of migrating business telephony systems, with Steven revealing strategies to mitigate risks and ensure businesses are future-ready. From enhancing customer and employee experiences to achieving significant cost savings, this episode is packed with actionable insights. Plus, you'll get an introduction to the Ziro Platform for Microsoft (ZPM), a game-changer in telephony management that integrates seamlessly with ITSM providers like ServiceNow. This episode is essential listening for anyone looking to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving world of business communications and technology.

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Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, diving into the world of Microsoft Teams, phone and voice communications today with a true expert and innovator in the field, steven from Xero. How are you?

Speaker 2:

Doing well. Evan, I've been waiting a long time to have this session with you, so super excited. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:

As am I, and many of us go back many years decades even to Microsoft's evolution in voice communications, back to Lync and all kinds of things. Ocs and beyond and our friends at Microsoft are great. They can make things a little complicated from time to time. So maybe talk about your journey at Xero and what's the big idea.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so we started our journey about 14 years ago. Myself and some of my colleagues worked at Cisco for many years. We saw some opportunities to offer service that was missing. There was some real significant gaps where customers had a hard time getting the service they needed, they wanted, especially when they needed it. So we jumped into offer service, and then, over time, our business evolved from core consulting services to managed services, and then we started to get into the software business, where we built tools and automation to really eliminate any of the day-to-day mundane, non-value-add tasks that customers have to go through to manage their phone systems.

Speaker 2:

What changed for us, though, was really when cloud became more mainstream and we needed a solution that made sense for our customers, one also where we could add value, because something to resale, you know, a device for the sake of it there's no extra value that we're bringing to the table. So we you know we tried to work things through with Cisco, and while today they've got a really solid solution, at that time they were going through like four leadership changes in five years, and so the portfolio was struggling, and so we decided, hey, we're going to bet on the market as opposed to one individual horse, so to speak. So we tried out really all of the top UCAS players and while again, there's a lot of great technology, we felt that when we were bringing larger mid-market enterprise opportunities to the table, it seemed like the challenges and things that we were going larger mid-market enterprise opportunities to the table. It seemed like the challenges and things that we were going through was almost like the first time we were going through them with some of these major players. So that gave us some concern.

Speaker 2:

And then we started working with Microsoft and what the cool thing was about Microsoft was this was really a platform that is so open to be developed and add your value add. It was the perfect fit for us. One, enterprises were asking and wanted this technology because they already bought into the platform and they wanted to see how else they could take advantage of it. And two, aside from the licensing component, microsoft really is a true partner organization. They really depend on their partners to add value at.

Speaker 2:

And I didn't understand that when I was coming from the more engineering world, but now that I kind of crossed that chasm into the IT world it's really a different beast and so it's kind of table stakes or almost par for the course, if you will sorry, with all the cliches today. Part for the course, if you will sorry, without cliches today for a Microsoft partner to develop, enhance the product, the user experience, et cetera. And so this ended up being a perfect fit for us and we've been thriving over the last couple of years since we've been joining this ecosystem. The opportunities are tremendous and now, with Gen, ai and how things are evolving just overall for communications, it's a super exciting time.

Speaker 1:

It is, and I think post-pandemic. Microsoft sort of won the lion's share of market share in this space. Congratulations to Microsoft. But as far as Xero goes, maybe give us some insight into how you make things easier for companies moving to Microsoft Teams. What's the big idea there?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely so. You know it's funny before we got into so, because we started our business in 2010,. In the IP telephony days, things were pretty mainstream Customers there wasn't, and what I mean by that is it wasn't a lot of net new companies doing their migrations. They already had, so it was very operationally focused, and so the services and tools that we built were to help our customers when they were in that day two, in that operational phase of their lifecycle journey with the technology, of their lifecycle journey with the technology.

Speaker 2:

Now that we're in the Microsoft business, and because of the timing where everybody's migrating off on-prem and into the cloud, we found ourselves really selling new systems and being involved in migrations again. So once we started to get into it, really hardcore and deep, we started to identify all these areas where there's challenges to get a customer off one legacy system and into the new one, and so what we've developed is a platform that pretty much automates the vast majority of the migration process from gathering data from an existing system, which is extremely painful, and, evan, telephony is probably one of the few areas where you can get away with not documenting or writing anything down, and so inevitably you go to a customer and you're like OK, so what do you want to do? Tell me about your system. And you have like 30, 40 questions you want to answer and, unfairly, like, the customer doesn't have this information at their fingertips. It's painful and strenuous to go find this stuff. It's like giving them a massive homework assignment. And strenuous to go find this stuff. It's like giving them a massive homework assignment.

Speaker 2:

So, for example, we've built out some tools where we can grab all that information instantaneously from their system, leave all that work out of the customer and immediately start having a data-driven conversation and through there, once we have the data, we're able to organize it in the right fashion. So then we can migrate customers really almost automatically and with that ease. And so the result that we're delivering for customers is probably saving them 80% of the time that it would take with a traditional provider to migrate them. We get them there in 80% less of the time, or I could say you know, one fifth of the time, whichever side of the coin you want to use, and so what that means for the customer is their time to value in their ROI is huge. And then they're starting leveraging the technology so they can take advantage of all the other benefits of why they're putting that in there, whether it's improved customer experience, getting more insights and inferences on the data, making it easier for a customer, saving cost, all of those aspects come through and it's all through solving these customer problems along the migration journey so they get to where they want to be instantaneously.

Speaker 2:

And I'll just add one more thing what's interesting, and one of the insights that we've kind of uncovered here, is the challenges around migration in our space, and this is probably the case for most technologies, but I'll just focus on what we know about is they're not technology challenges, they're data challenges. And so when we started to use that lens and approach to what we're doing and just figured, okay, we need this data and we got to get this data into this way so we could do this action, well, that started to click and now we've really been able to take it through the whole process. I'll give you one more example. Think about porting and for the audience. You know porting your number. Think about you know when it used to be hard to take.

Speaker 2:

You know move you know, carriers because they kept your number and you were kind of stuck with them.

Speaker 2:

Then things opened up and you can pretty much take your number wherever you want to go. Well, it's the same concept in the enterprise telephony world, and if anybody who's done porting, everybody's got a porting nightmare story where you wake up in cold sweats and really have had a bad experience. But the challenge isn't just because the losing telco doesn't want to give out that number They've got to. They certainly don't make it easy, but they've got a very specific process that you have to follow, and if there's one mistake out of hundreds or thousands of numbers, well, you go right back to the beginning and have to start again. But once you understand that and know how to get the right data in the right way, things go really smoothly. And there's just another example of focusing on the data. And the approach here, as opposed to the tech, has really allowed us to make a big difference automate most of the process and then things are just really easy. So a lot of cool stuff happening in the space.

Speaker 1:

Well, easy would be nice. A lot of businesses are reluctant to even consider migration or start it. Why, if things aren't broke, why fix them the kind of mantra and telephony? So how do you think about helping businesses decide if migration is even worth the time and effort?

Speaker 2:

So there's a couple of ways. First, let's leave the idea of making a phone call on the side for a sec, because that's nothing new and exciting. What we're really trying to do is figure out what a customer's core objective here is, just overall. What's the strategy around communication? What are they looking to improve? Where are the challenges that we're having? We really start there and then that, in and of itself, let's just say a customer is looking to really improve customer experience, or employee experience for that matter. They want to get more insights, inferences on these conversations that are going on, because, like the most valuable and richest conversations, they're happening on the phone, they're not happening on text. Text is tactical, it's super efficient, gets a lot of stuff done, but when we got to resolve an issue, we got to pick up the phone and talk it out. So if the customer's objective is, how can I mine and understand what's happening there from, let's say, a Gen AI co-pilot perspective or whatnot, and understand what's happening there from, let's say, a Gen AI co-pilot perspective or whatnot, getting the last mile of probably the richest, most important data into that tenant so it can be mined for a customer is huge, and that in and of itself, evan, could be a good enough reason why a customer wants to migrate their phone system and get it in because it's part of a bigger picture or bigger strategy.

Speaker 2:

The other one that comes up often is cost savings. And as again, cliche as it is and everybody says I could save you money and I could save you money there are massive savings to be had when migrating your phone system. Even still today, in 24, which is unbelievable, I know, but it's true because I see it all the time. Just give you an example. We're working with a large major city in the US, in the southern states, and that's all I will say. When the business case was done to move off a traditional telco onto Microsoft Teams calling, they were going to save I think it was two million dollars a month just because of how ridiculous their phone system costs were.

Speaker 2:

We're working with another organization, who's more in the manufacturing and distribution of certain items that you will find at Home Depot, and we were introduced to this account because we're working with their parent and so this is a subsidiary. They needed to move their phone system, they wanted to move to Teams. We sent them a proposal and we were almost about to go through with the transaction and the customer called me and he's like I just want to go over this one more time to make sure I have it right. So my sales person was like, oh no, like there's a problem. They're going to try and negotiate with me and whatnot. What it came down to was we cut his bill by 80% on phone and he just needed to make sure that the numbers were real because he couldn't believe it.

Speaker 2:

Now I'm not telling you every case is that drastic, but I would tell you on 85, 90% of the opportunities you work on, there are significant savings going on. 90% of the opportunities to work on there are significant savings going on, and they're all bundled in, whether it's a portion of licensing, the telco piece, some of the third-party applications that are tied to this system, even usage. So part of the data that we're able to derive right off the bat, when I kind of briefly went over kind of those assessment things that we're able to do, we're able to quickly ascertain who is actually using the phone and isn't, and I'll tell you that you know, on average these days we're seeing that probably 25% a little bit plus of a user community hasn't picked up the phone, made a phone call or received a phone call in three months.

Speaker 2:

Cool, now, we're not judging if that's good or bad, we're just judging the reality. Months Cool Now, we're not judging if that's good or bad, we're just judging the reality. But what that does translate into is, once a customer has visibility and awareness what's going on, well, then they can make the right decisions and very easily to take cost out of the business that way also. So cost savings is probably the second biggest thing as why they would do. And then the third piece that I kind of wanted to touch on, where we help get away from the if it ain't broke, don't fix it is we want to have that old system on there.

Speaker 2:

Part of the reason why people are a little bit more reluctant to change is the perceived risk of this project going awry, making a big mistake of this project going awry, making a big mistake, choosing the wrong one.

Speaker 2:

Because, like the good and bad of what you know, our customers face today is like there's an abundance of choice out in the marketplace, but the challenge there is okay.

Speaker 2:

So, with all these choices, how do I choose the right one? How do I know what's right for me and forget even today if I'm going to make an investment in technology ABC, how can I be sure that if my needs change in a year, because things are changing so fast in business, that the system's going to be the right one to help me tomorrow? So going through that and de-risking this project for a customer, one from getting really clear on what they have so they know they're not missing anything and no one's going to slap their wrist for hey, you missed all these numbers and customer service isn't working Like we resolve that but also demonstrating to them, proving to them that the decisions that they're making today aren't pushing them in the corner where, if the business changes, they're going to be stuck and have this massive investment that they can't get out of, et cetera, et cetera. Focusing on those pieces so the customer is comfortable and has confidence is probably the third key piece where we help our customers again do the right thing for their business.

Speaker 1:

Well, fantastic value there and you know what happens post-migration. How do you keep things running smoothly for your customers and what's involved there?

Speaker 2:

So I appreciate you asking that question because that's a place where I think we thrive and continue to differentiate ourselves that most of our competition or traditional partners in this space they really focus on kind of that day one, that migration. Okay, I'm going to help you migrate and you're migrated, we'll see you later. I'm on to the next thing we don't want to ever leave because we know and all of the data from the Gartner and Forrester studies show that 80% of the total cost of ownership of any technology is in that day two operational aspect of it. And specifically, when a customer is moving off of a traditional phone system you know, a Cisco, a Navaya, a Mitel, whatever it may be and moving into Microsoft Teams, you're really learning a whole new language and a whole new set of skills. Microsoft does everything that another system can do, but they do it in a different way, and so one it could be, you know, a little bit intimidating for a traditional telecom engineer to go into the Microsoft world, because now you're in IT and you're playing in Teams, admin Center and even some of the cornerstones of setting up a phone system where in the traditional world it's set up. You know everything is linked to the phone number. In the Microsoft world, everything is linked to the user. Sounds like no big deal, but it is when you start configuring and having to make some decisions on how calls are routed, et cetera, et cetera. So what we've done in this case is a few fold. One we've got phenomenal managed services at Follow the Sun 24-7, 365, where you're getting a real telephony expert on demand whenever you need it.

Speaker 2:

And in this space there's three key components that are critical to making telephony work. One you have to have PSTN knowledge, skills dealing with telcos. Two, you have to have networking skills. These are still applications running on the network and even though you know, most companies just by default say hey, it's not me, my phone system is working great, it's your network, go speak to your. Hey, it's not me, my phone system is working great, it's your network, go speak to your networking guys, which is really unfair. Sometimes challenges occur because there's some issues on the network. So we've got to have those skills and go pretty deep to identify a core issue. Grab the traces, grab the packet capture so we can actually figure out what the problem is. And the third component there is expertise around the team's tenant, because there could be changes and we've seen this countless times where somebody we actually have a funny story where one of our customers was having a challenge getting their voicemail delivered to their phones. This customer in particular still had hard phones that they were using, which is cool. Their phones this customer in particular still had hard phones that they were using, which is cool. And the long story short of is they changed their email signature structure, format and image and then there was a setting in Outlook which prevented the voicemail from getting to the phone. Go troubleshoot and figure that one out. So, when you put all these skills together, really, really important. So we've taken a lot of effort focus not just on the process for making us really efficient and giving great customer service, but having the skills to back that up. So that's one key thing.

Speaker 2:

The second is some of the tooling that I've spoken about a little bit earlier. So we've developed the platform. It's called ZPM Zero Platform for Microsoft Really innovative name. But when we say ZPM at school, when we say Zero Platform for Microsoft not as sexy, but that's the idea and this platform is a full journey platform. So day zero, when a customer is doing that investigation consideration phase, helps with the migration, like I've spoken about, through automation. But then it's there for all of the day two and support aspects of this and the key is we can automate a lot of the day-to-day moves, as in changes, did management, some basic core reporting, so that our customers don't have to develop into Microsoft expertsts Day 1. It is a simple front-end GUI where you don't need to have telephony expertise, you don't need to have Microsoft expertise, and so you're able to even push this work down to entry-level help desk folks so they can make changes. Super effective. There's guardrails in there so that they can't make any errors, keeps your format in a standardized fashion and you can make these changes in 20, 30 seconds as opposed to 10, 15 minutes.

Speaker 2:

And so we're continuing to build out that capability to make it easier for customers to handle all of the day-to-day two things that come along. We've even gone so far as to integrate with a lot of the major ITSM providers. So ServiceNow is a great one. So many of our customers are running their business on ServiceNow and they've built in those jobs specifically within the platform to automate and gate all the efficiencies and whatnot Fantastic Telephony. We now integrate that into those processes. So, for example, automated onboarding and offboarding just makes things so much easier. We integrate it into the company's process. Phones and systems are set up. When new employees come in, they're torn down when they're no longer with the organization. The system remains clean, keep the standard that the organization has. No one's paying for licenses that aren't used anymore really efficient. So we you know, long story short, we speak up. We think a lot about day two and are looking to add more adoption types of services to again make sure the technology is sticky and their customers are getting the most out of it Fantastic value there.

Speaker 1:

And you know how do you think about some of the hairier issues when it comes to Microsoft voice compliance and security and you know auditing all the things that get pretty complex, pretty fast.

Speaker 2:

So like is there? Is there something, evan, in particular, that like, um, it comes to your mind when you're dealing with the regulated industries and in finance and banking or health care.

Speaker 1:

You know there's a lot of requirements there for audit capability and compliance and security. How do you think about those? They part of kind of your offer in some way.

Speaker 2:

So, you know, for us I think those are really core and table stakes. Uh, when we show up on the telephony side, um, you know, especially when I think about 9-1-1, for example, and so in the us there's ray bombs act, carries law that is really just the standard to set up a phone system, and so in fact, what we see happening now with our migrations is most customers are still noncompliant, fully to the letter of the law, which is like, oh well, it's not just enough to disclose you know the building that you're in, like we got to know the floor in the area because, god forbid, there's an emergency, got to make sure that people can find you. Just saying you're in this massive building, you seconds matter, um, it's not enough. So, in fact, with the technology inherent and built into teams, um, it's allowing customers to become more compliant and and compliance here in this case, it's really safer, the right thing to do for any employee who's god forbid in an emergency situation.

Speaker 2:

So it's really good where I think of things that kind of you brought up like, let's say, certain industries have certain standards, so those from a compliance perspective I think there's really no issue. Where those come into play, more is on the functionality side of things. So, for example, let's say, in the financial services, specifically in brokers, those ring down phones, microsoft at the core, the solution doesn't deliver the capability or as well as maybe a traditional one could. So we would supplement with some third party applications or tools wherever that stuff is necessary, applications or tools wherever that stuff is necessary. So there we pay more attention just to finding the calling requirements and more of the SLA of the service, as opposed to a compliance thing, because from a compliance perspective we don't really run into much.

Speaker 2:

Where things can come into play from compliancy is just to make sure us as a telco provider we comply with whatever countries you know the equivalent of the SEC laws are and whatnot, for taxes and reporting.

Speaker 2:

But Microsoft really has this stuff down packed. They've got their calling plans offer where they spend, you know, a ton of time making sure they're compliant. We do with our telco capabilities when we're offering services globally to customers. But what we make sure to do and this is again part of the flexibility that we bring to the table for customers is we're quite flexible on telco, pstn, so you could use ours, you can bring your own carrier, you can have a mix depending on where your locations are. We want to make this stuff easy, simple, the right cost, and so we just look to package up whatever the right solution is for the customer and level of service globally, and then we'll do all the support work and take the responsibility for making sure it's up and running 24-7. So we think about these things where it's applicable, but it's not something that comes into play. It's more of a how do we ensure we are meeting the customer's service requirements SLAs they need, depending on some of those more higher impact industries like healthcare, financial services, like you mentioned.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic. So you seem to have worked through almost all these issues. What else, what's needed to uh, you know, effectively, scale, deploy and enhance? You know your your telephony experience. Do you have a vision of of what's next, or a roadmap or things you're thinking about for the near term? Long term? Absolutely.

Speaker 2:

So a couple of things. One, we're starting to think about verticalizing more and more of our offerings to have them that much more tailored to specific industries. We've seen that throughout the years we've kind of gravitated to a couple of specific ones, and so this year in particular, you're going to see a lot more focus around healthcare, education, financial services. For us as an organization, we're not neglecting others. We've just seen in those particular ones, there is still high demand and need for phone. It's a critical part of the business process for those industries and so how do we serve them better, speak their language more and adapt to some of their more realities with some adjustments to our products and services? So you're going to see some of that.

Speaker 2:

This wouldn't be a Microsoft call if we didn't talk about Copilot and Gen AI. So I'm going to do it. This stuff is real. As you know, and I've seen you had many conversations on this. Microsoft is, if there's an expression to say, all in to the exponent 10, that's what they're in on Copilot this year.

Speaker 2:

And it's exciting for us being in the communication space because, like I kind of alluded to before or mentioned before, phone is this critical element where your most valuable data is sitting in and people don't think about it like that. People think about phone of like I don't really care about my phone anymore. People think about phone of like I don't really care about my phone anymore. However, it's what's happening on that phone. That data needs to get into the tenant so that co-pilot can start learning it and be mined. And when you think about that, 95% of the world is still on copper, according to you know, superstar analysts like Jay McBain, who keeps you know, sharing that information. There's a massive opportunity to integrate that within the tenant and then start mining it for inferences, for sentiment, to identify which employees are engaged, which employees are super productive.

Speaker 2:

What's happening on the customer service side? There's a massive shift that's starting it's in its infancy around just the whole contact center business that's going to be turned upside down, andancy, around just the whole contact center business that's going to be turned upside down and do a 180 with regards to this technology. So you're going to see us playing more and more in there and it's not to be an AI co-pilot player just for the sake of it. We're going to stay within the domain of communications, but harnessing that voice meeting, chat data and leveraging it to improve service both internally and externally. That's a place that we feel that we can make a big impact on. So really exciting times ahead and September 5th it's going to be an exciting year.

Speaker 1:

It is indeed Speaking of which, as you get out into the marketplace, there are lots of meetings and events and get togethers. What's on your radar for the next few months?

Speaker 2:

So I'm probably not going to be home for the next couple of months. I looked at my calendar for October and I it's kind of scary. My wife and kids are going to hopefully not not hate me or have to make it up to them, so I'm going to a bunch of channel events. Vince Menzioni's got a phenomenal event in Dallas at the end of October that's super excited about. We're going to be at Ignite slash Inspire in November. There's a bunch of Microsoft community events that we plan on attending and some partner events in Louisville and Atlanta. So lots of exciting things that I'm really pumped up about. There's the Cavell event October 1st that I'll be on a panel and speaking at as well, along with the Cloud Communication Association's event the next day. So there's a lot of cool stuff going on this fall and I'm excited to be a part of it, share and contribute to the community. It's a great one.

Speaker 1:

We are contributing so much onwards and upwards with the mission and good luck in the busy event season this fall. Thanks so much for joining, steven, much appreciated.

Speaker 2:

Thanks, evan, it was great. Hope to speak to you soon.

Speaker 1:

And thanks everyone for watching, listening and until next time. Thanks, take care.