CX Solution Market Strategy in an Economic Downturn

Telarus CRO, Dan Foster, Meets with UJET SVP of Global Channels, Steve Infante, to discuss a selling strategy for CX solutions.

Dan Foster (00:03):

Welcome partners, and thanks for joining us today. We’re gonna talk CX and Telarus investment in the CX practice in some of our interesting, unique, emerging key partners like UJET Steve Infante. Welcome. How are you?

Steve Infante (00:18):

It’s really a pleasure to be here.

Dan Foster (00:20):

Yeah. Thanks for coming out. Absolutely. So, real quickly, give our partners a sense for what UJET’s up to. I mean, you guys have had a real exciting year and some interesting technology developments,

Steve Infante (00:30):

So it’s very exciting times at UJET. Since I’ve been at UJET, we’ve seen you know, last year’s Enterprise Connect. We won Best in class, best in show. Congrats, which was fantastic. Thank you very much. Yeah. And at the same show we announced our exclusive OEM partnership with Google as their contact center platform for their CC AI product, which is absolutely fantastic. And it has been a, just a seismic shift in the marketplace.

Dan Foster (00:55):

I mean, those are monstrous announcements. Yes, Google and the show win. Congrats. Thank you. So let’s back up cx I mean, we’re very focused on cx. You know, when I even step back further, we see the CEO challenge revenue generation mm-hmm. productivity, but really branding customer experience is becoming the new, not just down in the old contact center view. Yeah. But really the customer in the ceo. So, talk to us about how you think of CX. Is, am I, am I framing it right here?

Steve Infante (01:25):

Absolutely. So, CX is the big buzzword in the marketplace. Everyone has a play in cx, whether it’s, you know, laptop computers all the way through the contact center and into you know, organizational change and things like that. But how UT looks at it, we think, we look at it a little bit differently. It’s particularly in the contact center space. So traditional contact center providers, the old on-premise systems mm-hmm. CX was formed around the limitations of the technology. You could only do what the technology would allow you to do to expand into the customer experience. So what UJET did, right? Our owner and our founder worked. He was one of the inventors of the or and product managers on the razor phone from Motorola way back Oh. Back in the days we go there. So, yeah. Yeah. So he starts at the endpoint and what I find very interesting is he looked at CX from truly the customer and worked his way backwards into the technology, into the contact center space, which is completely unique and different because contact centers were built to provide, you know, call routing and getting the call to the right person.

Steve Infante (02:31):

And it was all about the agent experience and the supervisors and the administrators of it. And eventually it worked its way to the customer, right? But it’s a long way away from where the origins of the product came in. Our product, the origin of our product was at the customer, and we work our way back into the contact center. So that different lens and that unique lens provides a unique and different point of view to get a true customer experience that has impact and measurable value, which is obviously, I think it’s it’s a key differentiator in the

Dan Foster (03:01):

Marketplace for us. Right. Especially you know, post pandemic. Mm-Hmm. CX has never been more important. When you think about cx, it really goes all the way to the digital doorstep, the website, all the way through to call deflection, right? Like, you think of folks like Amazon, who’s called Amazon recently, right? Mm-Hmm. where do you, but we know that there’s a lot of impact that you can have with CX in certain sections of the technology with certain partners, with certain customers. Where’s your ideal customer? What’s that profile?

Steve Infante (03:32):

Yeah, absolutely. So it, it’s evolved quite frankly. The pandemic has changed kind of points of view across the board. So that ab obviously has a huge impact on it. But also as our technology has evolved our original go to market was, was we were very strong on the mobile side of things, and we are still very much so, but customers are leaning in towards our, our reliability story. We, what why we won enterprise Connect best in show was our our product called CX InterCloud, which allows us to do active, active active across multiple clouds.

Dan Foster (04:07):

So think GCP and maybe AWS, I can run ’em both,

Steve Infante (04:10):

Right? Okay. In real time. So it does a couple things. One is if one goes down, it’s, there’s, there’s no disruption, both cuz they’re both running active, active number one. Number two is also that we are able to provide realtime, truly realtime updates in, into the CRM. Cuz we’re, we’re running active, we’re not sending little batches at a time like most of our

Dan Foster (04:30):

Competitors. So is that protecting customer data or what’s the value there?

Steve Infante (04:33):

Yeah, that’s another piece of it around our security platform is we do not hold onto any customer pii. So in effect, we point everything back to the system of record in the CRM. So, okay. So any companies or clients security posture that they put in place, we align directly to it. We don’t have to adjust it and come out through our system and back it in their, which is truly another differentiators that, you know, CISOs really appreciate and CIOs as

Dan Foster (05:00):

Well. Right. So, so if you’re in the Telarus platform, if you’re in our CX practice mm-hmm. , we know that you’ve got a lot of great integrations. You know, we do a lot of vetting. We were excited by your technology, but also by your ecosystem Google, but also a lot of your interactions with some great integrations, so mm-hmm. customer with a k ServiceNow. Walk us through where you’re

Steve Infante (05:21):

At there. Absolutely. So we feel that our platform, the, the contact center is a, a big and a one of the core pieces of the puzzle, but integrating into, so the major CRM, so Salesforce, ServiceNow, Kustomer, Zendesk dynamics, et cetera. All of those great are, we consider those table stakes and, you know, the, we wanna get that message out there that those integrations exist at the core. And it also, we have a lot of integrations with more AI type partners as well. We have a great AI story ourselves, but if there are products that clients already have, we can pull, bring those into the fold and, and create a seamless experience for agents all the way out to, to the end clients.

Dan Foster (06:03):

So, ai, Google ai, obviously, I mean mm-hmm. probably one of the leaders in AI at this point. Mm-Hmm. , where, where do we see the Google partnership in AI evolving as it relates to UJET?

Steve Infante (06:13):

Yeah, great question. So the, so we were built from the very start in gcp. So when, when the contact center platform was built out, it was built in microservices in containers. And so we’re free of any of that kind of technical debt of the legacy systems that, that are out there, that we, that we compete with on a regular basis. And so that does a couple things. One is it’s very clean and easy platform to write into and integrate into. So it’s very seamless. Obviously it’s all Google and with our, our partnership with Google, we’re the exclusive OEM provider of contact center for Google CCI platform. We align with them from an R&D perspective, from the get-go. So as they continue to build out AI tools in that toolkit, they they work with it on our platform. First. They test it, they make sure that it’s ready to go. So we’re first to market from a contact center perspective with all the Google AI tools and its core to our product. It’s not all add-on and integrated it, it comes, comes key, it comes out of the box with with the core product that we sell in the marketplace today.

Dan Foster (07:19):

And I, and I love the term technical debt mm-hmm. , I mean, you guys must be a leader in terms of when you go into an on-prem, because the, the majority of the market’s still on-prem, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And so the technical debt, you come in with that, but I want to go back to mobile because mm-hmm. that’s, you were more or less first there mm-hmm. strong capability. But really we’re seeing key verticals like retail and others move mobile first as well in some cases.

Steve Infante (07:44):

Absolutely. And, and the re the way consumers buy has changed quite a bit. And the way consumers the way consumer loyalty is, is managed, is through their experience in that buying process. And it’s not necessarily walking into a brick and mortar and having that experience. So that interaction is so key and so critical. So most people when they communicate, they use their mobile device, right? That’s how they do it. Right? And so having that be a clean and robust and integrated experience from that, from that end customer level creates a very high level of customer satisfaction which creates loyalty, which creates new sales for customers, et cetera. So it is the value proposition of having a really good customer experience at the edge translates into revenue. It’s where it’s, you know, CFOs really care about that kind of stuff, obviously.

Dan Foster (08:35):

Right. Well, speaking of CFOs value proposition, we got an economic downturn. Mm-Hmm. everybody or most of the analysts, most of the economists wall Street Journal, you know, every morning mm-hmm. some data showing that that’s where we may be heading. Yeah. Hope they’re all wrong. Right. you know, 2023 has a, a lot of challenges. Where do you see your product fitting in, in an economic downturn?

Steve Infante (08:59):

Yeah, great question. So obviously there’s two ways to, to manage an economic downturn, increase revenues to decrease costs. So and we have a really good story in both, like I just described on the top line is having a very easy experience from the mobile device, right? Having a very clean experience creates loyalty, which creates top line revenue and repeat business, et cetera. So we have a really good player there. And on the cost savings side of things, again, I go back to the technical debt conversation. Our product is so clean from the foundation of the technology implementation of our product. And I’ve worked for a handful of different places and, and have done this for quite a while. It is the most simple, clean and easy delivery model that I’ve ever seen where it’s, it’s literally pennies on the dollar to implement our solution compared to some of the others that are out there.

Steve Infante (09:53):

So just the outright single or the one time cost to get into the technology are much lower. So we also think the ongoing operations of our product have a significant savings. So if you look at what are you spending today with your legacy, whether it’s on-prem or, or a cloud, you know, hybrid or, or a legacy cloud provider versus what it takes to operate our solution, we feel there’s a definite advantage from a, from a cost savings perspective as well. So we hit it both from the top line and from the bottom

Dan Foster (10:24):

Line. That’s exciting. Yep. And as you think about the technology evolution of that stack, it seems like you guys fit in there neatly into that CX experience, the brand experience, the economic downturn. Absolutely. Absolutely. So hedge against that. Mm-Hmm. , I want to thank you for coming out today. Yes. This is great. So partners reach out to your existing support, your CX team here at Telarus to hear more about the UJET team. And Steve, you got a great team out there in the marketplace. We’re excited, thank to go to market with you and have a great day.

Steve Infante (10:56):

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me.