51. What are the customer interactions of the future?

Listen in today with our incredible partner, Ryan Urbanski of Martin Advisory, as we talk trends, tech stacks, customer interactions, and more. Martin Advisory has been consulting for over 10 years, so pay close attention as Ryan shares what he’s seen, dissects some customer environments he has been through, and also lays out where he thinks we’re headed next!

Transcript of episode can be found below.

Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is 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.

Josh Lupresto (00:15):
Hey everybody, welcome back. We are on wrapping up the exciting track of contact center, kind of contact center, CC CX, customer experience, all kinds of good names. This is about specifically the interactions of the future. And, and what you’re gonna hear throughout this is you’ve seen with the contact center practices that it evolves. We have to communicate with our customers, and you have to communicate with your customers in the way that they wanna be communicated with. So I’m excited today to, to hear this from a partner’s perspective. So, Ryan Urbanski of Martin Advisory is on with us today. Ryan, thanks so much for coming on, man.

Ryan Urbanski (00:52):
Hey, thanks Josh. Thanks for having me.

Josh Lupresto (00:55):
So you know, we, we, we launched this talk track, Ryan, with first hearing from, from Sam Nelson, our fearless leader of the contact center side of the business, the CX practice. We’ll get some perspective after that from one of our suppliers and then now on on with you. So before we get in, you know, get into these weeds of, of, of talking about deals and technology and evolution, I just wanna hear about you. Tell us about how did you get started in this? You know, have you always been in tech? Did you start out doing something else, polishing boats? Like what’s the story?

Ryan Urbanski (01:30):
<Laugh>? No, we Christina and I, we started its organization in oh five. And so we had established it before that we were with mci directly prior to that. And then before that, yeah, just dabbled around in another technology fields. I’d say a little stint with Inner Call a little stint with rhythms. I think Dan was there as well. So just kind of, kind of worked our way through. And then once we decided that cuz there was a line where a lot of the carriers were actually kind of drawing a line in the sand that was delineating the customer service and stuff like that. Similar stories to everybody that started at our time. That’s when we created Martin Advisory Group. And so Martin Advisory we, we kept it agnostic. You have no idea who we are, no one knows who Martin is. So we we weren’t sure where the company was gonna go at first, so kind of just started it from there and have evolved since then, so to speak.

Josh Lupresto (02:30):
Love it. And, and evolved you have, right? Obviously huge partner, fantastic partner. Love the the energy and the effort that you guys have. So, so certainly appreciate the partnership. I wanna talk about, you know, you, you started in oh five, right? That the cx we weren’t even calling it CX then. And, you know, we weren’t contact center, I think met some, met in something different back then. Tell me about where did this, where did the cx, where did contact Center first start, you know, and how did you really learn about that broader contact center landscape?

Ryan Urbanski (03:06):
Well, the, on the contact center side, I mean, back in the day, right, there really wasn’t a lot of cloud solutions or anything for us. So when we heard of a contact center solution, immediately the, the, the flag that went up was, how many minutes can I, you know, can we propose and, and look at solutions for our clients? Right? So you wanted them to have a pretty substantial contact center. You can charge them the, the five to six per minute rate that was going through, and that was a great deal for ’em. Yeah, so I mean, back in the day, those, the, the contact center in our view was just looked at as a a service type solution for them. So then as it evolved a little bit, I would say we got, got into the contact center space probably about seven years ago on the cloud base.

Ryan Urbanski (03:50):
And so once we started getting some solutions that we can give to the clients, that’s when we kind of dipped our toes in the water and, and felt a little bit more confident going up against the Avaya solutions and Cisco solutions, the on-prem solutions the customers had in their shop today. And kind of got into that space. And so it’s been funny. I mean, it hasn’t been that long, but just to see how not only the, the technology invo has evolved, the business decisions the procurement process even this year I was talking to another partner about how this has changed so differently for us this year than it has on years past. I think it’s just a model that we continue to see as a, a large opportunity for us. I mean, as far as contact center business for, for Martin Advisory, when we started, you know, back in oh five, and I gotta reel that in a little bit, that was way too long ago.

Ryan Urbanski (04:44):
But, you know, we were network infrastructure heavy and, and services heavy. And I’d say the part of our business we make today, the infrastructure probably accounts from maybe 10 to 15% of our business contact center makes up you know, the 50% of that, the UCaaS maybe 20. And then so the other miscellaneous is on the security and stuff like that. So it’s taken up a, a large portion of our portfolio as far as what we’re doing today for our clients. And I think, and there’s different ways to get into it now, which is kind of cool. Yeah. Which we didn’t have before.

Josh Lupresto (05:15):
Exact point, right? I, I think the cool thing about this is that we’ve been able to see the channel evolve, right? You mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you worked with, you know, opportunistically what you were able to do from a technology perspective. One, the customers were, were at a certain level of evolution that was on-prem, and we were pushing a lot of SIP and prs and, and different kind of, you know, TDM based technology because we didn’t have anything else. Those A either A, those technologies didn’t exist or b, they didn’t exist in our channel as we are familiar with them and the business models that we need. So, yeah. So yeah, thankfully to your point now, almost, you know, to a scary point, there’s a lot of stuff we can sell. And so sometimes it’s just about whittling down and focusing it and, and not being, you know, overwhelmed from all the different things that are there. Yeah. I would love to talk about, you know, you, you, you mentioned kind of one of the first I would love to talk about maybe what’s the first deal that, that you’ve touched on in this space. Was it a, was it a, you know, enabling voice to an existing prem contact center? Really, what’s the first CX deal for you if you look back as far as you can recall?

Ryan Urbanski (06:21):
So, the first CX deal, they were a medical, they’re in the medical field mental health, and they went from a on-prem ShoreTel solution to going to the cloud. And then, so we got them out there. Yeah, no, it was different. I mean, they’re, they’re still, they were one of our first ones still a client today. It’s evolved a couple iterations since that initial sale. And, but you asked me the question, I was kind of smirking cause it made me think about the, the process we went through and, and how I want, I don’t wanna say clumpy, but our, it was our first one. Yeah. We didn’t have any experience on it whatsoever. So just a, a lot of the times that decision was made by the IT organization. There was no other business units involved. They kind of made the decisions and they really, because they didn’t understand it, we really went from a, like, to like, solution.

Ryan Urbanski (07:18):
So there was really no upgrades and stuff like that. And so it was, it was challenging to to take all of that because once you go from, from the on-prem to the cloud on a, like, for like, the business processes got muddled up, the technology and how they leveraged it got it muddled up. So since that time, we’ve gone through several different iterations of kind of tweaking and changing it. And I think we’re on like version 3.0 or 4.0 from that first time. So yeah, that was, that was kind of our, our, our first engagement into it. So we, and I think they had about 150 seats. So it wa it wasn’t a, a small project by any means, but it was definitely, we learned a lot by going through there as we learned from everyone that we go through. So it was interesting though. It’s funny you asked

Josh Lupresto (08:07):
I I I’m gonna come back to you brought up a good point that I think is, is critical to bring up is, is how the, how the pre-sales process has changed Uhhuh. <Affirmative>, because it’s not an, IT only saying, Hey, we bought this, you’re gonna use it now. And everybody went, okay, cool. Yep. That’s not how it works. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna come back to that in one second. I’m gonna start with a, another question first. Is that okay, you know, whether it be this customer as an example or just your overall thought on this question as an example, I wanna talk about how your, your relationships have evolved and changed and how customers look at you as you help them with these more complex projects over time. How does that, how does that frame up or how does that change your relationship with your customers, the ones that you’ve had that, that you obviously want to keep and grow?

Ryan Urbanski (08:52):
Yeah. Well, the, the, the whole process has been great on all accounts because, I mean, obviously me, I’m not an expert in it, right? I mean, I know enough to, to get my foot in the door, but we’ve really leveraged a lot of resources with our Telarus team, you know, so like Sam Nelson Jason Lowe, Meagan Thai. They’ve all been kind of our, our, our backbone or, or the, our experts in the field when it comes to getting these engagements. But what’s been nice about it is because what we’ve been able to do is, obviously we touched other business units within the organization that we didn’t have relationships with before. So while we were kind of maybe singular threaded in the IT organization, now we’re working with marketing, now we’re working with analytics, now we’re working with bi. So we kind of, we’ve been able to distribute our relationships to other parts of the organization to kind of make us more of a valuable partner for our clients. So it is only strengthened our relationship and made us less single threaded, which has been great cuz it’s led to other opportunities that we never would’ve known were available that don’t necessarily come through it all the time. So that’s been great.

Josh Lupresto (10:00):
Good, good points. Yeah, I think that’s, that’s always the end goal is that you know, we wanna do this delicately in a way that, that in, you know, helps us uncover other things. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but it really, I, that’s the indirect side effect. I think the, the direct goal is to really just make sure we’re uncovering all the concerns. So there’s any of these gotchas that come up later. And, you know, if, if we come in on a CX deal and we’re talking about the contact center needs, and the word database gets mentioned and the word homegrown gets mentioned, well, if we don’t start talking about, well, where is that database? Oh, what’s on a server that’s in the corner that is on, you know, premise-based MySQL, well, I mean, that’s hard to interact with. That’s potentially problematic if it’s not resilient. Have we thought about moving that to a cloud-based infrastructure provider?

Josh Lupresto (10:47):
Mm-Hmm. If we can mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, if we do, then it allows you to make API calls. It allows you to, you know, maybe we can get it managed for you if you don’t have a DBA on site. All those good things. And yeah, those are, those are just, I guess, valuable or, or profitable unintended consequences. So, yeah. Love to see it when that happens. And it happens more than we thought. And I, I think we’re just opening customer’s eyes and to your point Yeah, I think it translates in like, whoa. Yeah, I didn’t know they could help with that.

Ryan Urbanski (11:12):
Yep. No, it’s been great. And just streamlining and, and again, not only just the multiple relationships, but as you just talked about, you know, opening up the, their eyes to the existing infrastructure and being able to kind of make them more efficient. You know, they, they see the value of working with us. Well, wait a second, this is great. You know, an outside pair of eyes is helping us with this. Gives ’em some ideas they didn’t have internally before.

Josh Lupresto (11:34):
So I wanna ask you about, I’m gonna go back to that question that, that we, we put a pin in of the procurement process, <laugh>, the, you mentioned clunky. We went through our same, similar learning process, right? We, we were all trying to figure out how do we tackle these big deals years and years ago, and what are the different components of it? It, and I think when we realized there was this, this trifecta of important people in an enterprise deal and any, and it doesn’t even have to be enterprise anymore, but it started out with a, a quest of how do we crack enterprise and how do we help partners crack enterprise? And what we realized was, okay, this person that we thought I was our decision maker, the IT manager, they’re important. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. But the business practice leader, the customer support person, the operations person, they’re also really important.

Josh Lupresto (12:24):
We need to factor in what they need. And third, what we have to factor in is the procurement person, because they have a job and they have a different job and they have a different agenda. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, and you probably see it the procurement person and the IT person, they don’t always get along mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So sometimes we’re just a counselor in, what do you need? What do you want to get out of this? Right? Let’s figure out a way we can come together and, and kind of, you know, bridge that gap and be the oh be the mediator, I guess. Uhhuh <affirmative> to some extent. So from your, yeah. From, from your perspective, how have you seen that from the partner side as you’re getting into these deals? You know, evolution of that process in the last five to 10 years?

Ryan Urbanski (13:05):
No, it’s, and that, this is the conversation I was having with another partner, is that this is completely changed even in, in, in 2022 has really been our main focus. Cause traditionally we’ve gone through these engagements starting with the IT organization, you know, and, and so kind of how we evolved is that we, we went from there, we took their requirements, kind of looked at those through the different service providers and came back with some solutions. That was step 1.0. What happened is that we just missed a lot of things. So then what we did is step two, okay, IT organization, you had your own requirements that great version two was, okay, you’ve got your requirements, but you know what, and this was what Megan Ty was great with helping me with. There’s other there’s other requirements that you may need to address.

Ryan Urbanski (13:54):
You know, you don’t know what you don’t know. So we would go through and kind of help them compile a complete requirement list, right? Stuff that they knew, stuff that we knew from what the industry was. And that was kind of version 2.0, kind of went through the process that way. And so now what we’re experiencing is, okay, that’s great, but you know, what, we’re really missing, as I had mentioned before, the different business units that are going through. And you know, what, on top of that, marketing has these requirements that it has nothing, knows nothing about analytics has requirements and knows nothing about. So, whereas we used to start with the IT organization, I wouldn’t say that we put them last, but they’re definitely not first anymore. I mean, all these organizations have director of customer experience, director of patient needs and stuff like that.

Ryan Urbanski (14:41):
And so th there’s actually unique positions that are responsible for organizing their omni experience and their digital patient experience for, you know, on the healthcare side throughout the whole course of it. And so what we’re, what we’ve kind of migrated to here internally is, okay, let’s, let’s start the conversation with these groups, right? I mean, they’re, they’re, they’re different to talk to. You know, we’ve been talking to IT people for the last 15 years. It’s kind of cool to, to talk to someone in marketing or start the conversations that way, but their requirements kind of, they take priority over what it needed. So it was kind of driving the ship. They’ve kind of stepped aside and most organizations are saying, Hey, whatever marketing and they need, they’re gonna drive the ship. It, you need to figure out how to make it happen. So we’re starting our conversations with those units and then trickling down and kind of looping in it as we go on.

Ryan Urbanski (15:33):
That’s been the biggest, biggest change and, and biggest kind of shift that we’ve made in our business this year and going into the future. And it’s actually, the great thing about it is that, cuz as you mentioned, a lot of those gotchas, when we were going through the old way, we’d get to implementation only to find out that everything we were activating and turning on wasn’t necessarily what the business wanted. So then we had to go back and there was a lot of situations where we would stand this up based on what it was saying, only to have to do a professional services engagement to realign it. And so now that we’re kind of getting on the ground with these other business units, we’re hitting the ground running a little bit smoother on these implementations than may of where we had in the past. So that’s, that’s a long-winded answer to your question there, but no good. It’s,

Josh Lupresto (16:22):
It’s good. That’s, that’s what I wanna make sure that people understand is that it doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter when you jump into doing this mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but what really matters is you’ve gotta know the history of how we’ve got here. Yeah, I’m not, I’m not trying to go back to the Alexander Graham bell, what a pots line was, but you’ve gotta understand the last five to 10 years of what customers have gone through, both, because I think that helps you in the selling process, but two, you have to understand where customers are because you may want to get them here. And the, it’s not always a, it’s not always a leapfrog process. Sometimes it does have to happen serially to that point mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And so you’ve gotta understand where they’re at, where they’re at, and, and otherwise you, you can’t get them to where they need to go. So no, great, great example. Yeah.

Ryan Urbanski (17:05):
Yeah. Perfect.

Josh Lupresto (17:07):
I wanna talk for a second. I, I wanna get into kind of a detailed, more recent example of what, what you experienced and what you went through. But before I do that, I, I wanna, I wanna talk a little bit about, you know, the interaction side of this. So if I flash back to, you know, what our vendor portfolio looked like 10, you know, five years ago, even the idea of an interaction meant, well, it’s gonna be, you know, through a contact center seat, and the agent is gonna have the ability to maybe, maybe take some email into that, maybe a voice channel only, and we’re gonna voice route, but then we’re gonna give you analytics around it and reporting, and that’s great and that’s all you need. But then if we look at, now, the last five plus years have, have opened up both from products coming to market, but probably more importantly of what the changing demographic of the customer base was.

Josh Lupresto (18:00):
I think everybody realized that, and everybody in product that these vendors realized, we have to be able to communicate with the customers in the way that they want to communicate with us. So if they wanna voice call us, great. If they want to text us because they don’t wanna pick up a phone, great. If they want to email, if they wanna use WhatsApp, whatever, we’ve gotta be able to appeal to all these things. And so I think what it created, it, it, those that were opportunistic created the ability as vendors to come in and say, you know, somebody like ADA comes into our portfolio. We’re just, we’re a chatbot company. We wanna enable you. And maybe for you, maybe that’s a wedges product, maybe you can’t come in and rip out the full seat, right? And so I think what, what behind the scenes, what we’re trying to do is obviously we want our, we want our providers to continue to evolve and say, yes, not only are we a leader in voice, we’re a leader in sms, we’re a leader in chat.

Josh Lupresto (18:49):
We have all those that’s bundled, but maybe if you come into a deal, maybe ripping out the whole thing isn’t up for grabs. Maybe they’ve sunk cost into something else. And so we need to enable you to go in with whatever tools you need from a vendor perspective. So, long-winded way to load up this question, but I, I, I, I just, I wanna understand maybe from your perspective out there, what you’re seeing in trends in the asks from customers around the interactions. And where do you think that, where have you seen that kind of go, right? Have you, how, how important, I guess, have you seen the omnichannel component be over the last few years as these practices have evolved?

Ryan Urbanski (19:28):
I mean, it’s the, it’s, it’s the number one aspect. I mean, just as you talked about the, whether it’s the customer base, whether it’s efficiencies that the organization wants, maybe they, they don’t want to have the staff to, to be able to do this, and they want a little bit more automation to, to offset some of these common interactions. I mean, you, you hit it right on the head. And so, I mean, I don’t, and there’s a fine line, right? I mean, I’m not throwing anyone under the bus, but Frontier Airlines decision to, to stop taking calls all of a sudden. Yes. You know? Yes. Oh my God. So funny. Cause I was talking to my daughters about that. I was like, let’s test it. So I called the, called the number to actually see if there was some way to, to backdoor and get it through to someone.

Ryan Urbanski (20:05):
And there really wasn’t. And so, I mean, you, you can get a lot of stuff done with the Omni, but you, you, there has to be a balance. And so the, I mean, our, our business, we focus on the healthcare side, on the financial side. So there’s some unique compliance things that has to happen on the omni side with both of those. But, but what we’re finding, and then we do some work on the non-profit side. And so what, what we’re finding is whether it’s, you know, a click to dial, you know, whether there’s a, there’s a someone that’s interested in getting some mental health, but they’re, they don’t wanna make the step of scheduling appointment, but they do want to talk to someone. And, and so I’ve got customers that are, that are trying to make it easier to start, start engaging, you know, these people and you talk about a different base, maybe they just want to chat.

Ryan Urbanski (20:51):
Maybe they’re not comfortable talking about it at first, but they’d like to chat with a, a clinician. You know what I mean? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So it’s helping them create these these potential clients and the, the helping their patients on a level that they weren’t able to do before, simply because they didn’t want to do the phone call. And so they can actually have, they talk about the number of interactions, eight to 10 interactions via text, you know, they start with the chat, it moves the text, you know, goes through those methods before a phone call’s even made. And so, yeah, we’ve got a lot of clients that are pulling that omni stuff through. And so what we’re working with recently is a lot of automation on the email and chat instances, I would say, for our business. So a lot of our clients, they want to, they’re spending a lot of their time and they’re using a lot of resources internally going through some of these more common tasks.

Ryan Urbanski (21:50):
And so we’re really trying to work on whether it’s streamlining the subject line of the emails that come in or, or doing some things on the texting side, trying to get a little bit more automation into there so that the agents they have are only needed to do unique requests instead of the, so that’s, that’s kind of where we’re seeing our business kind of migrating through. So when, when we talk about what’s happening on the voice side, the, it’s almost like the voice side’s kind of a, a third place type conversation, right? The contact center used to be completely voice first, everything else. Second Voice is really kind of an afterthought at this point of what we’re trying to get done.

Josh Lupresto (22:28):
Agree. Yeah. Great, great example. It’s funny you bring up the frontier thing. I was just talking to somebody about that, about that news mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And we were presenting some stats about you know, trends, trends to look for for 2023 and beyond. And one of the big trends in that was that 87% of the customers out there are the, the end customer is willing to pay more for a better experience because we all know how bad it is and how painful when we have a bad experience. And in my mind here look, this podcast is not sponsored by Delta. If they wanna sponsor it, they’re more than welcome to <laugh>. But here we’re a big Delta hub in Salt Lake and Uhhuh. And so we, we love Flying Delta. And I’d say one of the things that Delta has done well is, you know, when’s the last what’s the, the last thing you ever want to have difficulty communicating with?

Josh Lupresto (23:17):
It’s in travel, right? When travel goes bad, you want to, you wanna solve it and get over it quickly. And one of the things that Delta’s done is they figured out an easy way to communicate however you wanna communicate with them. You wanna text, you wanna call, you wanna, whatever your status matters, all of that good stuff. The reality is you’re gonna pay more for Delta than you’re gonna pay for Frontier. And this study was about 87% of people came out right at the time as frontier says, we’re cutting voice <laugh>. Now, if I was a Frontier Lifer and Frontier did a survey to me and said, would you, you be willing to pay $5 more a ticket if we, you know, if we give you premier voice you know, support tier one story mm-hmm. <Affirmative> absolutely all day long. Yeah. Yeah. So you’ve gotta know what your customers want. I got it’s cost cutting and weird economic headwinds and all that good stuff that people are going through. So I, I can’t speak for their business case, but yeah, I think, yeah,

Ryan Urbanski (24:05):
What, and, and there’s times where you need to talk to someone, right? I mean, Southwest, they have a great online experience and you could do a lot of stuff through their app, but there’s a couple of times where you just, you need to talk to someone, you know, Hey, I, I need to take this person off my register or whatever, that you can do through the tool and you need to talk to someone. So it’s nice to have that lifeline there, but they cut it off completely. Was it’s crazy. So we’ll see if that gets reversed or whatnot.

Josh Lupresto (24:27):
Crazy. It kind of reminds me of the old days where you know, when, when uc first started, partners would, would ask, how do I jump into this? Maybe I’ve, maybe I’ve done network, I haven’t jumped into uc, and that was really one of our first advanced solutions. And we said, go out there, walk in door, knock, see what phones they have on the desk. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> call in. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, get an experience, try to get through to support, try to get through to whatever. And I think we’ve gotta use the frontier thing as a reminder of, we can still do that. Let’s see what the experience is like. We might have a relationship, we might have a target, we might have a prospect, but we don’t know what our wedge in, we don’t, we don’t know what our realization for need to do something is from the customer side. So sometimes we have to find it. So that, that frontier thing’s certainly reminded yeah. That, that one just was surprising.

Ryan Urbanski (25:12):
Yeah. No, and you’re spot on. I mean, a lot of the times what we’ll do is, you know, when we get a referral or something like that for a, a new opportunity, we’ll go through, we’ll do exactly that, spend some time on their website finding different ways to, whether it’s chat maybe it’s an sms, see what the response time is, we’ll kind of go through that and we’ll also call ’em, see what’s going on. So by the time we get to the first conversation, it’s not, Hey, what are your, you know, what’s going on? We can actually say, Hey, listen, you know, I, I kind of went through the queue. I was in your chat bot, it took me 15 minutes to get someone there. Are you guys using that as a, a real tool or is that just something you pinned up? Cuz you feel you need to have that? And so we kind of are able to kind of go into that first conversation with a lot of ammo and, and knowledge prior to just saying, Hey, you know, you got something going on. So, no, that’s, you bring up a great point. It’s great to get the customer experience prior to getting into those new prospects.

Josh Lupresto (26:01):
Kudos to you though. I mean, that is that if, if, if two people are calling your prospect and the other one is calling them saying, Hey, I I can help you with this. Maybe I could save you some money. And you come in and say, listen, we did this. I pretended like I was an end customer and I did it and here’s what I experienced. Is that okay with you? Did you know that? I mean, that, your angle on that is just so different. Right? Kudos to you for mm-hmm. <Affirmative> for going through that process. Mm-Hmm.

Ryan Urbanski (26:25):
<Affirmative>.

Josh Lupresto (26:27):
Okay. as we get to kind of the last couple questions here, I want to hit you with one of a, I wanna talk about a detailed example. You know, we talk about in the beginning how you got into this space, the evolution, the first deal you sold. I would love, love to hear, and, and we certainly don’t have to share customer names and stuff like that, but, you know, walk us through something that you’ve been brought into recently. And, and here’s the things that I would love to kind of have everybody understand. One, you know, did it, did it end up looking like what you thought it was going to be in the beginning? And two, really, what, what were the problems? What were the complaints and what kind of tech stack did they have prior? And what did you end up putting in place? What ended up fixing and and what did it solve?

Ryan Urbanski (27:15):
So let’s use this example. So they are a nonprofit maybe about 200 seats. International. They are business is to sponsor children impoverished children across the different countries of the world. And so they had an on-prem genesis solution, and we went through the process of looking at different service providers that moved into a, a cloud-based provider. And I won’t say which one, I guess the, the for sake of this one, but basically it was their first, it was their first iteration from going on-prem to cloud. And so I, let me go through this a little bit. So what happened is that we didn’t necessarily do a like to, like, we did some improvements and they went through and it was good. But what we found out was that a lot of the business practices that they had established and the way they were doing things from like a workforce management perspective, they were realigning skills on the fly and taking people in and out of things and really doing a manual process because that’s how they had to do it in the old world.

Ryan Urbanski (28:24):
So when they got to the new world, there was a lot of business practices that they had that didn’t translate and it, it just didn’t work out the same and it didn’t give ’em the same information. Cause now all of a sudden what happened is that when they moved to the prem, to the this new solution, they were getting analytics and information that before they never thought mm-hmm. You know, they didn’t know that they had 2000 emails that were unapplied to, and they were just sitting in queue before they, they just couldn’t see how many they had there. So now all of a sudden this was a good solution, but it created kind of question mark in their head. They’re like, well, wait a second. You know, why are all these problems happening? They’re like, well, we didn’t know we had these problems before.

Ryan Urbanski (29:07):
We’re like, well, okay, we do now fix them. So their way to fix them was to to just kind of tweak and, and manage some things. And, and so we, we, we put a stop on that is what happened. And so what happened is that we, we got some other resources involved from an engagement perspective. We got some additional resources within their company to get going. And so what happened is that they were, they were missing their KPIs on their, their call to answer, you know, it was supposed to be I think 30 seconds, and it was like five minutes on the voice side, on the email side, as I said, I mean, their, their largest backlog was about 5,000 emails. And they were supposed to respond to those within 24 hours. And then they had the longest priority was, was five days.

Ryan Urbanski (29:50):
And so what we did was that we kind of went through and said, okay, let’s, let’s restart this whole program and kind of understood what their business practices were. And we actually went and kind of retooled their workforce management organization to, to kind of tweak their mindset a little bit. But what they were able to do then was they took that 5,000 email backlog and all of a sudden their KPIs with the automation and stuff we had talked about earlier, they started getting that backlog down or actually ahead of the account. And then, so they started having, they were using a BPO organization to compliment theirs. So they had their team here and they had another team in Thailand. They were actually able to scale back their team in Thailand by about 15 agents to 20 agents just for some of this automation and stuff that we did. So their bottom line saw big reduction in what they were trying to do. So, I mean, I don’t, I don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for, but Perfect. That’s kinda the latest case on, on how this, this technology and stuff like that kind of helps serve them a little bit better, not only their, their, their, their sponsors, but as well as kind of cut some bottom line internally. Yeah,

Josh Lupresto (30:58):
No, that’s perfect. I, I think what, what I imagine in this from a visual perspective is our, our ability to put an x-ray over this deal mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, right? And really understand how did we get here, what did we, what were the key things that helped the customer see the light? And I think you called out all of those, right? The things that maybe some of those they were thinking about and others you helped them realize and see and probably a lot more of the latter. And then you’re ultimately the hero in that, and you’re putting a solution in place that not only just solves problems, it evolves them, and then it, it, it gets them into a vehicle that they can continue to drive for years and years grow and scale and, and, and all of that good stuff with. So no, that was a awesome, awesome example. Exactly what I was looking for.

Ryan Urbanski (31:38):
Perfect, perfect. And yeah, you mentioned, I’m not, I am not the hero. I don’t know anything I <laugh>, I mean, I, I leverage your team in, in kind of what you guys are doing there. The, the, the nice thing, and the way I position it with my clients is obviously I’m not the expert, right? I mean, you guys are the ones that are in different opportunities with different types of clients and different service providers on the daily, you know, your team has eight to 10 meetings a day, let’s say, with different client experiences. So the, the exposure you guys have and just without having to be certified on every single break, you guys hear about so many different situations that it saves me and my clients a lot of legwork. You know what I’m saying? When we’re in there trying to talk about things and, and they speak about a couple of things and, and Megan and team kind of, oh, wait a second, I’ve heard about that. You know, this gotta help that way. It just saves us so much time trying to go through that process and stuff like that. So no, you, it’s your team that I leverage. I don’t know anything lovely,

Josh Lupresto (32:36):
Appreciate the, it’s kind, it’s it’s hard to call this work when you get to, to come in and, and do what you love every day. Yeah. I’d tell you, you guys do have the hard job. I mean, I don’t want to go back to door knocking selling stuff. Yeah. So if you can knock down the doors, we will, we will ly hold up our end of the bargain of helping you on the tech side. Happily. We love it. Yeah. So good stuff. That’s great. That’s what makes it a good partnership.

Ryan Urbanski (33:01):
Yep.

Josh Lupresto (33:02):
Okay. So as we as we look into our, our, and, and not everybody’s gonna get this reference, but some people are gonna get it as we look into our Miss Cleo eight ball here and our, our our magic, magic crystal ball the, the Ryan Urbanski opinion of, of the future. I mean, you’ve seen a lot of evolutions in this, of, of what the customers need. You’ve seen evolutions in the tech stack. If you just look out a little ways, look out, you know, let’s, let’s, let’s add one, one variable into this. Let’s add in the variable of the fact that a lot of companies right now are being asked to improve efficiency, do more with less, all that good stuff. But, but couple, in everything that you’ve seen up to this point, do we continue down the same trends of, of the same conversations that we’re having because there’s so much area for tech improvement and efficiency improvement, or what are your opinions just, I mean, interactions of the future? Where does it continue to head?

Ryan Urbanski (33:55):
Well, I think just, I mean, kind of complimenting some of the conversations we had earlier, right? I mean, I, I think it’s a completely different customer experience. I think different different business units are driving these conversations internally. And I think some of the, the different interactions that the companies want with their clients has also evolved quite a bit. I mean, we’re, we’re going through the I wouldn’t say an undercurrent, but they, I’ve just noticed, I’ve been in the business for a while. I’m noticing a lot of my clients are, are starting to retire, right? And so we’re coming in with kind of a, as you mentioned, a new generation of individuals and stuff that are coming in there. So, so those individuals are used to having interactions with the company is a little bit different than maybe the outgoing support is doing.

Ryan Urbanski (34:45):
So it’s, it is been kind of, it’s, it’s refreshing and it also kind of rejuvenating to kind of work with this younger subset of, of executives that are coming in that have a different mindset on where things are going. And no, I think it’s just, it’s simply gonna progress that way. I mean, I think when we say the customer experience, I think that’s exactly it. I don’t, I don’t think we’re gonna be calling it a call center anymore, and I don’t even know if we’re still doing that today. So it’s really just that the customer experience and, and everything goes along with with that and how those tie in across all the different business units across the board into that sector. So, no, I think you’re spot on. Good, good spot on stuff,

Josh Lupresto (35:23):
Josh. Good stuff, man. Well, Ryan, that brings us up to the end. I really appreciate you coming on, spending a little bit of time with me this morning. And thanks so much for doing it, man.

Ryan Urbanski (35:32):
No, I appreciate it. Thanks for letting me ramble and stuff like that. <Laugh>. It’s a, it’s a, a subject I’m passionate about. It’s fun. It’s a lot of fun. So I appreciate appreciate the time.

Josh Lupresto (35:43):
Okay. That wraps us up for today, everybody. Thanks for joining. Ryan Urbanski of Martin Advisory. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of engineering at Telarus. This is Next Level BizTech.