Ep. 151- The Pulse of CX-Realtime Insights that Matter with Meagan Thai
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Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Hard to believe we are already in 2025.
Who better to kick us off in 2025 than today, Meagan Thai, Solution Architect over CX at Telarus. Meagan, welcome on.
Thanks. Great to see you. Great to be here, Josh.
Welcome back too, returning guests.
The title of the track today is the Pulse of CX, Real-Time Insights That Matter. Obviously, a lot of good things happened in 2024,
but I think you’ve got some really cool insights. I want to dive in and share with everybody.
First of all, if nobody’s engaged with an architect, maybe just walk us through anybody that’s unfamiliar, you as the Solution Architect here in the West on the CX side, help everybody understand what is that means? What is an architect and how do you help?
Sure. It’s just a fancy title. What it really means is I specialize in anything that’s CX related, customer experience. You’re talking about UCaaS, contact center, CPaaS, AI, all these acronyms that we love to throw around. What I tell my family is I really, I dabble in business communication software. I think that’s the easy way to explain it. I’m here as a resource for our awesome tech advisors.
Tech advisors can use me to talk about the supplier landscape. What are we seeing in our industry today? But I’m very customer facing as well. Tech advisors can definitely bring me into customer facing calls, where I can help them vet out the requirements for their customers, and then ultimately help make those supplier recommendations for them.
I think that’s a more elegant way of explaining what we do. I’ve just given up on explaining what we do. I think at this point, I don’t know if this is office baseline or where that is, I just deal with the people,
something like that.
That’s right. We just help. We just like to help. That’s what we do.
We’re just here to help with technology.
All right. So 2024 was a busy year. As we’re thinking about this for 2025, just kick us off with one to two of these latest developments you’re going to be focusing on this year.
Yes, this year. You’re right. Last year was so busy and I don’t expect it to slow down any time in 2025.
So I feel like it’s a continued effort. We do this all day every day and that is, I mean, our jobs here, especially on the technology side as solution architects and your engineering team in general, we really, what we have to do is continue to understand what is different between our suppliers, the platforms that we offer, because we’re here to help make the correct recommendations on platforms and solutions that’s going to help our customers. So we’re constantly trying to understand, well, what’s the latest and greatest? You know, we do tech calls with our suppliers all the time. They’re tech updates or touch base calls. What’s new and exciting? What’s the latest features coming out? What’s different? So we continue to learn that. But I think just as important and this is what we’re going to focus on or I’m going to focus on is what else is out there in the marketplace? What’s happening? What are some of the suppliers doing that we may not have access to? But more importantly, what is going on in our industry, right? Because it’s ever evolving. It changes so fast. We need to constantly keep our finger on the pulse of what’s coming out, what’s the next latest and greatest technologies we need to look at and consider. And we just have to understand everything that’s going around. Use cases, technologies, wherever the case may be, because our tech advisors trust in us and when they bring customers to us, we have to be in the know, right? So I mean, it is a full time job, always educating ourselves and our tech advisors. So I’m going to continue to focus on that to figure out what’s the latest and greatest, what’s happening in the industry, not just within our portfolio of vendors that we have access to, but everything outside of that as well.
And to that, to dovetail on that, the other thing I’m going to be focusing on is continuing educating our tech advisors. So I’ll be collaborating with Sam Nelson, our VP of the CX Practice. We are bringing out fresh ideas and educational points for RCXA Sends that are coming up. I think we’ve got one coming up like right away this month in January.
But that’s going to be some of the things I’m focused on is, again, learning on what’s happening, what’s changing. And then, of course, being able to convey that into an educational series with Sam.
So I love that. Let’s let’s let’s flash back here. Right. So returning guest is like a Jeopardy reference, like returning champion. Back to episode 86, we were talking unleashing CX Excellence and we were talking about this whole omni-channel world idea. Right. It seems like so long ago. But but where we were really starting to see this strong pivot towards digital channels, demands for self-service predates a lot of the AI trends and things like that. But so so that was, you know, a year plus ago. I mean, walk us through what’s changed in your world since then. New and exciting things hitting your radar.
Oh, my gosh, that’s it feels like we just did it over the summer. But I think it’s been over a year ago. That’s crazy.
And you wouldn’t think a lot has changed, you know, when you’re talking about customer experience, like what more do we want out of being a customer? But, you know, we customers are very demanding in what we we want to expect. So lots have changed. And I think you’ve nailed it, Josh, when you said I. That is still the buzzword that is still key.
And as we see AI continue to just fastly evolve, we’ve got to keep up with it. So here’s what I’ve seen changed. All right. You know, for four years now, customers have been asking for more data. And I’ve said this many times, we want more visibility and we we can’t get that visibility from our the platforms, the solutions, our VCAS vendors that we have access to. The data is there. But you know what I’m hearing now? Customers are savvy enough to say, you know what? I know I can work behind the scenes. So we not only want the visibility, we want it now. We want it in real time. And that’s what we’re talking about. Real time insights. But they’re insights that matter. So what I hear a lot from our customers, it’s kind of funny because I’m telling you that they say this word over and over again. They say we feel an air quotes, but we feel like something is a miss. Something is not right. Our agents or our employees are telling us one thing, their challenges, their struggles. We hear that from them. And then from the customer side, we might be hearing something, some pain points, their complaints. We feel like we’re not doing the right thing. But how do we know for sure? We need facts to back this up. But we want it now. We don’t want to wait till after the interaction is done. We don’t want to wait till the customer surveys come out. We want to be in the know now so that we have all this information. What’s trending? What’s being asked for? What is the customer journey looking and feeling like? So you know what? We want information so that we can make some decisions right now on the fly to help us fix these problems, to help us make better decisions, to better our company, our business model. We hear that a lot. So from a customer perspective, I think their expectations are rising.
And when I say a customer, meaning our customers that were helping solve their business issues, their expectations are rising. They know AI can work behind the scenes. And I’m hearing this being asked more and more all day, every day. Not only do we want just the data, we want it now.
Does that so much to ask?
No, I don’t think so because the customer is always right. So we just have to figure it out. So I like that.
OK, so that’s some of the, I guess, the demand that you’re seeing from the customers. And as CX kind of keeps moving so quick, what are some of the new products or cool products that you’re seeing come out? Maybe let’s walk through that side of it.
Sure, yeah. So everything in real time. So I talked about the insights that they’re asking for. OK, that’s one thing. They also want transcription.
Huge buzzword these days. Everything transcribed. It doesn’t matter what interaction it is. It could be voice. It could be web chat. It could be whatever, emails. Everything is just every interaction they want transcribed so they can see it and refer back to it. Remember, giving them real time insights.
They also want auto summarizations. What does that mean?
Think about being an agent, maybe on a 20 minute call. You’re talking about a bunch of stuff. You’re troubleshooting potentially.
You’re trying to help the customer. And at the end of it now, you’re like, oh, shoot, I got to put all these notes into one location so that I can remember what happened. So customers, again, they’re very savvy now, these businesses. They want to use AI for not just the transcription, but the auto summarization. So help me summarize this 20 minute conversation into one brief paragraph that’s going to convey everything that was discussed. And giving you the solution, what was agreed upon, what are the next steps. And there’s some really cool products out there that can do all this analytics and all these trends and being able to listen in on the fly. We’ve got one I just saw a demo recently where it’ll listen into the agent. So the agent would say, OK, no, that’s great. Yes. So you want me to follow up? I’ll follow up. I’ll give you a call back at 4 o’clock this afternoon. If it hears that, it can actually create a task for that agent so that the agent doesn’t drop the ball. So at 4 o’clock, it’ll pop up as a reminder, hey, you’ve got this task. Remember, you’re supposed to call this customer back. I mean, this is like stuff that’s happening behind this thing that’s so amazing and so automated. And at the end of it all, it’s because you want your employees or your agents to be more productive, more efficient. And let’s just let’s just face the facts here. We want everything now. We want it done quickly. Right. Things can’t happen faster for us as a business. So we are seeing a lot of that cool stuff happen behind the scenes. So that’s some of the products I’m seeing and I like. And it’s resonating really well with our customers. Another one, Josh. OK, this one might blow you away. It kind of blew me away.
You know, a lot of our customers, they might outsource their customer service departments, their sales departments, and they may outsource it overseas because it’s more economic. Right. So they’re saving money by doing this. We still see that trend. We still see a lot of our customers outsourcing.
But with that comes challenges. So, you know, if they’re overseas, they may not be a native English speaker. Right. They may speak English, but they have a heavy accent.
So we’ve seen in the last year technology that can neutralize that accent. Right. It’ll neutralize. It’ll soften it. It modifies the accent so that the agent who is not a native English speaker can better communicate with those customers that are native English speaking customers.
But let’s take that to a whole new level. So that to me was impressive. But more recently,
I’m super excited about this. You can’t tell my face, but we saw a demo and I know a couple of our C-CAS providers can offer this now or at least they’re rolling it out. It’s taken it to a whole new level. It is taken it to where you can pick as an agent. You can pick whatever accent you want. So not just neutralizing my accent, but I can pick a totally different accent. And by the way, I can select a different gender so I can be a female picking a British accent in a male voice. And I can do this on the fly. So it gives these agents full control on how they want to portray themselves to better communicate with their customers. So take for example, I mean, even if I were here in the U.S., I’m on the West Coast. If I’m helping customers in the South, I might want to select a Southern accent to better connect with that customer that I’m servicing. It’s crazy.
So that’s what’s available now. They’re rolling it out. And then I think it’s going to get to the point where, of course, you can transcribe it. That’s that’s a given.
But I think taking it a step further is translations.
We were kind of getting that off and on like, hey, can you translate a call in real time? Like, well, we can translate Web chat or something. But now we’re starting to see more of that. Let’s translate it in the conversation in real time. So you can have a Spanish speaker converting to French, French to English, whatever you want. And this is happening in real time with a switch of a button. So the next step from there is how do you transcribe those multiple languages and present that back again? Right. Providing insights, presenting that back in real time to the companies.
I love this. That’s a lot. I think that’s why we call this the pulse of the industry. What’s going on? That’s a lot of that’s you know, if you don’t if you like,
you know, doing something different and learning something different every day, this is the space. There is so it’s so exciting to be in technology because, you know, first of all, who’d have thought that we’d ever ever be able to do real time language translation and accent matching, you know, neutralization, all of those things. And, you know, we’re we’re of this mindset of OK, we saw one person come out one provider that we have do it. And now, whoa, this other one came out and there’s is a different flavor, right? Maybe we have two, three next time we talk, you know, we’ll probably have four or five. And so then it’s going to be well, how do they differentiate their product? And it’s all it’s all good things because, you know, that’s that’s that’s that’s where you’re so incredibly valuable to the partners is because maybe on the surface, some of those look very similar, but there’s such subtle differentiators. Well, yeah, but they do it, but they don’t do it, you know, in this situation. No, it doesn’t do that. Oh, yeah. No, no, it does that. You know, you’re you’re kind of blowing people’s minds with it. So I think there’s such a fun time to be in technology.
Yeah. Well, and you’re right. And I think you’re right. It takes one or two to start the ball rolling. And then there’s a snowball effect because, you know, our vendors, we love them all, but they they’ve got to compete with one another. So they’re figuring out what technologies they have access to and then they improve upon that and make it their own flavor. Right. So the more you see one or two coming out, it’s going to snowball and eventually that is no longer going to be a differentiated. Then we’re on to the next. Well, what else is new now? Right.
This one does teleport like what? Look at that. You blink and you blink and crap like that is out. I mean, there’s a we just we just got back from, you know, not too long ago, AWS re-invent. And this was mind blowing to me of OK, so, you know, you’re in the primary session. Traditionally, you know, ballroom type Vegas, Venetian, things like that. But there’s such an overflow. They overflow to another room. They simulcast it to one of the giant, you know, 500 inch screens or whatever it is that’s up there. And you’re wearing headphones. And so you’ve got this, you know, session simulcast to you. And the group next to you has a different session simulcast. You’ve got all these people in this room listening to all these different sessions. So that’s cool. You know, that’s cool tech on its own, right? Seeing the streaming and all of that. But then you go to some of these other sessions. And this is what really blew my mind was.
If you’re actually in the primary session, not in the overflow, you’ll notice that there is a I don’t know, about a seven, eight feet tall unit, five feet wide, and you’ve got a full blown hologram of a person who is in a hologram studio in their home doing real time ASL translations and things like that. And all the sign language real time. They’re not even in the room. They’re doing ASL simultaneously while this person is real time, you know, on stage. And so, you know, you hear about these things coming out, but then actually seeing people apply them and use them, you go use case, use case, use case, use case. And so to your point, you know, that could even, you know, you could imply accent matching translation. I mean, just sky is the limit.
Absolutely. I mean, you’re describing Star Wars right there, right? In real life. And so I often wonder about the Jetsons. I need to go back and look at some of their episodes and be like, what did they predict decades ago that’s really coming to fruition today?
Yeah.
It’s it’s not impossible.
I’m curious on I do want to go back before we get to the next topic. I want to go back to one thing that you said where you talked about transcribing.
Do you see anybody yet saying, OK, I want to get all these transcriptions? Are people kind of are you seeing them feed them into the large language model yet? Is it a collection for the information to then plug into a data set? Like I see transcriptions is so valuable. Any any thoughts on there of kind of that pulse?
Yeah, I would say so. I would say LLM has a big part in this and Gen. I, of course, I saw we talk about these days and that’s what’s giving us a capability to transcribe this accurately. And I do see, you know, I think where the customers are benefiting from this and why they’re asking for it is because they want to see what trends are popping up. All right. They you really you can’t take, you know, I say the good old days like last year, the year before, you can’t just take, you know, a randomly recorded call and be able to figure this out.
So with the transcription that saves you that much more and it’s very searchable. And so I think that’s why they just want to make it easier. They don’t have the time to listen to every cause or pick it apart. They want to go right to the source and be able to find what they’re looking for. And so, yeah, transcription and it’s only getting better because of the elements behind it and all the gen. I that’s coming into play that our vendors are able to to tap into that technology behind the scenes to make it happen.
So let’s talk about strategies, right? You know, I love giving partners. We educate them on a lot of things. And then it’s OK, how can you go apply this? How could you make this applicable to your business? And so let’s talk about strategy here for a second.
Any any pro tips that you’ve seen people be successful with to get meetings, tee up conversations? Just any any thoughts on that?
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you know, it’s funny, Josh, is you’ve nailed it. I mean, I’m getting this ask a lot from our TAs lately. Our tech advisors are coming to me, especially for health care and the financial verticals. That’s what they’re focusing on. And coincidentally, that’s what I love. The opportunities I’m working fall into those two vertical markets.
So first thing is I would always encourage our tech advisors to have confidence in their expertise and be able to convey that to their whether it’s our existing customers or their prospects. And so I would say, you know, to our TAs, make sure that they let their customers or prospects know that they’ve got a whole team behind them to do this, i.e. Tilaris. And this isn’t our first round at this. Right. We’ve done this before. We do it all day, every day. We do it very well. We’re here to help. And so from there, you know, making sure that our TAs are conveying that confidence like, hey, I can help you. And by the way, here’s some questions that they can ask to start the conversations is so Mr. Customer or Prospect. So what what challenges are you currently facing with your customer experience initiatives? Do you have any initiatives if you thought about it? And the question I like is, well, are there specific areas, areas where you feel that your current technology is failing you, where it’s falling short? Because I don’t want the TAs to get discouraged if your prospects are saying, oh, no, we already have CX in place. We’re good. We’re good to go. They may not be good to go. You know, find out where the gaps are, the missing pieces, because what I ultimately want is for the RTA to get their prospect or customer to a point where they’re agreeing to have a conversation with us, bring us into the mix, do a deeper dive, because really, that’s that’s that’s what we’re trying to target and trying to get to. Right. Is ATAs, you’ve got the expertise, go out with confidence, start prospecting, start the conversations. Here’s what you can ask them and keep in mind, the goal is to bring us into it so we can continue taking that down the line with that sales prospect.
Yeah, I like that.
Are you when you see some of those, if we just take it maybe one step further in that questioning track, you know, you mentioned, you know, we’ve all been into those deals where it’s like, hey, you know, what do you need, Mr. Coder? No, I’m good. Nothing, right. You’ve got the arms folded, you know, you can’t see, but arms are folded. I’m good, right. But I like that you you take it a step further of, hey, where is this thing not letting you down? Where do you feel that it’s falling short? I guess from a from your perspective to keep going down that thought track, are are you finding that at that point, still, a lot of the customers, the end customers out there are being reactive in their thought of what do I design next? Or what what part of them are really proactively searching to go, geez, what what do I need to be doing? And I asked that because I think that helps our partners or TAs frame up. Should I be telling them what are some things that other people are doing modernizing their CX experience or their end customer experience? What’s your thoughts on that?
Yeah, no, I agree. I think the TA should be doing that and having that conversation because as we all know, in all these vertical markets, it is extremely competitive. You’ve got the health care you’ve got. I’ve got a credit union on every corner in my town and they’re building more and more. And I’m thinking, my gosh, really, there’s such a demand for credit unions. And they all know what’s going on with one another. They talk. They might be competitors, but they talk to one another. So they know what technologies are being put into place because they bring this up to me on these customer calls. They will tell me, oh, the so-and-so bank that I keep in touch with, they’re doing this. What do you know about this, Meagan? What are you doing for conversational AI or how are we keeping up with our mobile banking apps or whatever? So they talk to one another. So they may have have something in place. But I think in the back of their minds, if you get the right person at these organizations that you’re talking to, they’re going to know that they need to step it up. They’ll tell me that. They say, we know we have to modernize. We have to step it up is what they exactly their words because we know what our competition is doing. We’re not there yet. We know we have to be. Our customers are asking for it. So I hear that all the time. So I think it’s really important for our tech advisors to share that information. And so what that means, though, is our tech advisors then need to do a little bit more research into those industries that they’re focusing on because there may be some similarities across them. But there’s definitely definitely some differentiators between health care and finance and retail and manufacturing. And it’s because we have these conversations all day every day that we can kind of pull pieces from what we think are the asks from each of those industries. But our tech advisors need to educate themselves and keep their finger on the pulse of what’s going on, what’s in demand. And I’m more than happy to have that conversation with them as well to let them know what I’m hearing. All I can do is let them know what I’m hearing. Right. What I’m seeing in the industry.
Yeah. And I think, you know, one final thought maybe on that is you’re making you’re helping a lot of people make a lot of decisions. And I think if if we think about all the way down to that I.T. person or that C.X. person at that credit union, this might be the first or second time ever in their life they make this technology decision. Meanwhile,
you’ve probably helped somebody make it three times before the day is over. And so the volumetrically, you’ve seen so many different environments. And I think that’s just that’s a little bit of human nature, too, of customers are everybody’s reluctant to want to be the first one to make this decision. You know, there’s nothing wrong with being innovative, but they also just want to go after my my thinking about this the right way. Has anybody else done this? Right. So I think there’s such a we give them time back angle here. We’ve we’ve done this same situation many times. And so I love that you bring that up with health care.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you bring up a good point. These customers that we’re talking to, they want to validate their thoughts as well. And sometimes they will admit they say, we don’t know what we don’t know. I hear that a lot. And so you have to show them the art of possibility, what you can do with A.I. They know A.I. is in the mix. They have no idea how to use or what it can do. And so you have to walk through those use cases with them to see where it is that you can help them solve their issues or get them to that next place, like you were saying, to modernize their business, to be competitive in their space. Sure.
All right. So if we think about then let’s talk about advice for partners.
Any tips that you want to offer the tech advisors once they bring you into an opportunity to kind of talk about a smooth process through and through?
Yes. Yes. I love this because this will really help me out selfishly, make my job a little bit easier. I come in representing the technology side of things, right? What I could really use some help from our T.A.s is before you bring me into an opportunity, I’m a prepper in my daily life. OK, and especially I’m a huge prepper when it comes to my job. So I would love to spend even if it’s five, 10, 15 minutes with our tech advisors and say, hey, give me what you know about this prospect. And if you don’t know anything, give me at least their name and their website. I can do the digging around myself. I need to understand what their business model is so I can pivot and make sure that the conversation I’m having with them makes sense. Right. I’m pulling all the information from that customer as much as I can.
So I always ask for some prep. Let’s strategize a little bit. We don’t have to go into the details. But tell me, how do you want me to present myself when we’re on this call? You’re bringing me in, you know, partner. So do am I coming in as a white label person and my part of your organization, which is totally fine? We don’t even have to go there. You can just bring me in as your subject matter expert, your solution architect, whatever it is. Or if you want to say I’m with Tilaris, whatever that is, I just need to know so I can prep and and come in and represent myself accordingly. So from there, as we go through the process, I’m going to do a lot of the Q&A myself, right? I’m going to do the heavy lifting for our partners to gather the information. But I would love I would love it if our partners listened in and take notes. That’s how I learned. So think of this as a learning experience. Right. So when I started off as a channel manager, I had my own essay that I would be on every single call. He or she would run the show and I would take tons of notes and I would listen in. Why is he asking this question? What are the answers coming back? And it started to be very consistent across all calls. And that’s how I learned. So I would love it if our TAs could take notes, listen in and make it a learning experience.
And one really, really good best practice. And I do this with one of our top producing partners and it works really well. Before we end the call, let’s see if we can get another schedule, scheduled meeting.
Yes.
And that meeting could be a follow up conversation. It could be, hey, Mr. Customer, you want to bring in additional folks into this conversation? That’s great. Let’s do that. It could be maybe the call is, hey, we’ve got some vendor recommendations for you. We’re ready. You don’t talk through that. Or it could be we’re ready for the next step, which is let’s bring these vendors in, have them engage and have them do demos. So we want, if at all possible, before we end the call, let’s have something on the books, on the calendar for the next engagement or at least have the next steps. Let’s just not say, OK, great talking. OK, see, bye. What happens after that? Right. So I need our TAs to follow up to have the next steps and help me coordinate those demo calls with the vendors and whatnot. I’m more than happy to do the prep calls with them to to make sure that our vendors are well prepared for that specific demonstration. But I really need to lean on our partners hard on coordinating that and keeping that wholesale process moving.
I love that. I love that. And you bring up because we’ve run we’ve run a handful of these big enterprise deals together over the years. And and there’s a couple of things that I’ve seen you do. First of all, we should put your notes in some sort of Hall of Fame, because I’ve never seen note taking. We can actually read your notes unlike mine, which is like, oh, I hope he’s OK. Maybe he got hit in the head before he wrote that because nobody, including myself, sometimes can’t make sense of it. But different problem.
I think this idea of the bigger the deal you get into, we find that the multi pronged approach is so key into that. We’ll come back to your meeting thing in a second. But, you know, you’ve made sure that, hey, let’s bring in the CX person. Hey, let’s bring in the VP. Hey, who’s in charge of purchasing? Hey, who’s in charge of the tech stack? You know, so kind of unifying that because it seems like at the end of the day, you know, customers get busy, silos are built and the right hand doesn’t talk to the left hand. So we’re knocking down some of these inherent unexpected roadblocks before they become roadblocks. And so I love that. I think you’ve you’ve done amazing in some of those those angles. But I think the other thing, and I know nobody wants a recurring meeting for the sake of a recurring meeting, but we found in some of these enterprise deals is it really helps. I’ve seen you and the partners drive this of, hey, let’s let’s we got a lot of things to kick off. You want to roll this thing out in, you know, what might be nine months from now. But if we don’t kind of get everybody on the same page over the next three to six, you’re not going to be able to make a decision. And so this idea of people kind of popping in and out from a recurring call perspective, I’ve seen it really build great relationships with the customers and the prospects and they’ve they gave everybody gains more confidence in this process over time. Any any anything weigh in on that?
Yeah, no, my gosh. I mean, I think this is why I take so much notes because I can’t remember all this, Josh. I mean, I’m trying to take vitamins and drinking my free tea, whatever it is to help me. But I can’t. We have so many ops that we’re helping our TAs with. Right. And I don’t I mean, I guess we can expect everyone to remember this. But yeah, the notes is specifically for this because we are seeing a lot of opportunities that’s going to take us. I mean, not if we’re lucky, we can get it close to nine or six or nine months. We’re seeing two or three years sometimes. Right. The larger the opportunity, the longer it takes with the recurring meetings. So it’s always good for me to keep track of the notes because we want to go back to it because, you know, what the worst thing we can do is go back and ask the same questions to the customers. How frustrating is that? Oh, so what? So customer, what did you say you needed? How are you using this today? Are you integrated here or there? I mean, it’s ridiculous. You want to be able to come in and and pick it up. Right. Pick up the pieces. It could be months that go by. You get. And that’s happened before where it could be months where the customer is going quiet and all of a sudden our team saying, hey, Meagan, we’re back on track. Let’s start talking. And I think, oh, my gosh, what do we talk about? Go back to that. Pick it up and just continue moving forward. So you’re not slowing down. I mean, I think that’s well, this is where meeting transcriptions are coming into play, right? So you so we get into that. But I really do it a lot for my own sanity. But yes, if the partners can also do that with me, we’re sharing notes. As a matter of fact, this morning we did that. We had a partner who she is really good note taker as well. That’s why I love working with her. And she pinged me and says, hey, I’m getting on this demo calls. But do you remember what they said about this? You know, because we share notes with each other. I’m back and I found him like, yes, this is so we’re well aligned. So I love that. But yeah, it’s really more than anything to show that we really listened to the customer and we know what their needs are and what we’re focusing on and trying to help them solve their issues.
Love it. Final couple of thoughts here. So one real quick, you know, we always talk about lessons learned, mentors, things like that, anything over the years that had a great mentor, learned a hard lesson, anything you want to share there?
Oh, gosh, it’s such so many years. First off, you’ve been an awesome mentor. And I’m not saying that just to butter you up or whatever, but I swear I feel like to the podcast.
All right.
There you go. Well, you know, I feel like seriously, our one on ones, I’m learning something all day, every day.
But I think, you know, I think maybe what’s more important for me to talk about right now is the hard lesson learned.
I’ve been doing this for many, many years.
This is going to be cliche, but I got to say it because I’m always doubting myself. I would say lesson learned is going with that gut feeling, that gut instinct.
It’s never let you down. Right. And I’m saying that because it’s never let me down.
Years ago, when I worked for a supplier, I had at that time, it felt like one of the larger enterprise opportunities for the company for myself.
Over the months, I built a really good rapport with the end customer. He was a huge influencer in the decision making process. Huge. So I knew what his reaction would be like, his personality, the approach to getting this done and moving forward. I just knew. So when my execs came to me and I think what it was was they gave me, they wanted me to message to the customer and ultimate them essentially because they were getting impatient. They wanted to close this out. And I thought, this is not going to go over well, but I had to relay the message. And I knew at the minute it came out of my mouth, the reaction from the customer was exactly what I had anticipated. And I empathized. And of course, I pushed back on the executives and I said, I knew this was going to, you know, this could harm us. And the customer actually did say to me, Meagan, you know,
you guys are about to lose this deal because of what the execs are doing and saying, no, that’s not what we want. This is what we want. And so I was able to soften things and, you know, just keep it moving. Ultimately, we did close it. But I guess that, you know, the learning experiences go with what you know is right for that for that customer. You know, the customer more than, you know, anyone else, you deal with them all the time. So go with the flow, but go with what you know is going to work, even if it means going against, you know, what your directives are. So to this day, I mean, we did get that customer to this day. I keep in touch with that customer on LinkedIn. We ping each other once in a while. I mean, we met for lunch after the fact as friends and colleagues. It was it was amazing. It was very cool. So again, just go with your gut instinct. Have confidence in yourself. Don’t don’t burn any bridges. You know, the last thing you want to say, you know, what is it called? The career ending move? What I forgot what that acronym is.
Yeah, it’s a technical term as a CLM, a career limiting move. Yeah.
You see all those just just be smart about it, but just go with your gut instinct and it’ll all work out.
Love it. Love it. Love it. Awesome advice. All right. We’re at the end. Final thoughts.
Looking at the future, transforming out next couple of years,
anything you’re looking forward to, innovations, just final thoughts.
Oh, yeah. If I can just dream, right.
You know, that would love. I would love for the for our reality to be that of remember that movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise. Love that movie. Can we just use AI to not Oracle’s but AI to predict that someone’s going to be doing something malicious and catch them in the act before.
I would love to see AI continue to evolve because it’s so powerful. We’ve seen it do deep fakes and deep fake voice. And it’s really scary how impressive how real it is. So I would like to see it continue to evolve. But I want it to evolve with security measures in place. I want it to be to the point where we’re not we’re not afraid of it. We’re embracing it because it can it can be more beneficial than harmful.
So I don’t want this another movie.
I don’t want to see another I don’t want to see a Skynet meltdown. I want to see a Minority Report, right. Put it to good use and not for malicious intent. That’s what I want. More AI but a safer, safer AI.
Our security audience listening appreciates you. So I love it. Awesome. Good stuff. Meagan, as always, lots of knowledge, lots of good drops, lots of pro tips. Thanks for coming on. We appreciate all you do.
Absolutely. Hopefully it’ll not be another year, year and a half before I see you again on the podcast.
Now, not with those nice remarks. I’ll be back on soon. Don’t you worry.
Awesome. Thank you, Josh.
All right. That wraps us up for today. Meagan Thai, Solution Architect of CX at Telarus, the world-renowned Meagan Thai. This has been the pulse of CX real-time insights that matter. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus.
Next Level BizTech has been a production of Telarus Studio 19. Please visit Telarus.com for more information.