Author transcript
Hello and welcome back to UC today. I'm again joined by Mark Bernal, chief operations officer and co-founder of New
0:1515 secondsWave Communications. Last time Mark made the case for why UC on boarding needs to move to towards guided self-service and
0:2222 secondswhat that looks like from the customer's side. But today I want to flip the lens on to partners. what happens to your support provisioning and engineering
0:3030 secondsteams when customer numbers start climbing and whether growth has to mean growing pains. Mark, thank you again for joining us. How you doing today?
0:3838 secondsI'm doing great. Yeah, thanks for having me.
0:4141 secondsGreat. Really looking forward to the second part of this conversation. So, let's start with the challenge itself.
0:4646 secondsWhat's the biggest scaling challenge partners face when they're bringing on more UC customers?
0:5252 secondsWell, they they really have a need specifically if we're talking about teams, right? You have to have a bunch of teams people that that know the
1:001 minuteteam's admin center. Uh you have to know the licensing requirements. You have to know um you know how to help and and
1:071 minute, 7 secondsdebug you know certain things re related to you know the spin up and then you know whatnot. And so you know that that's what we're really trying to solve is to be able to do more with the people
1:161 minute, 16 secondsthat you have so you don't have to necessarily scale up that whole um side of the business, right? We want more automation, you know, more AI assistance
1:231 minute, 23 secondsand things like that as these tools kind of become self-service. And so, you know, some of those are some of the the biggest issues uh surrounding um you
1:311 minute, 31 secondsknow, UC scaling is is the people required to to make sure that they can handle the volume that's coming in, especially if you're dealing with smaller customers. Um and so, uh that's
1:401 minute, 40 secondswhat we're really trying to help, you know, solve is to make it self-service, make it easier, and to not have to do as as many people in the scaling.
1:491 minute, 49 secondsYeah, absolutely. You you touched on it there, that tension between customer growth and internal capacity. So why does customer growth so often create
1:581 minute, 58 secondsthat kind of pressure on partners internal support provisioning and engineering teams specifically?
2:042 minutes, 4 secondsWell, when the customer doesn't have the knowledge of say the team's admin center and they maybe don't have they're they're new to say a team's phone system, you know, the the phone system
2:132 minutes, 13 secondsitself is is a really great product, but it can have a lot of complexity to it.
2:172 minutes, 17 secondsAnd so, you know, when the customers don't know and and then there's a certain size of customer that, you know, some of these operators and partners, you know, don't want to help because of
2:252 minutes, 25 secondsthat, you know, work that goes into, you know, the white glove service, right?
2:292 minutes, 29 secondsSo, you either have a white glove service and you scale up your people or you have less people but then you have customer complaints because they're not able to deal with the volume. So, it's
2:382 minutes, 38 secondskind of a tight rope that you're walking, you know, with that. And so, you know, we want to provide automation and tools where, you know, you can still provide white glove service and handle
2:462 minutes, 46 secondsthe volume so that you have the best customer experience. And so, you know, those are some of the the major challenges just simply that the customers don't don't know and they're
2:552 minutes, 55 secondsgoing to be hightouch, you know, so that you can get them through, but you don't want to turn away smaller customers because you don't have the the capacity, you know, internally to help them.
3:053 minutes, 5 secondsAbs. Absolutely. We we've talked about the the pressure there. Let's let's look at uh Launchpad, which we touched a little on in the first part of this uh
3:123 minutes, 12 secondsinterview series. How how can Launchpad help partners activate more customers without adding internal resource at the same rate?
3:203 minutes, 20 secondsWell, we've been able to connect all the dots, right, excuse me, in [clears throat] this problem. So, you know, it it's a full self-service all
3:283 minutes, 28 secondsthe way through. So, um meaning that you're able to sign up, you're able to pick your calling plans and and things as you move forward through the
3:363 minutes, 36 secondscountries. Um, and you're able to bring in all your licensing so that the system knows what licenses you have. It's able
3:423 minutes, 42 secondsto um configure your autoattendants and call cues and and those types of things.
3:473 minutes, 47 secondsAnd so as it steps through, then it also determines what licenses you have, what licenses you may need to purchase. Um and then um all your user assignments
3:563 minutes, 56 secondsand creations and and so it's really the full breath of the solution um that connects every single dot together so
4:044 minutes, 4 secondsthat when you get to the end and you build your phone system and say 10 or 15 minutes, it autocreates all of what you've just done and it keeps the guard
4:114 minutes, 11 secondsrails on so that you can't move to the next step until you've done the prerequisite steps because they all kind of feed into each other and it's very
4:194 minutes, 19 secondsintuitive how we put it together so that you can't really make any mistakes And and if you do make a mistake in how you say set up your your autoattendant, you
4:284 minutes, 28 secondscan go back and edit it and change it um without any issues. So, you know, there's also self-help all the way through. Um so, if you get stuck on
4:364 minutes, 36 secondssomething or you're unfamiliar, the system can generate and you know, help articles and things like that that show you how to guide through or what we're
4:444 minutes, 44 secondslooking for in certain places. So, we've really taken a tremendous amount of time and and testing and effort to make sure that the experience for the customer is
4:524 minutes, 52 secondssimple, intuitive, and that you you can't really make mistakes as you go through
4:594 minutes, 59 secondswhen it comes to providing that service for for customers as you've described there. when it comes to the the you know white label experience building you know
5:075 minutes, 7 seconds[clears throat] that that experience for for partners who want to promote their own service and their own portal their own brand why is that that so important
5:155 minutes, 15 secondsfor partners today do you think well I mean they've spent you know in in a lot of cases you know many many decades building their own brand and so
5:235 minutes, 23 secondstheir customers know them and so they definitely want to have their own brand you know front and center you know in the portal experience that their customers are going to go through. Uh
5:305 minutes, 30 secondsthe other benefit is is when we talked about white labeling, it's white labeling everywhere. So it's not only the portal but the support information.
5:395 minutes, 39 secondsIt's uh white labeling for you know the tenant uh um you know page for say OC all the way through. It's email address
5:465 minutes, 46 secondsnotifications that go out to customers when they build the system. Plus they're using their own voice that they pipe into you know Launchpad. So they're
5:545 minutes, 54 secondsprovisioning not only you know their brand and everything but they're provisioning their voice services and their porting processes and they're also bringing in you know their CSP accounts
6:036 minutes, 3 secondsand things like that so that the licenses that their customers are purchasing through this process are also you know on on their brand. So it's when
6:116 minutes, 11 secondswe talk about white labeling it's not just a portal like everybody you know kind of talks about white labeling as just a portal but we've taken it a step further and every single facet of the of
6:206 minutes, 20 secondsthe solution is the brand of the provider. uh that's that's using it. So, you know, we've taken the necessary steps to make sure that that's all the
6:286 minutes, 28 secondsway through. And then even when you get to the end and you want to say add add-on services to your to your team's experience. So if you're talking about
6:356 minutes, 35 secondsanalytics through say dber or smarsh or or you're looking to do um you know mobility through tango or analytics
6:436 minutes, 43 secondsthrough tool ring like all of these companies we've done integrations with to bring these add-ons in and then you can also provision these add-on services
6:516 minutes, 51 secondsto your newly created phone system. So the partners that we do integrations with are benefiting from you know having full service teams if you want to do SMS
6:596 minutes, 59 secondsyou know provisioning through clerk chat like like I mentioned like all of these teams related things are get it now provision it now and so we we make sure
7:087 minutes, 8 secondsthat it's simple not only to turn up and manage the phone system but to also add these other value ad partners where where they're able to you know get those
7:157 minutes, 15 secondsservices turned on immediately and you can also use the the white label partners account so like we're not saying that we have to sell you those
7:237 minutes, 23 secondspartners and services we can, but we're also saying that if you have those direct relationships with those partners, you can put your API credentials in from from your accounts
7:317 minutes, 31 secondsand contracts with them and we're just going to help facilitate the integration and provisioning. So So we keep the distribution channel intact.
7:407 minutes, 40 secondsCertainly. Uh Mark, as a as a closing thought for you, I'd love to bring together what we've talked about in this conversation for for partners who might
7:497 minutes, 49 secondsbe watching this. So how should how should partners be thinking differently about on boarding as part of their overall growth strategy rather than just treating it as an operational task?
8:008 minutesWell, I mean it drives revenue. That's I mean that's the number one goal, right? Everybody's trying to drive revenue at the end of
8:078 minutes, 7 secondsthe day. And so you know when when everybody's going after the same enterprise level customers, you know, and and the bulk of enterprise customers
8:158 minutes, 15 secondshave already moved to UC. I mean, if they planned on doing it, they've pretty much already done that. Um, and so then now it becomes how do I get smaller and
8:238 minutes, 23 secondssmaller customers. Um, and a lot of times, you know, to be truthful, the the top tier carriers, they they say that the smaller customers are are harder to
8:328 minutes, 32 secondsdeal with. They take more time, and so maybe they're they're setting limits on the size of customer they'll take. When you have full automation like what we've
8:398 minutes, 39 secondsbuilt now, you can, you know, allow smaller and smaller customers to become part of the system because the amount of effort that goes into it is negligible.
8:468 minutes, 46 secondsyou know, the amount of support is negligible. And so now we're able to provide access to more, you know, revenue streams because the simplicity
8:548 minutes, 54 secondsof the onboarding is there. And so for any of the partners that are out there now, you can bring in a ton more revenue. You don't have to touch it. It
9:029 minutes, 2 secondsit basically onboards itself. And so now, you know, you can drive more revenue in more areas. And then even your sales channel and partners are
9:099 minutes, 9 secondsgoing to be happy because now they're able to access, you know, more, you know, numbers and and revenue to retire quota and things like that. So it just
9:169 minutes, 16 secondskind of opens up the gates for for everybody to participate.
9:229 minutes, 22 secondsAbsolutely. Mark, that's all the time we have. Uh want to say thank you very much for joining us here at UC today. Yeah, great. Thanks for having me.
9:319 minutes, 31 secondsSo that's it for this conversation with Mark Banell of New Wave Communications, but there's plenty more on this topic here at UC today. We'll shortly be
9:399 minutes, 39 secondspublishing a feature bringing the wider story together tracing the shift from legacy provisioning on boarding through to where launchpad fits in and making
9:479 minutes, 47 secondsthe case for treating on boarding as a genuine customer activation engine rather than just another black office task. So do look out for that and
9:549 minutes, 54 seconds[music] thank you very much for watching.
