The ActivateCX Podcast
Join Frank Rogers on The ActivateCX™ Podcast, your resource for demystifying, clarifying, and providing guidance around AI, CXM, and the modern Cloud Contact Center.
In this Podcast series, Frank interviews Thought Leaders, Unpacks critical AI & CX technology, and addresses the leading Experience topics of the day.
#cx #customerexperience #ai #ex #cxm #contactcenter #salesstrategy
The ActivateCX Podcast
How AI is Changing the Way We Communicate
Learn more about RingCX https://activateCX.arroyo360.com/ringcx
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Watch Frank Rogers with Special Guest Amir Hameed, discuss AI contact center solutions and how RingCentral has bet the farm on customer experience and artificial intelligence. Don't miss out on this insightful conversation!
Chapters:
00:00 What is the RingCX Strategy?
04:40 Moving the Contact Center Forward in the Journey
08:26 Betting the Farm
11:28 Data is the New Oil
14:01 Wisdom gained from Lessons Learned
16:06 What we can expect next?
18:35 Head over Heals
21:56 The Non Sales Pitch
23:26 Closing
#podcast #contactcenter #ai #customerservice #salesstrategy
Amir, welcome to the show. Thank you, Frank. Pleasure to be here. If we think about the potential impact of RingCX, I know that it's a niche product. Right. It's a niche player, this is the way it's presented to be perfectly honest, low cost, easy to use, fast to deploy. Those are three check marks that are very important when you think about what's the normal experience with a contact center, but I get the sense that there's a bigger strategy at play here. And I want to get a feel from you because, you've got that close chair with product, is this a fit in strategy, or is there something bubbling up behind the scenes at RingCentral to think of this as revolutionizing customer interactions and experiences? Where does it sit in the market now? Where do you see it going? Absolutely. Look, I guess, mentioned we went GA and we have nearly 400 customers already, all shapes and sizes. We thought it would be just an SMB player, you kind of in the small business, we have enterprise customers that have already purchased it. Yeah, thousands of seats. So we know the scale is there. It's really about the use case, but what I find revolutionary to your point is because it's AI first, it's got all the digital channels, it's got the voice, the outbound, the inbound the real time coaching as much as we have. I've been doing contact center for a very long time. You have things that quality management workforce optimization. Well, all of that is. Is absolutely gonna spin with AI and so coming back to our RingSense one of our other solutions. We have our RingSense for sales, which is doing very well. That's a fit for purpose product to help sales forces optimize leveraging AI conversational intelligence. We have a RingSense for RingCX, which is doing fantastic because again, it's leveraging leveraging What the customer needs in terms of a post call analysis, coaching, giving all that intelligence. So, I do believe that the future of quality management and the analytics and certainly that whole workforce management workforce optimization is going to be revolutionized with RingSense and we're starting it today because already, many customers are like, this is it, we don't need a separate workforce management solution added on your RingSense. RingCX is absolutely developing it and there's lots of learnings, because we're seeing, with RingCX, we're focused on, you know, before the call, right before the call or the, and I won't even call it a call because there's digital channels coming in. So we know information about the customer. We've got the integrations into the CRM. So you, so you have all of that intelligence. Then you have the actual interaction itself, we can leverage bots where appropriate, but you absolutely Need the ability to know when the bots have been have been exhausted And and a customer wants to escalate that to a a real person Again, whether it be on a digital channel real person Or voice or video. So we have the ability to take that along. And then during that critical time, you, you need to know who the customer is. You need to know what they bought. Are they, are they a platinum level customer? You can't be asking silly questions that would annoy the customer because customers have choices. If I'm a platinum level customer, I'm expecting you to know already who I am. If I've escalated through and now I'm in an interaction. Maybe I started on a web chat, or maybe it was a social channel. I'm asking it to speak with somebody. They need to know who I am. They need to know what I've already purchased. I'm expecting them to give me suggestions of what's next. And again, leveraging the AI with RingSense, we can give real time guidance, based on knowledge, based on information, based on history. So all of that during the interaction to make it as delightful as possible. And then, of course, post test. Transcribed, this is where we do the scoring, which which interactions were the best? How? How much did the person listen? How much versus talk?, the empathy, all of that stuff comes into play to make sure that then the supervisors can leverage that From a coaching perspective, right, coach and make it even better. So all of that's built end to end and we're, already thousands of features we're continuing to build. So I feel I'm excited because it's ground up. And to your point, coming all with a single pane of glass, working with RingEx with RingSense, all coming together into this, amazing platform that can do great things for our customers, whether they're talking internally. Or outwardly. It's interesting in terms of looking at historically the contact center world has played very much on the back end of the customer journey,? Like post sale. So it's been in particular areas of adoption Or advocacy, there's been cross sell upsell components to it, but it hasn't really sat firmly in the front part of the journey, which goes from acquisition to activation, top of funnel to close. And I think that RingSense fundamentally comes in there with this very RingSense for sales focus that says, we're going to bring the contact center forward. We're going to bring channels forward. And so anybody inside the business that's customer facing on the sales side. Well, maybe in front of that B dev sales, that would encounter like maybe your SDRs and your BDRs into your sales, your ABM strategy, as well as in all of your customer support could fundamentally be across a singular platform and making sure that you provide the channels and the touch points across the entire journey. I think AI is the big pivot point, but I think just in terms of utility inside of an organization, the concept that people have, which is I'm not a contact center is starting to become a senseless comment because the word contact center has a connotation to it that people infer a whole host of things, but really it's a CX hub that I think is going to become changed a little bit here is now changed, but it's going to be over the next 36 months. And I think perhaps inside of RingCentral that you see this, am I right? Yeah, absolutely. And, and to your point, customers now are already. So educated right all the information's available so they likely when they reach in for for information, they've already got a pretty good level of understanding. So to your point now, maybe they've escalated to an agent and that agent realized, Oh, this, this customer's going to asking some very detailed, very specialized question that's a bit outside their pay scale. Well, guess what? Because of the single pane of glass today, you can reach out and see who's available. Somebody in product, somebody in engineering, some sort of expert that is available. That's not sitting there to your point in the call center or contact center, but they're available. They're a subject matter expert. Everybody works for the customer. I think that's one thing I say, irrespective of what your badge says, everybody works for the customer. So the customer has a question. Okay. That agent can peer in and say, Hey, so and so is available. You know what? I'm gonna I'm gonna have them link them in, and it's very seamless. We're not asking you to call back. Nothing. You know, you can have that interaction. Say, Hey, I've got a high roller customer. They're asking about a specific solution. I know this is brand new. Could you come in? Absolutely. Let me join the conversation. Oh, I know who you are. I've got all because I've got the screen pops. I've got all of the information from RingSense the the that tells me and we can hit the ground running and all of a sudden the customers like, wow, I started this from a web chat and a social. I escalated it into the contact center. What it what it appeared to be. And now I'm actually talking to expert at headquarters. It's actually designing the solution. They're listening to me and they're making recommendations to me. Wow, like how amazing is that and that's all within a minute, like, you know, from, from when they've started. So the speed of connecting that customer with the right subject matter expert, they can be anywhere in the world. It's just done. And we're, we are doing that today. Absolutely. And that I believe is super powerful and will continue to evolve as as we proceed with RingCX. So inside of RingCentral, how much are you betting the farm on RingCX and AI? I think it's one of our most important products. So AI in of itself. So we acquired a company deep effects some five years ago almost. And so we've been dabbling in AI. We've had the benefit of doing that. We have some of our own language models. We of course we'll use the large language models where appropriate, but every single solution we have, Has RingSense built in it, coming back to even our RingEx. So again, as, I keep saying this. Everything sounds the same. You're in the industry, right? I'm sure you're seeing that. Oh, let me talk to RingCentral. Let me talk to so and so. I just heard that yesterday. I just saw this today. But what really excites me is we came to Enterprise Connect, and imagine Enterprise Connect the whole industries there in Orlando. You have the opportunity to submit best in show. Right. So what do you think? Everybody puts in their latest and greatest AI. It all sounds the same, right from that five are shortlisted. We were the one of the ones shortlisted with our with our with our RingSense note taking capabilities that we had. And then we actually won best in show. I mean, that was a tremendous honor for us. We hadn't won that before. And to win that where it was all AI centric and you saw all the competitors, it was their AI as well. It was a huge validation that the investment we've made in AI and then taking it to a level where, you and I are maybe having a conversation and transcription. Everybody does. Everybody's transcribing. That's fine. But then based on our conversation, Taking it out and saying, Hey, these are open items. These are decisions that were made. These are follow up items, like truly enhancing the level of productivity to the point where, wow, this is amazing. And certainly our RingSense for sales does that as well, where, you're talking with a customer and it's, and it, and it will automatically update the CRM, which is important because, if you're looking at Salesforce accuracy, Hey we've committed this deal this quarter. But we know from the notes that there's a board meeting that needs to happen now guess what? I just had a conversation with the customer RingSense for sales is activated Customer says oh my gosh what believe it or not. Even today the cfo got covid still happening They're not they know what the ceo. Yeah Yeah, that's The cfo's got covid that board meeting got moved to next month now a salesperson may forget to enter it But RingSense for sales would say that oh You That's very important. The board meeting is not gonna happen till next month. The board meeting is where the decision will be made to proceed. Go, no, go. And if that's happening next month, there's no way that this deal is gonna come in this quarter. So that's a simple way. Just one simple example of the value of RingSense. In real time to kind of help with with forecast accuracy. And then, and of course there's so much more, like I said, scoring and the actual conversation and the sentiment analysis and so on. That really helps obviously from a predictive analytics perspective in the sales world and when you look at overall data is really the new oil and from that particular perspective, what is RingCentral doing across it's product line, whether it be EX, CX or RingSense to think about a unified data set that customers can ingest and can manipulate and can drive projections. They can drive insights. They can drive automation from it. How much of your strategy has a really large data component to it? I think it's massive. I think we've always had a lot of strengths in our analytics that we had, even with our you cast solution. So we're continuing to build on that, and we are going to unify those analytics across every single, interaction. I won't even call it a call or so. Every single interaction, the platform would know, how they entered into the interaction, whether it was a Chat or a voice or otherwise the duration. If it was missed, if it was dropped, you would have all of that detail. The quality of the conversation, both in terms of sentiment analysis, but also the quality in terms of The audio, the video, I mean, we're tracking all of that because we want to maximize that experience across the board. So having those deep analytics across the board, we've got tools today that we make available to the customers. They can't because we don't know how the customers may use them. We certainly have best practices. That we can suggest and recommend, but one of the, one of the best closers for the SEs is, the analytics, when you see the analytics and they're like, wow, wait a second., I'm on a legacy platform and I own it and I run it and I,, maintain it. You guys are telling me you're going to deliver this over the cloud and you're going to empower me with this much analytics. You know, there's so many departments that can be using it and they have their use cases We suggest them but there's canned reports There's customized reports that they can make giving them access to the information that they need to run their business end to end leveraging Again, the interactions I'll call them as, as a competitive differentiator, because now they have full control and information and empowerment over every single interaction externally, internally, that's happening in their business, irrespective of where they are. It's not just, Oh, headquarters will get it, but the satellite offices won't. No, it's apps. It's across the board. Amir, you talk a little bit about your tenure. You worked for other uc firms, contact center firms in the industry. As you've come into RingCentral, what lessons learned do you bring to the table and how do you see that making a difference? Yeah, again, I've been in the industry my whole career. I'm Canadian. I started at Nor Tel, which was a big telecom provider at the time. And then, I moved to Avaya. Spend some time on the session border controller side with Sonus, kind of securing the communications, if you will. And then I entered the cloud space with 8x8 in a similar role. And now it RingCentral. And again, it's the same customers that you're speaking with? So many of those legacy platforms are still working today? So they're like hey the dial tone works. Why would I need to migrate it? Pick up the phone. It's working. It's fine, so there's a lot of education that goes on and I think that's where the again coming back to the ROI. Right the art of the possible. Well, if you were to take this and make it a true strategic asset It's not just your phone system But it's truly going to inject into your CRMs and your other systems of record. One thing at RingCentral, we pride ourselves at having an open platform. There's hundreds of integrations that are pre built that we offer out. And then we've got a marketplace where there are about 60, 000 developers actually working on it. I've actually got a team of API SEs because some customers are very proprietary. Well, we have this proprietary platform and we're like, okay, well, Can you integrate with it? I'll have an SC that'll look at that. They'll scope it out. We'll expose the open API's will do a little bit of a mock up for you. Maybe even a trial or a demo or a pilot to show them that when you bring RingCentral in, we want to be behind the scenes embedded end across the board and on all of the various tools you have it's not a one size fit all I like the energy behind that. Where do you see RingCentral in 36 months? Again, I you know, where do we see the industry in 36 months? I mean the the torrid pace of innovation is what's getting me excited right because I I couldn't tell you where I can tell you where we're gonna be. We will absolutely be a multi product company. We will have RingSense will be infused in everything we do. It's already started. But in terms of where we'll be in 36 months, quite frankly, will depend on our customers? Our customers are gonna dictate where we're going to be because we are going to listen to them. And our roadmap will be shaped on what customers needs. And again, the customer needs are going to change because imagine all of their competitors are going to be that much stronger. So how do you give them that competitive edge? And I think it's through innovation. Like we have to continue to innovate, innovate solutions that make a difference for our customers, but we're not going to know that until we do. Unless we come back to what we started the discussion on the discovery, the discovery is so critical. And that's going to determine the whole industry where it goes. I see the big thing for our firm, what we're experiencing with clients right now, is essentially the challenges that are brought forward by a hybrid experience model, hybrid experience model, human channels, digital channels, AI, how do I modulate? Moderate people inside the organization. Where do they fit? Where do we move people into high value agent situations? Where do we make sure that we still keep, human customer contact? Even if it's more expensive than going down the road of an AI where do we optimize and automate? We're moving into, I think an environment where it's not just a function of What technologies do I need? But understanding the radical impact I have on the business and how you need to smartly evolve the business in such a way that it puts people in the best position to win. And that's even, all the way from the customer to the people inside the business, down to your shareholders, stakeholders. We're now at it at a point where there's a certain level of down pressure around that, that has great opportunity, but it's more of a nuanced conversation. That, that's my, look at the next 36 months is how do we, how do we evolve the businesses to handle this? Because technology is ahead of it. The technology is ahead of it. The adoption is so key. I think you're absolutely right. Because again, in the pre sales world with the discovery, We can paint a tremendous picture of what's possible. But at the end of the day, at the heart of it are people in the business themselves. And so once you've implemented, you can't walk away either. You want to make sure that the usage is there that the adoption is there and that the customers know what they, what they bought,, in the beginning when we were selling a RingSense for sales, it was flying off the charts and it was great. And then the customer's like, well, what are we doing? And then we realized, Oh, we need to spend some time with you. They don't, they don't even know how powerful it is because they're just using it for transcription. Well, that's the, that's the most basic part of it. And then when we come back and we show them and like, wow, because again, the people that you're talking to in pre sale. Are not necessarily the ones that are actually deploying it and using a day to day. So I think that adoption and making sure that they truly have the training toe to maximize because it comes back to the ROI they will not get the ROI unless they're actually using what they have, and they won't use what they have if they're not familiar with it. And so again, in pre sales, we try to do that. We try to get as many disparate groups involved in a pot in a trial or in a pilot and then kind of train the trainer. Let's get these various, users, different personas within the company involved so that they can see how they can leverage the AI. For their team, which may be different from the benefits to somebody else. But the more we can get a diverse group involved earlier, the better But then again, the follow up is so key, making sure that we touch touch base with that customer as a trusted advisor because it's not transactional. We want to continue and look at the pace of innovation. You know what? We were able to position and sell them. And that they're using today, literally in six months, there could be something that's that's wow. And let's have that conversation and then build on. It's not like it's rip and replace. No, you've already got the platform. It's going to evolve and grow. And that's what we do at RingCentral. We want to make sure that What you've got today is there based on that five nines foundation, which is critical, available, we discussed earlier, and then let's continue to add those bells and whistles, those AI solutions that make sense for you. Because I think I'm starting to hear that a lot as well. It's like there's a bit of AI overkill. Everyone's talking AI. Oh, my God, it's going to cost me so much. Is it really made a difference or is it just AI for AI sake? And I think that's so important for yourselves for us. To, truly, talk about the landscape, but really hone in on those innovations that'll make a difference for the customers. And you delight the customers, they'll keep coming back. And, and then that's, I think that's the beauty of the industry we're in. Yeah. User story, I believe is the root. Of where awareness comes about, everything else is a specific generality. But once you get to the user story, then you can't obfuscate any of this. You know who the actors are, you know what the workflow is going to be. You know what the experience is, you unpack the details and it becomes pretty clear and pretty obvious. If you were to give a non sales pitch for RingCentral, just remove All of the marketing, all of the sales, just a non sales pitch for RingCentral. What would that sound like? It's all about collaborating, it's all about communication. So whether it's business communications that you can trust, why trust? Well, again, it's secure, which is important and it's available to you. So I think in a nutshell, Communications collaborations that you can trust, would be the easiest way in one line to kind of encompass what we're trying to do here. Because whether you're talking internally externally, it's all about that collaboration and that communications. We're marketing to businesses right today. We're not a consumer brand. So I think that's important. But trustworthiness is key,? Because it's secure? You don't have to worry. We've got the seven layers of security built in the encryption, the dynamic and everything that you would need there. It's paramount for us to have an environment that's five nines and then you build all the bells and whistles that will be available to you across the board, not goes out the window with an outage and then you're stuck with nothing. So maybe the pitch is if you need a communication platform that works all the time. Then select our platform. Is that the pitch? Hey, it's great, Frank. You know what? I think you could be a great marketer. I'm working on it. I'm working. All right. Love it. Amir, thanks for being on the show. Pleasure. Thank you, Frank. I really enjoyed our discussion.
