Dan Foster: (00:00)
Welcome partners, and thanks for joining us today. We’re gonna talk CX in 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: (00:19)
Thank you. It was really a pleasure to be here.

Dan Foster: (00:19)
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.

Steve Infante: (00:27)
Yeah.

Dan Foster: (00:27)
And some interesting technology developments.

Steve Infante: (00:30)
So it’s very exciting times at UJET. Uh, since I’ve been at UJET, we’ve seen, uh, you know, last year’s Enterprise Connect. We won Best in Class, best in show.

Dan Foster: (00:39)
Congrats!

Steve Infante: (00:40)
Which is… Which is 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 CCAI, uh, 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.

Steve Infante: (00:57)
Yes.

Dan Foster: (00:57)
Google and the show win. Congrats.

Steve Infante: (01:00)
Yeah, thank you.

Dan Foster: (01:00)
So, uh, let’s back up CX.

Steve Infante: (01:02)
mm-hmm. .

Dan Foster: (01:02)
I mean, we’re very focused on cx. You know, when I even step, uh, back further, we see the CEO challenge revenue generation.

Steve Infante: (01:10)
mm-hmm. .

Dan Foster: (01:10)
Productivity, but really branding customer experience is becoming the new, not just down in the old contact center view, but really the customer and the CEO. Yeah. So, talk to us about how you think of CX. Is, am I, am I framing it right here?

Steve Infante: (01:26)
Absolutely. So, CX is the big buzzword in the marketplace. Everyone has a play and cx, whether it’s, you know, laptop computers all the way through the contact center and into, uh, you know, organizational change and things like that. But, uh, how UJET looks at it, we think, we look at it a little bit differently, particularly in the contact center space. So, uh, traditional contact center providers, the old on-premise systems.

Dan Foster: (01:50)
mm-hmm. .

Steve Infante: (01:50)
Uh, 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

Dan Foster: (02:01)
Right.

Steve Infante: (02:01)
Our owner and our founder, uh, worked. He was one of the inventors of the, uh, or in product managers on the razor phone from Motorola way back.

Dan Foster: (02:09)
Oh wow.

Steve Infante: (02:09)
In the day, right?

Dan Foster: (02:10)
There we go. So, yeah.

Steve Infante: (02:10)
Yeah. So he starts at the end point.

Steve Infante: (02:12)
And, uh, 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 the contact centers were built to provide, you know, call routing and getting the call to the right person. 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. 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, uh, that has impact and measurable value, which is obviously, I think it’s, uh, it’s a key differentiator in the marketplace

Dan Foster: (03:02)
For us. Right. Especially, uh, you know, post pandemic.

Steve Infante: (03:05)
Mm-hmm. .

Dan Foster: (03:05)
CX has never been more important. Mm-hmm. , uh, when you think about cx, it really goes all the way to the digital doorstep, the website, all the way through to called deflection, right? Like, you think of folks like Amazon, who’s called Amazon recently, right? Mm-hmm. , uh, 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: (03:31)
Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, it, it’s evolved quite frankly. The pandemic has changed kind of points of view across the board. So that obviously has a huge impact on it. But also as our technology has evolved, um, 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, uh, enterprise Connect best and show was our, uh, our product called CX InterCloud, which allows us to do active, active active, uh, across multiple clouds. Uh,

Dan Foster: (04:06)
So, so think GCP and maybe AB AWSs, I can run ’em both right?

Steve Infante: (04:11)
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, uh, able to provide real time, truly real time updates into the CRM. Cause we’re, we’re running active, we’re not sending, uh, little batches at a time like most of our competitors.

Dan Foster: (04:31)
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, uh, in effect, we point everything back to the system of record in the CRM. So, okay. So any companies or clients, um, 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 into theirs, which is truly, uh, another differentiator is that, you know, CISOs really appreciate and CIOs as well.

Dan Foster: (05:00)
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, uh, Google, but also a lot of your interactions with some great integrations. So

Steve Infante: (05:18)
mm-hmm. .

Dan Foster: (05:18)
Customer with a k ServiceNow. Walk us through where you’re at there.

Steve Infante: (05:21)
Absolutely. So we feel that our platform, the contact center is a, a big and one of the core pieces of the puzzle, but, uh, integrating into, so the major CRM, so Salesforce, ServiceNow, Kustomer with a K, uh, Zendesk, uh, uh, dynamics, et cetera. All of those right, 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, uh, 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.

Steve Infante: (06:05)
mm-hmm. .

Dan Foster: (06:05)
probably one of the leaders in AI at this point. Where do we see the Google partnership in AI evolving as it relates to UJET?

Steve Infante: (06:12)
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, uh, 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 a very clean and easy platform to write into and integrate into. So it’s very seamless. Uh, 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. Um, we align with them from an RnD perspective, from the get go. So as they continue to build out AI tools in that toolkit, they, uh, 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 it’s core to our product. It’s not all add-on and integrated it, it comes, comes key. It comes outta the box with, uh, with, uh, 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 wanna go back to mobile because, uh, that’s, you were f more or less first there, uh, 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- uh, the way consumers buy has changed quite a bit. And the way consumers, uh, 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, uh, level creates a very high level of customer satisfaction, uh, which creates loyalty, which creates new sales for customers, et cetera. So it is, uh, the value proposition of having a really good customer experience at the edge translates into revenues 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. Everybody or most of the analysts, most of the economists, uh, wall Street Journal, you know, every morning some data showing that that’s where we may be heading. Yeah. Hope they’re all wrong. Right. Uh, you know, 2023 has a lot of challenges. Where do you see your product fitting in, in an economic downturn? Yeah,

Steve Infante: (09:00)
Great question. So, uh, obviously there’s two ways to, to manage an economic downturn, increase revenues or decrease costs. So, uh, and we have a really good story in both, like I just described on the, uh, top line is having a very easy experience from the mobile device, right? Having a very clean, uh, experience creates loyalty, which creates top line revenue, uh, and repeat business, et cetera. So we have a really good play there. And on the cost saving side of things, again, I go back to the technical debt conversation. Our product is so clean from the, the, the foundation of the technology implementation of our product. And I’ve worked for a handful of different, uh, places and, and have done this for quite a while. Um, it is the most simple, clean and easy delivery, uh, you know, model that I’ve ever seen where, uh, 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, uh, single or the one time cost to get into the technology are much lower. So, uh, we also think the ongoing, uh, operations of our product have, uh, 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, uh, advantage from a, from a cost savings perspective as well. So we hit it both from the top line and from the bottom line.

Dan Foster: (10:24)
That’s exciting. Yeah. And, uh, as you think about the technology evolution of that stack, it seems like you guys fit in there, uh, neatly into that CX experience, the brand experience, the economic downturns. Absolutely. So a hedge against that. So, I wanna thank you for coming out today. Yes. This is great. So partners, uh, reach out to 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. Thank you. We’re excited to go to market with you and, uh, have a great day.

Steve Infante: (10:55)
Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, thank you. Take care.