Ep. 86 Revisited- CX and Your Journey into the Omnichannel World with Guest Meagan Thai

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New episodes launch next Wednesday, Jan 24, 2024. Today, we are revisiting the legendary CX Solution Architect Meagan Thai of Telarus. We discuss how Omni-channel is still so critical to understand, what some of the latest trends partners need to be aware of, and huge tips for more success when talking to customers to put yourself in their shoes!

Can you believe that we’re already at 100 episodes? While we go and ramp up and get ready for season three, we’re gonna take you back, listen to some of the great moments in these past episodes. So stay tuned as we take you back to season one and two. (upbeat music) – Hey everybody, welcome back to a brand new episode today. We’re talking about how to unleash CX excellence and journey into the omni-channel world. Today we have on the wonderful, the amazing, Meagan Thai also been called legendary, CX solution architect of Telarus Meagan thanks for coming on and doing this. – Thank you, Josh, good to be here. Does that mean I’m old? – No, no, no, ageless, ageless, timeless, whatever you wanna call it.

Meagan I wanna kick this off first about you. I want everybody to get to know you, right? We always talk about what are people’s journeys, how do they get into this? So let’s hear your journey, what’s been your path into this space? Did you always set out to do this? Did you stumble into this? Love to hear it. – Yeah, never would have imagined I’d be doing this decades ago. So yes, the legendary, I’ve been around it, been around for a few decades.

I don’t think people know this about me, but I have a degree in child development. So I used to work in that industry. Now some people will say, “Oh, it comes in handy for what you do these days.” But I was in that industry earlier on, my 20s, early 20s, and thought, you know what? The parents were kind of difficult to manage. The kids were great, but the parents not so much. I wanted to change and I got a break into sales from a family member, says, “You know, I think you’d be good. We’ll come in, we’ll train you on how to do this.” I’m thinking sales, what? Okay. So I went in, I was groomed, and back then it was a cable harnessing company. We started manufacturing cables and wire harnesses for Nortel, Meridian Systems, that kind of stuff. Little did I know that was going to be my path, right?

So I got my first shot in sales doing that and I would do account management, direct selling, and didn’t really enjoy direct selling so much. And then I got a taste for partner selling, what we call the channel today. But back then it was so new and this is probably in 2001. Back then it was called Alliance. It was an Alliance partner program. And no one knew what it was, including the team that was hired. But when I started getting a taste for, “Hey, how do you help partners sell this technology?” And it was T1s and DSL, right? Internet services back then. And I just enjoyed it because I loved working with partners hand in hand, and I can go to the partner and say, “Hey, where’s this order?” Put pressure on them versus putting the pressure on me to get the order from the customer. But I really just enjoyed the relationship and the educating and just working side by side with the partner for the same goal.

And the rest is history. So I’ve been doing that for, gosh, what 20 plus years now selling in the channel.

– Love it, love it. Nortel, oh man, it sucks you in. It sucks you in whether you plan on it or not. – That’s right. – So let’s talk about, all right, here we are in 2023. We’ve had a lot of episodes where we talk about different segments of contact center and customer experience. We’ve talked workforce management. We’ve talked all these different things.

What does omni-channel mean if we’re just defining this here? In 2023, but also, why is it still so important? – Yeah, it absolutely is important. It’s funny because, so when I started with Telarus about five years ago and back in 2018, we had to properly define what omni-channel meant. You know, it’s a way to seamlessly move your customer interactions between different channels of communications, whether it’s voice, SMS, chat, whatever, move them around seamlessly without losing contact with that customer. Hugely important, it still is today.

But I remember back then, we would define it as, you know, what does it really mean to be omni-channel versus multi-channel? Today, I think it’s a little bit different. It’s starting to pivot. The omni-channel word is still out there and is still being used anonymously with CCAS or contact center. So I hear partners all the time, as soon as they start talking about contact center technology, they mention omni-channel.

But what I think we need to realize, and it’s really important is, and our vendors are starting to do this, whether they may not say channel anymore, it is still omni as far as the transactions go, but they’re starting to say words like interactions and engagements, not so much channel. To me, I think, I agree with that. To me, it is still important to understand as a business, what different types of communication methods do you need to deliver to your customers, to the outside world? So again, I use the word channel still, right? But interaction and engagements, I think more defined what that means. So that’s really important. Now, back then too, we were really, really focused more on the voice piece and being able to move voice to chat to SMS.

Now we’re starting to hear more about the digital interactions, digital channels, right? It’s all about what can we do at the front door, whether it’s a web chat or a chat bot, whether it’s social media, it’s texting, because that’s how people communicate these days. Voice is still important. Josh, you and I worked a deal years ago where this customer was gonna cut out voice entirely and we thought, are you crazy? No, don’t do that. Because they were having issues with that and the feedback from their customers were, we need someone to call and talk to live. So we still want that voice channel or that voice interaction. But what I’m starting to see as far as the speak goes or the language in our industry, is more about interactions and engagements and how do we capture that? How do we continue to move it from different channels or different interactions seamlessly? So that’s still important. I honestly think it’s super, super important now because think about how we communicate at a personal level. And that has continued to increase as far as the expectations, right? So as you and I are just regular customers, but we’re dealing personally with one another or with our brands and services,

I think it’s even more important now to have omni-channel or omni-digital channels or digital interactions, because we’re so used to having everything at our fingertips.

And I think as regular consumers like you and I, the technology that’s out there, we know it’s improving over time, it’s faster, it’s more intelligent. We want answers now, we want it in real time, we want it fast, we don’t have to talk to multiple people or have multiple interactions to get what we want, any of our issues resolved really. So I think that’s what’s driving it. And that’s why it continues to be so much more important because we know technology is there, it’s getting better in order to get us the information that we need and the answers and our issues resolved in real time, faster.

– I mean, I think you bring up a great point too of,

it’s about what is changing, right? And I’m gonna jump now into a little bit about trends, things that you’re seeing in there. And I think you bring up this thing of whether it’s right or wrong to expect an answer right now, that’s the precedent that’s been set, that really great customer experience

is something that can get me an answer quickly, right? Regardless of what the answer is, how it’s handled, that’s a different conversation, but there is that expectation. So I’m curious from your perspective, right? As we talk about trends and we jump into that, what do you see now, right? Is it us having to pull customers forward? Is it customers coming to us saying how I do this or just what are the trends that you’re seeing overall? – Yeah, so I’m gonna get you the buzzwords in a minute now, we’re gonna talk a little bit about that. Okay, but before that, as we’re talking about trends and what I’m seeing too, and we keep saying CX, CX, right? Cause we’ve been talking about customer experience forever,

but I want the audience to know that it’s more than just CX now. It is about the X experience, but it’s not just customer experience. It’s in healthcare, you’re looking at patient experience, PX, right? In the finance world with credit unions, they call their clients members, the member experience. And then what’s even more important is we have to remember it’s the internal experience as well. So you’ve got the employees, the agents. So all of these, right? EX, AX, PX, MX, all these Xs, it’s all about the experience. So whether you’re an outside client or you’re an internal employee handling those interactions for the clients. So I think that’s one thing we have to be aware of. And so I think that one of the trend is that CX, that acronym is still being used quite a bit, but it’s expanded beyond that. Now the buzzwords though, the hottest and latest things are the trends are AI. AI, artificial intelligence, chat GPT, generative AI, all these buzzwords.

So years ago, we were talking about AI, but we would always say, you know what? AI is pretty complex. So if you’ve got customers bringing up the term AI, just come to us, we’ll talk to them. And that is still the message. It is still very complex. It has grown and improved and advanced. Now it’s like AI on steroids. I don’t know what it’s gonna look like a few years from now because it’s vastly changing.

And of course there are people who are afraid of what AI can do, right? Is it secure? You know, within any new technology, you’ve got people who are looking to scam you so they can always use that technology to their advantage. So we still have to be careful of course, but it is amazing what it can do. So the trends that I’m seeing now, a few things,

is using AI, generative AI to summarize things. So a lot of our vendors are coming out now and leveraging open AI or some other type of a chat GPT or any type of AI platform to enhance their own AI capabilities. And so one of three things I’m seeing as trends with this, one is summarizing meetings. You can take a whole hour meeting and put it now into one paragraph that tells you, oh, these were the key points we talked about. Here are the next steps. Done, right? Amazing. So I’m seeing that quite a bit as a trend from our vendors in the contact center space that’s saying, hey, we offer this now. The other thing I see is conversational AI, right? So a lot of self-servicing, for me personally, I love this, as long as it works well, but being able to provide a voice interactive, or maybe it’s a chat bot that’s very interactive, right? So it’s two ways. But the idea is the conversational AI is more of a speech recognizing, right? Maybe it can do some voice biometrics to authenticate a user. But that’s what’s starting. Remember we talked about that whole digital interaction or engagement is conversational AI is a huge piece of that at the front door. So it could be a virtual assistant, virtual agent, whatever they call it, but it’s very interactive and it understands your speech and it could address a lot of the mundane questions, right? But I think what’s key is if you go that conversational AI route, you still need to have some sort of escalation to a live agent. Because if it’s not providing the service or resolving your customer’s issues, you want to have that capability, right? The ability is to go to a live agent and get that result by human, still top priority.

The other thing is agent assist.

So we’ve seen that thrown around a little bit

in a couple of different ways. But in this term here, what I’m thinking as far as the trend goes is we’re seeing a lot of vendors now saying, “Hey, how do we make our agents’ lives easier, “our employees?” And I do see it twofold. I see it benefiting the agent, but I also see it benefiting the client, right? Getting all that. – It all matters, yeah. – Totally.

But the idea is, so now we’re using AI on the backend, we’re listening in on the conversation, we’re pulling keywords. We know that Josh is asking for, what is the latest rate? Can I refi? And it’s pulling up for me as an agent. Maybe it’s a link to a knowledge base. Maybe it’s a PDF or something on the backend where it’s, here’s the trigger words. And it’s presenting me as the agent with information so that I can help address Josh the customer.

Information at my fingertips, so I don’t have to go hunting around and stumble around and not be able to resolve the issue and have the client call back, right? So we’re doing everything in real time, allowing our agents to be more efficient, be able to resolve things quicker. And at the end of that all, guess what? Now we’re using AI to summarize what happened with this interaction so that me as an agent, I don’t have to spend time, my full two or three minutes typing up my rap code, right? Or my disposition positions, or what’s the next steps? What do I have to do? It’s doing all that for me. So now it’s presenting, again, summarizing, hey, you had this 10 minute conversation with Josh, here’s what was resolved, here’s the next step, the ticket is still open or not, it’s closed, bam, you’re done, and it presents it there. Now I can archive that little tidbit and be done with it and move on to my next engagement. I mean, it’s all doing this again, remember, in real time, quickly, efficiently, more accurately.

But regardless, I think it’s helping both the agent side and the client side. – Well, I think it’s interesting, right? I mean, you bring up a point of, it makes the agent experience better, or the employee experience better. And if you think about two things that that might solve for a business, one, we’re helping people potentially onboard their agents faster, more effectively, more structured, more repeatable. But sometimes the biggest pain point in a contact center is attrition. And if we can do two things, we can help people onboard employees faster, but we can also make the employees lives better, then we can help with the attrition side of it, right? So maybe we’re killing kind of two birds with one stone here. And I think all of that ends up in a better customer experience. So I think you bring up some really solid points there. – Yeah, absolutely.

– So if we think about it then, if we look forward here, we’re gonna jump to the future right away. If you take all that into consideration then, what’s your prediction on what’s coming? What is the future in regards to the CX side of it? – So, and this is just based on what I hear from our customers, right?

A lot of customers are looking for everything to be all in one. I think that the future is gonna be further blending of UCaaS and contact center. A lot of our opportunities are what we call an all in one solution. Customers are saying, I need both. They’re either leading in with contact center, and then saying, oh, by the way, we have back office users, hundreds of them that we need to tie into, or it’s the other way around. Usually we see it come in being pulled through the contact center discussion, right? InUCaaS So we’re starting to see this in our industry, whether our vendors are acquiring or building their own platforms, right? So if they’re leading withUCaaS they’re acquiring or building their own contact center or vice versa, or they’re partnering very well with those other platforms that we know will work seamlessly between the two. So I think that’s still gonna continue. That whole mix of UC, CC, that whole gray area, it’s all gonna become one. It’s just gonna be communications platform, or maybe an employee efficiency platform, or however you wanna call it, but I think it’s gonna be all in one. What I’m also seeing is more of that discussion with the CRM, right? So we’re seeing some CRM players out there who says, hey, we can do voice too. Why don’t you do it all in one platform? And in the back of our minds, we think, hold on, your core is CRM. It’s not voice.

But they’re attempting to do this. So I hear, and I’m starting to see, maybe this is the future. It would be nice for me, because I’m lazy, would be nice to have everything there, my fingertips, right, too many applications. I want one single pane. I want my CRM. I want my UCaaS I want my CCAS. I want everything all together. My forecasting, everything. Quality management. I want everything in one platform. So I see that will be the trend of the future.

And I think it can be. I think what we’re seeing in the industry, too, with what our vendors are starting to do, their business decisions, I think, will just lead us there. I don’t know. I could be totally wrong, but it’s just what I’m hearing from customers’ expectations. – Yeah, I mean, it’s just a changing landscape, too. I mean, but did you ever think that Slack would be doing voice or Twilio would be getting into these different, you know, everybody’s getting into something different. So yeah, it’s just, the lines are blurring, for sure. – Very much. – So let’s talk about, let’s get into some data around some deals, right? I think the part of the huge thing that you can offer is you see so many things. You talk to so many customers. You talk to so many partners. So let’s first talk about industries and verticals. What are you seeing or where are you being brought into where you feel like there’s a big room for improvement of these verticals need to improve their experience? And then what are really some of the challenges in that? – Mm-hmm. So I can tell you that most of my opportunities, I still see a lot in the finance world, the FinTech, the credit unions with multiple branches,

not so much like the big, big well-known banks, but again, the regional banks with multiple locations. I still see a lot of that. I see a lot of healthcare and healthcare, again, not necessarily the big giant hospitals. Sometimes those do pop up, but more of the behavioral, mental behavioral healthcare clinics, for example,

or maybe a regional hospital with a bunch of different clinics around them, or it could be rehab facilities, assisted living, nursing homes, things like that. And I think the challenge is that they have theirs, a lot of times they’re on antiquated legacy on-prem systems or they don’t have the infrastructure. So oftentimes we hear about, there are concerns about how do we migrate over? We’ve been on this platform. We knew we need to get off of it, but our infrastructure may not support it. So we have some analog, whether it’s devices,

life safety lines and whatnot that we need to roll into this project. How do we manage that piece and make sure everything goes seamlessly? So that’s one thing.

The other vertical that I love to hear from is manufacturing. I do still see that time to time pop up and I get excited because I know I can help them. I know that they’re completely antiquated.

But when we deal with an environment like that, what typically happens is they’ll tell me,

our demographics, our employees have been here for decades and they want a hard phone and they will not deviate. So we can’t talk about a chat bot. First of all, the demographics that we’re also servicing want to make a phone call and they want a live answer. They’re not gonna touch a chat bot or a web chat or a voice recognition, any of that. They’re not gonna text, they want live phone calls. And I said, that’s fine, that’s great. We can still support that. So, but it’s interesting that you hear this and you feel good because you know you can help them out because they don’t understand what technologies are in place today. So it’s always fun to talk about, you know, what’s the art of possibility, but the minute you hear them say, no, no, no, we want live answer, we’re old school, we just want it in the cloud now, then you start changing that discussion and listen to what they have to say and accommodate what they have to say. You know, you’re gonna get them in a better spot with improved customer experience and play experience and whatnot, but just you don’t have to give them all the bells and whistles. So those are the challenges, but we also hear oftentimes from education, from automotive, retail. So it’s the same industries that we’ve seen from time to time, but I would say the majority of the industries I speak with now is financial and healthcare, and it’s all about self-servicing. It’s all about automation and self-servicing. – If I’m a partner and I’m listening to this, is there any customers, right? You know, I’m thinking about, I got my existing customers, I got my maybe net new ones that I wanna go after and I wanna probe. Is there any industry that you would recommend not chasing or are you always finding a way to be able to help in any of these verticals? What’s your two cents there? – I think we’re always finding a way.

You know, I think in the past, when it came to hospitality, we were very limited, especially as far as UCaaS goes. I think with Context Center, it’s a little bit,

we’ve got platforms that are a little bit more robust that can support that, but from a UCaaS perspective, it was always, oh no, stay away from hospitality because we cannot integrate into the property management software. That’s changed now though. We do have some solid vendors in our portfolio that can solve for that, so don’t be afraid to come to us with any hospitality opportunities.

What’s interesting too is we’re starting, I had a call just this morning about CRM. We have a customer who’s going after CRM, so we get asked that more and more these days. How do we, we need a CRM solution? And it’s typically standalone. Maybe it’s for ticketing or maybe it’s a true CRM.

Sometimes I’ll get asked, can it be part of the solution itself? That actually is challenging. Having a CRM built into a Context Center or a UCaaS solution, we might have two that can do that. So, and then as far as a standalone CRM, we might have some options there too, maybe a couple different options or ones that we can help custom build. So I would say no industry, no vertical is impossible for us to help, but I think it depends on the technology. So if they are asking for CRM, let’s just become more cautious of it. Talk to us though. Like don’t be afraid to come to us with any opportunity. Chances are we can help you in some way.

– Awesome. All right, let’s get into the nuts and bolts of a deal. So walk me through, I think what we like to dissect in this part is really hearing about, you know, we keep customer names and partner names out of it. We can talk about, hey, I was brought into this situation. What was the problem? How did the conversation go? And then ultimately what did we end up doing? – Okay, so by the time we are brought in, what we would love to see though from the partner at least is do you have any insight as to why we’ve been talking to them, right? There’s a reason why, what’s that compelling reason? Give me some information, whatever you have, whether it’s use your account, a website, I love getting a website just so I can go and poke around and see what industry they’re in. What does it feel like to go through that experience and try to contact them, right? And see maybe where some of the missteps are. So that at a very minimum. Oftentimes I’ll get, by the time a partner comes to me, he says, hey, I’ve got a call center opportunity. That to me is always a, aha, call center. He said call center. So now I need to go through the discovery process and figure out, can we do this with UCaaS Is it just voice? Do we need to go full on contact center, right? Because they don’t know. Sometimes when they hear call center from their customer, they get excited and they think, it’s a contact center opportunity, it might not be. So we have to go through that discovery. So by the time it gets to me, usually we have some of the high level stuff taken care because I don’t want to go into a discovery call blind. I want to know something, even if it’s just a few sentences high level, what do they have in place today, right? So I can kind of set that stage for myself. So then I go in and I’ll ask the questions. The way I like to ask the questions and uncover an opportunity is I use use cases. I don’t get technical. I’d love to know what do they have in place today? I poked around on the website. So I have an idea of what that experience will be like from the outside in, but I also want to know what are they doing internally with one another? How are they collaborating? How are they communicating? And then we go through the use case and the flows and whatnot. And then they start to tell me about their pain points. So I can give you an example where things have changed a little bit. I’m working on a deal right now where we went through, and by the way, we had some really good information from the partner. I went around and poked on the website. It’s very different industry. We did the discovery call and at the end of it, I told my partners, I said, you know what? It really sounds like all voice. I don’t know if we have a context interplay here because they just want simple things from the voice side, but they’re calling them agents. But it could just be like UCaaS on steroids or maybe a call center environment, right? Maybe you’ve got some queuing, maybe some skills based routing, but you don’t need all the bells and whistles. And then we’ve been having multiple conversations with them, just a weekly touch base. And then on a second call, I think, we start to ask them about, hey,

what do you think about maybe doing some more and some AI components where you’re recording the calls today. That’s not a big deal, but when you had to go back to the calls, would it be kind of cool to do some keyword searches? Would it be even cooler to take it a step further and do some analytics and AI in real time on the backend that can detect the sentiment of what your clients are going through? Because this customer had some sensitive conversations with their, it’s an industry where it’s just, it’s sensitive to their clients that they’re servicing. So they had to be careful with that, but we gave them kind of the art of possibility on, hey, wouldn’t it be kind of cool to do this? How about some quality management? How about some deeper analytics? How about some even workforce management for scheduling? You’re telling us you actually have 300 agents, they’re all agents. That’s the number of your employees. You’re telling us everyone in your company functions like an agent. So my partners actually went on site and shadowed the different departments that they had on there and came back to me and said, Megan, they’re all agents. We really need context. And I’m like, wow, this has completely changed from our first conversation. And because they were telling us one thing, but we kind of opened their eyes to what was possible. And they said, no, we totally can use this. So what’s interesting about those guys too, is they are already on, I think they were on a cloud system that wasn’t doing what they wanted it to do, which is also different, right? Usually they’re coming from an on-prem and you’re showing them the light with cloud, but they’re moving from a cloud solution. So that was one that completely changed.

And that was nice. So now we’re opening that door to this whole conversation. We’re gonna go back now on this next call and have another conversation and say, hold on, let’s talk about your other users. You were telling us everyone’s an agent. Are there other back office users that could benefit from a UCAT solution? Now, so we’re kind of going backwards. It’s so, it’s interesting how it’s evolving.

The other one I wanted to talk about that took me by surprise was a credit union. They’re on an on-prem

and they were going through the regular spiel. I’m asking a bunch of questions. And it’s always about, what is this experience from your clients? I always start with that, what are the use cases? How is this going? And as I’m asking them the questions, then they stop and they said, you know what? Actually, our clients are pretty happy with the way that we’re servicing them today. It’s our employees that are having the issues. So we had to stop and say, okay, hold on. And so they said, no, it’s our employees. The system today, they can’t communicate with one another. So they can’t be efficient enough to handle our clients, but our clients are super happy. I said, oh, okay. So we completely, that was interesting. We would then change the conversation. We focused more on, okay, so how do your internal, what are the use cases there? How are they using the system today? Yep, I can see all the gaps, but at the end of the day, we’re gonna get them a solution that is going to benefit both, right? Like you and I were saying, it’s gonna help the customers, it’s gonna help them or their members.

So that’s interesting. So just listen and see you as the conversation pivots. Just again, go through use cases and figure out where they need the help the most.

– Great examples there. Before I get to this last question, you said something that I wanna call out that was important here, right?

Presumably you’re in a technical role, right? You have architect in your description, but you said something really key is that I don’t wanna get into the weeds. I don’t wanna get into the bits and bytes, right? Can you illuminate that a little bit for me, what you mean? – Yeah, yeah. So I think it’s critical from the get-go to understand, to listen,

what are your customers requiring? And I don’t mean, and we can talk about integrations, right? At a high level, you talk to them about what systems are in place. Do they wanna integrate it? What does that integration look like? But again, from a use case perspective, not, okay, so on the backend, I’ve got this and that, and I gotta put this here. We will let the vendors do the heavy lifting. We know who plays well with who, who can integrate with what platforms, okay? So at a high level, we can figure that out. I don’t go into the bits and bytes and talk about how things are architected necessarily,

or how, you know, if you’re gonna bring your own carrier, how is that gonna work on the backend? How are the two platforms going to play together? I know it can all work.

So I don’t go into the weeds with that or the details around that.

I think it’s absolutely critical, and I think that that’s gonna be the segue to, you know, the next question you’re gonna ask me, but I think it’s absolutely critical to understand the use cases and how the customer needs this to work for them. And then you can let the vendors come in and do all the heavy lifting. That’s their core. They’re the experts with how it’s gonna all mesh together and the details and the architecture behind it. We just have to know that it can be done.

– Yeah, and let’s not scare the customer off in the meantime. – Yeah, absolutely. – Great.

All right, final thoughts here. So again, you know, there’s partners listening to this. You’ve drawn out some really great points of kind of where it’s at, where it’s going, what trends, things to look for, what a deal looks like. Final question.

Biggest tip you can give the partners around CX and how to continue having and developing that conversation?

– Okay, yes. So we’ve said this, right? We say it doesn’t have to be technical. You don’t have to get into the weeds.

The way I approach it, and this is how I would have a partner approach it because they do get intimidated. You know, Megan, I don’t understand how they have the conversation. And I could say, you know what? Put yourself into the customer’s shoes. So you’re working with a business organization. They’re your customer. Put yourself into their customer shoes. What does that look and feel like? And that’s why I always go through use cases, right? I don’t say, do you have a contact center? Do you need this? Do you need that? Start spewing out all this information on what the technologies can do.

I say, Mr. Partner, just listen carefully to what your customer’s pain points are because they have to solve for their customers’ issues and pain points. They have to solve for their own internal issues and pain points, right? With their agents or employees.

So I always say the easiest thing to do because that’s how I do it, right? That’s why I go to the website first and foremost to say, okay, I’m a customer. What does this look and feel like? Oh my gosh, I have no idea how I can, okay, so it’s a voice call. That’s fine, I can do that. But am I going to be put on hold forever? You know, just put themselves into the customer’s customer shoes because we are all customers. We know what to expect from our own experiences when we work with our service brands. So I say do that first and foremost. And as they’re having that business conversation with their own customers and they’re trying to figure out what projects are you working on? How can I help you?

Just listen to what they have to say. And then if they get on a discovery call with me, you know what I do? I just listen, I take a ton of notes. I’m telling you, they’ll give me stuff that I don’t understand what they’re saying. And they’ll just type it out the way it sounds. Oh, they’re using this platform, okay. Oh, what do you use that for? Oh, okay, okay, got it. Just to put things in a layman’s terms because that’s all the customer’s going to do is they’re going to tell you, this is what we use, this is what we expect, it’s not working this way and it would be great if we could have it this way. Now, if they start telling you,

we don’t know what we don’t know, so we don’t know what’s possible, I can help with that conversation. Mr. Partner, you don’t have to, you know the technology is there to say, oh, that’s great, no, yeah, I think that’d be great. And let’s have Megan or Jason or Mike or whomever help us with that conversation and give us some best practices and ideas. But that’s all I can say is partners don’t feel like you have to have a technical conversation, don’t be afraid of it, put yourself into their customer’s shoes and figure out what’s going on and what you have to help solve for, that’s all it is.

Did I oversimplify that? Maybe. (laughs) – Easy, easy, good stuff. I think that’s gold advice

and everybody needs to take that and use that and then exactly that, right? I mean, you heard, you got to hear a glimpse of everything that you’re able to help them with and I think everybody should absolutely pull you in for assistance. So, Megan, that wraps us up for today. Really appreciate you coming on. – Great, thank you. I’m glad to have this opportunity. Always good talking to you too, Josh. – Always. Okay, everybody that wraps us up, Megan Thai CX solution architect with the layers. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP yourself, and here in this next level, please sit. (upbeat music) Next Level BizTech has been a production of Telarus Studio 19. Please visit Telarus.com for more information.

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