Inside the Win: How PolyAI Recovered 20,000 Missed Calls & Doubled a Deal with Agentic AI

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 is up, everyone? I am Sam Nelson, VP of CX and AI here at Telarus, and we are back with another edition of Inside the Win, but the CX and AI version. Today, I’m really excited. We’re gonna get into a real PolyAI customer story. We’re gonna look at who the customer is, what challenge they needed to solve, what they chose, and then, of course, you know, kind of what the experience has been and some takeaways for all of you as Telarus tech advisers that you can bring into your own customer conversations. Joining me today is Justin Shively from PolyAI. Justin, great to have you here.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Let’s make this really, really practical for our advisors. What type of… Well, actually, before I get there, tell us about what you guys do before we even get into a customer win.

So PolyAI, we do agentic dialogue for enterprise companies. And we’ve been in business since 2019. And I guess a fun fact is we’re one of the first pure play AI platform providers to enter into the channel.

That’s amazing. And we’ve had several engagements with all of you. You’ve been so wonderful to work with with Mike Sibeli at the helm. Fantastic that you guys are playing with us. Let’s dive right into the win, because I really want our advisors to learn from something that you’ve actually closed with one of them.

Tell me about the customer. Like, what kind of customer was it? What industry? Maybe like what size or scale that you were working with?

Yeah. So pretty well known golf club outfitter brand. So great for the channel, great for what we do, and certainly a lot of events in our future with that type of customer coming up. But the particular win was 135 ks ARR, so a little over $11 monthly, and their biggest pain point was missing calls.

They received over 200,000 calls per year, and some of that overflow was going towards BPO, and they were missing about 10%. So just calls that went unanswered, not even a voicemail just didn’t even get through anybody, roughly 20,000 calls that they’re missing, which is just unrealized revenue. And so even the BPOs weren’t able to get to it because if someone just hangs up and they don’t even get through, that’s a lost opportunity. And that was their biggest pain point.

But also, were, as most businesses, they’re in cost cutting mode, and so they’re wanting to do more with less. So that was the initial driver that they came to us on is how…

And also being a premium golf club fitting type of company, as you can imagine, they care a lot about the customer experience. So they have a very high brand association to their, you know, to what it is that they do. And missing calls is obviously counterintuitive to that.

For sure. And did this outfitter have in person locations or were they strictly e commerce?

In per… In person location. In in person stores as well. They have about, I think, a 160 locations global.

Okay. That’s really interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah. That’s……

North America. And a phase one was the North American sites, but a phase two, it will be their global their global locations.

That’s really interesting because you would think even with physical locations, you would think a lot of those inquiries would maybe just happen at those locations themselves. But very rarely do we actually have insight into what happened digitally. Right? Whether that’s online inquiries, or phone inquiries, or chat inquiries, or whatever it is. Right?

I think as consumers, we often forget that there’s a whole side of that piece of the business. Just because I have a storefront doesn’t mean that they don’t have this whole other piece of the equation that needs to be addressed that in fact is really high volume. That’s a lot of missed calls and a lot of kind of revenue just like walking out the door.

Yeah. Not to mention people scheduling an appointment for a fitting. Right? I wanna come in and get fitted for a pair of clubs.

I wanna check on my appointment. I need to reschedule my appointment. So these are all things that you’re calling in to do anyway outside of just inquiring about what it is that they do, hours of operation, do you have specials, things like that. So not only the missing calls piece of it, but just existing customers or existing people coming in, making it easier to do business that can’t even get through, either they’re on hold or no one’s just answering the call.

Yeah. So now that we understand what the challenge was, talk to me specifically about how Poly addressed this particular challenge, because it happens all the time.

Yes. So the BPO is…

Was an easy way to to get ROI because there’s no love lost with replacing a BPO, generally speaking, and especially if the BPO is doing nothing other than tier zero, tier one type of things. So being able to understand what does that overflow look like if we are now automating a percentage of those calls, thereby alleviating the need for the BPO entirely, that was like the probably the first thing that that got their attention, right? Because we understood what the overflow looked like, what the average handle time, what the abandonment rate is, and you know, you can come up with an ROI pretty easy there.

But the second thing was also freeing up more time for the full time employees that they did have to be able to do more complex things, repurpose them into doing things that would require a higher skill set other than just answering hours of operation or directions to the location, very simple things. So I would say freeing up or knocking out the BPO or eliminating the need to rely on the BPO entirely and freeing up time for the full time employees, as well as creating a better experience, only on the voice side. We haven’t even really talked about chat. That’s the other thing I’ll say is they were looking at a whole another provider entirely for the chat experience.

They were actually considering using a different provider for chat and voice. And most people that know of PolyAI, they think of us as a voice first type of play, whereas a lot of people don’t even realize we do omni channel. We do multi modal, multilingual as well. So when they brought up the chat opportunity to us, we’re like, we can do that as well.

And so essentially we were able to unify that experience to the voice and the chat, which the partner didn’t even necessarily know this when they brought it to us because we found this out in the discovery that they were in the process of redesigning their own website to support the chat, but they wanted to get the voice piece right first. And so once we found that out, then the deal became bigger and we’re like, we can actually make the experience the same on the voice and the chat. So unifying that experience on the voice, you know, multichannel as well as just making the experience better.

Every call is being answered. No calls are are going to voicemail or just missed entirely.

The employees are able to do more higher skill set things, and those are all things that ultimately drove the interest and the outcome type of decision for us.

Got it. So if I’m hearing you correctly, basically, the technology advisor brought you in to address a specific piece of it, which ultimately was the voice component. But upon bringing you in, you actually were able to uncover additional pieces to it with chat, and therefore, you ultimately expanded the opportunity. Is that right?

We we absolutely did. Yeah. The deal started off, I would say, half the size of what it ultimately… What we landed it at. And again, this is only phase one. Once we expand into the global sites, this deal is probably gonna go in size.

Wow. That’s amazing. I think the last thing everybody probably wants to know is how long did this deal take?

Good question. So six months sales cycle for this particular deal. And a lot of it wasn’t around… The timing was getting the metrics right around the proof of value period, which is how we were able to measure and put metrics around how we’re gonna be measured during the proof of value period. But it was it was negotiating those finer points. The last couple of months is what extended that sales cycle. But in terms of the interest and scoping and demoing and building an instance for them, I would probably say four months, you know, from start to finish for that particular piece.

Amazing. I love this story. I mean, so many great things that you did in partnering with a technology advisor. Again, expanding the deal, running a proof of value.

That’s really key, especially with all these AI solutions out there these days. It’s so hard to tell kind of what’s real, what’s not. But you put it into practice, and it’s very clear that you had very distinct success metrics to basically show that Poly was able to add value for voice, for chat. It sounds a lot like just wins overall, if that’s what I’m hearing.

Absolutely. And I think what made the difference is once you get beyond the art of the possible of what the technology can do, it’s what are you gonna be measured against? What will we actually put in the proof of value and in agreement for that matter on what are we going to hold ourselves accountable to? How do we define success with the customer?

And once that’s mutually agreed upon, that becomes the proof of value, that becomes the agreement. So even for the life of the term that they’re with us, we have very specific benchmarks that we are going to be held accountable to, and ultimately that’s what got the deal done, because it’s, you know, okay, this is great, I understand what it is that you can do, but I think the key difference is taking what their data, what their benchmarks were and applying it, not just what the industry standard, not just what PolyAI has done with other customers, but what can we actually do with the customer’s own data, the customer’s own integrations, the customer’s own workflow, and based upon that design, what are we going to put in writing that we’re gonna be holding ourselves accountable to?

And ultimately, that’s what made the difference with giving customer the comfort to derisk it for them and ultimately move forward.

Got it. Amazing. I love the fact that you guys… You all at PolyAI are really meeting customers sort of where they’re at and almost future proofing that AI strategy. I love it. Now… Alright. We’re gonna close this out. If you had to give our technology adviser community some key takeaways when they’re talking to their customers who might have a similar need, what would you leave them with?

I would say look at the entire opportunity in totality. Like, as an example, we only looked at the voice and we were only being brought in for a very specific thing. But over the course of just the initial discovery, we found out that the, there’s a chat opportunity, there’s a global opportunity. So these are things that were not in scope or even considered in the very beginning. So look at the entire opportunity and don’t be afraid to ask like, you know, what’s your future state? What is the vision?

I could unify all of this experience into one omnichannel experience, what would that look like for you and what would you be wanting to get out of? And then we can work backwards. We can start very small, which is in my opinion, we did start small here because we addressed their initial use case, their initial needs, but knowing that we’re gonna be able to grow with them into these other phases, into these other lines of business, into these other global sites, into these other channels, ultimately gave them the comfort of growing with them, right? So not just addressing something small now, which we can do, but we’re also gonna be there.

So I would say for the TAs looking at this, don’t be afraid to ask about what would putting in an agentic dialogue experience, what would that do for your entire organization, not just for initial line of business? And then the second thing I would say too would be, let’s get access to the customer’s actual data. What are their benchmarks? What are their workflows?

Because we can say anybody can quote a percentage, we’re gonna do this containment and that. Those are all just, I mean, those are just based on variable information. Right? But what makes it hit home is if I actually have that customer’s information.

So ask for that information early on and if they don’t have that, then that’s another area where you could potentially bring in Telarus, you could bring in other people to help uncover that to make sure that data is ready and those benchmarks and that data is able to be exposed to us because without that information, you can’t really even come to an ROI. So you have to understand what the outcomes are gonna be and more importantly, how you’re gonna measure those outcomes.

And yeah, those would be the main things I would say, you know, when looking at a deal and you know, it doesn’t have to be, you don’t have to do all these different things. And the beauty of a pure play AI solution like PolyAI, it’s irrespective of what the customer has. I mean, weren’t even talking about migrating them to a whole another platform, you know, avoiding the vendor lock, so to speak. We were able to address a very specific need for them, which was high call volume, missing calls, missing appointments, you know, just overall degradation of the customer experience that have, that people come to expect.

So, you know, I would think for a customer like this, especially where the customer experience is high, customer experience is good for everyone, but especially a brand that separates themselves on the customer experience like this club outfitter does, having a poor customer experience, a front end, a front end experience on the chat and the voice, Those those two things were at odds. So having something like this, you know, brings them up to that, know, that expectation.

I love it. No. Great summary overall. And folks, you you heard it directly from Justin.

Right? Let’s get an understanding of what a successful outcome actually looks like. What are the success KPIs around those things? And connect the solution to what the customer really needs to improve.

And in this case, it truly was the customer experience. So thanks again, Justin. Really appreciate the time. This was a fantastic one to talk about.

Just to our advisor community out there, folks, bring us all into these conversations really early. We can really help you explore the opportunity. We can help shape the right next steps. You heard it how Poly did it with proof of value and all that. And let’s really work with the customers and the supplier teams together.

But, yeah, that’s it for the CX edition of this Inside the Win.

Stay tuned for more real customer stories and practical ideas that you can take into the field. We will all see you next time.