Automated Transcript
Andy Herring, Product Marketing Manager at Pragma: Hey, Andy here from Pragma, Product Manager for the iPECS portfolio. I’m here with Rich from Cosoft. Do you want to give the guys a bit of background?
Richard Knight, Managing Director at Cosoft: Yeah, from Cosoft, we specialise in software development for lots of different platforms, but mainly with the iPECS platform, hooking into various CRMs. We’ve developed a number of SaaS applications that sit on top of the iPECS platform. I’ve actually worked in telecoms for nearly 17 years.
Andy: I think you actually met me in a previous life, didn’t you?
Richard: Yeah, I was. I was Product Manager at Pragma, that was nine years ago, I say. But yeah, there from day one when iPECS Cloud launched, so really familiar with the platform, and it was just a natural progression to start building applications for the iPECS platform and really specialising in that. I think we’re actually one of the only companies globally who have access to the iPECS API, so it really gives us a head start and an advantage over maybe other people who’ll dip into it later.
Andy: Sure, so from your point of view, I mean, we’ve been working with you guys for a while, but in terms of live products, for just over 12 months now. So from your point of view, how do you see things going, you know, in terms of where we’ve been and where we’re at at the moment?
Richard: Yeah, I think we’ve seen a lot of progression with not only the software we’ve been developing, but the APIs that iPECS have delivered on their platform, which has allowed us to really think outside the box on how we can differentiate from other software companies out there. A mixture of that iPECS’ API getting better and the stuff we’re integrating with getting better, so CRM systems, ERPs, booking systems, having really open APIs has just really allowed us to start tailoring stuff. I think that’s where we’re seeing the main attachment: actually, these companies who have got a really bespoke requirement or they want something really tightly knit into platforms they’re already using within their business and pulling those in. You know, people have been doing integrations for years, but this kind of call logging, activity logging, and things like that, it’s not really tailored to the customer or what they need. It’s more just, you can do this with the integration. We work closely with you guys, who work with the customer, and we completely bespoke that for that business.
Andy: I think one of the important things for us doing that journey over the last 12 months is not so much about integrations, though super important, but it’s the speed as well, the agility. I think, you know, what we’ve found working with you guys is, you know, we’ll come to you with what might seem like a random, kind of left-field opportunity, but it’s the speed with which we can get that stuff turned, you scoped, and then turned around and live into that customer.
Richard: Definitely. I think, yeah, obviously, one of the benefits is we do have a team of developers looking at things, and we can actually build what the customer wants before we give the go-ahead. So, there’s no surprises to the end user at the end of that process. We’ve delivered a scope and a design in some cases, they know what they’re getting, and it’s completely custom for them, which I think is where we’re seeing the most attachment, along with obviously the other complementary software that we’ve got that sits alongside Connect.
Andy: I’d say one of the things as well we’re finding is proving that this kind of technology and these integrations is not just the realm of these big multi-site, multi-country businesses. We’re dealing with a lot of much smaller, single-site customers that are just as interested in these integrations and how they develop their business and how they’re interacting with their customers.
Richard: Definitely, and I think maybe before people might have thought like the average user, number of users that we see taking these integrations isn’t massive. It is those people who’ve got a niche business and niche product or service. Before, they thought, you know, integrating these systems was this kind of outreach for them, too expensive or they don’t technically know that it’s possible. I think now, obviously, Pragma working really closely with, or Gamma now, working really closely with the resellers and partners, understands that really anything is possible, and it’s not unachievable for smaller businesses. A lot of the stuff we’re doing is helping these small businesses with time-saving really, so yes, there is a cost to that, an upfront cost, but the value that they get out of those integrations in time saving, you know, less errors in people inputting certain information because it’s automated between the platform kind of massively outweighs their upfront cost for the actual integration.
Andy: I agree, and I think, you know, almost kind of showing you’re only limited by your imagination, it’s like, you know, this whole we’ve heard it this morning in some of the conversations on stage at the event that it’s about a different way to engage with customers, being more consultative, and again, that’s not just the realm of going in and doing these big deals. Yeah, if you take your time to get to know a ten-year-old’s business, you’ll find that you’re uncovering opportunities that you may not necessarily have understood were there in the first place. And I think the product set that we have with you is vital to that in terms of you just said it’s about improving the way people do business, the speed with which they’re doing the business, the way they’re interacting with their customers. So, I guess, point or a question or, you know, point of conversation here is you maybe let’s review where we’ve been. So, at the moment we’ve got a number of products from you guys right so we started off with Connect, which is basically our soft phone. But I think it was fair to say it was always the understanding that that wasn’t necessarily just about being a soft phone, it was the integrations that we could deliver through that, was the key thing.
Richard: And the ease of those integrations, I think, was the main thing. Obviously, with the iPECS platform, you already had iPECS One, which is the UCaaS soft phone, and we weren’t trying to replicate that in terms of telephony features. Yes, we’ve got the calling, video calling, and all the telephony features in there, but the main thing for us was making those integrations really easy for the end user to not only use, but actually set up. You know, there’s no, because it’s a WebRTC application, there’s no installation of applications. You’re not having to run something separate on your desktop PC that might, you know, go wrong or need updating regularly.
Andy: And the users haven’t got to be experts either, right? It’s a webpage.
Richard: Yeah, it’s one click to activate an integration, you go to the app screen, you log in once, and then that’s your integration done, you know, syncing data, contacts, doing your activity logging, logging call recordings, whatever you want that integration. The actual process for the end user to get that working is just logging into HubSpot or whatever CRM they use.
Andy: I think an important point you made there is this wasn’t about replacing the product we already had. And I think 12 months down the line we’ve shown that because our run rate on iPECS One is still always where it was because there’s an absolute requirement for a PC-based soft phone, right? Whereas what we’re doing with you guys is incremental on top of that, and we’ve got a brilliant run rate that we’ve built up already. But I guess, was it two months after we went live with Connect, we then kind of came online with Engage, which is our web chat?
Richard: Yeah, and I think that was, from our side, that was more about showing what we could do with iPECS. Yes, we’ve got a number of users on it. It’s probably not as many users as we thought initially when we launched, but it was more to showcase what we could do as a software development company. The possibilities, like you said. And, yeah, exactly that, and actually make resellers think about, “Oh, if they can do this, then they can do some bespoke development into a GP practice, pulling in certain information,” but it’s a good product on its own. So, it’s obviously a chat widget that can be installed on a WordPress site, which automatically gets responded to using AI. For those smaller businesses, I think a good use case is like, you know, maybe an estate agent who’s out and about all of the time doing viewings isn’t always there to man the chat, but yeah, the AI will respond, so it uses all of their data from their website. So, if someone asks about a specific property, it will be able to respond using the AI about that specific property. It alerts the estate agents, so if they need to jump into the conversation if they’re around, they can do, and they can take over from AI. Yeah, so it’s a great product, and it’s got really good use cases, but it was more for us about showing what we could do.
Andy: And, you know, one thing I would say about that product as a consumer of online chat, you know, whether you’re talking to your bank, your insurance company, Amazon is a great one, I like the fact that in ours we’ve got that key little button that says “talk to an agent,” where, you know, on so many other stuff, you know, like my utility supplier, you just have to keep typing “agent” over and over and over again till it gets the message that you’re talking to a human being, and it’s so maddening.
Richard: Or it tries to give you automated questions and responses like “maybe you want to look at this,”.
Andy: Yeah, no, I just want to talk to somebody. Exactly. So, I think that that was really important for me that we had that. Then, you know, sort of building on this kind of art or the possible conversation, but I think a product for me that kind of really made people sit up and look was Sidekick. And, you know, again, it’s taken us time to get some traction, but even today, we’ve got people sort of go, “Huh, what? You can deliver that on your product at this cost price?”.
Richard: Yeah, I think that’s the great thing about it. Obviously, Sidekick, it’s actually, there’s multiple products that are going to sit within that. Sidekick is our brand name for anything kind of AI. Obviously that term has been bandied about for everything, but we try and use AI in a way that is actually useful for customers, not just a buzzword. So, we’re using it to transcribe calls, we’re using it for sentiment analysis of calls, generating meeting notes, but it ties really well back into our other kind of niche, which is the CRM integration, because we can take that data from the transcription and drop it into the CRMs. I think that makes it… obviously there’s a lot of people doing transcription and stuff out there, but the ability to tie in with the rest of the integration, the rest of the suite of products, is slightly different.
Andy: But I think something you just said in there kind of a nice segue and the next sort of point or question I wanted to ask was you about the roadmap. So, for me, with you, this Sidekick family that we’re looking to build, you know, we’ve got what we’ve got today, but with Sidekick, the transcription side of it, we’re looking to add voicemail. We’re looking to start offering automated transcriptions as well in the future.
Richard: Yeah, so at the moment, we’re doing transcriptions kind of ad hoc as people need them. It’s actually going to be able to set so you can transcribe all calls live. So, and obviously, that makes the sentiment piece a lot more interesting, and a lot more useful to the people looking at it.
Andy: And I suppose sort of, well certainly, a question I get asked a lot is from a product management point of view when I’m talking to customers is, “But what does your roadmap look like?” It’s almost like you’re in this constant loop. As product management, if you want people to be excited about what you’ve got today, as soon as they’ve seen it, they’re like, “Alright, what’s the next thing?”
Richard: Yeah, obviously we’ve got AI music on hold that we’ve also built, so really quick and easy. A person can generate music on hold automatically. Generates a script, which a customer can edit. But actually the scripts that are generated from that are pretty decent.
Andy: I showed it to someone this morning, and it was almost like this challenging look about them when I said we had this product. Like, “Yeah, okay, whatever, fine.” You know, it’s four steps. Give me five minutes and you’ll have a music on hold, or marketing on hold, information on hold, and they, you know, they were like, “Wow.”
Richard: Yeah, it is. And we’ve kept it simple on purpose. We want people to get through that process really quickly. You know, as you said, you can do it in a minute, two minutes. And then the massive benefit is obviously us being really tightly knit into iPECS is the fact that you’ve got that upload to iPECS button, so it just pushes the music on hold straight in there. So, an end user can easily manage their own music on hold and push it up. You know, if they want to change it through Christmas seasons or whatever, it’s just a really simple thing. And we’ve got some other stuff that’s coming to that just to make it even easier. So, you can see all your historical music on hold and you push, you know, you could have one that’s used for certain bank holiday weekends that you can just switch out and stuff really, really simply from there. So yeah, I think that’s a good product coming.
Andy: Yeah, I think the important thing for me is we probably need to be sort of careful, we’re not trying to rewrite the book on comms here, but what we’re trying to do is look at our portfolio and our customer base and try to make this stuff accessible for people and sort of take away some of the… I think one of the guys, one of the panel just before lunch, talking about how we like to have all of our buzzwords and acronyms and I think we have to be careful. It’s almost like a responsibility of ours not to overcomplicate things sometimes and understand it’s going to be actual end users engaging with this stuff. So, for me, I think a lot of what we’ve done in the past 12 months is making this technology accessible to those people and helping our customers understand that, you know, it doesn’t sit in the 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 above customers, it’s, you know, everyday smaller customers you’re going to go and talk to, and our skill set and ability to be able to make that accessible easily understandable as well, but what about the next 12 months?
Richard: This is where I’m gonna… we’re currently working on more stuff.
Andy: Dates to be confirmed.
Richard: We’re currently working on more stuff to sit within that Sidekick suite of AI. The next thing we’ve got coming is an AI assistant. The thing with that is there’s not a single use case it really fits in to what we’re doing with bespoke and working with different industries, but it could be used within stock management. So, someone in a shop, who’s working there, needs to check stock. They can click their headset, and it will hook into their stock management system. They can say, “I need a can of Heinz beans.” There’s none on aisle 10, and it will see and say, “Oh, we’ve got some in stock” and alert someone to bring that stock out, or it would say, “We haven’t got those, but we have got a similar product.” That’s just kind of one use case, but we can hook that into anything. Whether it’s booking systems for restaurants, people can check whether they’ve got table availability or hotel room availability, we can fit it into any of those as long as it’s hooked into something at the back end like a booking system or a stock system.
Andy: Again, I think we talked the other day about augmenting that to bring the chat back into that potentially as well, so we’re kind of doing it two ways.
Richard: Yeah, so you could actually have it within the chat widget. Knocked the mic. You could have it within the chat widget-
Andy: Anybody think this is your first time doing this.
Richard: Move my hands too much. Yes, so we could have that within the chat widget. If it’s hooking into the booking system, people could check availability via the chat widget as well as via audio. If they prefer to phone or check online, they’ve got either way.
Andy: And a little birdie, whose name might have been Richard, said to me that potentially we were looking to bring in voicemail into the transcription part portfolio.
Richard: Yeah, that’s actually already developed. It just hasn’t been launched yet.
Andy: I think we’ve got some, well, you say we, the royal we, but some plans for ACD integration.
Richard: ACD, I was, the team demoed that to me this week.
Andy: Which I think is really exciting from our point of view. Myself and Ed, who’s our sales lead, have talked about this quite a lot the last few weeks. To be in a position where, and I know some people have used the term “informal contact centre” or “contact centre light” or whatever it is, there is a requirement out in the channel for the customers where these kinds of all-singing, all-dancing high-end contact centers are a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but where I see us getting to is we have that high-end contact centre. But where I see us getting to with Connect and, you know, the bits that plug into that is being able to have a really strong informal, whatever term you choose to use. You know, ACD, being able to log into an ACD group, which is effectively a basic contact centre. We’ve got WhatsApp integration. We’ve got the transcription and sentiment analysis and the AI. I mean, you know…
Richard: We never wanted to try to get into the contact centre market because, as you said, it’s a very competitive place to be, but at the same time, when we’re doing integrations into CRM systems and ERP, you need a certain amount of that functionality in there, and it just makes it a much more rounded product. So with ACD, obviously, the ability for people to log in and log out of queues does bring that contact centre light functionality into it.
Andy: But I guess, to put it in more user-digestible terms, it’s about customer interaction. You know, whether you’re talking to a five-user end-user company or thousands of users, if they’re selling stuff or interacting with customers, there’s going to be an element of customer service involved. How do you interact with those customers?
Richard: Exactly, and most people don’t know, you know, as you say, a five-user business wouldn’t say…
Andy: “I need some UC” or “I need some CC as a service.”
Richard: They just know that they’ve got certain people needing calls at certain times and other people not, so we kind of bridged that gap and got that ACD functionality coming pretty shortly. I think it’s going to be with your team next week to start trying it. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of opportunity out there. We’ll probably see a lot more opportunity not only just people needing the ACD functionality but then going, “Okay, now we can do that. How can we hook that into the other systems that we’re using within our business to speed up our processes?”
Andy: So I guess, you know, the takeaway message to our customers that might be checking in on this particular podcast is just get out there and maximise the deals, really, because the customers are using it. Customers may not be using this technology, but they’re certainly interacting with their customers in such a way that the products we’ve got available would make that a whole lot easier for them.
Richard: Yeah, and I think that’s a good thing about the partners you work with, obviously, who’ve worked with Pragma for a while, and the new ones coming on board. They understand the SMB market. So now that they really understand the products we’re selling, they do speak to those opportunities and go, “Oh, we can actually save you time here. We can make your working day easier by doing these bits and pieces.” So we’re seeing a lot more of those opportunities come through with, as we were saying earlier, with those kind of small and mid-size businesses.
Andy: So I guess a question really, I mean, if you were to summarise it, because I know you and I can talk all day, but we’ll probably start getting a hurry up any now, but I guess if you were to summarise it, it’s an exciting next 12 to 18 months in terms of what we’ve got planned. I guess in that as well, it’s almost, you know, we’ve got two strings to our bow, which is we’ve got a really good solid set of standard products, which will enhance and develop, but we’ve also got that bespoke… which I think I wouldn’t say is any more or less important, but it’s really critical for people to understand that we’ve got that ability to be flexible and agile in terms of finding us the most challenging people. I think we’ve already had one of the most challenging ones, which was the cattle herding.
Richard: Yeah, we’ve integrated into cows.
Andy: Good.
Richard: Yeah, but not only that, every time we do a bespoke integration, if it’s a platform that other people use, it goes back into our standard integration. So that’s just getting stronger and stronger. But yeah, exciting, obviously. Don’t… It always feels, I know everyone uses the word AI, but that has opened up a lot of opportunity for us in loads of sectors. So, I think, yeah, having a really strong road map with ACD, music on hold, transcription, you know, sentiment analysis, it’s a really rounded suite of products now that’s just going to continue to evolve.
Andy: Awesome. Well, I think it’s probably a good idea to wrap it there, isn’t it then? Couldn’t have summed it up better myself.
Richard: Alright.
Andy: Catch you later.
