Why Nextiva Is Killing It (How They Did It)

Get your CX Right... https://activateCX.arroyo360.com/activateCXtoday
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Join Nextiva's Edwin Margulies as he goes behind the scenes of Nextiva Contact Center, discussing Contact Center AI, Thrio, competition, self-service, and more. Explore the latest trends in cloud call center solutions and customer experience technology.

#contact center ai #customer experience #ai

Chapters

• 0:00 Nextiva as a Unified CXM Platform
• 2:58 AI is the Word of the Day
• 5:34 Nextiva and the next Investment
• 8:25 The Stark Reality of the Contact Center Business
• 16:17 What's Next for Edwin at Nextiva
• 31:02 The AI Mis-information Highway

Transcript

0:00

So you mentioned Sprinklr. They're kind of an interesting company on the rise in the contact center area I like your earlier analogy that you used of the, the chocolate in the peanut butter. I mean, who doesn't like a Reese's peanut butter? Right. I'd say bad people. I'm going to answer that question. Bad people don't like that. So it's that good. So when we look at this combination, there's certain things on the Nextiva side, we see that they have a media management component, reputation management component. And these were things that were already in play before the merger. And It's kind of part and parcel of what is in existence on the side with Sprinklr and what is a differentiator for them from the standpoint of having that marketing viewpoint. Do you see for your contact center for Thrio as it expands the integration of some of these technologies from thinking not only about channels, which we think about in the contact center world. Email, SMS, voice, other digital channels that are out there. But when you look at anything that's in the marketing side and we talk about channels, we think about media channels in addition to communication channels. So is that part of a mindset going forward that you're going to start that integration and appeal to chief marketing officers and other people in that side of the CX business? Yeah. In fact, I would, I would characterize what we're doing as this overarching unified CXM platform is the underpinnings of it really three suites. One of them is. A, you know, a, brand management suite, built on the experiences of simplify 360 that was acquired, about a year ago ticketing social disparate social thread, mashups, fire hose, sniffing. Reputation management. I mean, it's a full, full, very robust suite that actually rivals a sprinkler in the area of brand management. And then you've got the CX component representative of, Thrio, and then you've got the, the communications platform component for knowledge workers that Nextiva, is bringing to the table. You take all three of those. And it's arguably. A unified CXM platform, right? Which is what Sprinklr touts. Now here, it's something interesting, just since you mentioned them, or maybe I mentioned them first, but we like to compare ourselves to Sprinklr. They're a worthy competitor and in fact, we have very similar positioning and aspirations as, as Sprinklr. I see us being head to head with them, constantly leapfrogging one another. For example, we have more experience in service provider space, the BPO space, highly complex. High transaction environments where you need dynamic scripting and robotic process automation. So it takes decades in the CXN space to really know what you're doing. This is another example of why it's so difficult for people to buy contact center technology, because a lot of the information that they go to is. Some cases it's sparse. Some of it just speaks in specific generalities. Great case in point for specific generality is AI. Everyone's talking about it. And everybody has a point of view. And to be perfectly honest, because it's not fully gelled yet, I mean we don't know how this is all going to play out. So we have a lot of conjecture. And one of the points of conjecture is, this is going to eliminate everyone's jobs. And to a certain degree, that's true, but it's also going to elevate people to new positions and new jobs and new job opportunities are going to open. So it's, going to create disruption, all caps. For, you and, looking at, Nextiva and Thrio the contact center world. And the investment around AI. Maybe you can talk about that as well. Where are you centered around that? What are the dials you're trying to turn? And now that you have this new horsepower agent sitting side by side with you, that has some additional purse strings to pull upon, where are you looking to invest in AI? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, first of all, let me establish that AI is part of our DNA. And has been, we use it in a lot of places, but we've learned some lessons over the years, right? For example, the year we started SoCoCare, it was, it was like really hard to get a hold of AI unless you were willing to either A, create it on your own or pay really big bucks to the proprietary players. It just hadn't been commoditized yet. And even back at the turn of the century, would you believe my engineers at telephony at work, we're developing fundamental AI algorithms for intelligent email routing. Again, that was out of necessity because AI was not yet a commodity. So here's the dirty little secret. Okay. We think with the cornucopia of raw AI algorithms available, that it's simply folly This day and age to be hiring linguists and machine language experts, let Google and Microsoft do that. So gone are the days when you have to build your own algorithms. So what we do is we use a variety of AI vendors. To keep our platform nimble and sharp. And in this way, we're future proofing our customers from the constant changes in the market, so we act like a general contractor swapping in algorithms. For example, we're using DeepGram for transcription. Google has transcription, but they charge three times more for it. DeepGram is more accurate, and is cheaper. But don't get me wrong. We love Google and we're using them for generative AI with Gemini and we're using them for all kinds of stuff, Vertex, you know, so it's not like we don't use them, but having that agnostic flexibility, makes it a lot easier for us to adapt to what's going on in the marketplace with AI. So we're all in with AI. But AI is not the the tail wagging the dog. It's simply a tool that we use to a help customers to automate when they want to automate B provide agent assist kind of technology so that you can aid the agent and getting the job done quicker. And without, wanting to quit all the time. So it helps out with attrition. You can also use AI for insights and trying to understand what's going on in your business to do some forecasting. I mean, we use it in many different ways. But if you're familiar with the old Jerry Seinfeld standup routine, we've got soda. We've got soda, people dancing in the street, all excited about having soda. It, you know, yeah, we have AI, but we're not dancing in the streets over it. We're dancing in the streets over the practical and judicious. Application of it that actually moves the needle of productivity for customers? So it comes down to the use case. It comes down to what does the customer need to do? Not Hey, we have AI. So everyone has AI, but what are you doing with it? If we were looking at, this general contractor perspective of you pulling together the right tools, the right vendors that you're using for these use cases for the application, you're damping down any particular risk that may exist in the platform because you're the kind of final authority in terms of what actually gets delivered into the app. Absolutely. In fact, in the user interface for the administrative panel, we have this concept of libraries. So we've created libraries of AI functions and there's little dropdowns that you can select that say, what service do you want to select? Oh, I want to select Deepgram, or I want to select. Gemini generative AI, or I want to select shelf AI for, for knowledge base and they use open AI. So I have these little dropdowns that allow you to number one, define what service you're pulling into that campaign. And then secondarily, the parameters that are available. You can just go tick, tick, tick, tick this. You know, I want to use sentiment. I want to use this. I wouldn't. So basically we're homologating hurding cats, if you want to call it that. And, and kind of of obfuscating the ugly from the customer. They don't have to go to individual AI vendors to, proprietary interfaces and command line programming, we've taken all that ugly. I can kind of see and hear him saying like. Who are these people? Like, what is this AI? You know, it's definitely, I get it. And so let's talk a little bit about like the next 24 months because you guys are, pretty much in, let's go mode. You've got the merger and there's things that you have to shake out and work out. Like, all the things that take place in terms of getting the rank and file in motion and synced up, but nevertheless, there's also very direct we want to achieve these things in 12 months. We want to achieve these things in 24 months. It's investment. It's marketplace. It's it's what you're saying to the market. Where are you doubling down? Because you only have so many resources. What are you going to focus your time on next 24 months? Well, I would kind of split it up into different swim lanes. So there's the go to market. Forward sales motion for channel, for direct, for BPOs, for international expansion. So since January 8th of this year, it's only been a couple of months already, we've incorporated, all of the SKUs and all of the bundles and all the packages into the ERP system so that salespeople can quote and go to market with this additional product. We've enlisted the services of top notch trainer who used to work at Thrio, who is now going to be doing certifications for partners with a video based self paced training program for the CX part of the product line that has Scoring and everything in it, and ask questions. It's, very sophisticated. And then I, myself as the chief evangelist of the company, I'm doing a lot of cross pollination kind of training in terms of best practices, how to help customers ideate nominations for automation, using an eight step discovery process that I've been using for decades. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to cross pollinate. And we're trying to kind of just get the elbows and knuckles thing going. Just, the fundamental business precepts. So that's like one swim lane. So we're in the thick of that right now. And we've got a nice big pipeline. Right now the, the legacy Thrio sales team and the Nextiva sales team are kind of merged together, working hand in hand on deals. There's oversight because some of these concepts are new and so that's moving along. I would say that's in that same business kind of swim lane. And then from a branding and positioning standpoint, I think we're kind of already there because. The Nextiva platform has evolved over the past decade. And we were reselling Five9 for a couple of years. And so the company's cut its teeth on what is CX, so that, transition into a more sophisticated environment, that's more complex, you know, our, thanks to Five9 for getting us there. I mean, I love Five9, I sold a company to Five9 and I was a Five9 employees, so there's no bad blood there, but now that of course the Thrio platform is part of a Nextiva, it kind of changes the dynamic. But the fact is, that this company Nextiva has been in that forward looking mode. And, now they're outstripping competitors because if you look at RingCentral they got their own contact center product now and they won't be as dependent on NICE, but it's going to take some time. You can't do this overnight. Right. So we're already there. And the other swim lane, I think is comes down to the, basics of integration. So the first thing that we integrated, was the ability of a unified dial plan peering into the same session, border controller, using the same carrier underpinnings and being able to transfer calls back and forth between PBX and ACD users. So, that fundamental thing is, complete and you can buy these products and they're already talking to each other. I say through the summer, the things that are going to be happening is like layering on top of that, like unified presence management more of a unified step by step but ultimately I think where it's going is think modular, think modularity. Let's, let's orient ourselves towards the use case of a particular vertical and, massage the product. To be a little bit more sophisticated in terms of our approach to the market. And like Sherwin Williams paints, kind of cover the enterprise that we need to have more of a verticalization mindset in terms of the way we tease out the use cases. And this is why I'm so thrilled that the, development department here headed up by Sental valuthin, who was 20 year veteran of Microsoft, the guy who actually launched Microsoft Teams and was the P& L manager for Teams this guy knows go to market, so his vision is perfectly aligned with the, with the technology experts from Thrio and part of that vision is this idea of A modular approach that's highly adaptable that is the kind of morphs into the use case of the customer where panels ideas, integrations can be modularly plugged in. That's the direction that we're going. And you'll see more of that coming out over time, but in the, short term, it's fundamental integration, right? You know, plumbing integration that we've already done. Next step is going to be presence. Then the next step is going to be, beginning to unify the UI. The good news is that all of these suites that we have, they all do work. They all are enabling customers in a great way. So now it just comes down to finesse. Now it's, now it's kind of the fun part. We've got, look at, we've got the ice cream Sunday and now we're just working on the cherry on top. Edwin, the more that I'm in this industry, the more that it just becomes reinforced over and over again, especially as we talk about experience, the best experience is availability. And so to me, having a rock solid, reliable network and solution is critical and then the next piece even outside of just really cool functionality. We'll just say the ability to nuance a system is just the ease of use of the platform. That is really critical from both an administrative perspective, as well as from a hands on practitioner, I would call them the agent. Right. The person that's actually meeting with the client. So anything that's a distraction for them gets in the way of, having a really great experience with the customer. I think you can own the market with just being ever present and then having smart iterative evolution in the platform. And to be perfectly honest, the entire industry, I mean, we look at omni channel. Great case in point. There's like 30 channels out there, right? That are readily, effectively can be used, but most people are kind of sitting on three, maybe two. So the penetration in terms of channel access and true utilization is still immature. When you look at AI, the amount of people that have AI built into their contact center, probably less than 10%. If you look at it, it's most of the standard kind of IVR, ACD, but it's getting people to a human. That is kind of what you're experiencing right now. So it's still as greenfield. And I think that if the philosophy is, we're going to rally around the user story, The use case we're going to make things really simple. We're going to make things iterative and we're going to get to market quickly. That's if there was any advice I could give anybody that's in the platform business. It would be that because to me that's the hard part. The reality is that the salesperson sells it as With specific generalities that sound very easy to get a head nod on and let's go. And then it gets convoluted somewhere between there and the statement of work and the project manager. And then the project manager works to fish out what actually needs to be done and it becomes a challenge. And so I think that Just being open that like this is complex but we can simplify it by having a smart starting point is really important. You're an interesting cat, Edwin. You're talking about 10 slides from a guy Kawasaki pitch deck and about the big picture of running and growing and building a company. And then, you're talking about, A PBX in detail there's not a lot of people that can straddle those particular items as well as be innovating on the AI front. So it's great to see that in this merger that you're still in that seat and you're still pushing. And so you say that your role is the evangelist. What do you see that entailing? What is that going to bring about? Well, you know, it's funny because that that that title Is for me is, is kind of an old story, an old fun story back in 1988. When I started at dialogic, I was like employee number 26. I was a chief evangelist and director of marketing. So. The incorporation of the word evangelical or evangelist in the titles is, is kind of de rigueur. But I've been doing it for 30 years. So for me, it's kind of an endearing title and less of a functional one. But to answer your question, Frank first I am one of a number of people who is counted on to kind of like be on point With the correct message, the message that inspires people to not only work here at Nextiva, but for customers to feel that they're settled into the right horse to ride. That we have a vision, that we have scruples, That we always do the right thing for our customers, that we care deeply about them, that the idea that it all starts with a conversation. So an evangelist, a technical evangelist, has to, first be a people person. It's about the fact that, none of this stuff would work if there weren't people behind it, people helping you with your discovery, people looking at the problems. I mean, looking at your company, what you guys do, I mean, most of what you guys do in terms of your value added is to understand the Where the pain points are identify all the different types of transactions, characterizing them, calling the ball on what the low hanging fruit is and deciding what to attack first. I mean, this is people skills, right? That's not technology. Yeah. Of course you have access to technology. You have to, but it's that the tip of the spear. Is really about people and it's really about understanding the business of the company that you're trying to help. If you don't understand that business then you're not going to be able to serve them. Well, so let me give you a little side trip here, just to give you an example. So I went in with the discovery process and we share that with our partners. But I went into a company. Called OnTrack. They're one of our customers their a public company. They're in health care, wellness programs, wonderful people. And we spent a couple of days with sticky notes and whiteboards and everything going through the discovery process. And we identified something very important that a lot of the patients we're kind of care averse sometimes they were depressed. So we were talking about how we could maybe apply technology to that in the way of AI, for example. And now a lot of the care coaches there, well, they're all nurse practitioners, right? So they're, they're, these are sanctioned conversations between a patient and a nurse and they're talking about things that will help. alleviate pain, help get people on the right track. But sometimes if they're depressed, they might utter a statement and SIHI statement, suicidal ideation, homicidal ideation, right? So anyway, during the process, we were trying to understand their business, trying to get into it, get waiting in. And we came up with this brilliant idea with their help that wouldn't it be great if we could pluck out. In real time, what people are texting back and forth to one another in this dialogue, because a lot of them are using chat as, as, as the means of communication between the nurse and the person because they're busy that, you know, and they want to do it in close to real time, but not exactly real time. So anyway, we were used Google to look at the words. And we created corpora for them based on a list that they gave us of like 500 words, 500 phrases, so that we could automatically escalate a transaction to someone who could literally talk someone off the ledge, literally. Wow. Just by, just by monitoring that capability or what they're saying. Right. So now flash forward a couple of years, cause this was three years ago. I mean, there, there are people using AI in their contact centers, right? So flash forward now, the use of generative AI makes it a lot easier. It doesn't really fundamentally change the use case, but now administering it as simpler. Cause you don't actually have to write all the phrases you can, you can allow it to self train using generative AI so that the, the scorecards that you're are more flexible and more adaptable. So it's not as hard to administer. So, and that's that swapping thing I was telling you about before. So anyway, what is the point that I'm making? The point that I'm making is that being an evangelist is first about understanding people and trying to get into the zeitgeist of what their problems are in their company and tuning in, being personal and understanding. So it's kind of, for me, it's kind of a bi directional thing. I lean into the employees, try to understand what they need, what they need in terms of their learnings, what they need in terms of their exposure to customers, lean into the customers, try to understand what they're talking about. I get the help of analysts, industry analysts in that regard, of course, and VOC. But that's the first part. The second part of it really has to do with. Establishing the idea that anything is possible and, you know, I do this as an internal evangelist. I do this with loom videos, right? So I'll, I'll record each week. I do a loom video. That's like about 10 minutes long. That explains a certain aspect of our portfolio. So on the top, you've got the unified CXM platform. Then you have the CX components, the marketing and branding components, and then the enterprise communication components. And then, I will select one of those suites and then focus underneath on one of the capabilities inside of that suite. And then. Give either a demonstration or give kind of , an inspirational speech on different ways it could be used by different types of customers and I post that and everyone watches it and then I provide them with backup. So they get the loom, which is basically me giving color commentary, but then behind the loom, they're going to get a PowerPoint deck that they could repurpose for their own needs. Right? And also sometimes a white paper. So I'm kind of doing a lot of like internal publishing to make sure that this cross pollinization thing happens. And a lot of times I'll take one of those looms. They're sanitized enough that I can share them with the customer. And I'll send the hyperlink to a customer saying, Hey, tune into this loom here. It's, an ed talk, not a Ted talk, but an ed talk about breadcrumbs or about journey orchestration or, or whatever. So I'm just trying to spread the news if you looked at my LinkedIn profile, you'll see that we have that in the backdrop. We have that whole thing about starting a conversation. That's where it all gets going. And so I don't know if I've answered you. I know it's, it's a little bit ambiguous when you ask the question, what is an evangelist? It sounds a lot to me like leadership. And it also sounds tremendously about the need to reinforce culture. So probably much of these videos that you create are not so much how to videos, which those are always great, but what's really more important. And I think the big overarching question that people have is like, why should I care? Why am I doing this? I mean, that's, the inspirational part. That is the connective tissue that leads to hope. And so if you don't have the why behind it, it's a problem. And also it recognizes that people, as much as you may have policies and procedures and knowledge bases and all these things are remarkably disconnected from each other in this particular time period. And they need that connective tissue. And that's one of the problems in our industry. It's a problem in how we get to working with a client to help them understand how they're going to buy a particular platform. Fundamentally how is this going to affect the people inside the organization? And especially if you're moving across functional zones, you're working with a CMO. A CRO, you're working with the VP of ops, or COO, the VP of customer success. All of them have a hand in customer journey and in customer experience, remarkably are still very siloed, at least around that particular function. So if, one is to go in and, sell a contact center and they're working with the Nextiva in Thrio, If your mindset is incredibly siloed around the contact center and you're myopic with respect to how it's going to impact people, how it's going to impact the customer, be brought to life inside of that organization, how the interconnectedness is between the CRM and the data lake and maybe the outbound dialer, multi touch attribution and marketing automation, all these things, , they're interrelated and they're moving kind of in their own level , of unique path, but also interconnectedness inside the organization. So here you come in and you're talking about the contact center as if , this is what CX exists. But I can tell you right now, if you go to a CMO and you say, Hey, Give me your top 10 applications that you work with that deal with customer experience. They won't mention the contact center. No, they won't. No, you're right. That's why we were very careful as we'll look at as patriotic as we are about the CX part of the platform, the contact center part of the platform. We're part of part of a bigger whole now. And it's actually a more ambitious and more important thing to be talking about the unification of these silos. That's what's important. Now, I have a question for you now, Frank I've noticed something over the years that you probably have noticed too, and I just wanted to get your take on it. I've noticed that a lot of times you go in and you do consulting with a customer and you identify different automation candidates or workflow candidates to tune things up, make things better. One of the. Pitfalls. One of the things that happens sometimes, if you're not careful, is that you go ahead and you automate a whole bunch of stuff. And all of a sudden, former policies. And rules become broken. How do you rationalize that in your business? Yeah. If you look at the number one thing that people don't want to violate is , they don't want to violate anything that takes them out of compliance or puts the organization at risk. I think the biggest trick in all of it in bringing about the change is that it's going to be a co opted role inside of the client. And so if you don't have a process that speaks to that co opted role, let me give you an example. You're working in the standard . BMANTR world of sales What is their budget? What is the impending event? What is the buying process? Who owns this right here? Who is the key decision maker? Those are all great. Great. But if you think about it, they're very linear in terms of the data that they give you back, they give you really no nuanced insight as to what it really needs to happen to make this something that's adopted inside the business, because ultimately, if you're single threaded around, I need to make a sale, I need to close this deal and I need to get this in this quarter. You're doing nobody any service. Now your sales manager may disagree with that. They may say, no, that is your role, but your role is to affect change for the client. Your role is to create something that's sustainable. These contact center purchases. They're five and six year contracts, they're a major commitment of dollars and people and resources time. And so you've got to think about who are the people that you're touching inside the business. I think that's probably the biggest thing right there is being able to really suss out through a proper discovery. Really? Who is going to touch this? Who is going to own it afterwards? Because that's where the pitfall comes in is that someone's going to own it afterwards. And if they don't have their grubby little fingers all over, the acquisition side of it, they're not going to adopt it with much zeal because it can be something that's done to them and not with them. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think You having your fingers on the pulse of the customer problem and understanding the business is really where it's all about because , you can just bang something together and automate a couple of things, but you know, you got to pay attention to, what are the policies? So if you look at a policy, the next question to ask is, are your agents, if you're talking about contact center. In lockstep with the policy. And if you automate or do agent assist or other kinds of technologies that would automate a customer transaction, they might be able to do on their own. Is there room for violating that policy by just simply automating something that you thought was so dead simple, right? So the only way around that problem is to do proper discovery, right? This is the hard truth in doing service for a client. If you're afraid about being fired in the process, you're the wrong consulting group for them. You're right. Right. So you have to be fearless. Yeah. You have to be fearless because honestly, you can say things in different ways. So I'm not saying that you can't be smart and thoughtful and empathetic in how you position information and ideas to your client. But if Your ideas aren't based upon your best understanding as a consultant, as a practitioner, you should be somebody who is working and toiling in anonymity to be a craftsman so that at the end of the day, when you stand in front of people, you've done your very level best , to understand the problem and to present a solution. They're going to make the final choice. It's their dollar. It's their time, but you have to be like you said, a little bit bold in that process. Yeah, you have to be, you'd have to be fearless because, you have like an ethical obligation to be fearless because if you don't say what needs to be said, and of course you want to season it with salt, you don't want to be a bulldog about it. Then you're really not, In the direction that they need to go and you're going to miss things completely. So no, it's not for the faint of heart. You want people to say about you, Edwin, I really like that person. But man, did they challenge me? And that's great. Wonderful. Your purpose is, is now. Yeah, exactly. Let's, let's conclude here with just a question to you. What do you want to call BS to the industry right now where we need to get, our head on straight. We need to be thinking about this. Right. Yeah. I think the thing that bugs me a lot that I, that I hear a lot and see a lot, and it really kind of sticks in my craw is that,, AI is going to solve all your problems. You're not going to need agents anymore. And here's the thing, you can take a very specific use case, like a password reset finding out, what check has cleared things that are fairly straightforward and you can get almost 100 percent containment on those things where people will not go to an operator or will not. Send an email because the bot is going to answer them and give them a good answer. And there's plenty of success stories that have been around for years. I mean, AI is not new. The point , is that, over the years, what I've found is that, somebody has to be the adult in the room, ask the right questions. Find out, what is the threshold of pain? Find out what, what is the problem you're actually trying to solve? Let's not, just not throw AI at it. We'll pull AI in as it's needed, depending on the transaction volume, depending on the complexity. Each use case in its own right is its own sovereign use case. You can't just say, Oh, , there's an AI for that. Like there's an app for that. Right. So, you have to look at the use of AI in a judicious way, not make any broad sweeping. Comments about what it will or will not do. You have to put a statement of work together and you have to then have exit criteria that define what the success is, what the uplift is, so on and so forth. So when I hear, AI is going to make everything easy and, you're not going to need agents anymore. It kind of. It kind of rubs me the wrong way because it's, disrespecting the process of understanding, right? I couldn't agree more. We built a framework for assessing fundamentally this. Supply and demand construct of people and process inside the business. And the way that we look at it, Edwin is just say that, first of all, let's recognize that displacement can exist and will exist. So let's get over that. And then secondly, let's move this and reapportion people and put them in a place to win. Ultimately, if that's what the business's role is, let's get customers. Let's keep customers, keep people, let's keep the best people and put them in a position to win. There is a way to do that. And I think AI presents an opportunity around it, but kind of like the old classic movie, Soylent Green. Do you remember that movie? I feel that I feel CX is people like that. I almost want a little bit Seinfeld with that as well.. Lovely discussion. We'll have more. Thanks for being on the show. Okay. Thanks a lot, Frank. Appreciate it.