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Welcome to Inside the Win. We’ll break down real world wins, showing you exactly how strategic partnership with our experts empowers you to tackle your most ambitious opportunities with confidence. Let’s jump in.
What’s up, everyone? I am Sam Nelson, VP of CX and AI here at Telarus, and we are back with the CX edition of Inside the Win. We are here to give you insights on how kind of early collaboration with our team can really revolutionize your customer engagement. And joining me today is our very own Michael Baillargeon, our CX and AI solution architect on the east. You may know him as the famous Mikey B, and we wanna dive into a specific win here. So Mikey B, welcome to the show, of course. Tell us how you got involved in this opportunity that we’re gonna talk about today.
Well, this one’s pretty unique, and I need to go in the way back machine, into the early mid two thousands, two thousand seven, two thousand eight.
I was at ShoreTel, brilliantly simple, and I was a sales trainer. And the CEO came up to me and said, hey, Mike. I feel like not everybody in the company knows our value prop. They don’t know our elevator pitch.
Can you put together a training that will let somebody in payroll or accounting or engineering when they are at the barbecue or cookout, depending on where you are in the country. Right? And a friend says, hey. What do you do?
They’re able to kinda pitch it out. And and I think Telarus did a great job with that. So I created along with a colleague, something called everyone sells, where it doesn’t matter where you are, whether you’re in an elevator or a cookout or on a boat, and someone says, so what do you do? You’re ready for it.
Fast forward to twenty twenty four, early, yeah, probably twenty four, early twenty five, maybe.
At a cookout, a really good friend of ours down the street and, you know, grilling hamburgers and maybe an adult beverage or two. And he’s like, Hey Mike, you do phones, right? I’m like, Yeah, I do phones. And what about call center?
Do you understand that? I’m like, I actually specialize in that. And he’s like, we should talk. So I reached out to a really good friend of mine, a TA who I’ve known for a decade now.
And I’m like, hey, you wanna go on a road trip? Go to this guy’s company. He’s a good friend. So this is very friendly ground.
And here’s what we learned. They’re a logistics company. They have about twelve to thirteen locations in New England.
And each site was on, check this out Sam. Were in the same UCaaS platform, but each site had a different contract and different pricing.
Eek.
Eek, right? Oh my god. So what we did is we went to three or four of their key sites and we talked to their dispatchers. They’re the ones that would dispatch out the yellow buses or the special needs bus or whatever.
And we talked about a day in the life. Hey, you know, what’s working right now? And they’re like, well, the phones work and they ring most of the time. What’s not working?
Well, we have all these applications we have to go into. We have a text application of an email application.
I’m tied to this physical phone and you know, and they ask, you know, I need to walk around. And the other hard the other hard part is they ask us to kind of fill in in different offices. So I just can’t stay in my office and log in to a queue from their office. I actually have to get in my car and drive to their office to log in to the queue at their office.
So it wasn’t very kind of unified platform because it was twelve different contracts with twelve different pricing and twelve different end days. We talked to the call center leadership team there, and we kind of did the art of the possible. Well, what if we could do record every call and put sentiment analysis to that and score it? Like, oh my oh my god.
We can’t even listen to calls today.
Yeah.
Oh, what if people could just log in from anywhere? Oh, that would be fantastic. What if you had a unified view of all the queues? Oh, that’d be great. What if we did SMS and email and voice all in the same platform to which one UI, they’re like, tell me more.
And it was just an awesome, awesome play.
The TA was amazing because they really had to manage all those contracts. So when the first contract came up, it was about two thousand five hundred dollars MRC. So, you know, great.
But what happened was it became the domino effect, right? One goes down two thousand five hundred, next one, two thousand five hundred, two thousand five hundred, two thousand five hundred. Now you have twelve sites all under a unified umbrella.
And then they come to us like, well, Mike, as you know, we’re just not a New England based company. We actually are all of the country. Can you do the same thing in Texas? So then we did Texas.
Now we’re into the Midwest and the Southeast. So all told, they have roughly one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy five locations, and we’ve done thirty or forty of them. So this is a went from a, yeah, I’ll take my steak medium rare to, you know, this will be, you know, a six figure biller in a eighteen month process. So it’s just a great That’s incredible.
Wow. Okay. So remind me, because you mentioned, like, dispatch, what kind of company was this? We don’t have list the name of the customer, but what did they do exactly?
Yeah. So they’re a yellow bus company. So, you know, you you stick your kids on the bus, and you wave goodbye to them, and they go to school. So they had classic yellow buses. They had special needs buses.
They also had party buses. But it’s just a transportation company. And what we found out is the number one question.
So a parent calls in on a yellow bus is where’s my kid?
My kid on the bus?
And and you know, and you know, I never, you know, we sent our kids on the bus and we just expected they were just gonna magically make it and make magically make it home.
Right.
But sometimes it doesn’t happen that way. Right? Sometimes the kid gets on the wrong bus.
So that was the number one thing. And and and the dispatchers are amazing because then they would pick up the radios. Right? And then they would radio the different buses.
Hey. Is little Susie on the bus and whatnot? Maybe she on the wrong bus. So that’s the number one question.
The other big question is to schedule the special needs buses because, hey, I have, they also do medical transport. Think of Uber for medical transport. Hey, I have a doctor’s appointment. My child is in a wheelchair.
I need a very special bus. Come pick them up, take us to that appointment. So they get a lot of calls for that type of scheduling work.
They also get from schools, hey, as a reminder with the big football game, we need a bus for the football team, the cheerleaders, the band, and all that. They set up all that stuff. So it’s not just, you know, an eight to five type thing. It’s really it’s not quite twenty four seven, but it’s certainly like six AM to probably eight PM to answer all these calls. So, you know, that lot goes into busing, Sam. You know, we it’s a very interesting industry.
Yeah. Well, and you would think that with all this technology, right, we’d have I think some people track, actually track their kids in real time where they’re at. But believe it or not, folks, it sounds a lot like companies out there are still getting inquiries about like, hey, where’s where’s my kid?
Where’s the bus? The bus is late.
Right. Well, yeah. Where’s the bus? And where’s my kid? Right? So that’s really interesting.
So one thing that caught my attention here was when this person that came up to you at the barbecue and was like, hey, you work you work in with phones. Right? And so at the end of the day, it sounds a lot like people are still asking about, like, these physical phones and what they can do to revolutionize that. So is it fair to say, Mikey B, that right now, a lot of folks are still stuck in this era of physical phones and, like, siloed systems?
Yeah. It is still amazing how how many on premises systems customers are still out there that we’re pulling off. I have this slide, and I’m happy to send hit me up. I’ll send it you.
I call it the graveyard of PBXs. It has all these logos and names that if you come across these phone systems, they are dead in the water. You do a little happy dance because you just found yourself a lead. Right?
So we’re still seeing that. This particular one, they they actually did the right thing. They moved to UCaaS. They just didn’t choose.
They didn’t have you know, a tech advisor to really guide them. They did the classic, oh, it’s COVID. I’m gonna Google best cloud phone system and whatever came up first, they just signed the contract, which is why it was twelve different contracts with twelve different pricing and twelve different end dates.
So yes, so there’s still a lot of people like that. You mean, it’s a ninetyten rule. Ninety percent of all clients these days, ninety percent of the workforce are cool with a softphone, Right? They’re used to these Zoom meetings or team meetings or Webex meetings or GoTo or Dialpad or RingCentral or Vonage or 8×8 meetings where a headset and they’re good to go. But there’s ten percent where it’s like, you can take this phone on my cold dead hand, right?
And what’s great about is our ecosystem is all of our providers can go either direction. If you want a physical phone, great, here’s how you do it. You want a softphone? Great. Here’s how you do it. It’s all about the flexibility.
Okay.
I’ve I’ve I’ve taught my children not to lie, but I’m gonna do this is a pro tip little white fib. Okay?
So I love it.
We’re ready for it.
Okay. So I had a client who’s like, Mike, I don’t wanna deal with those physical phones anymore. How do I how do I get people not to use them? I’m like, listen, this is what you tell them.
Hey, you know what? Right now, there’s a supply chain issue and tariffs are going on. We really can’t get physical phones. We need to move over to this new phone system.
I apologize.
Tell you what, I’ll buy you a great headset and use the headset. It’s gonna be about two, three months before the supply chain, the tariffs kind of right size things that we can get inventory back in. I apologize. Use that.
Go back to them in a couple months after. Hey, do you still want that physical phone? Oh, no. This is great.
I can walk around the office and fantastic. I’m good to go. So not a lie. It’s a little fib to to save yourself from buying a two hundred dollar phone only to find it in a desk drawer three months later.
I love it. I love it. Oh, that’s awesome, Mikey Best practices straight out of Mikey Vee here. Folks, you heard it today.
Right? Engage us early and often. You never know when you’re gonna find a lead. Even if people just ask about phones could absolutely turn into a massive opportunity.
So with that said, stay tuned for our next Inside the Win to learn more about how leveraging our team accelerates opportunities with bigger results, and we will see you next time.