Revolutionizing Global Customer Communication: Klearcom's Innovative AI and Telephony Solutions Transforming the Telecom Landscape

What if you could revolutionize customer communication on a global scale without any intrusive installations? Join us as we sit down with the visionary co-founder and COO of Klearcom, who brings 35 years of telephony and telecom expertise to the table. Mark unveils the secrets behind Klearcom's innovative approach to enhancing customer experience for multinational companies. From validating interactions at a local level to ensuring seamless global communications, Mark and his team are rewriting the rules of customer service. Discover how their non-intrusive solutions are transforming the telecom landscape while emphasizing the critical role of flawless communication in today's fast-paced business world.

In the latter part of our conversation, we gaze into the future, exploring how emerging technologies like conversational AI and machine learning are reshaping customer experiences. With the traditional methods being replaced by advanced AI solutions, the potential for revolutionizing contact centers is immense. Mark shares insights on the practical applications of AI, such as predicting and preventing customer issues and tailoring solutions for diverse industries. As AI environments, NLPs, and LLMs continue to advance, we envision a future where AI facilitates dynamic, natural dialogues with customers, ensuring that businesses worldwide can operate more efficiently and interact with their clients more effectively.

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:01

Hey everybody, Really interesting chat today, as we talk about improving the customer journey and enhancing customer experience, something we can all get behind in the enterprise Mark from Clearcom. How are you?

Speaker 2 0:15

I'm super Evan. Thanks so much for having me on today. Super excited to be chatting with you about all things tech today with you about all things tech today.

Speaker 1 0:25

Yeah, and specifically really intrigued by your mission. As someone who's been in telephony and telecom for 35 years, I've seen the pain that still exists in many areas of customer experience. Before that, maybe introduce yourself as a co-founder and COO and what's the big idea behind ClearCom?

Speaker 2 0:44

Yeah, sure, so that's exactly it. I suppose my own background has been core telephony for a long, long time. I'm co-founder and chief operations officer here at Clearcom, so the big idea behind our company really is to improve customer experience on a global scale, but at a local level, and I think that's one of the key differentiators in the market right now. A lot of the challenges tend to be quite global when you're getting into the telephony world, and it can be a murky world depending on how voice is being traversed, how many countries, how many jurisdictions that voice packet has been traversed across. And what we're looking to do is validate at local level what the customer experience really is like.

Speaker 2 1:25

And thankfully, with the ClearCom solution, some of the world's leading organizations have the capability to be able to test not just at a local level, but a local level on a global scale.

Speaker 2 1:36

So if you're a large multinational based out of the US, for example, and you want to find out what my customer experience is like in France, italy, germany, guatemala, for example, you'll have the capability, with the ClearCom environment and the ClearCom solution, to be able to generate local test calls validating local customer experience all the way back. So from Guatemala, all the way back to the US where your central points of presence may reside. If there's any inefficiencies, if there's any degradation from a voice quality perspective, if there's any challenges in terms of connectivity, if, I suppose, beyond the telecom side of things, if you're moving into the contact center side of things, if your transcription within your IVR and the messaging you're receiving within your IVR is not being picked up effectively, anything that impacts that customer experience. That's what we do at ClearCom we identify, we triage, we find that root cause and we ensure that you can raise those tickets to either your telecom operator or you can take it a step further you can look at those items within your contact center environment as well.

Speaker 1 2:40

Wow, that's a lot to unpack and that sounds amazing. So tell us, how did you arrive at this goal of ensuring flawless customer communications? What was the big idea when you started? How have you seen that evolve? You've been at it for a while.

Speaker 2 2:55

We have. We have definitely. It was a meeting of minds is probably the best way to describe it. So, me and my co-founders, Liam Dunn and Satish Bharat, we all come from different areas within the technology sector, my own being core telephony, having worked in that across MPLS, voice networks, PBX solutions, you name it right. I've run the gambit across a number of these and even in terms of provisioning services for multinational companies like Dell and so forth within the telecom sector, and I suppose my other colleagues having Satish, who's a guru basically within the cloud contact center solution space, having years of knowledge within that environment, and Liam having come from a heavy technical and sales-driven space as well, it was a meeting of minds where the three of us were able to come together really understand the problem that these multinational organizations faced but, as well as that, being able to do it in a non-intrusive manner, and I think that's one of the key USPs A lot of companies right now. They know they have problems, right. They know they've got issues with voice quality, voice connectivity, they know they've got challenges within that space, but they don't know how to triage and they don't know how to identify those issues on a local level. There's solutions in the market right now. That will basically pinpoint that there's an issue, but it won't get to the root cause of what that issue is.

Speaker 2 4:13

And I suppose, when the three of us came together, one of our biggest USPs, one of our biggest points that we wanted to really focus on, is being able to give all of that information to a customer without them having to do anything other than simply provide a local phone number in a local country. And let us do the rest. Because when you're already in a tricky situation, when you've already got an issue, you don't want to have to jump through multiple loopholes. You go through a lot of security processes, a lot of challenges to be able to identify what's happening on your own network, and especially when you're trying to identify that in 100 plus countries, With our environment, one of our biggest drivers is to be able to validate for our customers in those 100 plus countries is their number connecting? Is their IVO reachable? Is their contact center operating as expected? Are we able to reach down to the end agent? But being able to do that without any deployment, any installation, simply by just taking a customer's phone number, finding that root cause and being able to reach down to the end agent, but being able to do that without any deployment, any installation, simply by just taking a customer's phone number, finding that root cause and being able to raise it to them in real time, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Speaker 2 5:12

We are extremely passionate about customer experience. Not so much or not a case that we're only passionate about testing customer experience. We're also passionate about delivering customer experience, and I think that's a key differentiator for a lot of companies out there right now. Like a lot of people will talk about delivering or identifying customer experience challenges, but if you're not delivering that customer experience to your customers as well, then there's a major pitfall that a lot of people might fall into. So not only do we identify what's gone wrong, where it's gone wrong, how it's gone wrong, we will also triage and work with our customers specifically on that.

Speaker 2 5:50

So we handhold our customers all the way through the process. So we've got a 24-7, 365 network operations team. They're managing every single alert that comes in. We triage right down to what's gone wrong within that contact center environment and we give all the root cause, all the CDOs, all that raw data to our customers in real time, 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. And then we take it a step beyond all of that. So we've got an account-based team that will liaise with customers every single day, talk about the issues they've encountered, look at trend analysis and looking at global reports and being able to identify is this more of a widespread issue? Is this a customer-specific issue? So on and so forth. This is exactly where our sweet spot is. It's hand-holding engagement. It's delivering customer experience while testing customer experience.

Speaker 1 6:39

Brilliant. So let's take a step back and look at the big picture. We've all seen in my case for decades frustrating and unpredictable IVR systems out there. Why is that and what have some of the challenges been, and why is now a good time to correct these systems? What's changing in the tech industry, the landscape that allows us to really improve CX?

Speaker 2 7:08

Yeah for sure it's a multifaceted approach really. I mean. So first and foremost you start with your telecom operator. I mean they are the ones providing that egress and ingress point into your contact center. So they provide that local number you know. So say they provide that local number in any of the countries across the world. So say you reach out to BT Global Services or Orange Business Services or any of your global providers that are providing those numbers, well, they always hand off to a third party, right? So I mean they don't own that infrastructure, they don't own that last mile when it's outside of their own jurisdiction.

Speaker 2 7:42

So that in itself, that last little bit of a handoff that can lead to a myriad of issues. I mean the number could be down. Customers are not even aware of it. Your telecom operators are going to tell you your number's down. By the time you find out that your phone number hasn't connected or there's an issue with your phone number, it's normally an irate or frustrated customer that's after contacting you in a different way to let you know that they can't get through to you locally in that country. So that's just one specific area where things can go wrong.

Speaker 2 8:12

You take it a step further. Then you get into the IVR so say your call does connect, all right, that's great, my call has reached an IVR. But what happens if you're getting a French message on an English IVR? Or what happens if you're pressing DTMF1 and you can't navigate beyond? Or what if you're taking a step further and you're using a voicebot but the voicebot isn't understanding your dialect, your language and how you're speaking. Being an Irish person, our accents can get a little bit skewed every now and then. So even looking at that at a base level, that's just, I suppose, two aspects of that communication chain. So, from the first point where that call is generated, hitting that toll-free number or local number in any of those countries, the voice traversing getting into and subjective to human error in a lot of cases, right, because they may upload a prompt. They might upload the wrong prompt to the wrong IVO with the wrong message and it's a very simplistic thing to do. And then obviously, like I've already outlined, I mean if DTMF isn't working, if speech navigation isn't working, then the customer is sitting at that front end not able to converse, not able to get to where they want to get to, and that customer journey and that customer experience already is negatively impacted.

The Future of Customer Experience

Speaker 2 9:32

When we look at the global economy right now, you're looking at circa 7 trillion in terms of the switching economy in the market right now, which is phenomenal, Like it's absolutely huge when you look at the amount of people that could be coming through to you frustrated and they're coming to you with an issue and they're trying to get you to resolve that issue. But when they can't get through to you, a lot of companies and a lot of individuals will turn around and go okay, I've tried once, I've tried twice, now I'm just going to go elsewhere and that's the switching economy. That is more prevalent now than it ever was before because it's there's a lot of options, there's a lot of value out there and if somebody is not having the ability to have that conversation with you, they're going to have with somebody else. So the battlefield right now is around customer experience. If you go back a decade, there was no such thing as a customer experience officer, because a lot of the big companies would say where else are they going to go? It's either us or them. Nowadays there's so many more options out there that a lot of customers have that viability. They have the capability to be able to switch and they can do it all online or they can do it through comms, whatever way they want to do it.

Speaker 2 10:41

So if you're not providing that perfect level of customer experience to a customer right now, you're potentially losing that customer and it takes 10 times the effort to get that customer back after losing them than it does to retain them in the first instance. That's why the communication chain right now is at its highest level of prevalency, of um of importance, I guess, to a lot of companies and to a lot of individuals. So that's just one aspect, but the whole landscape is changing. So traditionally it was enter DTMF1, enter DTMF2, so that multi-tone function and just pressing those individual options to get through to an agent. That was one aspect of it.

Speaker 2 11:22

But now the world's evolving so much more. You have your generative AI, you've got your conversational AI, you've got your LLMs, you've got your natural language processing. There's so many different terms being battered around right now and it's all about improving the customer experience. And, like I said in, customer experience has evolved so much over the last decade that these sort of terms never even existed before. So when you start to evolve that into your contact center and when you start to choose things like conversational AI. That's at the point where you're taking it a step further.

Speaker 2 11:55

Not many people have gotten to that point yet because there's so much evolution that needs to happen within the contact center space, but it's where everything is going. So when you look at people now that are happy to engage with chatbots, that takes them a step further. But the reality is, when you're in an situation, you don't want to sit there speaking to a chatbot, you want to speak to a person, you want to get through to somebody that can converse with you, that can address your problem in real time. Conversational AI is going to do all of that, but it's not there yet. So when we're testing for a lot of our customers now, we are seeing the migration from DTMF options in the IVR to voice bot voice agents, and it's at this point in time. It's at its very simplistic stage because there's a set parameter behind those voice bots and those voice agents.

Speaker 2 12:42

So we'll only accept a certain amount of change, right. But when you start to move towards large language modeling and if you've got generative AI, and then if you take it a step further and even if you start to move towards, I suppose, different things like machine learning, for example, that's where the environment and the AI environment is actually starting to evolve and grow more, so it becomes more of a self-learning environment at that point. And if you're into a self-learning environment, that's where it's more conversational. So when your IVR is having that conversation, that two-way, that stops customers having to get to an agent because they feel like they're having a direct conversation. So imagine into the future where you can just contact a phone number, contact your supplier, and all you got to say is I have a problem, and they'll start the conversation from there, or perhaps they kick off the conversation with how can I help you today?

Speaker 2 13:37

So it's not a set parameter list, it's an open end book and that can be evolving as time goes on, depending on your dialect, depending on your engagement, depending on your tone. The IVR will have that complexity built into the background through conversational AI. But, like I said, it's self-evolving, self-growing. But it's not there yet. We're still a good bit away, but it's definitely where the market, I believe, is going.

Speaker 1 14:03

Oh, that's fascinating and I love the reference to AI and real-time monitoring using machine learning. It sounds like all the hype and buzz around AI, that's a really practical use case of AI for the real world. How does that technology actually work in terms of identifying and preventing issues before they reach a customer?

Speaker 2 14:27

Yeah for sure. So I suppose when you look at what we're doing right now our base level entry product when we first kicked into this market and when we first started looking at what the market was dictating and where things were going, what the customer requirements were, generate a phone call, did you get a response, did you not? Very simple, very straightforward. Then the demands moved a little bit further, so it became more around okay, let's get into the contact center and are we getting the right prompt? Are we getting the right speech? Are we getting the expected response when we go into this option? And again, for us that was quite simplistic, it was quite straightforward. We were able to enable that. But while we were doing that, we were evolving that on a global scale. So we were taking that into local markets. We were providing the capability to be able to generate this through landline and then being able to validate it through GSM gateways and so forth and being able to give that multi-modal option to our customers. But then obviously everything changed and everything starts moving a lot more towards conversational AI and that's where we start to evolve our environment as well, and we're going to have a very nice release coming up into Enterprise Connect that we're going to be more than happy to share closer to the time. But there's a lot more development that we're doing within our environment right now. That's catering for the evolving market and when we start to look at conversational AI and where that market is dictating it going, we're starting to evolve our NLPs and our LLMs and we're starting to and create all those large language modeling. We're starting to create all of those potential dialects, potential challenges, potential speech environments.

Speaker 2 16:11

But then taking that a step further and looking at that on a sector basis, because every sector has its own requirement.

Speaker 2 16:18

If you start looking at the financial sector, for example, if you look at the pharmaceutical sector, there's going to be different responses, different engagement, different strategies that these will all have when they start to build out their modelling. And it's imperative for us that we're behind them, we're supporting them, we're giving the capabilities to ensure that pre-production and post-production so in a pre-production environment, that everything is expected, everything is operational, everything is giving the correct response prior to them actually going live so being able to give assurances to customers in a pre-production and a post-production environment and if they're going through any kind of migrations, which that's one of the key things. Right now. A lot of customers are going through that. We see anyway, a lot of customers are going through migrations, both cloud contact center migrations, telephony migrations. But the next phase of migration is going to be the AI migration, where they're starting to migrate all their voice, their interactions, their front-end systems and it's going to be more around that AI traversal.

Speaker 1 17:44

Amazing. So, speaking of customers you work with really who's who of Blue Chip, you know global customers. I'm looking at your website and you kind of have a list of clients here Pretty amazing. You know, I see you know names. You've all heard of Pfizer, a brand. Pick one as an example. Maybe Pfizer. You know what are you doing with that, what's the value you bring? Maybe tell maybe an anecdote or story around that engagement.

Enhancing Customer Experience Through Technology

Speaker 2 18:12

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So we've been very, very fortunate that a lot of the biggest companies in the world have trusted us to work with us in recent years and we don't just have kind of one-off relationships. These are long-term relationships that we have with our customers and it's all built around ensuring that we're given that reassurance, that validation, before they go live and after they go live. So I suppose, look at Pfizer. I mean, that was initially that started off just as a project.

Speaker 2 18:48

They were going through a significant migration within their contact center world and they were working with one of the world's biggest telcos and from their perspective, everything was good to go. They were happy with everything. They'd migrated their IVOs, everything was operational, it was doing exactly as they expected to do and kind of last minute they said, hey, could you guys roll in behind us and just run a few samples here? Let's make sure locally in all of these markets everything is working as expected. Because that's the challenge a lot of multinationals have right now locally in each country there's nobody physically there testing and if you're generating call from the us into france or the us into germany, for example, that's not local call and it's taking a very diverse path before it gets to that end destination. So they said, hey, look, we've signed off, we're happy with everything, we're about to go live. Any chance you could just have a look at this for us and run a few sample tests? So we did and uh, yeah, instantly we started to notice a few little variances between quality, connectivity, validation, calls not traversing the correct way. So locally within the us, from that end perspective, everything looked good.

Speaker 2 20:00

But when we started to test this locally in all those other markets. We're starting to pick up on all these challenges and, like I said, that was a relationship that I guess we kicked off a number of years ago and we're still working with these large multinationals, because what became a project initially then became an ongoing relationship and for us we take everything extremely personally. So for us this is a personal relationship as much as a business relationship. But we've been very fortunate in that, once they saw the value in what we were doing, even at a base level, that we were able to put that into more of an ongoing testing environment. And so now ongoing.

Speaker 2 20:43

We have eyes on 24-7, 365 days of the year in terms of the full Pfizer environment, looking at what their numbers are doing, looking at their connectivity, looking at their validation, looking at their messaging, because obviously for large multinationals, the likes of Pfizer, for example, it's imperative that they're given the perfect level of customer experience, because when somebody's coming through, especially within the pharma sector, it's generally something potentially critical and they want to ensure that those lines of communication are up operational 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, because at such a large organization like that, they're very conscious about the impact on their end customers and we're very conscious about delivering a good service for them so they can deliver that good service for their end customers. So it's all about CX from our level and CX from their level all the way through.

Speaker 1 21:35

Brilliant and talk about. You know, when you work with big clients like Pfizer and others integration, you know many of these giants have real limitations on what you can touch and not touch and security. How do you deal with that? Those sort of challenges.

Speaker 2 21:52

Yeah, that was something that was built into our company from day one. So I suppose when we look back at how we created the company and I suppose what was imperative to us and what was important to us as a company back in the very early days, that was one of the key aspects that we honed in on straight away, because when you're liaising with companies like this, a lot of times there's some level of integration, there's some level of installation, there's some deployment that a testing provider will need to do within their environment, and I mean it's highly secure. A lot of them might not want to install something on their network. A lot of them might not want to put something on a backend system or open up any patches or ports that potentially can lead to a hack. So when we developed out our environment, it was all based on non-intrusive testing. So from our perspective, we've got a number of aspects to what we do that ensures that we don't have to install anything on a customer's network. Quite simply, we can have a customer up and running in 100 countries within 20 minutes. All they have to do is provide us with a list of numbers. Well, so there's no limitations in terms of capacity on our side, we don't limit the amount of concurrent calls our customers are able to generate. We don't require them to install anything on their network. It's a very simple, easy deployment.

Speaker 2 23:13

The beauty of what we do to take it even a step further is we can validate voice quality based on an actual live environment. So whatever audio quality we get back down that line, we'll provide an audio quality metric against it. It's a term we call NVQA, which is Neural Voice Quality Algorithm. It's a self-trained, self-learned, self-evaluated algorithm that will essentially grade any level of audio quality that's provided down the line. And if that audio quality degrades, if it changes, if there's fluctuations, if there's crackling on the line, if there's fluctuating audio, if there's any level of degradation that's impacting that audio quality, our system picks up on it automatically.

Speaker 2 23:53

It simply is a case of give us the audio, we'll grade it. So not only are we going to validate your numbers are up, we're going to validate your audio quality is to an exceptional level. Any degradation will pick up on that. But again, if you're traversing voice over multiple networks, multiple IVRs, into different contact centers, and even if you get down to that end agent because that's a whole other area if you get down to that end agent and the voice quality at that end is degradated or there's poor experience, at that point we're able to pinpoint just down to that end agent level as well. So we take in that full customer call path and we're able to take every hop within that chain and validate on every individual leg what the connectivity and audio quality is like and validating transcriptions um translations. We cover over 100 different languages as well. So we're right in there providing every aspect of what the customer needs without any installation or deployment.

Speaker 1 24:46

Wow. Well, that's sort of a mic drop moment, so not sure where to go from there, but we are going to Mobile World Congress. I'll be there, as will you and the team, of course, in Orlando in March, the big annual get-together for the communications and CX industry. What are you looking forward to besides getting out of Ireland, maybe, and seeing some sunshine again?

Speaker 2 25:08

But what are you looking forward to?

Speaker 1 25:09

for Orlando.

Speaker 2 25:11

No, that's pretty much. It Just give the sunshine, we're happy. Give an Irish person any level of sunshine, we're happy at that. No, we've got a couple of big announcements that we're going to be releasing specifically at enterprise connect. That's going to be our first uh, our first port to call, and so we're looking to sharing some information around conversational ai validation, true testing at a local level all the way through. So we've uh, we've got a couple of releases that are in the pipeline that we're going to be shouting from the hilltops. We're also planning on irishing up a few coffees for anybody who tends to stop by.

Speaker 1 25:45

So this real Irish coffee, or Irish coffee, if you know what I mean.

Speaker 2 25:49

You bring the coffee, we'll bring the Irish, let's put it that way. So we're really excited. Look for us, enterprise connect as one of our first events that we tend to aim towards each year. It's a real eye-opener, but it's one that um, it's one that we've we've really taken over the years, um, and one that's really taken to us. So we, uh, we go full tilt into this one at start of the year and we just grow and build on that over the coming months. But uh, yeah. So, from our perspective, we'd love everybody to stop by, let's have a good old chat, good old catch up and the first drinks on us.

Speaker 1 26:26

Brilliant. Well, I'll be in line for that and thanks so much for joining. Much more to come at Enterprise Connect and over the course of the next few months. It sounds like you have big plans underway. Thanks so much for joining and sharing a little insight into the vision and mission.

Speaker 2 26:41

Evan, I really appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Speaker 1 26:44

Thanks everyone for watching, listening, sharing and see you at Enterprise Connect. Take care.